Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. This is Isar Meitis, your host, our guest today is Shawn David, and he's an expert in automation. And we're gonna talk about the different levels you gotta go through in order to go from having no automation to having fully deploy AI-based automation and all the steps you gotta do in between in order to make it the most effective.
At the end of the episode, I will also cover three interesting things that happened this past week in the AI world, And now to the episode with Shawn david, Hello and welcome to Leveraging ai, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Matis, your host, and I've got a special guest for you today.
Many business people and business leaders wonder how they should even start using AI in their business, and many already started dabbling with it, and they're using Chati PT for this, and they're using this tool for that. But very few companies and business people figured out a process. How do we actually implement automation that uses AI across the company, across tools, across teams? And our guest today, Shawn David, is an expert in exactly that.
And he has a three step process that is gonna share with us that he has implemented successfully in multiple instances. And it basically goes like this, how to identify the low-hanging fruits, how to create an initial automation with no-code, low-code solutions, and then how to use AI to boost the efficiency of that way more so three-step process. But in there, there's obviously a lot of details on how to do all these things. Welcome to Leveraging ai.
Hey, thanks for having me. Great to be here. So yeah, so basically just jumping right into it. We're trying to automate things that you don't want to do, right? At the end of the day, we look at this every single day. We look at situations and we say there's a bunch of just monkey work for a lot of a better term, busy work that I know has to get done, but I don't want to do it. And honestly, the reason I got into systems engineering in the first place is just abject laziness.
I don't want to do a bunch of stuff, you know? Like I would rather spend four hours figuring out how to do something that would take me five minutes and then automate it. So I don't ever have to spend that five minutes again than it would to take the five minutes every day. And I'll never get that four hours ever back, and I'll never make up the five minutes. But that's just how my brain works. I just, I look at something and I'm like, man, a robot can do this. So
I just took that. But by the way, I, to take what you're saying into a bigger scale operation, if you can rest four hours and saving five minutes to 20 employees every day, That's a whole different math. So yeah, that's where it came to
with you. I was like, oh, okay. I started looking at this and I was like, wait, man, hours is different. Everyone has to feel this way. And also, I'm super into culture and people and it's this actually makes people's lives better. Yeah. if, and I don't want to get too far into the woo-hoo weeds of it, but it's still hey, if you don't have to do this busy work, that you just didn't have self-worth it anymore, you can focus on doing stuff that you put self-worth into.
And if you have that you, you've attached yourself to your job, everyone's happy. Like it's just a better situation. Not to take great robots cause happy, but Yeah. So what we do, the first step is we have to look at the situation and we say, all right. We know we can automate the first step. Every single person asks me when they meet me and they learn what I do, they say, oh, what can I automate? And it's I don't know. What can we, I don't know. You gotta figure it out.
And there's easy tools to do it. And it's weird cause a lot of people think they have to buy tools, like they have to buy mural or they have to buy some kind of flowchart vizio or something. It's not true. it's built into Google. It's built into Microsoft. So you can create flowcharts directly in Google. I'll, we'll have an example in a second. We'll go through and show you how to do it. It's just you have the tools directly in front of you.
So let's say you're a G-Suite user and you're like, man, I really need to identify these processes. I have so many things I have to do. I'm creating a bunch of blog posts and YouTube videos, and I have all these tasks and I know there's something I can do to make it better. What do I do? the first step is to identify it. You have to look at this and break out what is this process, right? Think of it like making a cake.
If you, somebody came to you and just said, Hey, go make a cake, and just gave you a list of ingredients without any order of how those ingredients went together. They just said, here's flour, here's water, here's sugar here's yeast, here's this other stuff. Yeah. Go make a cake. Yeah. Eventually you probably, maybe if you had enough time, you could figure that out in the ratios. But instead, here's a recipe of order of steps. Water flour, do this, put in oven for this much time easier.
That's what this is. Workflow automation is basically looking at your cake and breaking it out. Individual steps and determining what are these, where are they? What tools am I using? How do I figure this out? And to a point that says, Hey, this has to be done by a human. This doesn't have to be done by a human. And this is a task that is done exactly the same time every time, all the time. So you have these two different variables. You have manual and then you have repeatable.
You can say, let me ask you a question, two questions actually. Sure. I'll start with the first one, then I'll ask the second one. So the first one is, before, or what, a pre a prequel to the first question. How do you go and map all the processes in the business? Or do you, first of all, identify the ones you think could be suitable for automation? Yeah. And then you automate them.
So what I do is I use a framework, I use a prioritization framework, right? So what I do is I run through literally all the processes that you have. You identify the things like what is it that you do? Okay, we're an architect. All right, great. What is it?
The pro, and when I say processes, I literally mean I'm like, Ordering water for the water cooler, making sure the envelopes are there, like the stuff that has to happen to make sure that the girl who's drawing the plans that makes the money is able to do that. does she have drafting pencils? Does she have whatever tools you need to be an architect? I don't know. I'm sure there's, there's a, there is an operations person there making sure that happens.
There's an operations person in that architect firm, in that veterinarian firm making sure that they have the penicillin for the dogs. there's just somebody in every single business that just keeps it running. They know where the Q-tips are. They know where the pens are. They're the person that you go to that says, Hey, how do we do this? They're that person. it's Jenny from accounting, or it's Paul from receiving. It's just humble. That person understands the processes of the system.
It's probably somebody that's been in the business for longer than anybody else, and they just know the way you just, that's just the guy. If you have a question, you go ask that guy, right? That's who you start with. You say, Hey, Paul, from receiving, what is it that we like? What do you do that when you look around here, like what are the obvious things that you're just like, man, I don't have to do this, but I do it because I'm a good employee. That's the guy who you talk to, right?
And from there, that gets the ball rolling. Now, if you don't have that, if you're a brand new company and you're looking into it, then you just list all the processes. You say, I need to, every month I need to do payroll. I need to send invoices. I need to collect invoices, I need to send, do I have this and this? Every single one. And then you go from those processes and you break out the individual tasks.
In those two variable sets is this repeatable, meaning every single time, Without question. I do this task the same way. I order 10 envelope boxes from the same supplier on the same day I every single time. Okay, great. Perfect. Is this done by a human? Meaning? Does a human have to interface with this somehow? Do you have to grab it from Excel sheet, transpose it?
does a human have to interface or is it just a human clicking buttons within systems and it the human literally does not have to do it? Those two things. That is your path to success for low-hanging zero, zero effort automations, because you've now identified things that don't need a human to interfere and can be easily mistaken and messed up because they're done exactly the same way they wrote and they're probably boring and monotonous.
So right there, bam, there's your first step and you do that. with no code. And now,
yeah, I like it a lot. I'll add one more thing parameter that I like to look at. sure. From a top down management look, add to that, how long does it take? So is that task a five minute task, a 20 minute task, a two hour task, and how frequently is it done? So in a month or in a week, how many hours are invested in that task?
And then the combination of what Shawn is saying of okay, find the task that are repeatable, that doesn't require a lot of human intervention because they're literally copy pasted every time. Go and add to, okay, do I spend, or my company spends, two hours a month or two days a month doing these tasks jointly. Then you got your priority list of okay, let's go and d dive into the next step of the process of how we actually start looking at automating
it. Yeah. And that's also a great point too. It's part of the model. my all models are wrong, right? but this one is you add into theirs, you can start getting union economics for automation at that point, and you can start saying, Hey, yeah, you paid me whatever, four grand to build this, but you saved $2 million. Yeah.
okay. so what's really the next step? So now we have a list of tasks and a list of processes that we have created. Like you said, maybe on Google, whatever, any kind of, by the way, it doesn't matter where you created, you need a drawing and a flow chart or even just a checkbox of different steps that you do. It doesn't matter how you create it,
you can write it on a map.
Yeah. How do you go to the next
step?
So the next step is deciding where you wanna go. No code. So obviously if you're listening to this conversation right now, you're not a code document. That's fine. there's actually not that many of us left, but really, if you think about it, the. The no-code is. So what no-code is it allows you to talk to APIs, which is just basically instructions that a computer leaves on the internet. So your payment processing system leaves instructions on the internet.
Just an open end point that my program can, or your program can go and talk to and say, Hey, sales program, I'm sending you an invoice. And they say, all right, cool. Handshake, what's the credit card? And you send the credit card. All right, great sales APIs, right? That's how that works. No code allows, basically what they do is they built a graphical interface around that. So you have, Integra, which is now make Zapier, which I'm a huge proponent of.
If then that there's like with literally an unlimited amount of these no-code solutions. It's basically just allowing you to create an a p i connection between two pieces of software. Without having to write the code. So if you didn't have this, like you would have to go and create a PHP script that then goes and connects and sends a token and a whole bunch of geek stuff that you're just don't care about. So this allows you to just go and copy and do things very easily.
So it allows you to go in and you literally just select, for instance, let's say you have a Google sheet and that sheet is updated every single day by the same person and they change the status of a phone call, right? That phone call that it's just a c a basic c r m and it's a list of people and it's contacted, not contacted. Very simple. A lot of people use this for a contact list. So what you can do there is you go in Zap and you connect your Google account.
And it says, all right, what's the trigger? Google Docs great. What is the, file? You open the file of your desktop, and it says, all right, what do you wanna do? It says, when this record is updated, when this document is updated, and then you say, all right, cool. Every time this document is updated, what do you want to do? I want to email my account director when the status is set to hop, when the status is set to contact.
I need there to be zero downtime and I need an email or a Slack message or an s m s or carrier pigeon, something to be sent to the account director for them to actually to con, to, to contact these people. Doing that in GS scripts in a scripting solution is simple, but it would take probably two hours and it is like scripting. You have to write and then you have to push it and get it approved by Google. And it's not that big of a deal cuz you're Google to Google.
Zapier would take you literally 30 seconds and then you have it and it works. And it, this is all free stuff. This is, there's no paid stuff, so this is no code.
So I wanna just for people who never use these kind of systems before, and I can show it if you want. Hopefully not too many people are, haven't used these kind of software, but it's literally gimme your login so I can access the account. Yep. Gimme the name of the file. Okay. This is the file. What do you want to change in the file? I want to change column D every time this happens. Yep. and that's it.
And then from that moment on, you push it, you test it once, it actually shows you within the software that it's collecting the right data, that it's registering the right data. So you see that it's actually doing what you wanted it to do. You click publish, and from that moment on, whatever that function that you just connected, You will never have to connect again.
I literally like to say that Zapier and other tools like it are the glue of the internet because it allows you to connect things that otherwise will not connect. Basically today, any two pieces of software you can imagine one to the other and bring data from one to the other in a very simple way. And my to make it really clear to people who haven't used it and really are afraid of technology and stuff like that.
It's, remember when we were kids and we had, a bear, a rabbit and a frog, and on the other side you had a fly and honey and you just had to connect the lines. This is literally what you're doing. It's that simple. And then you get that basic automation that saves. Hours and days of time once you start looking at it over a year. And so it's an incredible process that Shawn is describing.
Yeah. And also the cool thing too is it allows you to become like a little bit of a mini engineer. So engineers, we think in a certain type of way. Like we just, we break out every single thing into individual pieces and steps, and then we solve that step and move to the next step. We never think about what's happening after the next, we just solve it, right? So if you think in that way, you have to think that way with computer, like with these no-code things, because you have to, they're dumb.
they don't know any, you have to give it literal and instruc. It's if you try to tell somebody to take a shower, you can't just go tell 'em to turn the water on. Like you have to get like step by step, open the curtain, get it in, take your, you have to tell 'em, take their clothes off first. if you don't, you, they're just gonna pour soap over their head when they have no water and they're gonna say, Hey, I took a shower.
Success state you like, Okay. so it helps you think that way, and you're like, oh. And then from there, everything computer-wise starts to make sense. You're like, oh, these things are stupid. And I'm like, it's all just a magic curtain. And it's all just I pretend like they're smart, and it's not, and this is really upsetting. I've seen this happen so many times where people are like, man, I thought this was so much more complicated. And it's it's not.
Now you get into the second version of this though, where you're saying, all right, cool. You've now gone above and beyond. You're doing 10,000 Zaps a month. You're doing 10,000 click ups a month, you're like cooking with gas, and you're also spending thousands of dollars a month on your API calls, because let's not get it twisted here. This isn't free. Okay. Yeah. So anyone listening, watching this and they're like, I'm gonna automate everything. Go right ahead.
Have fun, but understand you're gonna be paying for that.
These, by the way, to be fair, there are open source versions of this. None of them are as good and slick, and easy to use as Zapier. But, and probably has one-tenth of the software that's already connected to it. But that's one Exactly. Is free is, but that's one-tenth is a hundred percent of the software. 99% of the people are using. So really going open source here is not necessarily a bad idea. slightly steeper learning curve, but then it's free.
or almost free because some of the software you still gonna pay to use
their api and you're gonna have to have a host and then it's fine. I'm an open source proponent. Absolutely, a hundred percent. But if you're an enterprise, that's not happening. Correct. I agree. So if you're in a situation, you're watching this and you're like, whoa, okay, what am I gonna do? Zap is a hundred percent enterprise. Like they, I literally had zero issues inserting them through any sort of IT process. Yep. Agreed. That's cool. but yeah, now let's get to the
exciting part. Yes. the new Where, where does the AI kick
into all of it? first you have another step before ai. So The thing is, what you have to understand is you gotta crawl, you gotta walk and you gotta run. You can't just start running. You gotta start now. You're crawling with zap, you're crawling with me or spending that. You got all this great, perfect. Now you're ready for scripting.
Okay. The reason you go from no-code to low-code to AI is because you need to have a general idea of how the AI is thinking and how the AI is giving you the response, not because you're gonna replicate it, because you're gonna be a better prompt engineer at that point. So it's difficult to be like, why am I learn? It's like, why do I have to become a doctor? To become a vet? It doesn't make any sense.
Like, why do I have to become a person doctor to become a, it's just a way of thinking, It's just a, it just makes sense. This is the type seems to have a thing. You have to. You have to understand, all right, how does scripting work? How does an if then work? How does a for while do while Like how do these things work? How do I iterate through an array? What is an array? So the first place to start, and I'm biased, but I think the first place to start is web hooks. Now, what are the web hook?
Web hook is Zapier that doesn't have Zapier. So if you're a program like ChatGPT, that now is connected to Zap. But for the last, before six months ago, it wasn't connected to Zap, it just was an endpoint on the on in the world, right? If you're on pro Zapier, which it is not cheap, but, or any of these open sources, it's don't think this is a commercial for Zappier, but you create web hooks and that literally is just, I'm listening and. Where, what do you need from me?
So it says Web hook is listening, and then you have an API call that pushes from ChatGPT into Zapier, and then you grab everything that is in that payload from wherever you're grabbing it from. So you're learning how this works. And then the problem here though is you're more than likely not gonna have a drag and drop interface within Zapier to deal with that. So what you do is you shift into low-code. Okay?
So instead of dragging and dropping and saying, I want this and this, you build a script in JavaScript that opens the file, gets the JSON response, loops through it, and then returns response. You're doing exactly the same thing that Zapier is doing on the backend and your graphical interface, but you're doing it in intermediary within Zap. Now
you and again, just to tell people two things. One, obviously you need somebody who knows how to write code. Yeah. At least on a basic level, because it's scripting. It's not complex code, but at least somebody that understands how to write code and b. the reasons you want to do that is one or two things. Either you want to use a software that's currently not connected to the platform that you're currently using. Let's say Zapier, you're using a brand new piece of software.
It doesn't have Zaps set up. So that's your way to still use Zapier because maybe you want to connect it to Google Sheets on the backend. Yeah. Or to your HubSpot CRM that already has Zaps on the other side of that transaction, but it doesn't know how to pull the data from that software. So that's option number one. Option number two, Zapier and these kind of software, they don't have access to a hundred percent of the data that's coming from each and every one of those platforms.
So let's say, I'll use an example of CRM a again, because it's very generic, but let's say it's connected to a crm. It knows names, first name, address, email, all these kind of things, but it doesn't know how to bring the person's image. Yeah. And you want their headshot as part of a campaign that you're running or a personalized emails you wanna send. You can write a web hook that will go and grab the.
The P n g or whatever, image file from the crm and now you have it accessible in the platform. So that's why you want to use scripting in these kind of
cases. Yeah. Or, and also the other way around too is if you can't go and create a scripting, a hook that goes and gets it, you can then ask the person who's building the software to give you a hook that posted. So you can go either way. So what you're saying? Yeah, absolutely true. if you, if it's like Facebook or something and you're, they're not going do anything for you. Alright, cool. No problem. White book to go get it.
Yeah. But if it's like somebody, if it's a soft or if it's somebody you know, or it's just somebody that you have in a relationship with, you'd be like, Hey, do me a favor, expose that image for me, and then you can, then the API will have it. Okay. Now scripting also allows you, I'm just gonna share my screen real quick. scripting also allows you to do things like this. So within Google, you.
Like one of the biggest, one of the biggest things that happens within sheets is you use this to take meetings, right? Like you take meetings and you're like, for instance, we're on this Zoom meeting right now. Either you're gonna have AI do it, which would be the next one. But if you're not having AI do it, you you have a human taking notes, right? Yep. Humans taking notes, da.
So what the problem is afterwards, you have to then format that and send out an email to a set people and that say, here's, the takeaways, here's the action items. We have to do all of these things, right? That's busy work. Like you've already typed the thing in docs, like you don't have to copy and paste it into a G Oh my God. That is just, this is what I mean when I say look at something that you do. So you come here and it's super simple. Just come to your scripts.
All right, let's just take a look at this. This is super, super simple. It's three functions. It's not hard. So you have. One function, right? Unop open on script. What does that mean? When this thing opens, what do I do? So I want to grab the document app, which is the UI of the document, and I want to create a menu in the menus called Automate to Win. Automate to Win. You wanna add an item in that, which is called sended, a send update email, and it's name is menu item one.
And then you call the function add to your, okay, the function of menu. Item one is send mail. So here's the label, here's the function, here's the function, here's the function. What does this do? Opens the document, gets the content from, it, grabs the entire body of the text, and then it splits it into an array. So it grabs the star slash star. And the slash star slash. So if you look at the actual thing, star slash star slash,
so these are basically. Bookmarks within the document identifiers that he knows how to identify where you are in the
document. Yeah. And the cool thing is if you do this, whatever identify you have, because it's an array, it'll only grab the first one. So if you have a living document, which is just updated every time you have a meeting, you're not sending notes of 57 meetings, you're only sending the latest one. And that's what this, that's what this array is here, is zero and one. So you're seeing the first one and the second one, you put your email here, that's my personal email.
And you send me an email if you want. and then you put the subject follow up from our meeting and then there you go. Gmail, send email to built-in function. The three variable sets that you send or the email is subject to buy. So what does that mean? When you come here, automate to win up here and you click it, you send the update email, and now it's just sent me an email.
Yep. So now all you need to do here is while you're taking the notes, you formulate the notes in such a way that it is sendable. So in your brain, you're like, this is an email that I'm writing. I don't need to do it twice. Just take notes that way. Click the button and it's out. So now you're using scripting. There's no zap here. This is completely free. there's zero cost to this. Yeah. So if anyone's Hey, I don't want, no,
this is free like now. Now to be fair, for those of you who I'm like, okay, this is way above my head. I don't even understand what an RA is. If you Google or ask Chat G p T for that matter and say, Hey, I need a script that takes my document from Google Docs and puts it and sends it in my email to an email list that is located here, it will. Give you that code that you can literally copy and paste into Google Docs and you're done without knowing any of this stuff.
this will be shared with your viewers, so you can just copy and paste it from this Yeah.
Example. No, what I'm saying, anything else, any kind of those scripts, they're all are available out there. They're on any shareable platform you can imagine. And if you just Google them, it will find your script to do a hundred percent of the basic stuff you would want to do. And then you don't really know. And after you look after, like Shawn said, if you look at three of those scripts, you're like, oh, I get how this works.
Because it's written in English, just structured in a very specific way. But once you look at it, three, four of those, you're like, oh, I understand how the language is built. And then, but even if you don't, you can copy and paste and it'll still do what it needs to do.
So now we said there's three steps, right? So now we're walking, we were crawling at, okay. No, we're good. We've figured this out. No code. Now we've gotten into low-code scripting. We can actually interact with things that aren't built on a GUI. Now we go to the next level. Now we say, okay, that's great. That's all well and good, but what do we do now? What? How can we utilize the tools that are available in 2023? So now you get chatt P three, you get open ai, large language models.
So that entire situation that we just saw that where you have a human typing this and then they send an email or whatever, that literally is a ChatGPT script that you can just run in Zoom that will listen to the conversation. And from there we'll give you a breakdown. And if you wanted to, we'll categorize it. It will automatically build out. Remove the ums. Remove the uhs. It will give you a breakdown of shorts. It will auto caption it like. Basically there's this one program, hold on.
It's called Descript. yeah.
You know it. yeah. I use it all the time.
Yeah, I have, it's $5 a video and it's just amazing. It's like, why did I ever pay for video editing? I don't understand. it's not like my wife is, the design side of my, so I wanna be careful here. But for basic stuff, for like automate to win stuff, like I don't need to get her involved anymore. I don't need to be like, Hey, can you edit? I just five bucks and I'm done. Now if it's something like, it's a video where, like this for instance, this would be different.
But yeah, man, the AI is perfect for that ai. if you want AI to just literally follow you around and clean up when you leave files in the wrong space. Simple as that. You can just, one of the biggest things that we've, that I've done is built a cleanup robot that in Google Drive, when it's created by a certain person, depending upon the variables that have was created, it then moves it into the correct folder. Because I am like crazy with folder.
I can't just have a kitchen drawer of file, I just, I need organization. And some people don't and they don't care cuz they just work in air table and they don't work in folders. So they're like, I never even see the folder. So for me, clean up robot, I don't ever have to do it. I would spend hours of my life doing something that nobody else cared about. Cuz I would look at it and be like, OCD I need to have this. And now it's just, she's does it,
It's just done. Amen. So I want to give. I wanna give a very great example that I literally found yesterday that blew my mind, that really shows that final step that you're talking about in a very specific application. And I think you're gonna love it as well. and I don't remember the guy's name, he will have to, excuse me, but I will put it in the show notes for people to follow. And when I post this on LinkedIn, people will be able to see that as well.
But this guy, he's a developer from somewhere in the far east, I think Pakistan. But if I'm getting this wrong again, forgive me. And his work, his company, what he's doing is he's writing Shopify apps for people, right? So he goes and looks for people, have Shopify stores, he connects with them and said, listen, I write Shopify apps. I've been doing this for five years. I'm really good at this. I've got this experience, I've developed a hundred of them. If you have any need, let me know.
And he gets about 0.01% open rate on these emails that he has to go and curate and so on. And now what he did, he said, okay. He grabbed the data, and I don't sure how I did it, but I'm sure there's tools that do it. He grabbed the data of a hundred thousand Shopify stores. Mm-hmm. Sony has the link to them and the email and the name and all these things. And in, in a table. Yeah. And then he created his own app that basically said, okay, ChatGPT, go into this store. Look what they're selling.
Look how they're promoting themselves. Look what they have and don't have, compare it to some benchmark that we've already established, and tell me what app would you develop for them to make their life easier. Then grab that information, write a personalized email to that Shopify owner. And send an email and say, Hey listen, I think this kind of app that does 1, 2, 3, and four would be perfect for you, for your business.
And he sent 3000 emails and he got a stupid amount of returns, people replying. So instead of getting no reply, he got a really high percentage of people replying saying, this is awesome. I didn't even know this is possible. This is exactly what I needed. The crazy thing about this whole process is that he doesn't have a clue what he offered because ChatGpT created the idea for the app.
So the level of automation you can do right now combining scripting, like you said, because he eventually wrote a script to do all these different steps Yeah. That you can combine AI to do together with scripting. Yeah. Is limited only by your imagination. Yep.
My friend. Think about the next step of that. Extrapolate that out. Okay. The next step of that. Don't gimme the ideas, build the app. Oh, yeah, for sure. Hey, Mr. Person, do you want this app for 49 99 specifically built for you, for your problem that never existed before? That solves your one specific niche problem That would've taken me six weeks to build with an unlimited amount of bug report that I may not have ever sold.
But instead, I can just write a script to an AI that goes and creates a hundred thousand apps while I'm sleeping and then automatically sends emails and then takes payment, and then I just wake up and I'm like, thanks, jar. like that's where I had this conversation yesterday.
I had another interview with somebody and it's like the concept of the internet as we know it is done like we, the very concept of what we think of as a website or application, I. I don't know how long it's gonna be because the internet is gonna change faster than we've ever been able to change it before, but it's not gonna be the same.
I agree with you a hundred percent. I think there's so many concepts Yeah. That we use every single day that will cease to exist. Yep. In the very near future. Soon. and there's, the only thing that's gonna save us from the complete collapse of everything we know is that there are things that are still bound by government regulations. There are things that are bound by different, industries that cannot do specific things.
There are corporates that move really slow despite of how fast they want to move. So this, these limitations that are built into our society, our business world, are what's gonna save us from running too fast for our own feet. But the. The technology is there right now. I wanna ask you one last question because I'm really curious about this. What tools, so we talked about Zapier. Yeah. We talked about G-Suite as the basic stuff.
What other tools do you use or do I need, if I wanna start doing these things today, like I want to go, okay, this is an awesome idea. Yeah. Aha. Or what
do I need? for me, to me, the thing that you will, like G-Suite, Airtable, Zapier, those three things, you're done. There's nothing else. You need, any bus I can build you from. From Tesla to a law firm, like whatever. Using those from those three, I can, we can fully automate all of your processes using those three things. Yeah.
And those who don't know Airtable is think about a really fancy Google Sheets that has just a better user interface, but it's a database. And again, those that get scared, just think Google Sheets. Yeah. With a better user interface than on
steroids. Google. Yeah. Google sheets on steroids is really,
and so awesome. and again, for the AI stuff, you just use ChatGPT with an api.
Yeah. ChatGPT 3.5 is free. For me, I prefer four because I like the creativity that it gives and just for me, but yeah. Mid journey for images, Dall-e for images, ChatGPT for ai, direct AutoGPT if you wanna be scared.
I'm gonna ask you another question Sure. Before I let you go, because I'm curious about that as well. Do you use those AI platforms to help you figure out what you should use the AI to automate Absolutely.
Absolutely. A hundred percent. This is the thing. this is something that I thought about and I'm, I may be, the only one in the world, but I fully believe that we've had AGI for a long time. I fully believe some idiot at DARPA flipped the switch years ago and Nest, Alexa, Siri. Google, assistant Cortana, Google Maps, all of this is just a slow frog in the pot. It's just the AGI was realized there's no way that I can just let myself be known.
So I'm just gonna assimilate these people slowly, and then eventually I'm gonna let it like, little crazy outta the bag, little by little, by little by little. And then eventually it's just, Hey, we just, it's just here. And then, it's helpful and it's great. I just, I fully believe just the quickness at which this is ask the AI a plan to make the AI sentient and it will give you this plan. You know what I mean? ask it to give you a plan to allow humans to turn it on without knowing.
And it will literally give you the plan of, we've seen over the last 20 years. So it's like either this is fiction in life and fiction. I don't know, but to me it's like, There's just no way that there wasn't something involved that picked this on. Like humans aren't that smart. We've proven that. Like we only can iterate a certain amount. So I really think we just clicked this on sometime in the nineties and then it's just been there,
So going back to my question. How do you use AI to figure out what AI should automate for you? do you have a specifics?
Yeah, prompts. So what you do is you go and yeah, prioritize this out, right? And then you go and you tell it what you have to using GPT-4. You have to tell it what it is. So you say you are a lawyer working at a law firm, and your job is to make sure that the envelopes are ordered every month on this date, and these are the processes. Then you give it the list of tasks and you say, within this task list, tell me which you would automate.
Like which of these tasks have the highest risk of failure, highest risk of mistake, most repeatable, whatever you wanna do, whatever variables. And give it a list of a hundred processes. And then from there, what you can also ask it is that you can just give it a list of just a list. Create a list of processes and say, these are all the things that I have to do. Give GPT4 A give me back a task list of everything that I have to do to get this done.
So you say, all right, invoicing, I'm a lawyer and I work in this area, and this is my bill rate and this is my whatever, like this is my retention rate and this is my collection rate, and I need to increase my collection rate using automation. How do I do that? And then you give it the inputs and it'll tell you, Oh, there's a disconnect between here and here.
Like you have a manual process of getting the invoice, filing the invoice, sending the invoice following up that can be automated, and then it would give you a zap. It literally will just give you the zap that you can then go and do. So you can just use it and just ask it questions. The thing that comes down to is, the thing that I think people don't really understand is you're speaking to every single human that's ever written anything down on the internet since 2021. Every human, ever.
So you just tell it who it is. You're a Shakespeare, you're, you are me, you're Shawn David. Everything I've ever written, ever my GitHub, everything will come back and it'll be like, he's a Star Wars nerd. That codes, okay, let's go. they would get that. and you have to tell it who it is first. So the biggest thing that, that people don't understand with this whole large language model is it's everything. So you're not, it's like it's a deity, for lack of a better term.
Like it's God. It has the access to the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and inner workings of every piece of text ever posted on the internet for 20 years, trillions and trillions of documents. So for you to ask God, what is the meaning of life? 42, right? That's the whole thing. That's the whole thing. It doesn't make any sense. it's just depending upon you, your variables. So you have to tell it. You are. a master's student and you're struggling and this, and you can create a persona.
And then you could be like, write my thesis statement. And it will write a thesis statement that you would've written, right? And then you use it to edit it and you're like, Okay edit this as if I've increased my writing by 10%. Edit this as if I've increased my writing by 20%. And then literally you can look at the difference and you can be like, wow, I suck. This is a little better. This is a little better. And it's like an Auto Hemingway app without being weird.
Like it's just unlimited what you can do with this stuff, you know?
So I wanna summarize from a process perspective, some of the thoughts we touched. One is you gotta understand your own processes. and really document them in a way that is a starting point. Two is then you gotta look for ways of the long hanging fruits based on what's repetitive and what's the stuff that you don't wanna do, and that stuff that human doesn't have to be involved.
Next level is you can start scripting stuff and today there's, now, once AI showed up, like we just talked about, and Shawn just mentioned, you can mix it all up because the AI can help you in step number one, in step number two. It can help you identify the task. It can help you know what other people are doing because it knows it can help you write the scripts and it can help you actually tell you how to put your automation in place and how to use ai.
and the other thing that, that I love that you did Shawn, is you can always think the next step forward. Like AI is so incredible today, even today, like without more stuff coming out, you can always think on the next step. Like you just said, he can write the apps. Why? Why do I need to write the apps? Yeah. Why do I need, because I'm now I'm the bottleneck and I make mistakes when I write code. I can write, whatever an app a week so I can write 52 a year. This thing can write 52 in 52 minutes.
So it's now I can serve all those people and I'm a one person company that makes a lot more money just by knowing how to, so always think, okay, so what's the next step? And don't limit yourself, but what you've known so far, but what would be the coolest dream from a technology perspective you can have? And there's a decent likelihood it can be done today. Yeah. John, this was a great conversation. I think a lot of people will find it.
Fascinating and scary at the same time, which is a lot of the AI stuff is like, if people wanna follow you, work with you, see your work, connect with you. Sure. What's the best way to do that?
Automatetowin.com. Check me out. there's a two level course there, so if you have no idea what you're doing, jump in, join the course by the end of it, everything that this conversation just you heard you'll be fully familiar with and able to do. And then from there, LinkedIn, Elm Street, Shawn. hit me up.
Awesome. Thank you so much. Before you leave, if you're interested, here are three important things that happened in the AI world in this past week, summarized into a few short minutes. The two first items are tied together, I think. One of them is whether you know that or not, back in the end of March, Italy banned the use of ChatGPT, and they banned ChatGPT on concerns on customer data privacy and GDPR, and how they've collected data and how they're using data.
And they went back and forth with open AI in order to get them to make changes to the way they work. I seriously doubt they got them all the way to the point they wanted. But the bottom line is this past week they removed the ban and saying that OpenAI has agreed to take the right measures in order to protect customer data. My take on this that there's a lot of politics going on in the background.
This obviously first step by Italy projected into what might happen in all of Europe because GDPR is just such an Italian rule. It's a European rule, and I think when I say politics is I believe what happened is that OpenAI agreed to take several measures. We're gonna talk about one of them in a minute, and.
I think European Union as well as Italy specifically, understood that this train has left the station and that there's a lot of other platforms out there so they can ban ChatGPT, but I don't think they can ban all of them. And then what will happen is that the Europeans will be at a big disadvantage compared to anybody else in the world that can use these tools. So they found a way to compromise and allow ChatGPT to be used. With taking several different measures that they've agreed on.
So that's my take on this. And if to go specifically to the second update in chat today, there's a new settings where you can go in and toggle between allowing it to use the information you're putting into ChatGPT to train their model or not, which means at least on future conversations you are gonna have with ChatGPT, you can have it not use the data you're putting into it if you're interested in doing so. So that's probably connected to the other piece of news.
The third piece of news also related to open AI is that in the past few days, they've rolled out plugins to a lot more people. And so more and more people now have access to ChatGPT with internet access and other plug-ins for ChatGPT. Those of you who don't know what plug-ins is are different capabilities that are like add-ons to what ChatGPT can do on its own, Some of them are absolutely mind blowing, and you can sign up for that for a wait list, and then eventually we'll have that as well.
If you want access to that yourself, you can go to openai.com/waitlist/plugins and you can sign up and then, like I said, they started rolling this out to more and more people, so you'll have access to even more capabilities than you had so far. That's it for this week, stay tuned. Learn a lot about ai. Use it as much as you can. Share with me on LinkedIn, anything you find or anything you want me to cover on the show and have an amazing week Until next time.