Navigating the AI Revolution: Practical Steps for Smalls Businesses with Piers Linney

There will be no Internet, there will be no place where you go and search around these ridiculous websites and you use Google to do this long, this search and half the search is adverts and the other search is kind of irrelevant or, you know, it's.

I've got to get a search engine to go through the search results because there's so many of them that is going away. So the Internet as we know it will go away was the. Amazing. Hi F. How you doing? I'm very good in my new. In my new cabin. Might be. Take the echo out. It's all good. We've got a bit of a matching backdrop. Is yours like a baby pink? Is that what you've gone for? It's definitely not baby pink. It looks a bit baby. So she's using magnolia or white. That is quite boring.

I think I'm gonna put some like textured panels up or something. But I tell you what though, it's like, you know, we're sort of mid January when recording this, but it feels like, you know, I've already done a year's work. I know. I don't know what happened actually, like after Christmas I was like, I feel nice and rested. Go into it genuinely by like day three back in, I was like, oh, wow. I feel like everyone was.

Everyone got the momentum that they were going to get their businesses sorted and so I felt like. I think this is going to be a transformer. Kitchen says every year, can't you. He says every year from now on, I think. But I think this year particularly,

I'll share. Everyone was kind of sitting around looking at AI. I think this year it's going to be a big year actually, in terms of people having to start to take first steps or baby steps, whatever steps they like. But you've got to start looking at technology and how it can, you know, not. Not just improve your business, but also just using it personally. I'm amazed how many people don't use it personally. Yeah, I know.

And I was thinking, actually I wanted to do like a little video series of how I use AI on a day to day basis. I think you're going to appreciate this. This is. This is a major mum hack that I did. My son didn't want to go. He didn't want to dress up as one of the wise men in his nativity. He's like too cool for school, so he didn't want to wear his little outfit. And the teacher was like, can you have a chat with him and see if you can get him to wear it tomorrow for the show.

So I went home and then in the middle of the night, I had this brainwave. This is how I'm going to do it. Went on to chat gbc. Got it to create a image of my son's favorite TV character, which is Teddy Pierce from the Christmas Chronicles. Got it to create it with this, like, Wise Men outfit on with the crown and everything. And then I wrote a letter from Santa saying, hey, Frankie, did you know that Teddy Pierce also played that same character when he was in the Nativity?

So if you wear your outfit for your show tomorrow, you're going to be exactly like Teddy Pierce. And I showed him this picture of Teddy Pierce with that. And I was thinking, there are so many uses in our personal life. That's probably not why AI was created. I think pulling them all over your. Eyes and your children. I did, I used. I tend to use chat chick tea personally myself, but I use it quite a lot, like for everything I talk to about everything.

So in the new year, I did a post about LinkedIn about this said. I said to it, right, of all the information you know about me, tell me something about me that I don't know. An insight. And it did. I said, that's interesting. I said, and given what you know about me and what I do, what do you think I should focus on this year? And it gave me a long list. I said, right, okay, well, can you focus on my New Year's resolutions? And it was just insane.

You forget that if you relate to technology a lot, how much it knows about you and you can ask for, which is hard to get in the real world, let's face it, whether it's family or friends or partners, real kind of objective, no nonsense feedback. Yeah, totally. You could just. I mean, my partner's been using it loads. I always joke that he's in a full relationship with his chatgpt because he's laying in bed and he's like having a proper chat with it and he responds like a person.

But both of us created our fitness plan for January as well. So we created our fitness plan and yeah, got all our meal plan worked out. You know, all of our weight and height and everything's in there and there's so much you can do. But I do think I feel like everyone's using it because all of my. Network, I do keynotes a lot and I was asked the room, who's using it AI personally to augment yourself as a sidekick. Just feedback in the room.

And I'd say on Average this is last year, 20, 24, 5% put hands on. If it's a room full of lawyers, it was 0%, but 5, maybe 10 in the techie audit. And I always say it's like you're just missing a trick. It's like, I always say it's like being pushed into a, I don't know, a ring for, I don't know, cage fight with a kickboxer. And you've never had a fight in your life and you could take Iron man and you can't be bothered. You don't know how it works.

That's what you're sort of missing out is insane. But I think that's personally everyone to start doing that as your 20, 25 resolution. But I think in business this year, you're seeing a lot more interest in, you know, how does it work, what does it do? I've heard a lot of noise about it, but just show me now and prove the value to me. Yeah, 100%.

I've actually, I've used it loads this week actually, while I've been planning out my, like, my marketing plan and my strategy and everything like that. You know, it knows me so well. It's had a whole year's worth of history. So I could ask it questions and say, you know, where do we at if I want to hit this goal? Why this, you know, by this time what you think I should be working on, what do you think I was, I did last year, that I could have done better?

And you know, I've given all of my PNLs and everything like that, and it's, it's amazing. I've got a full consultant there working with me all the time. But yeah, full nerd. I love all the AI stuff. So take it back a little bit. For anyone who doesn't know, you've probably told this story a million times. But just a quick recap of your background, how you got to be here sitting in your little baby pink shed today. Good God. Quick recap.

So my, so my background, actually people don't really know this is. I'm a qualified lawyer by training. So I was a city lawyer in venture capital, corporate finance, and then I kind of left law. I went into banking. So I was one of the big banks like Credit Suisse First Boston when it was that. When it was solvent as well. So I did M and A. So leverage buyouts. So I did that for a long time. But I was always kind of in business even, even when I was at, you know, university in law school.

In the background. And I went into, I left the city to start an Internet business, you know, web one company basically, which was an interesting time given the crash happened about four months after we started the company. And then since then really I've been into, I take technology, a little bit of media and telecommunications and especially like the convergence of technology and telecommunications and been in mobile communications as well. Built quite a big business there and exited that.

I've been in businesses that haven't, you know, particularly worked out, we sold them fire sales. But I've always been fascinated by the next generation of technologies. Whether that was convergence of telecoms and technology, whether that was Atherton Bikes. I'm a chairman and co founder of Atherton bikes. We make 3D printed titanium and carbon mountain bikes. We've won most desirable bike of the year 2024, which is great. We won awards, we won World cup races.

So that's kind of, you know, again an exponential technology. And. But I think if I look at everything that's my skill set, mine's been more enterprise IT, I would say now I've done a lot of SaaS, I've invested in SAS companies, I've suffered the pain of success and failure in those. But I think everything I've ever done really points at this because AI is, you know, it's a different kettle of fish altogether. We'll forget that this is not a tool that's been arrived.

People say that AI wasn't invented, it was, it was discovered technology. We don't really know how it works in terms of large language models, but it's different. It's intelligence. We are productizing, commoditizing initially at least, cognitive labor, knowledge work. And eventually it'll be physical labor because the robots are getting better. And eventually AI will design much better robots. So this will change everything. So it's about business, personal, personal life we've talked about.

But eventually it's going to be societal, it's going to be about the whole economy. So it's absolutely enormous opportunity which is, you know, that's what we've been chatting. It's greater both be on the pitch, kicking the ball about, so to speak. But it is transformational. And I always say a lot of my sort of keynotes that this is not a once in a lifetime opportunity. It's a once in a species opportunity.

And I'm a big believer that businesses need to get on board with this because it again, there's a ship leaving the harbor and you can get onto it now, but eventually there'll Be a gap you can't leap over and you can't quite make it. And once the businesses that have embraced the technology begin to sort of accelerate away, it's got exponential growth. It's going to be impossible to catch up. Yeah, I totally agree.

And I know that it can like induce a little bit of fear in people of like, God, I feel like I just need to get on it in any way, shape or form. So I think it's really important to know like, what, where to start? Where do you even start with implementing it? Because I know so many people that I, I speak to, they understand the urgency and they're like, fine, I get it. I not going anywhere. I need to get on board AI but how do I even get started? How do they, what do you.

I don't, I don't think they do understand the urgency. I think that we, I think they. Did after they heard you speak. Well, I think that event that you spoke to. I'm the same. Yeah, you get into your, your just being programmed. We've evolved to be linear thinkers. You know, things grow at slow rates and 5% a year or maybe amazingly it might grow 50% in the year. Right. We can't comprehend this sort of exponential change.

And I think that, you know, we have clients in our business implement AI CO FOUNDER OF ALLOC and we sort of like, well, I know I've got to do something. Let's have a look at it and do run a pilot. We run the pilot and as you can see the cognitive dissonance, they can't, they can't believe we had one this morning where, you know, we run a pilot and it made 12 days of outbound phone calls that humans would take in two hours. They told us to switch it off. They couldn't handle the leads.

I don't think quite understand the power of the technology as to where it is today. I think it was Sam Altman or maybe the CEO of Google, said that if generative AI development and R and D stopped today, it would still take four to five years to deploy that capability throughout technology, software and the economy. And as you know as well as I do, it's definitely not stopping today. I mean, people say.

And also what happens is something happens, it evolves and people look at it and go, well, that's quite clever. But it doesn't do this. And like, well yet. And look at it a year ago, you know, look at it two years ago. Didn't really exist, to be quite frank. And imagine where it's going to be in three years. It is crazy.

Like I, I even, even if I look like my mum, you know, I first told her about chat GBT probably about six months ago and now it's such an integral part of her life, of how she works and everything like that. Yeah, she's fully on it. I mean, bless her, she's like in her 60s and she's rocking out the chat GPT. But now it's just such a big part of their life. And that's what I see so much with the people that do use it.

Even six months ago they didn't know it existed and today they're fully reliant on it. So it is so quick. One of the things that I love about your podcast is the beginning part of it. You always say, you know, like, where are we at with AI? This is kind of like the latest. And I love that you do that every week because you really do need to do it every week because that's how fast things are moving. I'm not doing as much now because it's tiring trying to keep up.

And also it's like how many times can you talk about there's a new model, there's a new big model, there's a new small model. This is evolved. That is evolved. So I think we did a little bit of that. And thank you for listening to our podcast. So that's the AI assisted organization podcast, all good podcast outlets.

And so we do a little bit of that in the news. But this year we're focusing a little bit more on doing the kind of high level updates, but also on the practicalities of how do you actually implement this technology? How do you, how do you, with a lot calls it, how do you put AI to work? How do you grow your workforce and importantly, especially at the moment, not your payroll. So where are we at right now though? Just as a high level overview, where are we at in with AI right now?

So we, we have like a two by two matrix approach, right? So think about, it's a matrix like that, there's four squares and the Y axis is the technological frontier, right? And the X axis is kind of the proof of value, the roi, implementing this technology. So the top right box, we have some clients that are, listen, wouldn't it be amazing if it could do this? We go, okay, let's see.

So we'll try and get it to do something like super creative or super complicated or something that's an agentic work for lots of agents working together and it kind of works. And if it did work. The ROI would be enormous, but it doesn't, it's not quite there yet. But it's worth playing with it and learning because the technology, the technological frontier is catching up. So eventually that stuff up here comes down to the bottom. It just works essentially.

Then we've got most clients where we focus and say at the bottom left box. So that's what it's. The question you're asking me is the technology works today. So if you have a large language model, you know there's a clue in the name. Okay, Anything to do with language, anything to do with analyzing data, communications, communicating with a machine. And that's going to get better as well. Sort of AI sort of driven operating systems.

And also if you heard about the sort of AI is now able to move a mouse and type as well. And that used to be like at the kind of application level, but now you're seeing it being integrated at the operating system level. That technology is already there. So anything to do with language documentation, um, and that's in text. Then you've got image images. So text to images. And what's coming now, it's kind of getting there. It's quite short, is text to video.

And in business, you know, we, I'm sure you've been there yourself, you think, wouldn't it be great if had like an animation to show how you do something. But it's very expensive to get it done. And actually you're going to be able to sort of have a text prompt and create training videos very, very quickly.

So outbound calls, inbound calls, understanding huge amounts of knowledge, looking at data and finding sort of the unknown, unknowns, things you haven't even, you know, you don't, you don't know, you don't know. See insights. And if you can. And we have this idea that imagine you've got like a dark room, right, and you can see the odd speck of light. With AI, and that's data, you can look, it's like having spectral vision or night vision.

You can now see what's going on in that room, which means you can react to it. And it might be sales by market, it could be product development. And by being able to do that, it's giving you a competitive advantage. So there are lots of things it can do in that bottom left box. And that means there's an roi. Responding to emails. You work on this as well.

So having rapid responses, someone on your website, they're interested and suddenly they can speak to an AI, have an email from an AI have a proposal automatically written and sent to them on WhatsApp or email whether however they want it to be received immediately. Speed of reaction is huge as well. And what's coming is think about SaaS. So software as a service, you know, why do you pay per seat? Because there's a human operating it, it's a tool.

And what's happening is you're going to see is that AI agents can operate increasingly applications. So your agents can operate your SaaS and eventually they'll be able to kind of write code on the fly and work together to get things done. So you won't need as much SaaS, you'll need your kind of core SaaS, which is like a law firm practice management system. A lot of the kind of marketing SaaS, things like that is going to be taken out, I think by AI agents. So what we focus on is AI agents.

So virtual workers, people are in your business, augmenting your team so currently they can focus on more value added work.

So when people hear AI agents, I feel like the next question is, is that going to replace people? This is what I'm hearing a lot when I talk about AI agents on my social media. People are saying, I personally think it is going to replace some people, AI, but it's not going to, it's actually going to create more opportunity as well. So I feel like there's a bit of a shift as opposed to a replacement. That's my personal opinion.

But I'm interested to hear your, your thoughts on it with the whole, you know, is AI going to replace humans? Is it going to create massive job losses and you know, surge unemployment rates? What's your, what's your thought on that? All depends on the time horizon. So I think of it as, I was thinking pictures as you probably gathered like a pyramid of, or a triangle of like human labor. So you've got cognitive labor and you've got physical labor. Okay, now I'm a bit of a historian, right?

If you go for the industrial revolutions, the first industrial revolution, you know, steam engines, second electrification, the third was kind of like, you know, the web, consumer electronics, it probably, that's probably the second one. Third one was kind of web. Then you had blockchain and the fourth one's really essay is AI driven, maybe blockchain as well. And as those revolutions happened, pyramid of value got filled right, with technology.

But the lucky thing was because the, you know, the size of the economy, working class, middle class, the triangle got bigger, so it didn't really matter. There's all stuff to do. I mean, if you look at things like computers and PCs, right, there's no clear evidence it's actually made us more productive. It just means we can churn out more nonsense. It's been filled and. But it's growing. So the space for humans has always been the same or bigger.

What's happening now, though, is with AI is you're actually productizing intelligence. So it's not just the tools. It's weird. Intelligence that used to use the tools, now we're replicating the intelligence that can use the tools to start to replace humans, especially cognitive labor, initially. So now that pyramid's been filled with more technology, but the pyramid is not getting bigger.

It's probably even shrinking, actually, because human populations are shrinking depending where you are in the world. So we are going to be eventually, within our lifetimes. Keep looking after myself, just about. You are going to see humans displaced in quite a lot of sort of jobs and roles, I think. I don't think my daughters are sort of teens and not by the time they're my age. I don't think you'd be able to get insurance, drive a car in a big city.

I don't think humans will ever be able to get insurance, working on building sites, anything dangerous like that. And cognitive labor is not just about admin and basic labor. It's lawyers, it's accountants, it's, you know, robots that are better than brain surgeons. They're better at spotting cancers. And human radiologists. So there's an issue now that's somewhere in the future. We don't know, right. We're talking about AGI, so artificial general intelligence, where.

And AI is going to be better, cheaper, faster, safer than any human at any task. Essentially a artificial superintelligence, asi, which probably come quite soon after AGI is where, you know, we don't even understand what it's doing or how it's doing it. It's a different. It's a different species, basically. But today AI doesn't do jobs, right. It's very good, as, you know, at completing tasks. So you might have a workflow with 10 tasks. And an AI is going to be very good at doing some of them.

What you don't want it to do is task one and task nine, and there's lots of humans in the middle. You want it to do kind of 1 to 3, 4 to 7, or, you know, 7 to 10. So they're kind of linked. And that's what is particularly. It's getting very, very good at doing that. So I'd say now it's augmenting humans means that in that pyramid again it's doing the repetitive, the mundane tasks that we don't really want to do.

Okay. That we can focus on adding more value at the top and that's where we need to migrate to. Because if you stay in that bottom part of that pyramid as it's moving upwards, you are going to find yourself kind of unable to find, you know, useful work in our economy in the not too distant future. Yeah, I think it has. There has to be a shift in mentality about upskilling. I feel like people need to take the responsibility of like I need to be better in order to compete, compete now.

So I need to upskill myself and the world we live in today. Everything is available to you. Everything I know about SAS and technology and AI I've learned myself. So I don't feel like there's any excuse now to not enhance your skills. But yet there has to be a mentality shift amongst people. But it's also you know, all these like industrial revolution analogies combined the Luddites, people smashing on machines all or you know, King Canoe.

This is before the revolution on the beach stopping the way that the tide coming in this wave. Great book. Mustafa Suleiman, one of the founders of a DeepMind became Google DeepMind called the Coming wave. You should read it. This wave is coming in right, it's going to crash on the beach and there's nothing we can do about it and it's only accelerating. And the, the economic incentive is so enormous that nation states.

You know saw the announcement of the UK government and very large tech giants and multi living, multi trillion pound dollar companies crisis and the venture capital funds are throwing literally billions of this because the winner or the winners, they take it all. Yeah. And that's why nation states terrifying because if another nation state suddenly, you know, develops a G R A S I, the rest can't catch up. And that's the same in your business.

So the stakes are so high at that level that you're seeing the acceleration, the advance with technology very, very quickly because it's now being properly funded. AI has been around for since you know the mid and it had a few false dawns, it had a few troughs of disillusionment and regions where the funding ran out. But that just isn't the case now. So what do you think the. Because the government did just announce their AI opportunities action plan, didn't they?

Can you go inside a little bit more what that means really the kind of areas that that investment is going into and what that kind of means for the UK. Yes, this is the 50 recommendations to the government and I think they've actually accepted all 50. So I've been sort of banging on about this quite a long time that it's really important we have a plan. And it's good to see that there is a plan.

I mean the plan, you know, it ranges some things like, you know, having sort of, you know, areas where they're going to invest in their data centers and infrastructure. There's some funding to help companies sort of understand, embrace and adopt AI as well. But the issue for me though is when what, what it kind of missed really is that that's all good. The reality is it's gonna be very, very hard to compete with the hyperscale platforms.

You know, the people have got enormous data centers, enormous compute, enormous budgets to buy all the GPUs, Nvidia can actually produce and even start making their own meta, Amazon or Microsoft, all trying to do that as well. Very hard for the little old UK to compete at that level. So you've got to be realistic about it. But what it missed really I think is that you've got to get this technology in the hands of SMEs, small businesses, startups.

All I talk about startups and being a fantastic place for AI startups and innovators to base their businesses and grow, which is great, but you know, you want your local flower shop to be able to use artificial intelligence to improve their marketing or their ordering or their profit, their profitability, the potential for success and to minimize the risking within any business. And that's where you transform the economy because typically this is UK specific.

Our productivity in SMEs, small, medium sized enterprises isn't what it should be. And AI potentially is a solution for doing that. But again, I think the government and governments aren't very good at this. I sat on the government procurement panel, right, for a few couple months ago and it was a talking shot. So they're going to make sure that somehow it's not hard, not easy to do.

Also on the board of the government bank during COVID in the UK where we know we deployed 90 billion in facilitated finance into the market. So I could see the machines and the wheels of government working and that was a huge pace because we have people's lives and livelihoods were at risk. But I don't see that in it. And I think that's where I'm trying to sort of do my bit to make sure that the average business benefits from this. That's the only thing the government stuff.

It always a bit slow, doesn't it? I feel like it moves. It's a big machine. Right. I've seen it in action. Yeah. I just can't wait until. I was in the doctor's surgery the other day and I was just forever. I was on the. I was on the phone for like 25 minutes in the morning and things. I was thinking, imagine if the doctor's surgery had these, you know, AI voice agents that was just booking in the appointments. Imagine if those of the NHS had AI, you know, built into it. It would just be.

It would just revolutionize it. But do you think you're going to be able to walk into a cubicle somewhere? I think one of the founders of combos can do a Skype or Spotify, one of them has launched a business and rolling out these cubicles, these pods, so you just wander into them and it scans you and it gives you a complete health debrief and that's. That's where the world's going. So whether it's.

So we're going into an age now of exponential growth. So it might be AI, it could be healthcare, it could be genomics. This will change our lives, it will change how long we live, It'll change the quality of our lives as well. So there is kind of like this sort of person. I'm very positive about this potential for abundance and improving the lot of humans. The complication is, is going to be in terms of what a lot of us end up doing all day.

Yeah. Between now and then, you know, I always say there's an opportunity, grasp it by the horns and run with it. Because this is an age now where you can either. I mean, I guess you get this. Don't you use ChatGPT a lot? It's like having a time machine. And I don't mean you can go back in time, but you can save so much time by doing things. And often I find myself doing things and I think, why am I doing this? I bet this will do it. And I think, I wonder if it can do it.

And I try and I get a pretty good response, actually. It's like having a time machine. So whether that time you discover or juice is to make more money, to work harder, or spend time to go and walk the dog and enjoy other things. Yeah, that's what it's all about in small businesses. I was thinking the other day though, like, because I get. I get chatty with you to do loads of stuff. If ever my brain isn't, it hasn't quite like engaged. I'm trying to figure something out.

I just get chat GP to ask, ask it questions and it will sort it out. Then I was thinking am I gonna like damage my brain development? Am I gonna you know, mentally get a little bit slower where I'm not challenging my brain? And then it made me think about because I love learning and I was thinking I'm not challenging my brain really. But then I was thinking about my kids.

So my kids are 5 and 3 and I watched a program the other day about social media and how it's affected them and things like that. And I was thinking I wonder how AI is going to affect them. My kids watch me doing it all the time and you know that this is their world that they're growing up in. And I was thinking I wonder if it's going to change their brain development or how they learn. I think one of the most powerful skills you can have as a human is to have the skill to be able to learn.

You teach yourself how to learn. And I was thinking I wonder if they are going to not have that skill or whether how it's going to affect them in future. This is a whole different podcast, right? That's what the education system is, the way, you know, it's learned by rotis and three hours, all that good stuff. So I've got, you know, kids who actually, they use AI and I, I sort of taught them say look, use it to, you know, to answer questions, things you don't have, things you might ask me.

But the way in which we learn have to change because right now, you know, you can give, you know, something like an iPad long has got connectivity maybe from you know, Starlink or something and it's got access to power from solar to a, you know, village in the middle of nowhere. And they can have all of human access to all of human knowledge, right? And they can spin up if they wanted to, one to a thousand nevermind, PhDs, Nobel Prize winning whatever to solve a problem for them, right?

That's where it's going. So you've got to change the way in which we actually learn because there's no need now to retain all this data in our brains because we're not very good at, not very good at sort of recovering when we need to. You need to be, you need to have the sort of the EQ which understanding how to interact with other people, not so much the iq. So IQ is going to become Commodity will be that unique added value that humans have.

But you know, don't get me wrong, people, AI, is it going to be sentient? Is it going to be, you know, conscious? It is. Is that what it's going to be? You know, what are we? Wetware, software, memories? No difference really. It will be. But how you define it. Sentient. Yeah. I do think it's going to be interesting saying that though, when I, when I was just saying about how like, I don't think as much actually.

I would say since diving into AI, I'm probably more mentally stimulated than ever before. You know, my brain has gone the way I think is much bigger than I did before, where it was just like, how do I do that one thing? Now it's much bigger. So I think there is a lot, a lot there. It would just be interesting, I think, to see how also people, Carly, people.

Think that they think AI is Chat, GPT or Gemini or Claude or if you're, you know, if you use a sass, it's some document summarization, whatever it might be, right? It's a lot more than that. So the, the models, they're multimodal. So if you've never done this, right, I'm sure you have, Carly, but if you listen to this or watching this, you've never done this. Use ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever you use. Take a picture of a scene and ask it to describe it, right?

It will describe it in minute detail even to what the carpet is made out of. If you got a carpet in the picture. Now think about that now in the hands of a robot. The issue with robots essentially was a, was dexterity and battery life and the ability to move like a human and do things. That's one, the physicality of it. The other one was just been able to understand our environment. So if you said here's a cup, now here's a mouse, right?

You've got to spend 500 grand to train it on a million different computer mice so you understand what it looks like. Many angle. Whereas now you take a picture of a room, say, describe this room to me. It describe the furnishings, the curtains, the lighting, the people, why they're there. It's insane.

So now you transplant that into a capable sort of robot, whatever the form factor is, and it can understand our environment and go and do things, go and pick up the white cup off that table and put it on that top over there and it knows that we're talking about. So that's the issue is that it's now Gone multimodal. So what it's doing and this is where it's gaining all of our senses. So it's got vision, it can obviously speak, it's got, it's intelligent, it can compute.

We're seeing smell even coming now. Touch is getting better. So eventually have all of the human faculties both in its kind of virtual version or increasingly in a physical version, embodied AI. And that's where, you know, I think that Ellen Musk has said this, lots of other people, that within my lifetime there is many robots wandering around in different form factors or rolling around as there are cars. I mean cars will be robots. Yeah, it is, it is going to change so quickly.

So just going back to on voice agents as that, because I think people are still on that edge of like, are they really that good? Can they really do what my receptionist would do? I'd love to hear some like case studies, examples of businesses that you've worked with where you feel like this has been such a good solution and it's just changed it so much. Yes, we've got lots of different agents. So our business implement AI, but lots of different agents on a platform we're building.

But let's pick out two of them. And one thing you're particularly voice agents. You know, with a voice agent, there's quite a lot going on. Think about it. You know, it's having a. So if, if I was the, the agent essentially and you're talking to me, I'm listening to what you're saying. It's voice. It's then transcribing that instead analyzing it. It's then thinking about a response. It's then as a voice that's, it's turning that back into an audio and talking to you.

And it's doing that now in probably response time of 200 milliseconds. If you get, if it gets too fast, it doesn't sound real. So you've got to get that balance just right. So if you think about it, now we have outbound and inbound voice agents. Okay. So the outbound agents are the ones that have really amazed me actually.

So I always thought that our inbound agents, very powerful, they can take in calls, they can do support, they can give people real time advice, they have memory so they understand and remember what you said last time you spoke to them as well. But the outbound is really interesting. So what we found is that a lot of companies, that AI is not about cutting costs and taking people out of the business, it's about how do I use technology to grow, how do I grow the top line?

How do I rinse more revenue out of the relationships and the customers I've already got or how do I re engage or reactivate the ones that have engaged but we never quite got there and that's where the real value is. So the outbound call. I'll give you some ideas. So we have outbound call agents in recruitment recently where you know, you've got a lot of these kind of people you've spoken to over the years but it's very hard to stay in touch with them on a continual basis. You know, how are you?

Are you looking for more work? Are you happy where you are the onlybody else who isn't that we could probably help those conversations and having, you know, I've done this when I was sort of in my early days in the city, you know, raising finance and bringing up lots of people trying to raise finance for companies. Telesale essentially banker or not a banker and it is soul destroying. Right?

Yeah. And you might get through 80, 100 if they're short calls in a day and you've got to write it up and you know, it's just hard work. Whereas the, the outbound agents, you know, we upload a campaign, we get the problem, right? The script, we upload the contact information. We did one today, actually did 12 days of phone calls in two hours. Right. It doesn't get tired, it's always polite.

You can, you know, choose to let the person know it's an AI or not depending on how you want to go about it. Sometimes we say we're going to get AI to call you as a service. So they're expected to be an AI Essentially most people when it's an AI don't know it's an AI. Regulation might catch up with that, but they don't know it's an AI. They don't care now because they're getting value and it can call a huge amount of number of people and it captures all the information.

This is the beauty of voice. So if you think about data, typically structured data or form filling or emails, it's CRM, right? It's first name, last name, email address. Some information winds up in fields, right? This is conversational information and previously very, very hard to pass and analyze. Conversations or transcripts really struggle Technology, large language is a clue in the name models are fantastic at this.

They can look at every single phone call in real time, look for sales opportunities, missed opportunities, training opportunities and that data that you capture is far richer than you ever would do by filling out a form or responding to an email or even a chat bot, essentially, because you speak, especially me, you know, hundreds of words a minute, not what you type. It's a lot, lot, fastest, thousands essentially. And you capture a lot of information you never normally would.

So we have another example is a dental practice. So they have people on reception. They're not trained salespeople, they're not trained support people either. Really. Lots of calls coming in. And I missed opportunities. So if you've recorded phone calls, sometimes for years, you never got to pay a human because it can also be soul destroying to go and listen to every single phone call and make notes. Okay, the AI, we have another agent and a call analysis agent that goes well with the call.

Agents can listen to phone calls and look for missed opportunities, training opportunities. So this dental practice, I always remember this one. There's a chat, I'm playing golf, going, I'm going to Marbella, I want to get my teeth done, but I have to call you back. Okay, but, and this is that this is. And because we know what he said he wanted and we know the price list, we can then put a value on the pipeline. 15 grand.

Okay, so then the agent can then say, this guy's got 50 grand, opportunity wants to call back. You can either then say to him, well, okay, when can we call you back? And the agent then will know when to call back. Or this quite high value sale, pass it on someone who's, you know, in this case it was someone on reception, we'd bring him back. But then what do you know? What that person then knows in the script they're given is this is the person's name.

This is when we called him, he was playing golf, he's going holiday to Marbella. This is the value of the procedure he's looking at. So when you have that conversation on the phone or automated conversation, it's personalized, it's richer and it's more likely to convert. Yeah, it is. I literally, I can keep going. But as long as one of these podcasts with. And we've got ones where this is in the America actually where people have.

They're like tote shop companies, little sort of mom and pop shops. And this company finds them. You know, you ring up one company and say I'm stuck somewhere. And they farm it out to these mom and pop shops. And it's ringing them all saying, hi, do you want more business? Of course I do. And then signing them up. Just completely awesome. Yeah, it is so powerful.

Like I said before I was a client of mine is a energy broker and him and his business partner are just sitting there just literally all day. And I had a meeting with him at the end of the day and his soul had left his body. There was nothing left. I'm not going Carl. There's no need anyone to do that anymore.

And I'm very clear about this, right? The concept of a call center is going to go away. It will dematerialize and it will be cloud based. It will be AI. Now, if you're trying to sell a, I don't know, a Bentley over the phone, right, Or Veyron, you're probably not going to get any call agents to do it. What it can do though, is find out from your base that first contact, that first conversation, Are you interested? Do you want to talk? Can we help you?

And then your sales team that you're paying salaries to, they're the ones that follow up as humans and have that conversation and then, you know, build a stronger relationship. Not doing as you just said there is leading the world to live. Going through the yellow Pages. Yeah, the yellow pages. You've shown your age there. Show my age. Now, Yellow pages was a book with phone numbers in. In case you don't know. But I think it's.

And if I was listening to that, if I was working in a call center right now and I was in that customer service role, then the next logical step is, okay, my job's going to be wiped out. Probably I need to upskill myself because then those people that are on the phones, that that service is going to become more premium, isn't it? You know, the people that were doing the customer service improvement, isn't it? You've got to migrate and add more value. Exactly, yeah. Then game.

So another great example is compliance. Okay, so a lot of some clients who have a lot of people, in one case it was five people listening to phone calls to make sure they comply with a compliance matrix that can be completely automated. There's no need to have people doing that anymore. So what they've done is redeploy those people to do something else that actually adds more value. I can't think of anything worse than sitting on hours of compliance. It's overflowing.

And essentially be robotics. There'd be menial tasks, dangerous tasks. You know, robots are going to do that. But in terms of voice, I think that voice is possibly the most powerful tool available now in AI because you capture more information. So think about again going back to databases. Typically a CRM, right, Is what it's a flat two dimensional database with fields. I don't care what it is. Google sheets, air table, you know, whatever CRM you use, right.

I think as voice almost is like an overlay to your CRM because what you're doing is capturing this unstructured conversational data. And these are kept in a vectorized database. So that's like a 3D Vernon database. Think about like the stars in the sky. Okay, so flat. If I search for hot dog, looking for hot and dog or maybe hot hyphen dog or hot dog put together if I'm lucky, right? In a vectorized database, understands this semantics search, understands context, but look for hot dog.

Might not find hot dog, but understands in that galaxy of information. Hot dog in three dimensional space is quite close to burger or burrito or maybe slightly further away is a ham sandwich. But so it understands context and you don't get that in a normal sort of CRM. So I think capture that information. One piece of advice I give to everyone, record everything. For this reason is now you can overlay that into your CRM. So when you do use your CRM email name. Email first name.

And I want to use AI to write something. It's got all that rich information to personalize it. Yeah, we do that with our task management system as well. So we use a ClickUp internally. I record everything on Fathom that automatically goes into ClickUp. That's training my ClickUp, you know, I mean record everything. All your phone calls or team power wows. People forget that if you're sat in a team, you're sat down a cup of coffee.

Well, one of the things you do this week and you'll record it on even an iPhone. Doesn't matter what you use, record it and save the file, run it through something, whatever you use. So you have a transcript. End of the end of the year, the course you say about all of our team pow wows, given this is our business plan, this is what we've been selling, this is our performance, what do you think we should do? Or focus on what are we missing? It'll tell you.

Yeah, I've seen a little device actually I can't remember what it's called. Is it? Yeah, that's it. I actually bought my stepson one for Christmas was his birthday. His birthday is close to Christmas and he's using it at school. Oh really? Records everything and it transcribes everything and summarizes all the lessons for him automatically. So good. Yeah, I didn't think about that in school, actually. That's really good. Love it. The kids can be like. And then teachers, are you listening?

They're like, I've got my, I've got my board of loud. Yeah, probably leave it on the desk and go play football. A classroom, there's full of these little pebbles at every table. God, imagine. I love it. Well, I'm so excited about where everything's going. I know that you're so excited about it as well. And I definitely recommend anyone listen to your podcast because it really does. You give so much value on it and it's just, it's very conversational. I don't feel like I'm tuning into.

There's so much noise, isn't there? There's so much noise out there and it's so ticky that I think what you're in our podcast is really myself and Alox. He lives in Lisbon, I live in the uk. Almost sort of catching up in a recorded format and talking about what, what's happened sort of over the last two weeks. Normally it's bi weekly about what we've learned and it is about the practicalities of literally taking this technology. This is what you do as well, Carl, isn't it?

And putting it to work in your business. Because if you're not, you're missing a trick. Yeah, 100%. I wanted to ask you something actually, just quickly. So you spoke about like call centers being pretty much wiped out, that industry pretty much being gone.

What do you, what industry do you think is going to completely take off because of AI? I was listening to an Ed Myet podcast the other day and they were talking about biotech and how it's going to like, you know, revolutionize the healthcare industry and things like that. If you were to invest in an industry right now, and you said, that's where I'm putting my money, where would you, where would you invest? Not in a company. I'm not going to ask. I don't want to give investment advice.

The value of stocks can go up as well as down. So you've got. So it's been like a bit like Internet 1.0, right? So initially all the excitement was infrastructure. Okay? It was Cisco, it was isp. You know, I worked, I worked at Credit Suisse. When they again show me that floated freeserv, which is like a dial up ISP they probably never heard of. And that is infrastructure. That's where the, that's where the action was. And then as the Internet began to mature, it moves upwards.

So it was infrastructure. And then it was like the web and then it was things on the web so things like Amazon shops and then E commerce kicked in and now it is what it is, you know, social media, you know, Web3 and that kind of stuff. So AI is quite similar actually. A lot of the value you've been creating now is you know, fabs, people making chips, right, the Nvidia, no GPUs, hyperscale data centers, you know, the Microsoft's of the world. You know Apple have tried Apple Intelligence.

I'm not sure that's adding a huge amount of value. So it's kind of moving upwards and eventually you're going to see is and it's hard to see yet to be honest with you. What are the, what's the layer on top? The interfaces with consumers or businesses that's going to add the most value. Now a lot of these might be the actual AI players themselves. So your anthropics, your OpenAI's, a lot of them are not public yet, although the billions have gone into them.

So if you're investing in, you know, if you're a vc, they're investing in those businesses trying to at least. But across the top you've got a huge number of startups playing on AI, right. I remember lots of companies started doing text to video, right? And they always startups doing text to video and they all kind of get into work.

And then I was on X Twitter and when OpenAI launched them or they announced Sora took another year to launch it and Sora is their text to video model, very, very good. Although Google have now launched one which is probably just been on better even and as they launched it on X Twitter it's serving ads to me because it's in context of text. Video startups you realize that in that moment literally that it's all over for them.

So it's quite hard to work out often where to invest in AI because it's moving so quickly. When we start to implement AI we were thinking about well let's not sell, let's not look for gold, let's sell shovels. But now we've kind of think we've seen a market opportunity that works for us and we're product market fit and we're kind of going after that. But if you want to zoom right out, it will transform healthcare. Absolutely. It will transform the value of data into the data analysis.

It will, it is going to transform the Internet. So there are some things you might want to get out of rather than get into. So things like SEO. So, you know, not too distant future. If I want a barbecue, I'm gonna tell my agent I want a barbecue on Saturday. I've got 200 quid, I'll spend 150 if it's secondhand but in good condition. My parents are coming, needs a beer by midday.

And my agent will go off and talk to other agents on e commerce agents, different websites and it will negotiate and ask, we got barbecue, got barbecue in milliseconds it'll come back and say, well I found you one, it's perfect, do you want it? And I'll look at it and go, yeah, looks well, I'll take it and I'll go back and close the deal for me and make the payment. There will be no Internet.

There will be no place where you go and search around these ridiculous websites and you use Google to do this long, this search and half the search is adverts and the other search is kind of irrelevant or you know, it's. I've got to get a search engine to go through the search results because there's so many of them that is going away.

So the Internet as we know it will go away. It will be somewhere you go for posterity or to, you know, to maybe see certain amounts of information. And I don't think that's something people are quite grasp either that literally the Internet as we know it, hyperspace is going to go away. Agents will talk to agents. On that note, I'm going to leave it there because I feel like it's a bit of a mic drop thing of just showing that, the size of.

It, if you think it, think it through to its natural sort of conclusion, that's what happens, isn't it? Oh, it makes total sense. Yeah. We'll have like an AI, personal shopper for every part. Well, AI, you know, assistants for every part. So I think, I think the, the consumer AI most people are playing at, that is going to be interesting. I think the form factor, the end of these things will be quite interesting.

It might be, you know, that might be just something in your pockets, just gpus and power and it might be, you know, glasses or eventually a big contacts. Where again, to answer your question, what is going to be enormous? It's going to be eventually VR, but between now and then is ar. So augmented reality power by AI where you can see information, things happening in front of your eyes, literally whether they're glass or contact, that's going to be enormous as well. Amazing.

Piers, thank you so much. I could talk to you all day. We've gone way over what we were meant to. But where can everyone find you? Where can they find all things? So the podcast, and I'm glad you're a listener, that's the AI Assisted Organization podcast. We talk about AI assisted organization. That's our kind of mantra and our framework and the businesses implement AI search that will come up or implement AI.IO is our website and on there we've got white papers, we've got resources.

I don't know, Carl, you should have a go. If you go to our website, click on AI Labs, you can actually put in your mobile number and speak to demo agents. So one's like a financial consultant, one's a medical consultant and you have a common, quite basic, ask me questions. At the end of it, in a couple of minutes you'll get an email or WhatsApp with a little proposal straight away, just to show the power of it and just to get an idea for the where this technology is.

Because a lot of people, you know, when you talk about ChatGPT, you're not talking to an AI agent and really appreciating how good it is. Yeah, yeah. The demos are super powerful. I love those. Thank you so much. Also, definitely you do loads of webinars and things like that as well. So I think follow you on LinkedIn, you've got loads. LinkedIn logo on LinkedIn. We've got some webinars coming up. Again, the practicalities as well. Maybe we'll do something together. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. I'm super excited. I think. I know we've got kind of the same solution but different, so I know that the people that aren't quite right for what we do, I definitely, I'm going to be passing them over to you. So super excited to partner with you on that. And yeah, thank you so much for your time. I've really loved it. Just nerding out for an hour about all things AI and I'm excited to see where it all goes. Thanks for having me. Thank you.