15 | Isar Meitis on Leadership, AI Strategy, and Business Growth

In this episode, Audrey Chia welcomes Isar Meitis, a distinguished AI consultant, entrepreneur, and former F-16 pilot. Isar shares his incredible journey from the skies to the boardroom, offering a wealth of insights on leading AI-driven transformations in businesses of all sizes. In this episode, they explore the critical role of leadership buy-in, strategic use cases, and the balance between automation and human connection. Plus, discover actionable tips for leveraging AI tools effectively and the future of work in an AI-powered world. Don't miss this engaging conversation packed with value for business leaders and AI enthusiasts alike!

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Transcript

riverside_isar_& audrey _ nov 12, 2024 001_claire_farwell podc: 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the AI Marketer's Playbook, where we cover actionable frameworks to help you maximize AI in your business. I'm Audrey Chia, your host, and today I have with me someone very special. Isar Meitis, someone whom I truly admire and respect in the AI space. Now, Isar has spent decades guiding leaders at the highest levels, from commanding elite F 16 fighter jets to leading four successful companies, he has done it all. And as an expert AI consultant, Isar has helped revolutionize hundreds of companies from agile startups to multi billion dollar enterprises. This man is also the host of one of my favorite personal podcast, Leveraging AI podcast. And Isar, it's an honor to have you with us. I'm so excited to be here. I mean, you and I have been LinkedIn buddies and AI stuff for, I don't know, a year plus now. So I'm so, so, so excited to be here. Amazing. And I think you have had quite an interesting journey, not just in AI, but in life. I would love to know a little bit more about your own story before AI, before everything, you know, went crazy. What was your journey like? Well, I was born back in the, no, I'm just kidding. We could be here for three hours. Yeah. We could be here for a while. but the, I, I started my journey, as you mentioned, as an F 16 pilot, I flew F 16s for the Israeli air force. I've done that for over a decade. from there I joined a small tech startup that did training and simulation, which connects to what I did before, right? So I flew F 16s and then I did training and simulation stuff, from, That I transitioned to starting my own startup in, affiliate marketing technology. So I was trying to change how affiliate marketing is done. I raised close to 4 million and never, it never took off, but my main investor in that business brought me actually very early on, like I was still running the other business. It brought me also to his business. He was running a large travel wholesale company and he said, we, we don't have an e commerce. Arm, do you want to run e commerce for us? And, my response was, well, you know, you're writing a pretty big check for me to do the other thing. And he said, well, you're smart enough. You can do both. Well, the truth is I was not smart enough to do both. I always laughed at that was the first nail in the coffin of that other startup. but I, I, I did both for a while. So we started in a new company called last minute travel. Or resurrected, I should say, because they had it before me, but it wasn't alive. So we resurrected last minute travel and we were able to grow that to 100 million in sales. In a few years, I had an amazing team of people and we basically were running a startup within the larger company. So we were disconnected from them on everything. And we were running kind of like their clients. So they had multiple clients who were a wholesale company were connected with them, like any other client. So, that was last minute travel. Then the company got sold, went through a very interesting merger, like a huge international merger, like the three largest wholesale travel companies in the world, merged into one under a private equity company. And that was an experience that I like to call interesting. Those of you who didn't get the opportunity to be in a large international merger. I don't necessarily recommend that, but it's, but it's definitely a very interesting learning process. so I was there for about two years after the merger, and then I left, started, another business, which I sold to my partner in October of 2022. And then I was looking what I want to do when I grow up. And, and, and Chachi VT came out like a month later and as a geek and as a tech guy, because I was running tech companies all my life. I was very curious and started playing with it early on. And a lot of people who are friends of mine, or I'm in, I'm an investor in several different businesses. And so the people I invest in and just people I know that are in senior positions started approaching me to help them with this AI thing. And one thing led to the other. And I started the Leveraging AI podcast and started multiply as a training and consulting company for an AI and the rest is history like they say. This is now a year and a half later, almost two years later, and it's very interesting. Wow. What a journey. Interesting is an understatement. I'm sure it was like a amazing rollercoaster. And I would love to know, right, when you first started leveraging AI, right? just in general, did you already know the business model you wanted to build around it? Or was it something you stumbled into? a little bit of both. So, so the way, the way it all started, like I said, it, it started very organically. Like people started approaching me, but one of the businesses that I invested in is a online training platform. So it's like a cohort base core space, but with actual people, actual instructors, but online. And I've been mentoring their CEO for the last two years. Five years or so since I invested in the company. And we've been meeting like every other week. And in one of our meetings in January of 2023, we started talking about doing an AI course on their platform. And he said, do you know anybody who can run the course? And I said, yes, I'll run the course. And he started laughing. He said, listen, you just sold another company. You're like, you had two really big exits. You got to teach a course. I'm like, yeah, I love teaching. He's like, okay, I trust you. You're it. And I asked him, okay, so when do you want the course? She said, April. And I'm like, okay, I'll have a course ready for April. So in the beginning of April, I taught the first AI business transformation course. I've been teaching it at least once a month since. So in many months I've done two of these courses. so I knew I want to teach and I knew I want to train because I always was passionate about helping people grow in different aspects of their businesses. I'm not a big believer in the consulting side of things. So that was kind of like when I say I stumbled into some of it, some companies really wanted me to come and help them in the implementation and not just a training. So there's a very short list of companies that I consult to, but I definitely knew that I want to do courses and they built leveraging AI and all the other stuff that I'm doing around that. Yeah. And it's beautiful that it's, you know, Kind of like where two different things collide, right? Your passion in training and teaching, plus that opportunity where AI came into the space, plus timing, right? And then it sort of all built this beautiful flow for you. And since you have consulted quite a number of companies from like startups all the way to MNCs, right? What are some core observations that you have noticed over the past two years? Wow. That's a big, we have four hours. You said, how long did you say? Yeah, no, no, no. So, so let's talk, let's talk about both extremes, right? Let's talk about what makes things work as far as AI implementation. And let's talk about what make things fail as far as a startup. So I'll start, I'll start with a good, so the, the two things that I see that are the most critical aspects of AI successful implementation, one is leadership buy in. Like if people at the top of the company, the CEO, or people in the C suite are really into this, meaning they understand the potential, they are themselves exploring and testing things. They want to implement it in their business. They understand the impact it can have. It makes a huge difference to the chances of success. And I'm also telling that to people who are not the leaders of the company. If you're not the leader of your company and you really want to push your company to implement AI, you have to find a sponsor. Somebody in the C suite or one of the executives or people on the board, depending on who makes the big decisions in your company and get their buy in and get them to support you and sponsor what you're doing. Otherwise. It will be very, very hard. Like you can still do small things. You can still have small initiatives by specific individuals, but having like a company wide AI strategy is just not going to happen without leadership. Buy in. And I've seen that in very large companies and I've seen that in very small companies and it's very consistent across the board. So that's one. The other thing that makes a big difference is that many companies think it's about the tech, meaning the amount of times people approach me and say, okay, should we pay for Microsoft co pilot? Should we buy licenses of chat GPT for everyone? Should we use this tool or that tool? And I'm like, that's not the right question to ask. the right question to ask is what use cases do you see for this? How will that strategically impact your business? If at all. And if you, if you have clear use cases and you have a clear path, do you know how to train the people? To use it because buying the licenses is not going to do anything without defining systems and processes and procedures and use cases for people to use them and invest in training continuously because in three months is going to be a new tool that you don't have today that will do the work faster and better than the tool you picked. Now, who's going to train them? How will they learn? And so these are the big questions. And once we answer all of those, then go look for the current technology that does is the best right now, knowing that it's going to change. And for large companies, that's a concept they cannot handle. They cannot handle it because large companies cannot change the technology every three months. So I'm like, okay, don't do it every three months, do it every six to nine months, but know that you need a process and infrastructure, a team within the company that will help. In those transitions as things happen, so you can continue to benefit from this really fast transformation that will probably not end in the next few years. And so these are on the good things on on success, right? So it's buying from leadership. not jumping into the tech, but rather solving for other things and thinking strategically from a company perspective. So these are on the positive side on the things that I see why people fail. And that's both on the personal level and on a company level. The very first thing is they give up too early. So you know this just like I do. Both of us have been doing it. I stuff daily every single day for months. So we are at the top end of capabilities in AI. How many times do you spend three, four, five hours trying to solve something you're trying to solve? I'm asking you for real. Yeah. So like sometimes people see like a landing page prompt that I built, right? They don't know how much, like how many hours I spent refining it and how many, how much work went into just testing the prompt until you get your final results. Right. And so most people won't do that. So even you and I are experts, we would still spend sometimes four or five, six, seven hours on one thing. And people are like, are you crazy? You could have built a landing page. I'll use your example. You could have been the landing pages in 30 minutes. Why did you just spend five hours to figure out the prompt to build a landing page? And many, many people just give up too early. They think from everything they hear, they hear people like you and me talk about, this is amazing. Look at, look at the prompt, look at the tool, look at the thing. And it's like in 30 seconds, it does something that takes other people two weeks. And, and then that's what they expect. And then they come to try it and it doesn't work and it hallucinates and it's not consistent and, and the outcome looks like crap and they're like, well, I can't use this. This is bullshit. This is all a hype and they give up. And the reality is the only way to know how to do this is to actually do this. Like, yes, listen to podcasts like Audrey's and like mine and watch YouTube videos and read article, like do all of that. But without actually trying and not giving up, like if you have a use case that you know other people are successful in doing, spend as many hours as needed. This could be two, this could be 20 to figure it out because what's going to happen, you're going to learn the limitations of these tools. You're going to learn the workarounds. You're going to learn how to connect different tools together to solve problems that one tool versus the other don't know how to do. And you'll be able to do magic. Now, the reason to do this, going back to the landing page. example is that if you know how to build a language, a landing page now in two minutes instead of an hour, and you have to build 20 landing pages a year, you just solved in the first year, 10 to 20 hours. So yes, the first one was a huge waste of time, quote unquote, but it's a great investment. Yes. And so I think what people are, and I see that all the time, like every course that I deliver every workshop that I do with companies, that's usually the questions. Well, we try this. It doesn't work. So we don't want to go down that use case. I'm like, okay, let's, let's go two steps back. What were you trying to do? What didn't work? And so I think that's the biggest, biggest mistake that people make is they give up on that. Too early. The other one we kind of mentioned on the positive side, they start with a tech instead of starting with the use case. Like, Oh, I, we, we have co pilot because we're a Microsoft shop. So we want to use co pilot. Oh, well, co pilot is not going to do this thing because it's shit in that particular thing. So you, you can say you want to use co pilot. It's fine, but you won't be able to do one, two, three, four. If you want to do one, two, three, four, pick this tool or that tool or the combination of these two. These two tools and so I think starting with the technology versus starting with the use case and trying to solve it with technology is another big mistake that people have. Yeah, absolutely. And I see that a lot as well. Like even for me, just in the copywriting niche, people are trying to use it in their workflows, but they don't start with the problem. So they want a prompt for something and they just expect AI to generate the output for you. But they're not working backwards from that problem they're trying to solve. So if you have the problem, that's where you can work backwards and create that workflow to solve that problem. Whereas if you just start from a blank state and you just want to leverage AI, you'll just be looking at 10 different tools and trying to figure out which one works best for you, but not actually getting anywhere with any of those tools. And I think you also have seen that a lot. Yes, no, absolutely. It's, it's definitely a, by the way, like anything in business, you got to stop, start with the goal. And then work backwards from that versus starting with, Oh, here's a cool technology, or here's a cool process, or here's something I saw somebody do on YouTube, and then maybe it's not solving for what you're trying to solve. And I think they are like on the AI side, there's really two aspects to this. There's a strategic side on how will this impact your industry? How can this impact your business? Good or bad? Because in many industries, AI will have a horrible negative impact on the industry or specific companies. And You got to know now because you've got to start shifting and making adjustments to your business. Otherwise you'll be out of business within the next two years. And that could be true for companies has been around for 20 years and being very successful. And so you got to understand the strategic aspect, but you also got to understand how can this help me on the day to day today. It's like literally today, like if you're listening, you can have better efficiencies today if you figure out some of the smaller processes and you, and you can work both things at the same time. Like you can work on the strategic initiatives while working on the tactical use cases that you want to implement right now. Absolutely. And I want to actually double click into one thing you said, right? you mentioned that a lot of jobs might be, you know, going to evolve, right? And companies might not even exist, in the next couple of years. I myself have heard from a lot of other copywriters, especially since AI has evolved so rapidly that they are pretty much, you know, in a position where it's scary right now because even without AI, Really amazing prompting skills. You can get very good output from ChatGPT and I have tested it myself. So I tried a very simple prompt. I got really good ad copy results. And when I compare it to, for example, a copywriter or junior copywriter's work, there is a massive difference and AI is actually really, you know, paving the way. So with regards to that, right, how do you think industries or businesses are going to change? And what are some of You know, the companies that might have to pivot a lot more quicker than others with AI. That's a very scary question. And I will try to be as, as, as open and, and share my thoughts. I, I really think that many jobs that we know today will cease to exist, at least in the way we know them today, within the next five to 10 years, and some of them faster than that. And, and the reason is that these AI tools will get better and better. So even the tools you talking about the AI that we have access to today, the AI that we have access to today can write better than most people. It can review documents better than all people. It can summarize information better than a large group of people. It can do so every work. That is relatively one dimensional. So let's talk about, you talked about copywriting, writing codes being a paralegal, you know, standard admin work in, in companies, all of those things AI can do right now, better than most, which means if you're in that profession. You better start thinking forward. Now, this may mean one of two things. You either going to become the best implementer of AI in your field, which means you're going to be one of the very small percentage that are still going to be copywriters five years from now, but you'll be doing the best copywriting work on the planet, and you'll be able to do it to 50 companies on your own. Because using AI, you'll be able to do better with AI. Then these companies could do on their own with AI, but most people in those positions, to me, the people that are the most at risk, by the way, right now, I think the industry, the industry that is going to go poof in the next five years is customer service. Like the concept of call centers or contact centers, chat and voice that exists today in places like the Philippines and India and different places in South America for, for Spanish speaking countries, is going to go away because the tools right now are good enough to replace these people at a small fraction of the cost. Running 24 seven in any language. It never gets pissed. It never fought with his wife. The previous caller didn't drive it crazy. Like it's, it's just great. And it connect to your CRM, to your ERP, to your customer service thing, to your profiles, like everything, like the chances of a customer service agent to be better than AI are maybe 1 percent at a much higher cost, hence it's just won't happen. And so. I think what's going to happen and I'm, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try not to make it sound too scary. Is that we will have to figure out how to live in a world that is very, very different than we are in today. And we're going to have to figure it out very, very quickly because many of the jobs we know will be unnecessary because AI will do it faster, better, cheaper, and we will have to do something else. Now, that's something else might be managing those AI tools. That's something else might be playing with our kids and somehow we got to make money through, you know, either UBI or some other mechanism, that's something else might be many manual labor that most people are not used to today. And, but even that, like if you look at the improvements in, in humanoid robots in the last. Two years. There's a crazy explosion in those capabilities. So even these jobs, the one that are going to be better paying are going to be replaced by robots within five years. And so I think we're walking with open eyes. Most of us, well, some of us with open eyes into a very, very different future than we know today, and we will find ways to adjust, but it's not going to be, most of us will not have or not. Most of us. Some of us, maybe many of us will not have the same profession that we have today. Yes, and I absolutely agree with you. I think the pace at which AI has evolved just in the past one and a half or two years has been so immense that it is undeniable how much impact it's going to make in the next couple of months even because even in a specific niche, right, you can already see how it has evolved and adapted that, Like day after day it's evolving, right? So, for me, I believe that if you're a copywriter or anyone in the marketing space, this is when you really need to upscale yourself. You can no longer be like, you know, A specialist in just one thing because that specialized job could be something that AI can support you with So now it's about how do you? Increase the value of the work that you do such that maybe it's about you doing strategic work Maybe it's about you looking at a bigger marketing plan, right? Then that at least gives you a bit of an edge over everyone else or even over AI so that you can stay ahead. So I always say that, and this was me two years ago, right? My client said, Audrey, you're going to be replaced, right? I, I said, I'm going to replace myself first by being the one who knows how to leverage AI to do so. So I think it's like a frame of mind, right? How do you manage what's going to come, but still be able to have like a positive, frame of mind and deal with it. But with that, I would love to know on the flip side, have you seen other success stories, you know, from your clients, from the people you have trained, how are they really leveraging AI for growth in their business? Yes, many. I think, there are two, let's touch on the two aspects, one in the strategic side and one is on the tactical side, right? Because we talked about this before as the main two things. So on the strategic side, I have several different clients. That we are developing AI software for them to transform their business. So they're doing something right now, like interior design, right? So they're interior designers. If you think about what interior designers do, they look at a house, they know how to understand how to design it differently, maybe moving walls, maybe adding lighting, maybe doing specific kind of things, but if you know the style that your client is looking for, and you know, the current floor plan of the house with its limitations. You can go in a direction that is going to be probably good for them. And AI can do that. A software that does it doesn't exist right now. So with one of my clients, we're developing that for them. So they're going to have a platform that initially they can use in house. And then over time, they can sell it as a B2B SaaS solution to other providers. Interior designers. Right. And so that's a complete transition from their business model. Why? Because I was able to convince them and I might be wrong, but I was able to convince them that somebody will do it. Yeah. Somebody will do it. And then one of two things will happen. You will either lose a lot of money or your entire business, or if you're it, you're going to make a lot of money and eat most of the market. And so. That's on the very strategic side. Like, where is your industry going? What, and the question I like to ask people, if you're in a leadership position right now, you need to ask yourself, I'm talking for a second about the negative side, then we can talk about the positive side. But on the negative side is what products or services that you are selling today are not going to be as attractive in the AI future, right? They might be eroded. They might be eliminated. But are, are not the people who are paying for it now will not be willing to pay the same amount of money six months from now, 12 months from now, 36 months from now, right? You have to know that because let's use your example. If you're a copywriter and you don't understand what's coming, then you're going to be unemployed guaranteed like there is no question mark at the end of that sentence. And so these are just on the negative side. But on the positive side, you can. Find ways to serve your existing clients or new clients in different ways, because you have access to AI, which you didn't before. Right? So that's the flip side of that question. So this is on the strategic side. So I give you one example on the strategic side, on the tactical side, as you know, and you know, you, you focus on a very niche universe, which I, which I wish I was to all over the place from very small companies to very large companies from. Marketing to HR to finance to sales to whatever but But there are really endless number of use cases on how on the tactical level, people are using this, anything from internal chatbots to get people information about stuff in the business that they need, whether they're doing customer service, whether they're doing customer success, whether they're salespeople, whether they are just, you know, one of the things I'm doing right now, I have a call later on today with one of my clients. on how they're helping people in open enrollment season to figure out which insurance to do using a chat bot that we're going to pour a lot of stuff into. So these are just on the chat bot front, on marketing, any generation of content from video to audio, to text, to blog posts, to social media, to like all of those things that previously you needed a team of 10, 12 people to do, even in a small company, in a large company, 200 people. And now with a much smaller team, you can do a lot more and at a higher quality than you could have done before on the sales side, finding more leads and nurturing these leads and filtering these leads based on your ICP, doing the follow ups. we talked about customer service. Like there's so many aspects. Oh, one of my favorites that I do with a lot of my clients, qualitative data analysis. So historically we all became pretty good at quantitative data analysis. Why? Because the tools we have do it for us. If you go to any marketing platform, it tells you your funnels and your, you know, return on ad spend or your, conversions or your revenue, like all of that is there. If you're going on a finance platform, it tells you all your financial information. If you go on a sales platform, it shows you all the data and so on, but qualitative data, customer service reviews. Yes. How do you analyze 3, 627 customer service? Really? You just don't. How do you analyze, customer support tickets? How do you analyze the proposals that you've written? Which one has won and which one has lost? And maybe the language is different. Maybe the flow is different. Maybe the way you presented your product is different. Maybe it's different to different kinds of clients. Nobody's doing it because it was on the verge of impossible to do. It was hugely time consuming. Now. You can, you can literally take all your customer service reviews or you can take all your reviews of the products you're selling on Amazon and you can learn from it with a few simple prompts and you can create dashboards based on that that will allow people in your company to tweak what they're doing based on what you've learned from 3, 000 whatever. And so there's really endless number of use cases. Yeah. And I think the beautiful thing is AI is a tool that can be used in a very creative way. So it's almost like problem solving, right? If you have a problem or something that you wanted to do for a long time, but couldn't do it now, it's the perfect opportunity to test it and leverage it. And I know you mentioned something about using AI for videos, for example, would it be okay for you to show us, you know, what an example of that could look like? Yeah, sure. I would love that. I there's, there's a million ways to do AI. Videos, right? So you can either use tools like runway and cling to create actual videos from scratch, either starting with an image that you created on a different platform, like me journey, or, or starting with just a prompt. And these tools are getting better and better and better and creating any videos you want. There's a different breed of tools that do these avatar videos and these avatar videos, think about how many times you want to shoot a video that explains your product or your service, or the talks about FAQs that. People ask your company and you want to be able to answer them, but with actual people, so that used to be extremely costly because you, first of all, had to figure out the problem. We already talked about this. How do you do the analysis to figure out what are the biggest problems people have? Then you had to write a script. Usually you would hire a company to help you with that. And they would interview people in your business and they will come up with a script. And then you had to hire actors in a studio. And do a bunch of shoots until you get it right. And then you had to send it to be edited and then you would bring it back and show it to your higher ups, your CEO, your head of marketing or whoever the person might be. And they would say, Oh, it's not exactly what we meant. And then you go back to the beginning and you have to shoot the whole thing again. And this will a take between weeks and months and be be extremely costly. Like on the low end, you're talking about 10, 000 on the high end. There is no upper limit, right? You can do a 2 million production for something like this. Now you can do all these steps with AI and different tools and get a really cool outcome very, very quickly. So let me show you. So what I've done, literally yesterday, for a demo to, so I do, I do these workshops, so we're doing workshops on how to do different things for their business. And one of the things they brought up is they, they have two lines of products and people are always confused with which one they need. They're a software company and they don't know which one to choose and, and they want to present it in a more fun way than, okay, go read these six blogs on our website to tell you what to do. And so let me share my screen. And I will walk you through, I'll share the entire screen. I've tried creating my own AI clone one year ago with, Synthesia. And that time was a really, already pretty powerful. So I'm excited to see what you have to share today. I think it'll be even more amazing right now. Yeah. So I'm going to play this video. And this video is again about the two products from this company who are a client of mine. All right. Let's dive in today. We're tackling D tools specifically figuring out which D tool software is the right fit, you know, SI or cloud. Yeah, that's the question, for sure. And we've got a ton of resources to help us break it down. Product descriptions, tours, you know, testimonials, articles, comparing them. All the good stuff. So by the end of this deep dive, you'll have all the knowledge you need to decide SI or cloud. Okay, and I'll pause it here. and so for those of you just listening to the podcast and not watching this, what we saw is two people casually sitting on a couch, looking semi professional but casual and they're sitting on two sides of the room and they're having this conversation, right? And they're both good looking and young and look like great representers of any brand probably. And they're going to walk us through the differences in how to make a decision. This is an 11 minute long video that I. If I had to create this in this professional lighting, like it looks perfect. Those of you are not watching this, first of all, you can watch this. So look for, look for Audrey's thing on YouTube or whatever, and you can watch it. But, it perfect lighting, great actors. They never say our arms, they're right on point. And they're talking about the right stuff to create this video would have taken me weeks, literally, and a lot of money. And this was created while figuring out how to create it in less than an hour. Now it will probably take me 15 minutes to create it again. So let's walk through the process of how I did this. So the first thing that I did, and now I have to share the screen again, perfect. So this is NotebookLM. NotebookLM is a free tool from Google. It's notebooklm. google. com. That's the way you find it. And what it allows you to do, it allows you to build these notebooks that will give you summaries and a chat bot for any data you want. Source you have, so you can drop into here. So you can see on the left here, I have like six or seven different things. There's a PDF. There's two YouTube videos and there's a bunch of web pages. So literally all I had to do to create the script for this is drop all these resources, which most of them are from this company's website. The PDF I also downloaded from the website and the YouTube are from their YouTube channel. That are all talking about this one topic and all of us have these resources for anything this could be done Not just for internal stuff. This could be done for market research, right? I can go ahead and say oh I want to learn about this thing in my industry or I want to learn about how to use These tools that are not mine and so on so just grab these links and you drop them into This tool and then it allows you to do several different things You can see that there are buttons here saying FAQ, Study Guide, Table of Content, Timeline, Briefing Doc. If you click on any of those, so if you click on FAQs, it will generate an FAQ document for these two tools and compare them one to the other. And it will do it in one go. That's it. It's done. So I click the button and now it's ready. And you can see that it has a bunch of questions and the answers. What is DTools software? What are the two main DTools product options? And then he talks about DTool cloud and system integrator, which is SI. What are the key features of DTools cloud? What are the key features of system integrator? Now the reason by the way, it's doing it as a comparison of these two tools is because when I uploaded information, I could have prompted it on what are the key things I want to learn. But it's also. That's the information, right? That's what I fed it, but it created this FAQ document in, I don't know, seven seconds, and I can do the same thing with all the other stuff. Now the bottom, there's also the ability to chat with it like a regular chat bot and so on. But the really cool thing that they added about a couple of months ago, which made this tool explode is this podcast generation. So. There's a button to say, create podcast or custom, which you don't see it now because I already created it, but it literally has these two buttons. If you click custom, that allows you to fine tune the prompt on exactly what you want to talk about, which in my case was, we have these two tools. You're an expert on comparing different tools and their capabilities. And I want you to walk somebody who doesn't know anything about these tools, which one, what are the differences and how to pick the right one. And then you wait about three to four minutes and it creates a podcast. Now you already heard the beginning from the two people we've watched on video. So I'm going to jump ahead a little bit to the middle. So you can listen to a different section of the conversation. But like I said, this is like 11 minutes long. So let's listen to a short section. Affect my choice between cloud and SI. Okay. So say you're mostly handling smaller projects, pretty straightforward, quick turnaround, cloud might be the winner for you. Makes sense. Like for a solo integrator, smaller team, home theaters, simple automation stuff. Exactly. But if you're tackling these huge intricate installations, like think massive commercial AV systems or multi building automation, then SI really shines. Because those need way more planning, documentation, all that. Yep. SI's got you covered with that. So I'm going to pause that. You get the point. This becomes now, I didn't script any of this. None of this script exists anywhere. It literally learns from the documents that I give it. It's scripts itself to create this natural casual conversation, which then you can use as is like as a podcast or you can then go and chop it off and, and, and edit it if you need to, but it's usually pretty good. The shortest I've seen it is, you know, three to four minutes. The longest I've seen it is like 16, 18 minutes, but usually they're around five to eight minutes long. By the way, the, one of the ways I started using this before we dive into the step three, how did I turn this into a video? Is every now and then. Every, every time I see an article that I want to learn that I don't have time to read, I literally drop it in there and create, generate. And then the next time I'm driving or walking the dog, I listen to it as a podcast. Wow. And so it's just another way. I love listening to podcasts. And so that's another way for me to consume information if I don't have time to read the article. And then I can do this while I'm driving, which I couldn't have done otherwise. So I have hundreds of these that are very, very short, just on small topics that I want to learn. So just food for thought, but then how did I turn this into this video with these two people? So I use two different tools. I use a tool called Haygen. So what is Haygen? Haygen is a tool that allows you to create videos of avatars that could be you. So I have avatars of me, it could be anyone, like you can train it on avatars, but they also have A very long range of avatars, old, young, female, male from any place around the world with different accents, they can speak any language and they can be in different environments. We can create the environment yourself. So put whatever background you want or their newer version, which looks even more realistic, have, they come in these different environments, they sit in an office, they're speaking on stage, they're out in the park, they're in a house. And so I picked. Two of these, but you cannot yet have two of them on screen at the same time. So what I had to do is I actually took the original voice from, from the notebook LM podcast, I uploaded to a tool called the script, which you're going to talk about in a minute. And I literally just took one of their voices out. So I was left with just voice of one of them. And then I did the same thing for the other one. So then I had the female voice and the male voice, and then I went into Hagen, picked an avatar, and I could create something like this. Now, what you're going to hear right now and see right now will make absolutely no sense because she's going to be saying all the back and forth without the guy speaking in between. So it looks something like this. Yeah, that's the question, right? All the good stuff. So by the end of this deep dive, you'll have all the knowledge you need to decide SI or cloud. DTools is business software made for integrators like you. And I'll pause it, right? It makes absolutely no sense. These are random sentences that do not connect together. But I've done exactly the same thing for the guy, right? So he does his part and then I took it back to the script. So now let's look at the script instead of this. I'm going to stop sharing again. I'm going to share the script. I love also how you have like, I love also how you have different workflows. It's a step by step process, right? And I can see like, it's very beautiful. You are piecing together different tools for specific functions because you know, each tool serves a specific chunk function really, really well. And then like finding out how best to piece it together. I can see that beautiful workflow in your mind and coming to life. So I want to say something about this because you mentioned it yourself before when you were talking about how you view things and how you try to teach your clients to do this. As you do this more, and that's why I said, you got to get started and you got to get your hands dirty. As you do this more, you You develop this lens, this AI lens through which you view everything you view your existing business processes, you view your problems, you view your clients issues, you view your solutions, you start viewing everything through that lens, like literally everything that I do, including stuff that I do with my kids, like I help my kids learn this as well. So I help them use it for different homework that they're doing for project that they're running for, my daughter's now doing research for colleges. How do you do better research for colleges with that? How do you review your work? So don't do the work with AI, but how do you review your work with AI? Get feedback so you can do better work. So there's literally everything that I do. I look through this lens. And like you're saying, because I've been doing this day in, day out for a year and a half, I know which tools do things better, but also like you and I said, sometimes I will spend four hours trying to figure out something and sometimes I won't figure it out and then I'll come back to it three months from now when there's better tools and I will be able to solve it. But it's definitely this, it's definitely looking at the problem. Like, can I do this? What tools do I know? What can they do? So even this, chopping it off with, and I'll show you in a minute, you know, let's do it now instead of in a minute. So let's look at this as an example. So let me share my screen again. So what Descript does Is it allows you to edit video and audio without knowing anything about video and audio editing. So if I go to the one we just, I just showed you the example for, you can see that I have a workspace that has text on the left, video on the right, and then a lot of tools in the far right that allows me to actually control everything that I need to control. And so the way this works is it transcribes the video, the original video, or in this particular case, the original audio. Of the two people speaking. So you can see back and forth and back and forth, and I can play it from any single point, but the transcription literally shows me what was played in that original podcast that was created by NotebookLM. And then what I did, I created, if you look at the dropdown menu on top, you can see that there's other versions of it. So you can see a version of just the girl. So literally all I did is I deleted all the text from the guy, and then I did exactly the opposite stuff. And that's how he created. The videos on Hagen with just one tool and then all I had to do, because when you bring it back, so then I had to, I brought back the video of both of them together. Oh, sorry, the video of each and every one of them. And then all I had to do is copy and paste the text back into its original position. So what I did is I opened two windows of this side by side. One of them had the original conversation from the audio that was created by NotebookLM. And the other one I was literally creating in real time. I was copying and pasting back and forth and back and forth. The guy, the girl, the guy, the girl, the guy, the girl. The whole process for the 11 minutes took me four minutes. Because all I have to do is just copy and paste. and I, and I'm looking at the source to know what I need to copy and paste. Now, is there a faster way to do this? Maybe, but this was the very first time that I tried to do something like this. and so I'm very, very happy with the output and the way it came out. And the process, like now I have a process that I can use to create videos of two avatars talking to one another. And, and again, now that I know I can probably create another one of those videos in less than half an hour. Yeah, and the, and the amazing thing is it's like problem solving and you can hear it in your voice even when you're talking about it, right? I too get excited when I hear about workflows because I think what you were talking about like, you know, the AI lens, it's basically breaking out, breaking down a single workflow into multiple steps. I feel like that is the best way to leverage AI when you can Break down your thought processes into actionable steps and then use AI at each step. And then when you combine them all together, like, Oh, this is a beautiful flow. I think I cracked something. and like what you say, it probably takes time, right? And you need to be really involved in the process. And that's how you're so quickly able to know, okay, this tool works, this tool works. I've tested this one. I think they can work together to then create that beautiful output you just showed us. Yes, I, I agree with you a hundred percent, right? It's, and it goes back to what I said before, it's that lens of knowing. What can you solve with what tools and then in what sequence you can connect them in any, many cases. And again, I'm sure you're doing this as well. Once you figure it out on your own and you fine tune it. So you finesse the different steps and the right prompts and the right steps and exactly what to do. Many of those can be then automated. Like you can use tools like make or Zapier or any 10 or whatever, whichever one you fancy to then connect these things in a sequence. And then you don't have to do the copying and pasting in between. Wow. Awesome. And I think you shared so many amazing insights, through this podcast. I would love to end off with like one big question, right? So I know you're a big fan of mentoring, coaching, and you're a big believer in the right leadership, right? How do you think leaders can effectively strike a balance between a more AI centered workplace while still embracing the human side of things? What do you think the future is going to look like for us? Thanks. It's an awesome question. I'll answer two aspects of this. The first aspect is the human thing. Think about the future in the future. And that future might be very near for some businesses in the future. AI will do most of the day to day stuff that businesses are doing today, which means everybody will be able to do it really well. So you said before, let's take your example of copywriters. the average copywriter today, the average one does a lesser job than a Fair AI, not even the best AI with the best prompt, which means we're all going to have great copywriting. All of us, every single company, every single company is going to have great ads. Every single company is going to have great customer service. So what's going to tell us apart? What's going to differentiate one company from the other human relationships. And these human relationships are the internal human relationships between employees. And then your internal, and then your human relationships with your ecosystem. So your suppliers, your providers, your consultants, your customers, your, distributors, like everybody in your ecosystem that you're engaging with, your human relationships with them is going to make a huge difference. Now it's already true today. It's just going to be even more powerful. So definitely invest both internally and externally in human relationships because they're going to play a much bigger role in an AI future just by differentiating between two different companies. So that's on that side. On the AI side. I think you have to start learning quickly, go as deep as you can, as fast as you can as a business leader, like really think strategically, how will that impact my business? Now this may mean that you need to plan to have less people in your company in the future. I'm, it's sad. It's horrible. I think, but I think it's inevitable because what's going to happen, your other option is to run out of business and then you have to let go of all your employees. Like literally these are the options. And so I think companies, or you find a way to grow faster. Like if you can grow, if you're in an industry where you can say, I'm going to keep all my people and I'm going to grow at 40 percent a year instead of 5 percent a year. Yes, absolutely do that. but I think that has the next two or three years where you can do that until everybody figures it out. And the fact that you know how to use AI better is not an edge anymore because. Everybody knows how to use Microsoft Office. And they're like, Oh, we're using computers to write documents. So we're doing fine. Okay. Everybody's not using computers to write documents. So it's not an edge anymore. So I think these are the two, the two sides of that equation. Yeah, and awesome to hear that. I think the future is exciting. I think there is good that there is bound to be challenges in the future, but there have been so many challenges as well as changes over the past few decades. And I think as humans, we always learn to evolve. So I know that our listeners have received tons of value from this podcast, Isa. Thank you for sharing your insights. If they want to, you know, attend your courses or workshops, consult with you or listen to a podcast, where can they find you? So first, before we dive into this, since, it will work for both our benefits, whatever you're listening to this, open your phone right now and rate this podcast, give it a five star review and share it. Audrey's podcast with other people and write something nice about it because she's working very, very hard to make this happen. And so that's the first thing while you have it out there, you can look for the leveraging AI podcast, which is my podcast. The podcast has two episodes a week. One is more about the news, what happened this week, but the other is very tactical. Like the thing I just showed with the videos. The entire episode is like this and it's with, I try to find the best practitioners in the world. Audrey was one of the first, to be on my podcast. So people like Audrey and like me who knows how to tinker and build stuff. And we literally. Go to specific use cases and dive into how to actually implement it with AI. So that's the podcast. If people want the course, just go to my website or connect with me on LinkedIn. So if you look for LinkedIn, I S A R M E I T I S. I'm the only one with that name on LinkedIn, which is awesome. And so if you found me, that's me and I'm, I live on LinkedIn. So you can find me every single day and chat with me and I'll gladly connect with you. and if you're looking for the course, you can go to multiply So it's spelled, kind of weird. So I was trying to be, I don't know, funny or, or sophisticated. So it's multiply spelled with AI in the end. So it's M U L T I P L A I instead of Y in the end. So it's multiply dot AI. And over there you can click on courses and find all the stuff that we're doing. we have, Courses that I teach. We have online courses that you can take yourself. We have workshops for companies and all the other stuff that already talked about. So that's, these are the different ways to connect with me. That is amazing. And if you have listened to this entire podcast and you're not taking action, you are going to be missing out. All right. You already heard what we had to say. Now's the time. So thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure having you on the show and thank you guys for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe to the AI marketers podcast and hit the bell for more actionable marketing insights. You'll see you next time.