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Discover how leveraging AI can revolutionize productivity, streamline tasks, and empower entrepreneurs to scale their businesses effectively. Tune in to explore the transformative potential of AI in simplifying operations and driving sustainable growth.
Listen to the full episode here - https://beyond8figures.com/podcast-episodes/
Watch the Episodes On YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@Beyond8Figures
Listen to the full episode here - https://beyond8figures.com/podcast-episodes/
Watch the Episodes On YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@Beyond8Figures
Creators & Guests
Host
What is Beyond 8 Figures?
At Beyond 8 Figures, we believe in DELIBERATE entrepreneurship. It means creating a solid foundational framework for your entrepreneurial journey, building from a place of passion, and intentionally aligning your actions with your goals so that you can create success on your terms.
Join A.J. Lawrence, the journeyman entrepreneur with several 7 figure exits, as he shares honest conversations with successful entrepreneurs about their experiences starting and scaling businesses to $10M and beyond, the realities of being a modern-day entrepreneur, advice for practicing deliberate entrepreneurship, and more!
I think most people think that these large language models, Chat GPT, just fell out of the sky one day. We've been working on that for 70 or 80 years. Right? And I started in the AI space inventing the first, virtual assistants. Her name was Mary, and, eventually, all of that got licensed for Siri and Cortana and Alexa and all of the other virtual assistants.
Kevin Surace:You can look at the advent of large language models and say, what kind of company can I create leveraging that technology? How can I use it to come up with something that really solves someone's pain and has enough of a mode around it where you aren't gonna have 100 other companies do it?
A.J. Lawrence:I'm excited for that idea that, like, alright. In normal life, I work hard or whatever, but maybe 80% effective if I'm really good at things. Having that extra 5%, 10% from, like you said, just like that may not be the best response, or you may need a little bit deeper. I that's exciting. And I just wonder, what are we going to be selling?
A.J. Lawrence:What are we going to be promoting based upon it when AI can handle so much?
Kevin Surace:Well, let's look at productivity this way. Right? If if you've got a start up, you're an entrepreneur, maybe it's you, maybe it's you and a few people, whatever it is at the beginning. If you would not take a pencil and a ledger book and start to keep track of your finances at the business. And you don't do that because, 1, we have Excel or, 2, we have QuickBooks or the like.
Kevin Surace:Right? So we have tools now that actually in that in the task of math and finance, and I'm giving you we'll use finance in particular, probably makes you and me 10 to a 100 times more productive than we would be with a pencil and more accurate. Some number like that. Huge. Just in that one task, that's a task that could have taken days and now takes a half an hour, whatever it is.
Kevin Surace:Right? So 10 to a 100 times more productive. That is what large language models are actually doing for our language tasks. They're making us for that task 10 to a 100 times more productive than we would have been. And we may or may not have better outcomes, but we certainly used our time better.
Kevin Surace:So if we've now automated math and we've automated now language, including decision making. Right? You can ask it, what decision would you make? Blah blah blah. So we've now automated the 2 big things that any entrepreneur has to do.
Kevin Surace:They gotta do math associated things, and there's lots of those. And you have to do language associated things, and there's lots of those. Right? Now there may be some other things. Obviously, there's other things you do during the day.
Kevin Surace:You have to, I don't know, take take this to the bank, or you have to take the dry cleaning to here, or you have to, you know, well, the fire up the chemical mixer, whatever it is. Right? That AI is not gonna do. But but all of those other desk Chocolate wood. Yeah.
Kevin Surace:All these other desk tasks are getting automated in a way that helps you. You're still in charge. You you know, you're the master of Excel. It didn't go off and run some math without you just like you're the master of the large language model. Same thing.
Kevin Surace:You are the master of it. You own it. You tell it what you want. You tell it what to do, and you take back, and you either take it or leave it or regenerate it or fix it or whatever. You're still the master.
Kevin Surace:And I think when people realize that and go, oh, this is just an incredible tool set that finally automates the other half of my time at my desk, including emails. I can I can apply this to emails and, of course, in Outlook, we've already now got starting to be built in and everybody's, copilot for Outlook and copilot for, writing presentations? It's phenomenal. The presentations look better than I could do, and I can also go out to, Stable Diffusion or DALL E 3 or whatever and and generate amazing images and boom, put them right there. There was an image I needed for one of the stars I'm working with in the home theater space sort of.
Kevin Surace:And I just needed this exact picture of these people watching this, and these are the speakers, and this is what it looks like, the size of the screen. I Please describe that all. I could not find a photo anywhere. Even, you know, not that I would borrow a photo, but even even, you know, stock
A.J. Lawrence:Clip art.
Kevin Surace:Yeah. Nobody had taken one from that angle. I I had one in 10 seconds. There it was. Boom.
Kevin Surace:Put it right in the presentation. It looked like I shot the photo. As if they didn't shoot the photo. This is this is, like I said, amazing time to be alive and an amazing time to be an entrepreneur. If you you think of all the presentation you have to write, do, make look great, I would do pitch decks, send them to an artist, and we go back and forth for 3 weeks.
Kevin Surace:Even though the pitch deck's gonna change all the time. Right? Now I write the pitch deck and then I go, I need art for this, this, this, this, and this. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Done.
Kevin Surace:I'm sorry about the artist, but I didn't need to do it. And by the way, give me a better layout for this. Okay. Here. Boom.
Kevin Surace:Yeah. Wow. This is amazing. Right? So this changes everything you do as an entrepreneur, including the testing of markets.
Kevin Surace:You know, you can ask chat GBD, what do you think of this idea? You know, I wanna make fireplace stones. I'm looking at the fireplace behind you, if that's a fireplace. I don't know. That Yep.
Kevin Surace:Mhmm. Yeah. That that looked the following way, but go together automatically, and it'll it'll have some great recommendations on, and even know how to solve problems and problems with employees. You know, it's amazing.
A.J. Lawrence:It's funny you say that because, yeah, I have been experimenting with some of those, like, avatar discovery or, yeah, avatar. You're like, okay. Here. Ask questions. And in the past, I've invested and been involved with various user testing platforms.
A.J. Lawrence:And I did something and sent it to a friend who's an ex CEO of one of them, but he sold. And he he was like, oh, this is really good. Who did you use? And I was like, yeah. This was earlier.
A.J. Lawrence:Now he's even my more of it. But I was like, Chat GPT was like, uh-oh. Yeah. We had to go find, like, 10,000 people to go answer these questions.
Kevin Surace:Right. Exactly. No. It it is an amazing time. And so that's why I think as an entrepreneur, you know, the only thing we don't have is time because time is money, and we're burning up money as we take time.
Kevin Surace:And your whole day goes by and you put 12 hours in, you go I only got done with half the task and okay. Start using these accessible models that are now in English, and and you might find 5 hours of your day comes back to you.
A.J. Lawrence:That leads to a very good question I would like to ask you. Because of your involvement, the time you've been in the space and what you're doing now, you really are very much involved in a focused use of AI. I think a lot of entrepreneurs will use the tools. You know, we have a very haphazard, especially when we're in that second inflection point into 7 figures. We've stopped rubbing sticks together as fast as possible, and now we're trying to figure out how to create structure and do this in a way we can actually sleep.
Kevin Surace:It's hail.
A.J. Lawrence:That's my goal usually. It's can I actually get to where I'm sleeping normally? But, we throw tools at problems as we see them. We see whatever people are finding cool, you know, here from podcast shows, whatever, where the tools are. How can we actually develop a practice around understanding?
A.J. Lawrence:Because it changes so quickly. It's not about which tool is the best, but just being adaptable to AI. How can other how can entrepreneurs start building an AI understanding or an AI practice?
Kevin Surace:Yeah. So so I I think there's two things. Right? One one, what are the best practices to use it within my company, me and my people? And where do we wanna use it?
Kevin Surace:And where do we need to be cautious, and where can't we use public models where we have to have a private model or private access, so that, we're not giving certain things away. So so I think you do have to put those best practices in and best, we'll say, models, for lack of a better word, because it isn't about Chase JBT versus Bard. It's really about often 3rd part you know, 3rd party other startups, right, who have who have really done great embeddings or great unique uses of those models so that it's much more valuable and usable to you. Right? And that's and and that's what you wanna do.
Kevin Surace:And so, so I just think look. You you you have to take the time to find what works for you, what really adds value, what really adds productivity, and then launch that out throughout the rest of your team, however big that team is, and then encourage them to use it. Like, no coders should not be using either codex or copilot. It would be ridiculous. Although most coders aren't, but the ones that are 55% more productive than the ones that aren't.
Kevin Surace:So please use it. It it we're you know, it doesn't work all the time, but you're gonna double your productivity. That's pretty amazing. Right? 55% more productive, and that's across, like, a 1000000 users.
Kevin Surace:So so I think that's fabulous. And then the other side of that is, are there places I can leverage this kind of technology to build out a product so so that the technology is embedded in my product. Right? You're not gonna Yeah. Go build a $7,000,000,000 foundational model that Chat GPT did, that OpenAI did.
Kevin Surace:But you can leverage OpenAI and Chat GPT or other models or llama too, whatever, in ways that are highly unique that you could build a real moat around. And, it's certainly, you know, at at at AppVance, you mentioned AppVance. We, have invented, methods, since the first product came out in 2018 to leverage AI and machine learning to find bugs in enterprise software. Where we are today is that we'll find 10 times more bugs than your entire QA team. I know what this is gonna bring up.
Kevin Surace:It brings up the question that we're not really gonna talk about today probably is, oh, how about my job? Look. There are certain jobs that are going to certainly be impacted by AI. Most of those are not in the United States today. And that's simply because not because we're being picky about who gets laid off or who's it because swaths of, of certain kinds of jobs were sent offshore over the last 20 years.
Kevin Surace:And those happen to be the things that were the most price sensitive. That we could not afford to pay $20 an hour. We wanted to pay a dollar an hour. So we went offshore. We pay a dollar an hour.
Kevin Surace:Tier one customer support. That's an example. Yeah. Certainly software QA, and there are many, many others. Right?
Kevin Surace:Those will be the first. They are already the first jobs that are under threat from AI. Again, not because they happen to be offshore, but because of the very nature of why we sent them offshore. We sent them offshore because they were relatively easy to train people and they were relatively repetitive tasks. And if I can train a repetitive task, then I can do those offshore, and I don't feel bad about it.
Kevin Surace:It's a it's a great use of human resources, and these are great people taking those jobs. But I don't need to do them onshore. I don't need the those people. Right? So those are the first jobs that are under threat, and, and and they're under significant threat over the next 1, 2, 3 years, not 20.
Kevin Surace:It's like most tier one customer support will be a chatbot or will be a virtual assistant, period. Full stop. Frankly, the machine does it better. It's more accurate. It it gives more accurate results more often, and, and you can update basically what it says on a dime as we learn more, right, as we change our FAQs, whatever.
Kevin Surace:So look. Again, exciting time. If you're an entrepreneur and you had tier 1 customer support, whether it was here or there or whatever, really, you can have a chatbot do that a week from now. It's very easy. I won't I don't think we'll get into embeddings and how that's done, but there are companies that do it for you.
Kevin Surace:And now, frankly, OpenAI is basically sort of launched the ability to do it right on their platform, and you don't need, necessarily pine cone and all these specialized databases. Right? So, it's really fascinating. It's it's just a fascinating time. And if you can cut your tier one customer support costs from a million a year to $20,000 a year to pay for the pay for the AI or 30,000, that's incredible.
Kevin Surace:That's more money back to you to drive the cost of your product down to be more competitive.