Introduction & Framing: Why SMBs Need AI
0:00 – 1:35

Enterprise Waste & The Consulting Gap for Small Business
1:35 – 3:47

What Businesses Should Ask Before Adopting AI
3:47 – 6:00

Delegate & Elevate: Where to Start with AI
6:00 – 9:04

The Biggest AI Adoption Mistake: Waiting
9:04 – 10:34

AI + Blockchain: Security and Trust Considerations
10:34 – 11:23

Security vs Convenience: AI Use Policies for SMBs
13:33 – 16:20

Efficiency First: Email, Communication & Internal Knowledge Retrieval
16:20 – 22:01

Long-Term Strategy: Working Backward from 5-Year Goals
18:34 – 22:01

AI Readiness & Where to Start
25:06 – 26:13

“When AI became accessible to everybody… I realized there was a huge opportunity as a force multiplier in SMB.”

“The SMBs are going to have to figure it out on their own, because there’s not really a Deloitte for small business.”

“Start with the things you don’t like doing.”

“If the competition is using this and you are not, they now have an unfair, unmatchable advantage.”

“There’s nothing to wait for. Generative AI is already having the impact.”

“Before you let your team loose on the tools, define what a generative AI use policy looks like.”

“We identify the longer-term goal and work backward.”

“If you’re not using these tools for ideation and strategy, you’re missing access to every thought leader in the world.”

Jonathan Green 0:00
Small Businesses need AI too with today's special guest, Chris Daigle, today's episode is brought to you by the best seller ChatGPT profits. This book is the missing instruction manual to get you up and running with ChatGPT in a matter of minutes. As a special gift, you can get an absolutely free at artificial intelligence pod.com forward slash gift or at the link right below this episode, make sure to grab your copy before it goes back up to full price. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now, then you come to the right place. Welcome to the artificial intelligence podcaster where you will learn how to use artificial intelligence to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan green. Now here's your host. Now I'm really excited to have you here today, Chris, because Thank you, Jeff. I was thinking about a lot about what you said about how everyone's focusing on enterprise. And every time I talk to a small AI company who has a product I like that. I go, Oh my gosh, this will be great for my customer, small business. They go, Oh, we're focused on enterprise, and it's like this brass ring everyone's chasing. And I always think about something I saw in one of the many investing TV shows I said, which is, you don't want any one customer to represent a huge percentage of your business, because then you're an employee, and I feel like a lot of companies, that's what they're chasing, without realizing that it actually makes you super vulnerable. So I love your approach to small businesses. I'd love to know how that became your passion. How do you decided that that's gonna be your laser focus? Let's start there.

Chris Daigle 1:35
Sure I've got experience in enterprise. My first like real jet, my first real job was working with Accenture big consulting firm, and I got to see what that side of the consulting world looked like. And how do I put this diplomatically, it just there was a lot of waste, and there was a lot of misrepresentation of talent, things like that. And I think the companies ended up overpaying for the quality of service. They were getting a result, but they were paying a premium for it. When AI came on generative, AI became accessible to everybody that could log on to the internet, go to chat. GPT, I really quickly realized that obviously there's a huge opportunity as a force multiplier in SMB, small to medium business. I had been doing a lot of consulting. I had started as an EOS consultant early in my career, which, if you're not familiar with that stands for entrepreneurial operator. Entrepreneurial Operating System. It's a framework for scaling and managing and running a business without it being terribly chaotic. I learned Verne Harnish's scaling up model the same thing. So I had taken an amalgamation of these frameworks that I had learned, and I was working with small businesses to provide that same service. And when I saw what Gen AI could do, combined with that, I realized that there's an opportunity to really compress the results curve, whether it's big company, small company, but when I started to think was, listen, this is so new, the people who really possess this knowledge, they're trying to penetrate enterprise, it's gonna be a long time before they exhaust that. So the SMBs, the small business owners, are going to be having to figure it out on their own, because there's not really like a Deloitte for small business or a McKinsey for small business. And our approach with Chief AI officer was to address that gap in the marketplace and to find those business owners, ambitious employees, coaches, consultants, whatever, who weren't enterprise focused, get them skilled up on how to not only the tools and the tactics, but also some frameworks for deployment and start addressing that gap in the marketplace. So that's what we do at chief AI office. So we educate, train, certify, and provide software for those folks who are going to lead those deployments in AI,

Jonathan Green 3:47
there's a lot of misconception that people have about what is that role of AI and how should it be, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what things should cost and what type of implementations. A lot of companies are saying I need AI and I need it now, but I don't know what AI means. And good point, it's the same thing that happened. I always talk about in the early 2000s every company said I need a website. Yeah, I don't know why, but I've heard I need it. My kids told me I need it. Or even before that was I need a MySpace page, right? Every band had a MySpace page. Well, then you needed then you needed your own website. And no at some companies, sure, but not every company needs it. And even now, a lot of companies don't really know what AI means. They know it's hot, so they know they want it, and they have no sense of what it should cost. Like I got approached a few months ago by a really large enterprise consulting company, to come in and work on a project, and they never had me sign an NDA, which is a and they gave me all of their stuff. And I was like, this is all in my book, aren't you? At enterprise level, they weren't doing anything I don't already know, other than charging 100 times more. And it's the same thing. I talked to a lot of people. I say your vendor is just selling you via ChatGPT's API, and just doing a 100x markup on you. If your overhead went up in the past year, something is wrong. Mine went down 90% Yeah, yeah. If you're if you're costing more, because there's such a downer pressure on the market from open source tools that that's why chat GPT is $20 a month. So if you're paying an enterprise company for their custom version of  ChatGPT 1000s of dollars a month, and all they've done is limit it. They've just gated it by putting it behind their prompt windows. And I always it fascinates me the poor decision making at that level. But I really wonder, how can someone at the small business level even figure out if they're the right type of business where this makes sense, where they should even be looking AI yet? Or maybe they need to get their first thing fixed. So let's talk about that decision process. What's the first thing you look at? Go, you don't need AI yet. What are you thinking about?

Chris Daigle 6:00
Yeah, so I would the first criteria would be, is your business? Is, do you do knowledge work? Are you AI going to help the is generative? Ai going to help the woodworker, the roofer, in the operation of their in the knowledge work, elements of their business? Yes, dealing with customers, follow up, stuff like that. However, they wouldn't necessarily be the primary beneficiaries. Let's say you are anything, brick and mortar, e Comm, course creator, there are certain activities in any business, whether you're General Motors or you are the small business. There are certain activities that are universal, marketing, sales, human resources. Those things. Doesn't matter if you're big or small, those are going to be functions in those business so what I would look at is, I would look at businesses that were looking to get more out of the staff that they had, or maybe they don't have the resources to get more staff, and identify what we always do is we say, look, start with the things you don't like doing. Right? We do a process that I learned from EOS called delegate and elevate, we asked the business owners or the employee or whoever, to draw an X, Y grid on a piece of paper, and then in the bottom right quadrant, those are the things that you don't like doing and you're not good at, however. They're part of your they're an expected deliverable from your role or your business. And usually the reason that we like to start there is because two things happen. If I can come in and get quick wins with AI, if I can do something that you already like doing and take that off your plate, that's helpful. But if I can take something off of your plate using this tech that you didn't like doing, the enthusiasm, the morale, the interest goes up and hey, can we do more of that? Can we get more of this crap, the work that I don't like doing off and we typically will start there. I don't know that there's too many businesses out there that wouldn't benefit from the learning how to think in AI is what I call it, right? So let's say that you're not necessarily ready to go all in on AI if you're not using chat, GPT or Claude, or whichever your model, your favorite model is for things such as ideation strategy. There's no consultant. There's no like thought leader in the world that you don't have access to now, hey, act as Elon Musk, I have a small bakery. What would eat? You know, like anybody has access to the thought frameworks that have been signatures of Steve Jobs. Warren Buffett, you name the business icon or coach. Bear. Bryant, whatever your approach to business is, if you're not using that to the tools for ideation, at least, or strategy development or collaboration, or, Hey, I don't know a lot about doing my books. What as a small business owner, what should I know the models are there to support you in those things. Can they out? Can you automate things and build out processes that are AI powered Absolutely? However, a great place for you to start would be just getting used to using the tool as, hey, got a quick question. Hey, I'm not sure about this. Just look at it as like the the wise old mench that's sitting in the corner doing the crossword, smoking the cigar, waiting for you to ask it a question, if you can picture that,

jon 9:04
no, I like that. What would you say is the most common mistake people are making right now with AI

Chris Daigle 9:12
being intimidated by it? Probably just here's what I'm seeing. Is that everybody, like you said, everybody wants AI, and they want it now because there's a narrative in the marketplace of you are going to be left behind. Jonathan, you use AI. I use AI. I can tell you that individuals who are like, I'm not a website. Who needs a website like they did in the late 90s and early 2000s if you take that approach with AI, the result cycle of you rejecting it, and the impact, the negative impact, on your business or career, is rapid, much more rapid than it was with any other technology that we've had in the past. So I think that the mistake would be to think that we'll wait and see what happens. There's it's happening. There's nothing to wait for. Ai generative. AI is. Having the impact. Large business, small business, solopreneur, dog walking. Business, I don't care what you do the competition. They don't even have to be an AI expert. If the competition is using this and you are not, they now have an unfair, unmatchable advantage against you. They they will get more done at a higher quality, and they'll get it done faster than you can in the old way, the old way of doing business, the old paradigm, pre generative AI.

Jonathan Green 10:34
Now there are some people who in their minds or believe there should be a merging of AI with Blockchain stuff. Do you see the an intersection there?

Chris Daigle 10:44
I think that you're going to see a combination of that. It's already happening, for sure. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of merit to that, certainly with the security element that that blockchain provides that would address a lot of the privacy concerns that I think that new and experienced users of generative AI are a little concerned about, like, where's my data going? What's it being used to train? How do I know it's not a hallucination? How do I know that this is not a deep fake video or whatever? And I think that blockchain would certainly mitigate effective use of blockchain would certainly mitigate a big portion of that. So it's coming.

Jonathan Green 11:23
Yeah, I just think about everyone said that about NFTs Three years ago, and how many hacks and security things, and, oh, we accidentally, they got control of too many nodes, and now they control the entire network. So when I think of blockchain, I don't think of it as secure, because every story you hear is, whoops, someone stole and it's an insane amount of money with what we forgot to close the door, we forgot to change this code, or we forgot to secure a node or this thing. So I think about that, which is, either it's centralized or It's decentralized, right? And each has different security flaws, like everyone was like, you'll replace your all your contracts with smart contracts. And it turns out it didn't work. So when I hear that, I get I just think all of the negative thoughts, if everybody got burned on an NFT is, oh no, ai nfts, I don't want it anymore. I feel like that talk. That's how I feel about it. And I hear, when i The one thing I want to bring up, which is good, is about security. A lot of people use AI without any thought towards security. For example, I know some people at a certain embassy were using Google Translate for top secret documents, and it's that's not secure, that's the most broadest website that steals everyone's data, like they put ads in your email. So people sometimes think get so used to a tool. And for example, I tell everyone, I say, if your competitor is Microsoft, don't use chat GBT or one of their products, use a different AI, because the only way to have a truly secure AI is to run it locally in a laptop. And at the end every day, you hit it with a hammer and you melt it. But when I suggest that to people, they never want to do it, because it's the only way to be secure, right? It's to stop it from a physical and a digital attack aircraft computer, kill it at the end of the day, new computer tomorrow. Nobody wants to do that. Obviously, it's very expensive, so you at some point you have to choose between security and convenience, and it's thinking about that. There's also companies that have gone all the other end and said, AI is banned from the company. We don't using chat GPT for security concern. Where do you think is the middle road? Where is the right balance for a smaller business to be between security and convenience?

Chris Daigle 13:33
So I think before you let your team loose on using the tools, there should be a discussion, and that discussion should look like some training, a podcast I listen to a lot, the Marketing AI Institute, Paul Roetzer and his partner, his chief content partner, over there, this is they bang the drum on generative AI, use policies, privacy and all that type of thing. And I have to agree with them. The protocol that we recommend is that let's define what a use policy looks like in your company, right? Let's educate the users of AI in your company on what it is, how it works, what the risks are, before we let them start using the tools and the performance of their job, their processes or their workflows. That training, combined with a clearly defined set of guidelines that generative AI use policy is a very good first start for companies. Now, I would imagine, if there's not already, probably are that there's going to be providers who specialize in making sure that your AI use is compliant and that it's secure. So first step business owner, executive, ambitious employee, is get educated on this. Don't just go in there and start using it. Understand what the risks are. Number two, define what use. Policy, what usage guidelines look like in your company once that's in place. Number three, it might not be a bad idea to two things. If you can't find that that human vendor that can come in and take a look at what you're doing in your processes, and they specialize in evaluating risk and data breach opportunities for use of AI. If you can't find that person, go to the models. Here's our guidelines. Here's the training that we use, ChatGPT, what are some security risks? How can I improve my my data environment, my data security environment for use of AI in the company, leverage the models as the proxy for that human expert. But I think if you do that most SMBs, yes, we've got data, we've got customer lists, and we've got things like that. However, the data science side of AI, like most SMBs, they're not ready to extract business intelligence from their data at this point. They're looking for, how can I get home to the kids earlier? They're looking more for those types of solutions. And I think if that's where you are as an SMB that you're looking more for. How can I create more time, create more revenue, and an exponential growth and the enjoyment of my craft? You're going to you're going to be okay with the AI use policy and some training for your team.

Jonathan Green 16:20
A lot of everyone's so focused on AI can generate AI can do these things, like outward, like I can write more blog posts, I can make more content. And I my approach is always focus on what comes in. The biggest time suck for most employees and most businesses is communication, meetings, emails. So the first thing I talk about, my opinion, is I use two big AI tools. One that filters the news, because I have to stay update on AI news constantly, and I don't need to know about fundraise. There's so many fundraising press releases. I don't need those. So filtering those out saves me so much time. The second thing is, with my email, the better my AI filters for my email because I have emails that I need to know about, yeah, emails that I just need to keep a copy of, and then emails that I need to respond to, which is a very small percentage, so out of every 1000 emails I probably need to respond between five and seven. That filtering saves me huge amount of time, and that's always been on my mind ever since I read a study that said the employee spends six and a half hours a half hours a day doing email, and I was like, what's the other 90 minutes lunch? That's a terrible worry. But when I think about it, when I work for a large organization, people that we have their email open all day, and it's the same reason I work for myself, and maybe this resonates with you, is I don't like being in meetings where I don't need to be there. And I've been to so many meetings where there was it about something I was working on. I'm not going to talk. There's nothing for you to listen to. And if I go to the bathroom, someone go, hey, where do you think you're going? And I'm like, why are you paying me to be here? It's such a poor use of resource when I have my employees. I was like, minimum team meetings. If you don't need to be there, you don't need to be there. And I swing very far in the other direction. So what do you think about like the first approach, the first efficiencies a smaller business or solopreneur can look at, like, should they really work? Look at, oh, I can do all these new things. Now I can start a blog in addition to everything else I'm doing. Now I can start a podcast. Now I can start doing video. I try to my thought is, let's limit how much is incoming and try to increase your time first. Let's take what you're already doing and do it faster before we add in new things. Because people get so distracted by what's new and cool,

Chris Daigle 18:34
it's a great approach. So what we do is, we the first thing that we're going to do. Let's say a client wanted to work with our definition of a chief AI officer. We train that individual to come in, sit down and say, Okay, guys, where do we want to be in five years? Three years a year. We're looking at that further goal. Because if all we're doing is reacting in the short term, that's you're fighting fires all day long, you're not really moving towards anything bigger. So we identify a longer term goal. You define what long term is. Maybe for your company, it's 10 years. Then what we do is we start working back. Okay? To get there, we need to be here in three years and one year and this quarter. So what we're doing is we're getting very clear on a set of activities that result in a larger goal as compared to a set of activities that maintain the status quo. So in that case, what we're doing is we're getting we're making it very easy for even employees to have kind of a binary filter of, is this moving towards the goal or away from the goal, or neutral? If it's neutral or moving away from the goal, it's probably an activity they shouldn't be focused on anyway. So we're looking at, how do we accelerate the velocity of achievement for an activity that supports that goal. And we don't leave it up to the individuals to guess. We make it very clear in these processes the frameworks I shared earlier, they're very specific on how you assign measure output from any contributor to the bigger picture, a similar. Stat that that I saw about your email stat was that a knowledge worker spends about 20% of their day searching for the information to work with. So if you can simply think about that, okay, I know that it's in a Google Drive, but I've got to get that in for which which drive was it in from her, which folder, all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of wasted time that's occurring there. So some sort of environment that there's some new tools that we've been working with that are, they're not LLMs, they're more rag architecture that they sit in your stack. And I'll give you an example. There's some tools that they integrate with your G, drive, Slack, click, and a bunch of other like, whatever your operational stack is that's very similar to what we've got. And these tools sit in the middle of that, and you can use the tool, and you can say, Hey, I know that we had the framework for a generative AI use policy. Where is that? Instead of me hunting and this is all usually we're interfacing with this in our Slack group. And it's that, that traffic cop in your business that knows where everything is because it's gone and indexed All of your chat histories and all that type of stuff for internal communication. That might be a great place for an SMB to start, even just like getting even if you're not going to be more efficient with your planning, or you don't have a big strategy or anything like that, just having a generative AI tool that had indexed your internal communications and knowledge about your business would be very helpful, because it's going to start to shave time off of that 20% of the knowledge worker looking for that work. That'd be a great place to start. I'm very interested in that email angle, man, because Jonathan, at this point, if I were to look, I've got over 10,000 emails and probably all of my inboxes, and I it's just because I gave up a long time ago, right? I had I've tried assistants, and I've tried vas. I'm using superhuman now. It's good, but, man, if somebody's got that AI solution, I want to hear about it, because that's a channel. Don't even email me like Mom, sorry I didn't get the email. I'm not looking at anybody's emails. It's just a big time suck for me. So I wish I had a better solution.

Jonathan Green 22:01
That's really interesting, because I feel the same way about your file management thing. I think about this, where I think the biggest opportunity in AI is people get so distracted by what's cool. And I always say, I buy a lot more toilet paper than I do stereos. The real profitability is in the boring What do you do every week? And I was thinking, How much time do I spend searching for files. I'm always reorganizing. How much time do I spend trying to remember who people you are, people are, and certain things that used to be really hard, like creating transcripts. Now too many things create transcripts. I have seven transcripts of every meaning because every tool is creating transcripts. And it's fine, it's useful, but then exactly organizing it and finding it. I was thinking about this a lot over the past week, because I use tools to help me remember who people are. Because it happens all the time. I can't remember who it is. I meet too many people. It's not personal. I can't remember every guest I've had on the podcast. I've had over 300 I try my best, but I have a thing that helps me. I can look at a picture, look up a name, and then I have a chance with an AI that's very interesting. And I think this, I think you've dialed into exactly what I really like, which is the biggest opportunity is biggest opportunity is in creasing those efficiencies for things that you don't even realize are time waste. It's like when you start working with a dietitian, the first thing they say is, take a picture of everything you eat, and then you're shocked. You go, what I didn't realize I was eating 17,000 calories a day. This is a very good idea, because it's the things. Because I a lot of people say things like, Oh, I I'm replacing myself, and please don't let the AI do something unsupervised. You always end up regretting it because it's something crazy always happens. You will get in the news eventually, because something so bad will happen. You know what I mean? But that's the wrong mindset. I always say, push yourself into management, which means you're spending less time doing and more time checking its work. That's where the efficiency is. And I really like what you're talking about, about organization, because I think that's where a lot of small business owners get stuck, is lack of organization. And I always think about, for me, it's the 8020 rule. Yep, 20% of what I do generates 80% of my revenue, and 80% of what I do doesn't matter. It doesn't help the business at all. And I always have to reassess that and move some parts around to go this part of the business isn't working. Give up this thing. Give up that thing. This isn't working, give up that thing. And that's sometimes. Those are hard decisions, because it's usually the part of your business you love the most is business you love the most is the part. It's the one that's making you the least money. And making these decisions sometimes in the same way they go, you don't realize where the time loss is happening, because I'm there's also a balance, because sometimes people are always they're so focused on efficiency, all they do is efficiency. They never get anything done. They just get everything done faster. So I'm always trying to find that balance too. I love what you're talking about. I think that people are Thank you, really good. I like your style. A lot of what you say aligns with what I talk about, but it's from a very different perspective, which is why I want to have in the show today. I know people are going to love this. Where's the best place for people to find you online and connect with you? I know we've chatted on LinkedIn. Obviously they shouldn't eat. Know you, because you'll never respond. I get it. Sorry, where's the best place to find you?

Chris Daigle 25:06
Best place to find us? So we encourage people to get a baseline of how prepared are you for AI? And what we do is we tell people to go to ChiefAIOfficer.com/IQ. It's a clever little blend of AI and IQ, but it's a seven question quiz, and it just it's going to give you a score, and you get an idea of it will those quick seven questions will help you very quickly identify gaps or areas that you just hadn't considered about AI preparedness for yourself or your company. So that'd be the best place. Chiefaiofficer.com, forward slash, ai q on LinkedIn, really, on all of our platforms, we put out a lot of content. This is a passion, a project and a topic that we're very passionate about. We're active practitioners. We're working with businesses in all industries. So we're coming up with not coming up with we're experiencing like breakthroughs and ahas that we love, sharing with AI enthusiasts and AI curious, plugging into us there or catching us on social. It's probably a great place for you to plug into what we're doing, what we're talking about.

Jonathan Green 26:13
Awesome. We'll put all the links below the show notes, as always. Thank you so much for being here for another amazing episode of the artificial intelligence podcast. Thank you, Jonathan, thanks for listening to today's episode, starting with AI, it can be scary. ChatGPT profits is not only a best seller, but also the missing instruction manual. Make mastering ChatGPT a breeze. Bypass the hard stuff and get straight to success with ChatGPT profits. As always, I would love for you to support the show by paying full price on Amazon, but you can get it absolutely free for a limited time and artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence pod.com forward slash gift. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the artificial intelligence podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Monday with more tips and tactics on how to leverage AI to escape that rat race. Head over to artificial intelligence pod.com now to see past episodes, leave a review and check out all of our socials.