Leveraging AI for Business- How Automation and AI Boost Efficiency and Growth

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the developer podcast where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are considering our episodes, our season, our series, Building Better Developers. We are building better businesses this time around. In this episode, I alluded to it in the bonus material. This episode, we're going to talk about AI. We talked last episode about processes and procedures and templates. Now, we're going to take it that next step. How do you take AI and make use of it? Because everybody's heard of it these days. Almost everybody can spell it. Let's dive into that for this episode. But first, I want to introduce myself. My name is Rob Broadhead. I'm one of the founders of Develop and Noor. I'm also founder of RB Consulting, where we are what they refer to as like boutique consulting. We're not desktop support. We're not like just generalists. We actually sit down with you, understand your business, help you craft a plan for technology through simplification, automation, integration, innovation. We help you figure out what is the best route for you and the best way for you to use technology to get that technology sprawl maybe that you have. If you've been trying to work on this for years or to give you like a really good roadmap moving forward. If you're just starting out, say how do I leverage technology not only today, but six months and six years from now and doing so in a case situation where you're not like every year having to say, okay, we got to like throw everything out. We got to rebuild everything. We didn't build anything that can grow. So now we've got to, you know, it's like having a house and you have a kid every year. And the next thing you're like, buy a new house, build a new house, build a new house. That's sort of how your business may be because you grow sometimes very quickly and we want to help you build a solution that grows with you. Good things and bad things. Oh, that's just like two sides of the same, not really two sides of the same coin, but it's the same thing in a sense because the good thing is we finally managed to get out, have a little bit of time and just went and saw a movie last night. Went and saw the latest Captain America movie, which was good. It's like haven't sat down and seen a Marvel theater and movie and I don't know how long. It's been a while. So it was a fun time. The bad side is it could have been more fun because they didn't have heat on in there. So we sit down and like two minutes, I'm normally cold doesn't bother me. I'm not very far into the movie where I'm like taking my coat off and wrapping it around my legs because my legs are freezing and I've got jeans on. It's not like I'm sitting there in shorts or anything, but it was cold and it was like, this is like odd little like we're going to go down and wrap it a whole little bit here on this one. So it was one of these odd things. It was, it was cold and I had my coat on all that kind of stuff. But the thing that was driving me nuts is my nose was so freaking cold. It was like when you're snow skiing and you've got like your goggles, you got your mat, but only your little nose is there. And it's like, I could not figure out how to like warm my nose. I wanted to just dip my nose into like a cup of hot soup or something like that. It was just one of those odd little things. So I probably overshared, but that's okay because I'm going to pass it on to somebody who may even do the same. Michael, go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Melosh. I'm one of the co-founders of developer NURB, Building Better Developers. I'm also the founder of Envision QA where we do very similar things Rob's company does, but we take the approach of essentially the test perspective from the user stories. We walk you through your company as your user. We understand how your software is supposed to work or how your processes work. And then we make sure that the software you have really is doing what your business needs it to do. If not, we can help you customize and create your own software, or we can help you find the right tools to essentially grow your business and streamline your processes. Good and bad this week. Good. I really knuckled down. I got heads down with one of the projects I'm working on, spent a great deal of time going through data and figuring out processes, as I said. The bad side to that is I maybe got to spend about 10 hours with my wife this week. So a little too much work, but got a lot done, but a little less time with family just because I was so heads down trying to get things moving forward. So for those of you that work a lot, do try to make time for your family because they are important to us. That is one of the things you got to like, we got a lot going on. You got to make sure that you're keeping track of that because you want that personal touch. You don't want like the cold kind of technology thing that AI might give you. So that's, we'll say that's a good little segue into. I want to talk about this time is AI and really leveraging AI for tasks, particularly like let's, there's a lot of ways you can go with it. I really want to keep us sort of focused on processes, procedures, and templates because that was the last episode. And this is sort of like the next step maybe, or maybe it's part of that step. For example, last episode we talked about the challenge being like pick a process and create a template or like refine that process. You find a way to just do that a little better to make a little bit of improvement. Now AI is a way to do this. Now it's, you may not think of it, but one of the nice things about AI at this point is I'm going to go, actually I'm going to go with two things. So one of the nice things is two things. So if you're keeping track, maybe I don't do math good sometimes. One is the repetitive types of stuff, the templates that are out there. It used to be that you had to like, you know, get a book or you know, you had to pay like a consultant or company or something like that to provide you with a template that was pretty useful. Now a lot of times AI can get you there very quickly. If you say, write me, you know, I need a template for an email for responding to a customer request for, you know, a refund or something like that, or I need to like, give me a template for building an email that is just a cold call approach to talking to somebody. You will get information back and you can actually work with AI a little bit and do some refinements and get something that is very specific, useful and what you want, you know, what really like makes you you. And of course, as long as you're there, you can put your personal touch into it. So you can let AI get you, you know, 80-20 rule, get you 80% of the way there. And then you go back and you can say, hey, I'm like, I want to tweak this. I want to add this. I want to adjust that. I'm thinking about this and like, that's one thing. I think I'm going to go back and look at like maybe my elevator pitch and some of that kind of stuff. Let's talk about, but that's where AI can help you out. This is where the part two of it is, is it can give you another voice, another opinion on whatever it is you're doing. So even if you're sitting there in a meeting room with 15 people discussing options for your business and how you want to go, you could throw something into AI and now you have plus one more. And depending on how you utilize AI, sometimes you can feed it information that is going to help it have that opinion based on a certain point of view. So like some people early on were like saying, hey, give me, write me a, you know, I'm going to take the day off email from my boss, but I want it in the tone of a pirate or something like that. And it's like, it'll give you the stuff that, or, you know, take this and then put it in the tone of that or pretend like it's coming from, you know, do take this email and make it like, how would Bart Simpson write it or something like that. What we can do is take some of those, those same kinds of things, just have those conversations, ask those questions and say, hey, based on like this book or this chunk of code or this thing or that thing, based on this context, tell me what I would expect to get from, you know, what would I get to expect to get back if I put it in this context? Because sometimes that gives you not only another opinion, but a very focused and maybe even very educated other opinion. Doesn't mean it's right, but it does give you that idea of like, hey, I can get, I can generate something very quickly that otherwise might take me a lot of research. And there's a lot you can do there that will help you take some of these regular processes and procedures and either get started, you know, give you a really good template if you can't find a template or help you refine the one you have. Because you can take your template and say, hey, I don't find, like, I don't find this converting. How would I write, for example, like how would I take this webpage and make it convert customers better, something like that. And you're going to get ideas. They may not be great. It's like the, you know, that are all the art AI we've seen where this guy, like people have 15 different hands or something like that. But if you take that, it can maybe there's going to be maybe some thoughts or some ideas or some some gems are going to be buried in there. We're like, oh, I didn't think about that. I'm going to take that and apply that into my my content or whatever my process is. So right now, I'm an example. I'm not going to send it to an AI. I'm going to give it to Michael and he's going to give you his thoughts on this. Thanks, Rob. So. First thing, I will give you a slight disclaimer with AI. If don't put anything in the AI that is proprietary, if you're like medical, don't put in patient information because anything you put into a any AI tool they own. And you want to make sure that you protect your intellectual rights, your copyrights, things of that nature. So you do want to be a little cautious with what you put in AI. However, with that being said, there is a lot we can do with AI. For instance, if you have like a podcast, you can take the transcript from the podcast, feed it into AI and have it summarize some bullet points. And then you can quickly write your blog on that. I am guilty. The other things you can do is you could also for said blog, say, hey, help me write some social media posts on different platforms. Now, a little caveat with that, you do have to train it a little bit to get your feedback. Like Rob said, you kind of want to maybe ask it for your different audiences or that you're trying to talk to. So one of the cool features you can do with AI is say, hey, write me that social media post, but then add a small caveat and say, hey, write me this post for these platforms, but target the particular audiences of those platforms. And you actually will get a different response for each platform. Now, it may not be exactly what you want, but it is going to give you a much better starting point than starting from scratch. So typically that takes you less than 30 seconds to type that into AI. You get the content and you may spend another 15 minutes tweaking it and then you can post it. The best part is that saves you probably an hour from going out to every single social media site, try to write something out there or writing one message, copy and pasting it to multiple platforms, which then you kind of get stale because then they're either going to follow you on one, not on the other. And you might not be hitting the right audiences on different social media platforms. Some of the other things with AI, which is really cool, we kind of talked about this, I think, in the pre-show last time was if you are working on your business or you're building your business and you don't have all the employees you need, some of the things you need to get started, yes, branding, but you also need some of that HR and internal documentation that you need. You can use AI to say, hey, build me a business plan or, oh, hey, go build me a employee manual or a code of conduct. You can then take that and refine it for your business. Instead of you having to go hire someone to spend a lot of time to build this, if you don't have the cash up front or the time, you can use the AI to get you something there quickly. May not be perfect, but it's enough to get you kind of the groundwork to get your business going and to make sure that you're covered in certain areas. And lastly, the thing that I like to talk about, you know, giving you another voice. It's actually funny, depending upon the AI tool you use. So don't just stick with one. Sometimes it's better off going to different AI channels is if you want a conversation like, hey, I want a to write an article to talk about this particular topic, but I am addressing or like, say I'm talking to a room of high school students, college kids, adults, businesses, you can target AI and ask them, hey, do this or how would you respond to this? The thing is do that in multiple AI chats. Repeat the process a couple of times because different AI bots are trained differently and you're going to get different responses. Some are better than others. Some are great at writing code. Some suck at writing code. Some are really good at writing sonnets and others are really good at writing business documents. So you just have to make sure you're using the right tool. So if you're writing or if you're using AI and you're typing in something, but you're not quite getting what you want, try another AI tool. You might get a different response that is more in line with what you're looking for. But before you just go with that one, I would take this, take the response from the one that works and say, copy that, paste it into the one that didn't quite work and say, OK, this is kind of what I'm looking for. Can you duplicate it? And sometimes just the different wording inputs in the AI will get you different outputs. So this also trains you on how to talk to AI to help AI give you the information you need back. And I think that's probably the probably the biggest thing is or the biggest benefit you will get over time with AI is the more you use it, you will learn. It's just like what they refer to as Google food back in the day, your ability to search and Google. You're going to get the same thing from AI, but it's that's part of it is it's a learning system. So what you feed it, it's going to essentially regurgitate back to you. And so as you're getting in there and building it, you're going to pause while Michael says something. Well, it's just going to say that made me think of the Dragon Dictionary, the talk to speak, because you had to spend a lot of time training the software to get the quality that you needed from the software. AI is a very similar tool. Very much so. And it's one of those like anything else you got to give to get you're going to have to spend some time, you're going to put some effort into it to train the tool. And this is where you it is valuable to have a actually log in and have an account on these things. Yes, you can go in anonymously and all that kind of stuff. But there is a value to having a register and have that so it can tie stuff to you. Now, granted, you don't want to give up personal information and stuff like that, but you do want to have some way to sort of like have it learned from you or just in the convert the conversations with the AI go in there and sort of keep that commerce, keep that thread going and say, well, what about this or how about this or what about this case? And then that's like that's feeding more information into it. And that's allowing you to build out an actual intelligence that is based off of where you want to go with it. Now, obviously, if you start sending it down a certain path, then it's going to go down that path. And that may not necessarily be what you want to do. So there is a value of hitting a fresh AI, you know, different engine or something like that, that doesn't is it will say, poisoned by your previous conversations, but instead gives you maybe a way to think outside the box and go in a different direction. So those are I think that's why you're like anything else. And just like we talked about last time, don't do it in a way that you're not going to be able to do all the work and then not use it. This is something where if you go in and you use AI for like one thing and never again, then you're probably not going to get as much benefit as you do if you do it on a regular basis. And it's an engine where it's able to essentially know you or remember you. So because if you do that, it's going to say like, hey, you asked me to do an email and then you asked me to do a status. And so it's going to take the tweaks that you did to those and carry those forward to your next thing. So when you say, well, hey, I want to do a proposal. It's going to start having some of that information built into it to say like, oh, you typically go this direction. And so it's going to start going that way. So make sure, you know, that's where you put the effort in and you will get the effort back thoughts before a challenge. So the last thing I will touch on with that is AI is still in its infancy as far as the general public is concerned. There are more advanced AIs behind the scenes. But if you go down one of those rabbit holes, don't be afraid to tell AI, hey, this is not going in the direction I want. Roll it back. The last thread that it was working was back up here. That will also help train the AI that, oh, this isn't the right path or the right. You essentially have to tell it when it's not doing the right thing. Don't just use the check marks and things. I find those don't work as well. If you actually tell AI, hey, that is not the response I want, but give it feedback. Tell it, hey, I actually was looking for something a little bit more along the lines of this. Sometimes that will immediately get the AI back on track and you can keep the message going. Yeah, it's just like, because I always think of those art things where it's like, you know, just an insane, like really bad picture. Sometimes you have to, it will go off the rails just like we do sometimes. And so you do something to essentially reset it and get it back on track. Because usually you're going to be able to notice when it's suddenly like, you're talking about a chicken recipe. And the next thing you know, it's telling you like how to kill people a thousand different ways. Like, okay, we've gotten off track. Let's say roll back to where we want to go with it. Sometimes those weird things happen. Sometimes from a business point of view, sometimes it may get you down a path. You're saying like, Ooh, I just found a whole new line of business. So sometimes it's okay to go down those rabbit trails, trails, but just be aware when you do so, because sometimes there's like, it's a bad trail to go down. I'll leave it at that. Challenge for the week is try it, try out AI. Take one of these things. The easiest stuff is like, take an email response, particularly if it's one that you do on a regular basis, or if it's already one that you've got an auto responder that's like, I always send this thing. Take something like that or one of these templates that hopefully you've now created from prior challenge and put it in AI and just say, is there a better way for me to take this and accomplish whatever your goal is? For example, like email, if it is a response to requests from a customer or potential customer, throw it into AI and say, Hey, is there, take this response and make it better if I want to sell to a customer or how do I make this response more likely to have a customer respond in a positive way, things like that. And then see how it goes. See where it goes. Take a couple of those things and you'll get something different. And if you use it, then it may be a good opportunity for you to make some improvements on it. So go for it. I mean, one of the best things you can do is say, Hey, how do I make building better developers better? And one of the ways, and it's probably going to tell you, I should almost, I almost wanted to go do this right now. It's probably going to say, send an email to info at developernerd.com because that is going to be a great way to get your opinion heard and for us to hear where you want to go and to integrate that into future episodes. Also, and this was where AI may give you other options, like you could go into the contact us form on developernerd.com. You can leave feedback, anything, any article on developernerd.com. You leave feedback wherever you hear podcasts. You can leave feedback out on the developernerd channel on YouTube. And if AI doesn't give you these answers, then you need to go to a better AI because obviously that one is not, the I is pretty weak and it's mostly just the big a lot of artificial, not a lot of intelligence. Yeah. I'm throwing shade at the AI engines out there and deal with it. So now we're going to be blocked. We're like blacklisted every, every I'll be like, I don't know what the heck that is. That's just sounds stupid. Don't talk to those people. They're anti AI. They're probably like, they need to be arrested or something like that. See, sometimes we go off the rails too. That being said, we're going to let you get your day back on the rails. Go out there and have yourself a great day, a great time, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember just the little bit of effort every day. Ends up adding into great momentum and great success.