Rethink, Reimagine, Rewire: The Founder's AI Playbook (with Seema Alexander)

Most founders are either tool-hopping or sitting on the sidelines. Both are losing strategies.

In this episode of Where Brands Get Their Edge, Borzou and Amanda sit down with Seema Alexander — Co-Chair of DC Startup Week and AI transformation consultant — to break down how founders actually need to be thinking about AI in 2026. Not as a shiny object. As infrastructure.

Guest

Seema Alexander, AI Transformation Consultant & Co-Chair, DC Startup Week 🎙️ AI CEO Podcast | LinkedIn: /in/seemaalexander

Topics Covered

• The Rethink, Reimagine, Rewire framework for AI adoption
• Why AI fluency (not just tooling) is the real competitive advantage
• How data is becoming every company's most valuable moat
• Narrow agents vs. agentic AI — and why the distinction matters
• DNA-matched cannabis recommendations as a case study in unique data sets
• What founders should automate first and what to protect from AI
• Why brand matters more than ever in an AI-commoditized world
• Preparing the next generation for a job market we can't fully predict

Connect with Us

Borzou — Instagram @bronxzou | LinkedIn Amanda — LinkedIn /in/akfischer

Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by NickelBronx — brand strategy, design, and marketing for founders who want a real edge. nickelbronx.com

Creators and Guests

Host

Amanda Fischer

Host

Borzou Azabdaftari

Alabama-born, Virginia-raised, and Iranian-made, Borzou isn't just another CEO; he's a college dropout turned serial entrepreneur, speaker, and the brains behind the award-winning digital agency NickelBronx. Known for his prowess in branding and digital marketing, Borzou's work has garnered Hermes Creative, Clutch, and Marcom Awards. Beyond the boardroom, he's a connoisseur of design and anything aesthetically driven, embodying style with substance. Borzou's philosophy? Embrace what makes you unique; that's how you find your tribe.  When priorities with his family, health, business, and community are satisfied - you can find Borzou chasing once-in-a-lifetime experiences. His favorite things are amazing people and making memories, and he’s always adding to his collection of both.

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Seema Alexander (00:00)
more you can, and this is me, automate your brain because you always say, I wish I had a second to me. You can do that now, right? And there are going to be actual tools and softwares and things like that.

Borzou (00:06)
Yeah, right.

my gosh, should I make a Borzo

Amanda (00:11)
you.

Borzou (00:12)
GPT so everyone can ask that question instead of me?

Seema Alexander (00:14)
There you

Borzou (00:25)
What is up everyone? Welcome to Where Brands Get Their Edge. If you are a founder, we've got the tools. If you're a marketer, we've got the truth. As always, I'm joined by my co-host, Amanda, and today we have Seema Alexander. How are you, Seema? You too. Guys, I've messed up her intro a couple of times, but she's co-board chair of DC Startup Week? Co-chair.

Seema Alexander (00:36)
Woohoo! I'm so good. Happy New Year, guys. How are you doing?

Amanda (00:41)
year.

Seema Alexander (00:47)
Co-chair.

Borzou (00:49)
of DC Startup Week, which if you haven't been to, get on the fucking list, you gotta go. And she's our resident AI expert, transforming businesses with disruptive AI, and she's got her own podcast, which I'm gonna snake my way on right after this. But thank you for coming, Seema.

Seema Alexander (01:03)
Thank you for having me. Thank you. I'm really excited for this.

Borzou (01:07)
Yeah,

we're all guys, this is January 5th and we're recording this and we're all struggling through our post-holiday slump. Did you guys have a good holiday?

Amanda (01:14)
I had a great holiday, actually. I feel like I did what I was supposed to do, which was let loose and have a really good time. But then I forgot the whole planning for the new year part that you're supposed to do. whoops.

Seema Alexander (01:14)
We.

I I probably did that for both of us. I had the fun

and the joy and the wine. And then I did a lot of strategic planning. it was, it was.

Borzou (01:38)
I feel like I'm

behind on that too. But I do have my forum retreat this weekend, so I can get ahead of it then.

Seema Alexander (01:44)
love it.

Borzou (01:44)
All right, everyone. So we are going to spend obviously today talking about AI because this is Seamus Wheelhouse and you know, the tools and the tricks and a lot of the stuff changes on a regular basis. And you see it as quickly as like, you once a better image data today, Gemini's best at this, Claude's best at that, right? Like the tools change so quickly. We're going to get into the founder mentality and really how you need to be thinking about AI.

to make your company better, right? And I think a lot of people are too worried about who they're gonna replace and what they're gonna replace, and that's, I think, the wrong attitude. Seema, what's your framework look like on this and how founders should be thinking about it?

Seema Alexander (02:23)
This is a great question. I'm going to give you a little background because I always like to talk about the internet days of where we are with AI because I feel like with the internet, I would say pre-internet, business looked very different.

Borzou (02:31)
I am.

Seema Alexander (02:36)
It was brick and mortar. The way that you would get your word out was from word of mouth and reputation. Post-internet came digital, right? And digital changed everything.

from companies, from the Netflix's, to the Google's, to the blockbusters, to other things. But in business, it changed the way that you are seen. If you weren't working on tools and using the things online, and you weren't paying attention to technology crossing the chasm, you really missed the

boat. How many of these companies that we know missed the boat and died at that age, right?

Borzou (03:07)
Listen, I was working in a family business at the time and I had to fight tooth and nail to get non-dial-up internet, right? So my dad would be like, listen, just get online once a day and check emails so you don't like block up the phones. And I was like, that's not how it works anymore. No one's going to fucking call and order into us. And so, no, I did this fight in real time and a lot of businesses did not adapt to make it.

Seema Alexander (03:10)
Yeah.

can't.

Amanda (03:32)
How old were you? Are you like

in a sweatshirt? what is this like a five-year-old in there? we need high-speed internet. No, I know.

Borzou (03:38)
No, we were friends then, Amanda.

Seema Alexander (03:42)
Unfortunately, I'm in the same boat, right? We

used to have a family business and I mean that's kind of where my story goes, right? My parents had the first Indian vegetarian restaurant in Washington DC and it grew to a couple locations. My dad had a travel agency for 25 years and they were operators. They were doing really well until the 90s when all the stuff with the internet happened and they went from doing really well to close to bankruptcy and so.

Borzou (04:04)
Yeah,

travel agencies got hit hard.

Seema Alexander (04:06)
Yeah, think about it. People buy for convenience. They buy for saving time and saving money. And Kayak, Travelocity, all of these companies started popping up because of the internet days. And in the hospitality side, on the restaurant side, was like, my mom never got into Google and AdWords and all the things that you need to do online, but their competitors did. So what happens over time is you lose that market share.

Borzou (04:29)
Even something as simple

as like making a Google My Business page or being on Yelp so like people can find you goes away. Yeah.

Seema Alexander (04:36)
100%.

know, your question around sort of how founders need to be thinking about this time right now, it's really interesting because when I, you know, I work with founders, I work with growth companies and in some capacities for enterprises and I get to see all sides. From the DC Startup and Tech Week side, it's like I also get exposed to a lot of these tech incubators. asked for, I've been on screenings committees for like tech stores, for

And the newer companies coming up, I would say eight out of 10 of them are AI native, quote unquote.

Like, I say quote unquote, but part of that is quote unquote is that they're thinking about AI in a different way. Some of them who are actually really considering using AI the right ways are looking at it from an intelligence perspective, not just a tool set perspective, right?

And founders today are getting stuck because of all the generative AI craze, right? Every day there's this new tool. Hey, better content. This one can optimize your LinkedIn. This one can create your funnels for you, you know?

all sort of disparate and it's not really strategically thinking about how do you leverage AI in a world that is, and what I say is the world of business is changing. Just like the internet did before digital, we're at a place that business is changing can act. And that's a lot of what I talk about in my framework, which we can go into in a few minutes.

Borzou (05:55)
Well, and

even for the stuff you're talking about, a lot of this like most of these products, tools, whatever, are just wrapped around the same four or five LLMs, right? Like it's all kind of the same shit just with a different coat of paint on it.

Seema Alexander (06:07)
Yeah, so

Amanda (06:07)
And it's like a new shiny

object. you know, everybody's trying to get their piece of this because they know it's hot and it's the new thing and it's the way. Yeah.

Borzou (06:15)
I want to make my own shiny object. I do.

Seema Alexander (06:18)
Look, when the internet came out and then the apps came out, like I say, this world of AI agents, which is a lot where things are headed and agentic workflows, or it's the next phase of it, that's where things are going to shift. agents are going to be the new mobile apps. And in my work, I was exposed about three years ago to one of the earliest agent.

agentic development environments. And what does that even mean? That was the backend of the environment to create AI agents that the co-founders of that company were consulting Google. It was that early, right? And when we started playing around with this tooling and what was possible, and all of a sudden you can, you know, take like five different things in your workflows and intelligently automate them and create things that took months and do them in seconds. was like, wow, like.

This world of business is changing like we've never seen before. And I just think like what people don't really understand is like they're in this tool set space, but because of the world of agents and agents mean a couple of things. can go into the regular agents and agent tick and where things are headed. they're looking at this incrementally and not so much strategically or what this means for their company long-term and short.

Borzou (07:29)
And I think part of it is also they're either like hyper tool focused or like money saving focused, which I think is not exactly the right attitude to have, but you have a different framework for existing companies and startups, right? So let's do the existing company first. Cause I feel like a lot of those people are either sitting on the sideline waiting for the perfect tool or tool hopping to like whatever the trendy thing is that day and actually wasting a of time and money.

Seema Alexander (07:40)
Yeah, yep.

Yeah.

Yeah, so My framework, just because you guys are fun, so that's okay. Rethink, re-imagine, rewire, right? And here's the reality. Like when you think AI, I'm curious for both of you, what does it mean to you?

Amanda (08:03)
Whoa.

Seema Alexander (08:03)
See,

just think about it, what does AI mean to you?

Amanda (08:06)
That's a huge question, but what it means, think, more to me is how it's going to change the way that people think and the way that they act. the way, so it's more of a forward, it's not just, what does it mean to me?

It means so many things and there are so many things that outcomes that we may see because of it. But what it is doing, it's changing the way people operate and we need to be able to try to get ahead of that and see how

we can be as impactful and meaningful as we want to be in the

So it's trying to stay ahead of what's happening here. And that's why we're inviting you. ⁓

Seema Alexander (08:41)
I love it. Beautiful. My leadership

perspective. What does it mean to you?

Borzou (08:45)
So I will answer for my business, because I think that's the question you're asking, right? Because I got a million other thoughts about everything from Skynet to whatever, right?

Seema Alexander (08:53)
Yeah.

Borzou (08:54)
to me, automation, and like an extra set. I don't know if extra set of eyes is the right word, right? But like something that's like looking and paying attention all the something as simple like as,

putting in a meeting transcript versus a scope I wrote for someone, like, hey, did I miss anything? Right? Like it's just, just having like a extra set of eyes that's like always vigilant, remembers the stuff we train it on and does things the right

I think those to me are like how I'm applying it the most right now. Yeah.

Seema Alexander (09:24)
So

what I always say when it comes to this first thing, first sort of part of the framework, rethink, it's

I do not believe, I believe probably 5 % of business leaders really understand what AI is and what it means, right? And when I say that artificial

Borzou (09:39)
Hold did we get it right or no?

Seema Alexander (09:42)
you guys got the mindset, the leadership, standards, absolutely right. it like,

What does machine learning mean? What does computer vision mean? What does intent recognition mean? What does reasoning mean? What's happening is AI is a bunch of Lego pieces, right? And once you, AI is a big word, it means a lot of things. It's like back in the day with web three, web three was a big word. had all the things underneath. And there needs to be a layman understanding of what these skills that come with artificial intelligence are, because if you don't do that,

you can't think about reinventing intelligent

workflows. You can't think about innovation in ways that are possible because you're using AI as this broad term and not really understanding what it is, right? And so for a lot of the work that we do, I mean, we help like leaders and business leaders really understand CEOs understand like, this is what all this means. So when it comes to your sales, when it comes to your marketing, when it comes to your functional areas and your innovation,

Let's figure out which Lego pieces are going to solve the biggest business challenges and the biggest business opportunities versus just looking at them as a tooling opportunity for notes or looking at it as a tooling opportunity for, you know, know, proposals, which are all good and need to happen incrementally no matter what. It gives you those aha shit moments as I call them, right? Of like, this is even possible.

But when you're a founder, you need to be thinking about how do you create operational intelligence in your organization, because that's where companies are going to be headed from the beginning.

And you don't want to be left behind not understanding what's possible with this stuff. Does that make sense,

Borzou (11:20)
Amanda, Amanda,

did you see how nice she is? She said that we were right and then basically said that we were like totally wrong.

Seema Alexander (11:25)
Now you're in.

Amanda (11:28)
Yeah,

it's just such a loaded question. What does it mean to you? Gosh, I could go on for hours about what it means to me. But yeah, I that's very interesting. I have a question for you then. What you're saying makes a ton of sense, camps of leaders right now, seems. Those that really embrace the technology, the AI, and want to incorporate in their business, and those that are very against it.

you can't really convince a person that's against it to do the things necessary to move into this future realm, I guess is what I would say. Like what would you do if you have somebody that comes to you, a company that comes to you and says that they want to be prepared for the future of AI, but then they're also subconsciously or consciously against implementing it.

Seema Alexander (12:13)
Yeah, mean, a lot

of it, you know, I do a talk called why AI is bigger than the advent of the Internet.

And what I realize is starting to compare what people understand in a previous sort of life and bringing it to where we are now in this era of business starts to get them to at least have a baseline of like, OK, I get where we're headed. Then you start to talk about fluency and what this stuff is and what's possible.

For us, we always show them things. We're like, OK, did you realize that this was possible in your industry today? And again, I go back to aha, shit moments, Amanda, because once some people can feel and touch something and say, wow, this thing that took me a month. I'll give you a couple examples of some clients just to give you an idea, because we have a client right now, the National Cherry Blossoms Festival, right? And they're an incredible, one of the biggest festivals in this area for sure, and in the US, one of the biggest.

You know, like any other events sort of group, like they have to do these impact reports that take a long time. They have major sponsors, 80 page impact reports. So it takes them, I can't give you all the specifics since they're clients, but a very long time, a lot of money. And it just takes, there's like, I would say over 20 data sources that have to create these things. And when we were going through this with them, we're like, you know what, we'll be able to automate 85 % of that.

in a click of a button once we program it and train it to all the information that they have, because that's possible today. And once you start to get people to say, wow, like that's possible, then what else is possible? All right? And I think that's the shift. It's like you have to get them to taste it. And I think, or to your things around proposals and content. mean, that's what ChatGP is doing every day for people. Like they don't even realize the amount of like,

that one tool, let alone the other LLMs have, right? And every day we see that. But that's the thing, it's like, you have to focus on the business challenges that they have and how AI can help and support that and actually alleviate those challenges and also alleviate a lot of their concerns, right? Like the reality is people are concerned about like...

They don't want to give up other people or they do and they don't know how to handle that. Right. And they don't want to be in the news three years from now by using AI the wrong way. Right. They they don't want the they know some of their data sucks right now. So how do you use AI when data is the know, like the baseline of it all. Right. So they just have questions and you have to answer them in not a technical way in a layman way and make it relatable. And I think that's the stuff that we've seen really help people move.

over that hump and really start to get excited.

The last thing I would say, Amanda, is like one thing we also share is that there's this incremental path to AI enablement in companies. Like here, we can create all these narrow agents in all your divisions, or we can create, I would love to get into this conversation eventually, these like more advanced, agentic solutions that really act like your team member or somebody to take over a lot of the work that. ⁓

not only is like the task oriented things, but provide intelligence and have these things do work for you. So it just opens up a level of human agency for growth, for creativity, for partnerships, for things that you want your people to actually be doing that they feel purposeful for versus some of the, you know, the everyday BS type of work

or just tedious type of work that, you know, we don't need to be doing anymore.

Borzou (15:38)
All right, well, let's let's go through your framework first. So I don't forget. I'll get out of it. But what you know, take us through the rethink step first.

Seema Alexander (15:40)
Okay.

So I mean, as I mentioned, rethink is the fluency side. the fluency, it's understanding it. What you guys actually both did really well is the mindset of leadership, right? The leadership, like the way you're leading companies is going to change. So a lot of that is around the rethinking and understanding what AI is actually going to bring to the table, what it means for business in general.

Borzou (15:48)
Is that most of it? Okay.

Seema Alexander (16:07)
Now, reimagine for us is like, OK, there are going to be new business models now.

And if you're a founder and you're in growth, one of the things I'm going to share in the other framework is that data is going to become the most unique moat. It's the moat of the future. And why I say that is AI is built on data. If you think about all the large language models, the chat GPTs, the perplexities, the degeminis, they're built on billions of information that builds these models.

But they're almost sucking all of it is almost done. So the more unique your data set is in your company, not only can you use that for personalization and precision for your customer experiences and marketing and campaigns and all the things, but there's going to be a place where that data can be used now for reselling for opportunities to use for other purposes as a new business revenue stream. So let me kind of give you an example here.

Are you guys familiar with Uplink? It's a Maryland based company that's a medical marijuana delivery service. Are you familiar with that? Okay. So I know the founder very well and I want you to hear his strategy. Like he started that company. He's never smoked weed in his life. His mom, you know, had cancer and they were trying to figure out like what's the best marijuana to use from a medical purpose to help her with her headaches and all this stuff.

Over time, he realized that the way that the industry worked is that the people just go by dispensaries and brands, right? And they're like, ⁓ this brand kind of worked, but there's no real deeper meaning, deeper data associated, aside from being correlated to a brand, which I know you like too, or is it like, that's a good thing, right?

Borzou (17:45)
I I do, I do. But I also

know what you mean. You get people talking about Indica versus ⁓ Sativa and like no one knows. And Amanda's husband will be the first to tell you those labels are bullshit.

Seema Alexander (17:51)
Yeah.

Amanda (17:55)
Yeah.

Seema Alexander (17:57)
Yeah, me just finish this off because

what happens is there is a level of plant data out in the market, like in terms of all what you just said and the plants themselves. But what he's doing is adding a level of personalization. Talk about unique data sets. They're adding a level of genomics. getting people to actually swipe their DNA and now using their genomics, using that data, mixing it with the plant information.

Now the eventual preferences or recommendations for the dispensary brands are going to be very specific to you and your chronic needs, not so much because this brand is so good or because these reviews are so good, because everybody's unique. And that's what I'm saying. He could use that in the future for reselling for research or other dispensaries. The model is changing, right? And that's kind of this re-imagined state is once you understand that, you

What is AI? The second is like, you can create personalized offers in ways you've never been able to. You and I talked about marketing changing and how it's going to become much more one-to-one versus where everything is today. And we can talk about that example.

But the fundamentals of business models are going to change because of AI. And that's sort of the re-imagined step. ⁓

Borzou (19:12)
I'm sorry,

I am reeling over doing a cheek swab for the right kind of weed.

Seema Alexander (19:16)
I'm just

Amanda (19:19)
I'm not just gonna go give away my

DNA to like everyone.

Seema Alexander (19:22)
But you look, mean, everybody.

Borzou (19:24)
I mean,

reeling. used to buy fucking Shake Off a Corner in Southeast and now we're getting like genetically matched. I was really upset. I missed drugs as a business. Like if everything that's happened to me were kids, AI, internet, this and that, I was like, how did I miss this? I feel like you just answered my question. I feel like that's why I'm not.

Seema Alexander (19:40)
Yeah, look, but that's

what it's any industry and every industry is going to get disrupted. That's the point of this, right? And then there's the operational side of, you know, re-imagining because the way like, you know, I just mentioned marketing. Look today, you know, there's A B testing is probably the two ways you get campaigns out and messaging and you're targeting and retargeting and using Facebook ads and doing all the stuff in the future. If I am.

marketing that black sweatshirt that you're wearing, Boazootie, you, now that my campaign is eventually gonna be that black sweatshirt, I'm gonna have some sort of knowledge of you, not only your buying habits from my brand, the public scraping of information of what you're doing or what vacation you're going on or whatever you're putting out there, and the campaign is gonna be very specific to you. And the campaign, even for the same black sweatshirt, if you were looking into it, Amanda, would be very separate for you. And that...

Operationally, the intelligence that's being built for companies is changing, right? And so there's just this opportunity. I feel like this is the biggest opportunity for founders that I've ever like could imagine, right? Or companies, right? Because it's like we're in that place where people are incubating in garages, next Netflix, the next Googles, all of those things. But even you don't have to be that big. You can do this for your own company because AI is so accessible.

Borzou (21:02)
Well, and I

think that is a big, there was a time not that long ago when I did a little homework into trying to make an AI product. And maybe I talked to the wrong people, but they're like, yeah, you need like at least 2 million bucks. And that may have been true at the time, and it's just not anymore. And I think a lot of people are, what is your advice for founders who are sitting? Go ahead.

Seema Alexander (21:16)
Right, no.

Amanda (21:19)
Yeah, but there's also a lot of

crappy product. people are creating just to create, to say they have and they boast and they're fakers and that's always been the case with everything and every new wave that's come across. And just in general, people are, there are a lot of fakers out there. So, but this is a big one. There's a lot of trash.

Seema Alexander (21:37)
Wow.

There is, think about

the gold rush during the internet days. Like the boom crashed so many internet companies because was fake, the people were faking it, not even before they were making it, because they weren't making it.

Borzou (21:51)
Well, and I don't want to,

I don't want to say the wrong company, but I'm pretty sure I know who it is, but I'm not going to say it just in case it's the wrong company. But one of these AI note taking companies that everyone fucking uses, they, when they came to market, they did not have a product. They would take the meeting audio, send it to like India. They would transcribe it, write a summary and send it back. They use that to get their first like two, 300 customers. And then they raised money and then they built the AI product. Like that's like.

Amanda (21:53)
Yeah, I'll be fast with you. Okay, go ahead.

Now talk about...

Seema Alexander (22:16)
Let me ask,

but look, isn't that market testing? Like, look, how many founders? They validated. Yeah. So, so that's the thing with, with the world that we're in, I don't know if you're familiar with Cursor and Lovable and all of these like vibe coding platforms. I mean, there are no code platforms that you can put your idea in and very like go as detailed as you want and it will create a prototype. So there is like, I, what I say for founders is there's no excuse anymore.

Borzou (22:21)
I'm not hating on it. Yeah, they validated the concept. They raised their money. Yeah.

Seema Alexander (22:45)
Like, know, if you go to an investor meeting and you are waiting to get wireframes done and all this stuff, you don't have to do that. You can create the prototypes in a like in an not in an instance, in a sense. I mean, you to be smart about what you're creating because you want to be intentional. But the tools are there today like they've never been done before. And now the investors are getting more and more savvy.

Right? So they want to see these things. you know, they're like, if you don't have it, then we have all these AI tools. You can at least create something to show us. Like, you know. Yeah.

Borzou (23:13)
Yeah. So let me, have a two part question for you. One, I know, right?

Amanda (23:17)
So many questions, so many.

Go ahead.

Borzou (23:20)
We can alternate.

I think a lot of founders are still sitting on the sideline waiting for the better ultimate perfect product to come out. What's your advice for them? Not to make their own thing, right? But like to get the right thing to implement into their system. Like they're waiting for the, you know, HubSpots and Salesforce is their internal AI product to be good enough, which like I don't think they're the best right now. What's your advice to them? The people who are like kind of chilling, waiting.

Seema Alexander (23:42)
mean, my advice is if you wait too long, there's a very good possibility you could be disrupted in the market depending on what you're waiting on. If it's a problem you're trying to solve, use these other tools to try to incrementally solve them today. Because I know what Salesforce is up to and HubSpot's up to. mean, they're enterprise large systems, and it's going to take them time. And you could be on their betas and all the things, ⁓ right? But.

There and here's the thing, like cutting through the noise of other tools out in the marketplace that are very, that are good. There's a lot of really good AI tools out there and they're solving, even if it's incremental problems, that's a good thing. But you can also create your own GPTs. mean, there's so much stuff you can do on your own today, let alone the agentic stuff that I definitely want to get into in terms of game changing things, right? But you can go in the backend of ChatGPT or Gemini, create your own gem in Gemini or your own GPT.

and solve some of these problems. really depends on how deep and how advanced they are, Burzu, right? Like if it's something that, you know, we're talking about personalized marketing and we want to get one on one, I mean, that, you got to be really thoughtful about that. And then you got to do like an analysis. Is it better for us to wait and buy or is it better for us to build right now and be ahead of the market? And what is that going to cost us? And what's the ROI, right? Like those are strategic decisions depending on what is it that you're waiting for is the question I

Amanda (25:05)
As far as the founders, you're saying that the founders, have no excuse anymore. But I'm not worried about the founders. The founders are always going to found. It's the task masters. It's the people that are the entry level people. It's the people that need to learn, the people that are up and coming. The people that have no desire to be a founder are now in a position where they would be better served by becoming a founder.

Seema Alexander (25:32)
Hmm, yeah, look, entrepreneurship is going be on a rise because of AI hands down. But we are talking about, I mean, look, I have an 11 and 16 year old, right? And I think any person going into entry level, it's like, know, the thing Jensen Wong, who's the CEO of Nvidia has always said, right? It's not about AI taking your job. It's about the people who know AI taking your job, right? And there's two different sides to this, right? It's like, whatever you do, and I always say this to the students now, it's like,

Amanda (25:36)
Yeah.

Seema Alexander (26:01)
Any industry you go in, please start focusing on the AI side of the industry as well, because it's only going to benefit you. Because we're in this, what I say, we're in the messy middle. Because we're in the next five years, it's like companies are not, they're trying to figure out what talent looks like. I had somebody who was pretty high up at Gensler, and she goes, which is a major design firm and architecture firm in this area.

Basically, she was like, look, can, like these entry level people, and this is the other side of it, are coming in with AI skills and they're building, or they're using all these tools to design these rooms. And she's like, I can walk in a room and I can look up and see like that light fixture is off by five inches. That door was not part, like it's wrong. Something's wrong with it. She's like, the problem is they're looking at all these AI tools as a source of truth and they don't have the experience. It's like compressing 15 years of experience, right?

Amanda (26:53)
Yes.

Seema Alexander (26:56)
So what do I do? And so it's like this, and I have some answers for it now after thinking about it, but I'm like, that's the reality most people are in. It's like, yes, use those AI tools, but I also think, I mean, we're internet people, right? We went through that ourselves, and that phase of things was, this is 10X that in my opinion, versus the internet.

Amanda (26:56)
yet.

Well, yeah,

I mean, you hit on something huge about the, you know, how everybody takes it to the absolute. think AI is always right, you know, and it's just like, how come when I search chat GBT on something that I'm not an expert in, it is always 100 % right. But when I search chat GBT on something I am an expert in, it's only about 60 % correct. You know, that's the thing. It's like,

Seema Alexander (27:38)
Mmm.

Amanda (27:40)
you really are best able to use AI to its fullest capabilities in your expert field and not in any other field.

Seema Alexander (27:48)
Well, it will eat. Yes, and yes, and right. So this is where I think micro language models are going to play a big role. Like, you know, we talk about the data sets and companies that are going to be unique for personalization and changing the experiences internally and potentially using them as other opportunities for business models. But those micro language models are being created either in open source world or in companies. Right. And

They are going to be expert focus. So in healthcare, there's going to be a lot they're working on that are very specific to healthcare reporting for whatever expert in branding, they're going to be people creating expert ones. So there's two parts of look at that. Use that because you're to your point, you're like, you know what you're talking about so that you know what's right or wrong. But I also would take that and go into perplexity and ask perplexity the same thing. I'd go into Manus, which I love. Manus just got bought over by

meta, it's like you gotta use a different, you gotta find the right LLMs also. Not all models are created the same, like, you know, and you have to do the quality assurance, Amanda, which you're talking about here. I think the models have gotten much better than they were three years ago, like, you know, but.

Amanda (28:54)
that.

That was a learning

lesson for me as far as you can't get too attached to a tool even though especially even though you have all of this data in there and all this and it starts to know you and it gets easier and it gets more knowing of what you're looking for and better answers and all that. There's certain ones that are better for different things. So you're right. You do need to change it up. But I still think it's going to be.

Borzou (29:15)
Well, and meta buying manias

is a little alarming to me. we're already like a little too easily influenced by social media and everything else anyway. you know, you were saying the next Netflix, Google, whatever, it's going to be the same Netflix, meta and Google just with new products. And it's a little.

Seema Alexander (29:20)
Chinese.

Maybe.

think about it for a second. Those products, I agree and I disagree. And the reason I disagree is that we're at that early stage of AI where segments of markets haven't even been created yet using the technology. And so there is like a yes. So yes.

Amanda (29:35)
I

Borzou (29:48)
My concern

is more geopolitical than business. Yeah.

Seema Alexander (29:52)
I totally

get it. Have you watched Social Dilemma? Yeah. If anybody in your community has, they should. Because I would say innovation has implications. And that really showcases tech pros in the social media days at Facebook, at, I don't know if Instagram was part of that, at Twitter.

They were just focused on being proud of people and their job is like, do we keep people on our social media channels? And part of that was the notifications, the sounds associated, the dopamine that they were creating so people felt like they could not get enough of these. No, it wasn't.

Borzou (30:27)
Yeah, it wasn't inherently malicious. was just to get

and, and, hey, people seem to like this kind of content. Turns out like means interact with a lot means got off about means we're going into different silos as a human organism. I have seen posts. have seen, I have seen a post of some like couple fighting and all the comments were like, guy's right. And I'll send it to my wife like, and then she'll look at it and all the comments she will see on the same post.

Seema Alexander (30:50)
Yeah.

Borzou (30:54)
are women saying the wife is right. Like that's how different what we see it as.

Seema Alexander (30:56)
Wow!

Amanda (30:57)
Wow. I mean, I shouldn't be surprised by that, but a shocking

example to me. Yeah.

Seema Alexander (31:02)
I am surprised by that.

Borzou (31:03)
yeah,

it shows you the comments. there's 10,000 comments on some posts, it shows you the ones that you want to see now.

Seema Alexander (31:11)
The reality

is there are people sitting in warehouses in countries that we don't even know the names of. If I'm being honest, they're creating this fakeness in social media. That has been obviously the shadow problem of social media. You couldn't believe things then, but you do because you just think it's the source of truth. Now, I always say you can't even. Everything that you look at, I tell my kids, you can't even trust and you have to verify.

Borzou (31:39)
Well, and I

kind ⁓ of think as much as, know, and I got a lot of reasons to shit on Elon and I get it, Grok's done a great job with that on X, right? Like any post.

Amanda (31:48)
children of their clothes right now, okay?

Borzou (31:51)
I didn't say it's been

all positive, but as a community management tool, as a fact checking community, mean, dude, you'll see Elon post something and someone will be like, Grock, is this true? And it's like, no. You know I mean? Like it does a really good job of kind of sussing that stuff out.

Seema Alexander (31:55)
I'm also going tell you it was a bit all positive. Yeah.

No. ⁓

That's interesting of like which LLM you use and for why. I'm curious. Yeah. Okay.

Borzou (32:12)
Well, Grok's just built into X, right? Like that's the only reason.

Amanda (32:16)
probably use rock the least I definitely use rock least.

Borzou (32:16)
Right. I only use it literally if I'm on X to...

Seema Alexander (32:17)
Yeah.

talking about?

Amanda (32:21)
When it said he was as strong as LeBron James I just act you know no thank you like that's not check that you know

Seema Alexander (32:26)
Yeah.

You know what's crazy? I mean, in this world, right? Like you forget how many moral decisions you have to make when you start to create AI models. And one of the things that I was exposed to early this year, I went to Moonshot Factory, which is Google's incubator, like early this year for this futures council work I was on. And then they were sort of talking about Waymo. And now we know in DC, Waymo's coming, which is autonomous vehicles. It's obviously been in the West Coast. Now they finally, I think, approved the autonomy to be here.

But think about the decision making that goes into something autonomous like that. If I had three people and passengers in my car and all of a sudden I'm in a situation where I have to get into a car accident and there's five other people on the right side or four other people on the left side, how does that autonomous vehicle make the decision to go where? And who is the right people that are potentially going to get hurt or die or injured?

versus the people in their car. And these are actual decisions and models that they have to put in place because that's the moral code behind a lot of these larger innovations outside of the intelligent workflows, which also have their own biases and ethics issues.

But these are big things that founders or companies as they're creating things need to start to think about responsibly.

Borzou (33:48)
Okay, this is very much a me question, but hopefully it'll be useful for other people too. How much of this do you think the founder should be doing? Because depending on who I'm talking to, and I'll talk to other agency owners, where they're like, dude, lock yourself away for a weekend and just learn lovable inside and out. Do you feel like founders, not just agency owners, but across the board, do you think that we should be really getting our hands dirty with?

the tools or like, you know, if we have the money, should we just fucking hire somebody?

Seema Alexander (34:14)
Yeah, so I'll give you a couple of perspectives and I'm going to put a little selfish plug because we're going to create something called AI CEO School just for this purpose because

I do believe going back to the rethink without getting your hands dirty, understanding the fluency of what the stuff is, I do think at a founder level some of these tools are just so amazing, like depending on your industry getting really good with some of those because once you understand it then you can delegate.

Right? Like it's that. It's just the, it's the common practice. It's like all of a sudden, if you were an agency owner and you wanted to be really amazing at Facebook ads and you've never done in your life before, and then you're hiring people who are experts in Facebook ads, but you don't know what the fuck you're doing. Like that's not going to be good for you as a leader to know if they're doing it right or wrong. Right? And to Amanda's point about being that subject matter expert, where is the beauty in that? But I think from a leadership perspective, there's also like, here's incremental stuff.

But then how are we creating intelligence in our operations? How are we going to create unique data sets to create more personalized content and campaigns? I'm using agency as an example, since you brought it up, for our customers, right? What is it, do we create build versus buy? Like you have to understand where this world of agentic AI is going, which you're going to have to make decisions and understand like, wow, we can connect all these systems together and get these insights that we've never been able to get before. And these

now agents on the Segentic solution can do stuff for me, which means I have to use my people differently. Like, you know, so there are some like the all these types of things are super important. And then as a leader of a company, you to think about governance. Like how are how should my people be using AI? Like what should we be talking about in terms of transparency or not to our customers around how we're using AI? Right. What's going to give us the most competitive edge and make us different if everyone's using AI? Because I want to make sure our brand, our voice.

All of our things are it's it's uniquely us or else you you know better than anybody sound like everybody else, which is a lot of the problems out in the world. I'll give you one other example. I had a woman named Laura Shushnick on my podcast, a I CEO podcast. She's the CEO of a company called Wisewire and they're an education production house. So they do multimodal education for major universities for just major education companies. And I think it was like she told me, know, a chat GPT came out in twenty two.

March of 23, she asked all her operational people, they're like, go tinker with AI for three months, each one of you individually, just go do what you gotta do. Three months later, they came back and she said, all right. And obviously with the mindset of like, how do we improve operations? How do we save money? How do we make better outcomes for our customers, right? And it was like her internal hackathon and they were design thinkers, like they had that mentality of systems in mind. And then they came up together and then each one of them laid out.

Here's what I would use in my tech stack and here's how we produce things differently when it came to video or this is the challenge that we have. And they put all this stuff in place. They reduced their tech stack by money wise. I mean, it was like she said like by 50 more than 55 % their ROI went up 30 to 40 % and they became thought leaders in their space because they were now showing their clients how they're using it. One last example in this same example is like, think about when you're ⁓

They used to do a lot of videos for CEOs or folks, researchers and stuff. And they would go to the office, up like studios and do all that stuff, which would cost $10,000, $15,000. And then you go back to the editing, your editor's office, and you're like, man, something changed. they will call and be like, we have to, and to go back and do that would cost a lot of money. But now you can use AI avatars to fix that stuff or digital twin. Like, you know, it's like.

They're using tools that they would have never used before to make their life easier, to save money, to save time. And the experience and the outcomes of their customers are that much better. I do think leadership needs to be involved right now once you get a handle on it. And remember, this is the weakest this technology is ever going to be, right? It's like,

Borzou (38:12)
Yeah.

Seema Alexander (38:13)
I think it's a little past DOS of like the internet days, like it's that, right? Like, and the more you understood about digital, the better and stronger your company got. The more, you know, eventually everyone will have a CAIO, but that's fine. They should be your advisor. You should be the person. This is a business problem. This is not an IT problem. This is a business opportunity, you know?

Amanda (38:35)
Good quote. Wait, I do have one more question. I'm sorry. We've done so much comparison. Yeah, no, I really want to know, Sema's ⁓ take on this. We've done so much comparing to the internet and the internet boom and then also the bust. Everybody's talking about how there's going to be like an AI bust at some point. What do you, how do you see that playing out?

Borzou (38:35)
All right, you want to transition into it.

you

Seema Alexander (38:59)
I agree. I mean, it's kind of what we've talked about throughout this whole podcast, right? It's like some people used a lot of these chat GPT wrappers or, you know, build them. Look, I think everyone's going to start building off of, not everybody, a lot of people are going to start building off of these large language models. They're going to become the infrastructure layer of some of these potential larger solutions. Even perplexity is built off of a large language model, right? And so, and it's a very strong tool.

But there are some just bullshit tools out there. People are marketing. To your point, it's like we're faking it till they're making it. They're not really embedding AI the right ways. And then if they're trying to scale, they'll never get there because they can't, because they really don't know how. They don't want to spend the money on developers to develop. The developers are probably going after or don't have the expertise because there is a finite group of people right now that have this level of expertise to help them and to optimize the costs of this AI. mean, I could keep going, right?

Amanda (39:54)
guess I'm

at the larger implications economically. No, that's it. I know how that's going to happen because everybody's over producing. But then what?

Seema Alexander (39:57)
⁓ yeah. Go ahead.

Yeah, well

look, in the beginning of Web3, I used that too, and even internet, like the investors went all in. People got really excited about this tech. And so there are going to be a lot of investments that are, you know, they spent billions of dollars in that are not going to come through. So economically, I'd say over the next year or so, we're going to see a lot of that bust. However, that doesn't mean stop. you know, like, yeah, you can't stop. You're like, this is

Amanda (40:29)
No, no, no, no, no, can't stop. You to put on the bottle,

Seema Alexander (40:33)
This is why the

last part of the framework is rewire, right? This is that moment. You have the fluency, not only from understanding what AI is and the big picture, the Lego pieces, the leadership side, the getting your hands dirty, right? You start to reimagine, okay, what if I started my business from scratch today and now we know we can create intelligence in our companies, we can create intelligent workflows, we can use agents in a narrow way or agentic, like larger solutions.

That's the thinking of it, right? The re-imagining what this is possible. And then you start to rewire incrementally to more robust. Like that's the framework right now that there's huge opportunities both on the early stage founder side and the growth company side.

Borzou (41:16)
All right. Well, that's, know you want to talk about agentic and what that means for different people, places, et cetera. Do you want to give us a couple of minutes on that? Cause I'm curious to see how your definition is different. The way I think about it is it's just a thing you can make do things. Right. And there's no kind of end for that. could be scraping data. It could be, pulling stuff in like anything that it's doing without me making it do it in my mind. That's what it is. And I feel like that's not.

Seema Alexander (41:22)
Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, I actually just got off.

I did an intensive at Harvard for a Gentic AI and it was awesome. It validated a lot of things I was talking about and what I've been talking about the future business.

But what was interesting, even there, Boazoo, like they had like eight different definitions of a Gentic, right? Because there hasn't been one, but the concept is there. So let me start with like, I think everyone obviously knows a large language models, the chat GPT's and perplexities. It's the natural language processing. creates patterns by the words or letters and it starts to

bring all the context together. There's lots of inferences in the back end. The generative AI phrase, now you prompt something and it will create images and pictures and proposals. It has that capability, right?

There was the agent phase, which is what you're talking about at that stage, right? Agents are what I would call narrow agents. They're doing a task on your behalf. You have trained an agent to, that's right, to do. But there's this other side, which is agentic.

Borzou (42:32)
I was right.

Seema Alexander (42:37)
And this is sort of what I was exposed to years ago. Yeah, so you were right and. You were right and. But Amanda, this goes back to your initial definition of AI, right? It's going to think and ration and be more like in a human capacity to actually do like do the task and do the work on your behalf, right?

Borzou (42:37)
I was not right.

Maybe she's so nice about it.

Amanda (42:43)
it every time. You should be used to

it by now. Yes, but also...

Seema Alexander (43:03)
So instead of me wanting to, I'm doing a LinkedIn profile, I need like, or I'll do a customer service thing, right? I'll maybe I'll use this. Where today, think about when you're on your phone and you're calling, I don't know, Intuit for QuickBooks, or mean, yeah, QuickBooks, anything. And you're on their customer service, and all of a sudden you're like, right now you're in this like,

You ask the question and they're like, is this one of the three things that you're looking for? You know, the way that customer service works today, which is like all outdated. The AI version of that will have machine learning in the background and actually have enough content and context. So we'll get you to closer to an answer, right? The future state of all this, and this is like a Gentic plus, imagine, you know, you're on that call for 30 minutes and you're still waiting and waiting and waiting, and then you get cut off.

Borzou (43:33)
Yeah.

Seema Alexander (43:56)
How do you feel? What do you know is going to happen today? You're going to be pissed. You're going to call back and what? And start the fuck over, right? Like that's what's going happen. But the future state is the level of memory, the level of just, you know, like, if I'm contacting this brand on the phone.

Borzou (43:58)
I gotta call back. I gotta call back and start over. Start over.

Amanda (44:01)
I I can go through it all again.

Borzou (44:05)
you

Seema Alexander (44:15)
They'll immediately either call you back and be like, listen, sorry, we got cut off. Here's where we were. They'll have all your history, understand exactly where you're trying to go. If I maneuver to social media with that brand, if I maneuver to their website, it will still know me and my identity if you give it permission. That's going to be the big.

Borzou (44:30)
I'm

imagining the AI like when I call rolling its eyes and being like, oh, this bitch again. Fucking Boris is calling again.

Seema Alexander (44:36)
⁓ I mean,

talked about artificial general intelligence and then the ASI stuff and that's when shit gets freaky to me.

Borzou (44:53)
Yeah, we're,

I think people think we're closer to that. I think people, I think some people think that exists right now because we use the term AI so like ubiquitously and like it's, it's not thinking yet, but we're.

Seema Alexander (45:02)
Yeah, it's you know, you

you can train everything enough there. It's reasoning there's

Amanda (45:08)
Well, I people have

romantic relationships with, yeah, so. That's true. That's true.

Seema Alexander (45:11)
They They do today.

Borzou (45:12)
People have romantic relationships with fruit. That doesn't mean anything.

Seema Alexander (45:15)
I mean, we've had it with rubber dolls for a long time.

do what they do, right? You can't. But if I'm being honest, have you seen the movie Her from back in the day? Yeah. I mean, you're going to see people marrying in our generation, my grandkids. But it's going to happen more than often. Because think about it, right?

Borzou (45:23)
No, but I feel like I need to watch it now.

Amanda (45:23)
Yeah,

and I've read the book, Antibot, which is highly recommend. Yes.

There have already been news articles about it.

Seema Alexander (45:41)
And they're already, think about this. This is what I find freaky. What's the toy brand, not Matteo? Come on, help me out. There's like big toy brand. Mattel, Mattel, okay. Mattel has a partnership with OpenAI, right? Imagine, and I've already seen some of these like novice toys for kids having large, like AI in it, right? And now all of a sudden your kid is like, has this doll and this doll is like,

Borzou (45:48)
Hasbro, Hasbro, Mattel.

Mm-hmm.

Seema Alexander (46:08)
your kid's best friend. know everything about your kid. And they're like, you know, saying they're the best in sliced bread. Why would your kid go into third grade drama and fourth grade drama with all the other girls where they're like, Sarah, my dolly, who's so real loves me. And in the future, like, that's what it's going to be like. The AIs are going to know you so well. I mean, my chatty knows me so damn well right now. think like, and the thing is, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah.

Amanda (46:09)
year.

Borzou (46:32)
So let me ask you this. So you brought up

another thing that I'm concerned, this podcast is never gonna fucking end. ⁓ We may have to do like three episodes of this. No, cause one thing that I, and we'll do a whole, we'll get on someone else's podcast to talk about some of the other stuff. ⁓ cause you know, cause you know, we all have kids, right? And I wonder so much in this, you know,

Amanda (46:38)
Yeah.

Seema Alexander (46:38)
That's

fine.

You

Amanda (46:50)
there.

Borzou (46:56)
We're like relatively on top, like, Seema, you're the most out of the three of us, but like we're relatively on top of this shit. And we have no idea where everything's going. Right? So like what, what skills, what majors, like what are, cause I, I love the idea of AI to teach, right? What you just described is terrifying to me, but I love the idea of AI teaching our kids, right? And like really customized courses for each kid, which is probably coming soon. but what are the skills that you think parents should be having their kids work on?

Seema Alexander (47:04)
no!

Amanda (47:13)
those points.

Borzou (47:22)
to kind of be ready for anything in the future.

Seema Alexander (47:24)
I mean, all the soft skills are going to matter more than anything and somewhat we're losing that because of just being on phones, right? And the loneliness epidemic and just like the scrolling and all that stuff. And the more you can get your kids to know how to communicate well, to learn how to interact with people, you know, how to negotiate, to do all the human things, right? Relationship building. Honestly, that is going to be one of the, all the soft skills are going to matter more than anything, right?

Then it becomes what I said before, like, because

we don't know what we don't know. And we also know that there are going to be all these new segments of markets and industry that are going to be built. Coding, if you're a coder, you need to understand. I just did a talk for a Google Developer Group at George Washington University. And I was sitting in front of all these coders. And I was like, look, you guys are learning all the pythons, all the cool stuff, but also understand all the vibe coding tools. Also understand all these new.

new ways of being able to provide code and the security around it and quality assurance around it. Like you need to know that like this is where your world is going and they are, you know, they're coming out of school. Like they're already baked, half baked. So your question is like, where do you even start? Right. And I think, mean, I always see you have to kind of start with where your passion and all that leads. But I always say at this stage, because we're in the messy middle, you want to focus on like that.

technology side as well because you have to. The soft skills, the industry you want, you want to get as much subject matter expertise and experience you can, but layer the technology. Employers are going to getting, call it excited, but they want people who have AI backgrounds in their industry.

So if you know how to use certain tools, it's helpful, right? At this stage, our kids are a little younger, right? So I mean, like I had my daughter and my niece on my podcast and it was really interesting because they were, they were like,

Parents talk about this shit more than we do and they didn't use the word shit, but they would. But they're like, we feel like this technology is being forced upon us, but we're not even able to use it in schools yet. And so they're like, just give us the tools that we are allowed to use and we'll use it. And so I think my 11 year old, I haven't let her touch ChatGPT yet to my 16 year old who's using it, but for...

Amanda (49:12)
Vroom vroom vroom.

Seema Alexander (49:35)
specific reasons and the teachers are scaring the crap out of them because they're like, know everything that you're doing in Chad GBT and you will fail and that's okay. I think the world of education is changing. It's partly, yes, actually I wanted to mention something about personalized education. I just took this Harvard intensive. It was my first experience with personalized education, which is really cool. And I think we're gonna build some platforms around it for our company because independent private schools are one of our target audiences.

Borzou (49:44)
It's also a lie. They don't fucking know.

Seema Alexander (50:02)
But why say it is because you go through the agentic course through live lectures and they have webinars and other things. An AI agent is fully trained on this agentic material, fully. They did a really good job, fully trained. Then it comes to me and it guides me on questions about my company and other things and things I've learned through this lecture or just re-emphasizing things. And then the next phase, there's some coursework.

And then the next day I get this and it's notebook L.M. if you're familiar, Borzou, like Amanda, right? It was like this personalized message, 15 minute message about what all this stuff that I just talked about or the lecture, the stuff I put in specific to me about my company and what I should be thinking about from this lecture. And it went on throughout the entire thing like that. And it was so like refreshing.

Because I was able to ask that agent so many things about what was relevant to me, like, you know, versus just going through the course in the way it wasn't applied. This was an applied course. We're going to see a lot of that. We're going to see a lot of that. And I think that's going to be very interesting for our kids and where things are headed. just think even, you know, I'm an 11th grader. So I think she's going to miss the vote for that, depending on what college she goes in. We'll see, right? I do think there's hope for the sixth grader to, you know,

Borzou (50:59)
Yeah, yeah.

Seema Alexander (51:18)
get some of that personalized learning over time. Yeah. I don't know if I answered your question. It's a hard one.

Borzou (51:23)
No,

Amanda (51:23)
Take

Borzou (51:23)
no, no, no, you did. You absolutely did.

Amanda (51:23)
time. Soft skills plus technology and one day at a time.

Seema Alexander (51:29)
And industry. And the thing is, we are

also in a place that there are going to be millions and millions of new jobs and new segments, and we don't even know what they are. Like, know, yeah. Yeah.

Amanda (51:36)
Yeah, that's what I meant by that. Yeah,

Borzou (51:39)
All right, guys, so let's do like a little round we'll close out with kind

founder AI rules, let's say. Three things to automate and three things to protect. Like what are the first three things that go to AI? What are the last three things that go to AI?

Seema Alexander (51:46)
Okay.

God, three things to automate. I love automating my brain. I didn't talk about this. Yeah, ⁓ look, I have a plot. I don't know if you would know it's like a recording device. So

Borzou (51:59)
That's important because mine's a problem here.

Seema Alexander (52:04)
anytime I go do my talks or speeches or recordings like this or like meetings up, I'm putting them in a brain. Seema's brain, like, you know, and I'm creating a secondary brain for me. So if I did something like today where I'm like, OK, here are the questions for my podcast or tomorrow I'm on a panel, I'm like,

Borzou (52:13)
Yeah.

Seema Alexander (52:21)
What would seem an answer? And it would just give me a reaction or, hey, I have to write a blog on X, Y, and Z. What did I say about this?

It's like, more you can, and this is me, automate your brain because you always say, I wish I had a second to me. ⁓ You can do that now, right? And there are going to be actual tools and softwares and things like that.

Borzou (52:37)
Yeah, right.

my gosh, should I make a Borzo

Amanda (52:43)
you.

Borzou (52:43)
GPT so everyone can ask that question instead of me?

Seema Alexander (52:46)
There you

Tony Robbins, all these big celebrity people, they already have that tooling and you can ask them questions. I actually created another thing to automate when it comes to business. I created a GPT with some of my top founders, leaders, CEOs that I was like, want my advisory board to be these five people. And I trained it. And now a lot of my questions that I get stuck on, I'm like, it's Mark Cuban, it's Sarah Blakely, it's XYZ. And I get incredible.

advice, like incredible advice. again, if we're talking founders, like you're lonely a lot of times, you're the one doing a lot of thinking, unless you're in masterminds like EO and other things, right? Like, you know, there's, you know,

Borzou (53:25)
We should have made

you go last. I knew your answer was going to be the best. Go ahead.

Seema Alexander (53:30)
Man.

Amanda (53:30)
I didn't even realize

we were going. thought you asked for three for shoes. It's gonna do all three. Let's just leave it like that.

Seema Alexander (53:36)
The

last one I would say operational, like so there's operational intelligence. So as you're thinking about your marketing and your finance and your areas that like are just the functional areas, now it's the time to really think about those ways of creating intelligent workflows so that you're not sitting and spending the time being janitor in chief of your own business. you know, like you're actually being able to create these intelligent workflows so that.

⁓ You can spend more time growing your company and building the relationships and training your people and you know doing all those things So I didn't want to give you the generic answers. So I'm giving

Borzou (54:12)
No, that was a

great answer. And I wondered if anyone bought one of those plot things. Now I know. ⁓

Seema Alexander (54:17)
Every time I talk

about it, I show it. People come up to me. I should have an affiliate link at this point.

Borzou (54:21)
Yeah, I mean, I'm almost certainly going to buy

Amanda (54:21)
You should, like seriously,

Borzou (54:23)
one now.

Amanda (54:23)
you should do that now even. Yeah, yeah, well, like, for you.

Seema Alexander (54:25)
I know, I know. We should add it to this podcast on the bottom.

Borzou (54:26)
Yeah, go

sign up for their program. And then top three things to protect.

Seema Alexander (54:31)
Yeah!

Ooh, empathy. think compassion and empathy are probably, it's huge.

Borzou (54:40)
This is, this is going to sound

like a joke, but that's like one of my top AI uses. I'm like, no, I'll like write the email I want to write and be like, can you make this sound fucking nicer and more empathetic? Yeah. I'd be like, okay, you piece of shit.

Seema Alexander (54:44)
Alright.

Amanda (54:45)
to make you empathetic? yeah, no, no.

Seema Alexander (54:50)
But like, look, like,

again, all those soft skills, you just can't relationship building like you can't get you can give the tone of voice to your point. Yeah, sure. Right. But that's a human human elements that like if you're interacting with customers like you should. ⁓ I'm just saying.

Amanda (55:10)
I mean, that's super ironic.

No, but he's using, it's super ironic to be using AI to make you more empathetic. Yeah. I'm a hundred percent sure it will be more empathetic.

Borzou (55:18)
It's only when I'm mad. It's only when I'm angry.

Seema Alexander (55:20)
Which is often, which is often, I'm just kidding.

Yeah,

I think being a good leader, like leadership is always now you're going to be in a world where you're going to be working and leading people and agents. And that's a really different ballgame. you know, and I think like this, you can't give up, continue to try to be better as a leader, to be better communicator. Like, you know, and I think when you have your core team and they believe in your vision and your mission, you want to keep it like that. And even this world of agents that are coming in.

You have to be able to articulate your vision and understand that these are going to augment your people, make them superpowers so that they're not doing all the busy work and doing all those things. And you have a sense of responsibility to be that person right now. And then the last thing, and you'll like this to end with both of you, is brand. You cannot give up your brand.

You can't. We never went into the future of business framework, but my last part of it, I mean, quickly it's like.

Every business is going to have a level of intelligence either from outside people, hopefully from internal and outside hybrid. Your company is just going to operate very differently than it does data is going to become your unique moat. We already went into that earlier, so it won't go into depth. Three, humans are going to be in the loop until they're not.

That means this whole change management side, the leadership side that we talked about. And all those three combined, brand is going to matter more than anything.

Right. And because that's going to be your it factor your edge. Right. Until agents market to agents. But I won't go there right now. Like you know but that will happen. So the.

Amanda (56:55)
Well, I

still think brand, arguably, it's everything that you put out there that's scannable, that's been reviewed, that's anything that the machines need to be able to input it. And that's part of brand. So it's been even agent to agent, I think.

Seema Alexander (57:11)
I love that Amanda because you're

right because even if the world of SEO is changing to GEO, the more content and context you have all around the place, the more the agent will absorb that. So you're absolutely right and thank you. Now you shifted my perspective. Love it.

Borzou (57:26)
All

right, I am not gonna also go because that was the best, but I will just add, cause you mentioned already earlier, it is that like taste and discernment, right? Like the, the Gensler person you were talking about with the lamp in the right place. I think maybe eventually AI will, it'll certainly continue to get better at it, but I do think that edge. And I think in a world where AI is making everything based on data,

It's going to continue to make safer and more the same everything for everyone. And that's where like taking chances, being different, ties into brand as well. Right. But I think we're going to see, unique opportunities for people to make noise just by like bucking trends. You know? otherwise thanks for being on. We'll have links for everyone to find everyone here, here, here. And if we get applaud affiliate link, we'll put it as well. ⁓ if not, don't buy one until Seema puts herself.

Seema Alexander (58:01)
No, I agree.

There you go.

Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

Borzou (58:15)
Otherwise, thanks guys. This was awesome.