How AI-Enhanced Virtual Assistants Help Businesses Scale with Joe Rare

0:51 AI's coming for you. Whether it's coming for you in a direct replacement or it's coming in and it can cut out 50% of what you do, it's coming. How do they prepare for tomorrow? The tools that exist today can only make you better. They will only make you faster. They will only make you more valuable. But would you say that it was hard to learn AI?

1:10 I ask AI to teach me how to learn it. Explain it to me from ground zero to get me to like level one and turn it into a podcast so I can listen to it on my commute to work. The employee sitting in the seat just has to understand. If I choose not to go chase down and learn this AI thing, there is a very high probability I will be gone.

1:32 It is your choice.

1:36 Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of Using AI at work. My name is Chris Daigle. I'm the host of the show. And this is a topic today that I hear a lot. I just got back from St. Louis speaking to a bunch of executives at a Vistage Executive Summit there. And they did a survey in the room. There's about 300 um executives that were in the room there.

1:54 And they kind of did this real-time survey where they asked them some questions about what their biggest concerns were, um, primarily about AI. And for a lot of folks, it was safety and risk and things like that, totally understandable. But the number two was what's going to happen to my people. Um, you know, if you're listening to this, if you're enterprise, you know, Jack Dorsey fired 4,000 people in one day from block at the beginning of the year, I think back in February or March.

2:19 And Jack doesn't know all those people and you know, had to make that decision. But for most of you that are listening, if you're lower middle market and above or below, uh, you know, you know where your employees were, their kids go to school and what car they drive and who's got, you know, kids in dance or soccer and those sorts of things.

2:34 And this is one of those topics that, you know, when when companies ask me, because look, here at Chief AI Officer, you know, my company, we um we had a much bigger team at the beginning of the year. Uh it's gotten a lot leaner. Why? Because we eat the dog food, we use the tools, we and but really it's been a lot about leveraging the abilities of agents.

2:55 Um, so you know, that's certainly going to be an option for a lot of companies, but how do you, you know, you're you're you're you're looking at AI and you're assuming maybe the end game means you don't have a choice but to have fewer people. But our guest today, his argument is kind of almost the opposite.

3:12 How do we use AI to make each person capable of more and then decide where the human still has to sit inside that process, where they're able to spend more time with the things that AI doesn't have, like the judgment, the discretion, the understanding of how your team works and those sorts of things.

3:28 So uh that's you know, what we're gonna be talking about today is something that, regardless of what your industry is, um, this is an important question that you need to have an answer for, whether it's for your board, for your executive peers, for the people that are sitting beside you in a cubicle, wherever you sit inside the business.

3:45 And today our guest is Joe Rare. And Joe came to AI through the virtual staffing and operations environment. And he now describes the model as AI enhanced staffing and implementation. He already owned a virtual assistant company before the AI framing that we're talking about in this conversation. So um, with that, Joe, before we get started, anything you want to tell us about your you, uh, your company level nine, um, and then we'll jump into the questions.

4:12 Yeah. Um, yeah, level nine virtual, we've been uh kind of doing our thing for just over a decade. And uh my, you know, my kind of claim to fame is that I build businesses that are run by VAs by virtual assistants. And so everything that we do, we have a back-end operational process that allows virtual assistants to fully operate the company.

4:33 Uh, so that means everything from uh recruiting and hiring to managing staff to placement of clients, even the sales side of the business, uh, all the way into payroll and finance and everything else. So um, you know, one of my favorite things to tell people is that I haven't checked my own email in five years.

4:52 And most people think that's crazy. Uh, but you know, if you were to think of the average, the average business owner, the average entrepreneur, they spend a minimum of three hours a day checking email. And when you think about what that means, if you quantify that into the time available to use for um revenue generating activities, yeah, that's the most important part.

5:16 And you can grow a business rapidly if you invest more time in generating revenue. And where is spending time reading email? Very rarely does anything of value show up in your email that actually moves the needle of the business. Almost never. And so um I've got a I've got a I've got a huge issue with business owners who don't have executive assistants handling their email.

5:41 So we actually created a service that does exactly that. But anyway, we'll get into that later.

5:46 So I guess I want to start. You know, you've had this business for a while. Uh VAs were kind of the uh original outsourcing or agentic situation that we find ourselves in. What was it that happened inside your own business that convinced you to change how you hire and train people around AI?

6:02 Uh just the fact that AI exists and realizing that there is no future that doesn't exist that doesn't have people questioning whether do I use a human or do I use um you know an AI tool? And so the challenge that you're gonna run into is that AI is phenomenal, and obviously it's a capacity multiplier, it's an output multiplier, but it you you don't get outputs without inputs.

6:29 There you have to have something inputting. So even you know, we've been heavy into building and using grokbot as uh an amazing tool these days. You still have to have a human tell grok what to do. Yeah, and you're then on the backside of it, you still have to have a human review it. And so I think that what the confusion in the market is, is that there's just this give it to AI and back away and you never touch it again.

6:58 And that's like the furthest thing from reality. And so you could set up all the great tools and everything that you want, but the truth is that there's still humans in the mix, and that's what we decided to really instill in our in our team is that this human element still exists. Like graphic designers, maybe you're not doing as much design work that's custom and all that, but you you are the voice, you are the engineer of that instruction that creates the output, then you're the final for the QC and everything that happens on the back end.

7:29 So things like that. That that's the reason we we adopted it so heavily.

7:32 You mentioned the inputs and outputs. I I have a mentor, and he always told me more inputs equals more outputs. So for the executive listening, if your inputs are being constrained by how much time you're spending in the inbox, taking Joe's example, um uh let's get that fixed. And then secondly, you know, you talk about how the human's still important.

7:52 Like, what do we want? Right? The human makes that decision, and then the human at the end says, Is this what I wanted? Is this good stuff? And internally, we call that kind of 1080-10. And I learned this from my buddy Mark Moss, who's uh got a show on iHeart. But Mark said the first 10% needs to be the human.

8:11 Next 80% is after they hit the enter button, or like AI does the lifting, but that final 10% still needs to be the human, and you're you're you're tracking along with that with what you're seeing there.

8:22 I agree, I agree deeply. I think that that that is essentially the 80-20. Excuse me. You're gonna have that 80-20. And it, I mean, again, you can find that absolutely everywhere in life, and it very much is that it's the 20% human, but let the heavy lifting be done by you know, that 80% block be done by technology.

8:41 So I firmly believe that.

8:43 Walk me through maybe a client example. What what was like when they come to you, is there a typical issue that they're like, oh, we know that this is a this is friction in our organization. What work was taken too long? And how are they handling before handling it before level nine and the the AI enhanced VAs picked it up for them?

9:02 Well, here's I'll give you two two examples that make a lot of sense. Number one is uh what we call revenue recovery. So the average business has they have um marketing, advertising, that all of that runs, right? The whole goal is to bring in interest, bring in traffic, bring in attention. But then what happens once once the attention gets there?

9:26 Do you have people following up with these leads? Do you have, you know, if if you're at home service as an example and you're sending out an estimate, well, what happens? For 90% or more of these businesses, the estimate goes out and then it's kind of like you hope and pray something happens. Maybe they follow up maybe once.

9:43 What we did is we decided let's create an actual service that just goes after recovering revenue for businesses. So you've got a database, everybody focuses on the front side of the business. We need to generate more leads, we need more coming in. And it's like, no, you don't. You have a massive amount sitting there that nobody talks to, nobody followed up with.

10:04 They've gone cold, they've gone quiet. Um, they still probably need what you had to sell. They just you didn't pay attention to them. And the buying cycle may not, and and so, you know, there's a lot of available options. And so what we decided to do instead was leverage AI on the front end to tap into their database, tap into, let's say, that everybody they've sent an estimate out for or a um, you know, a proposal, whatever that might be, have AI do an analysis.

10:33 So we do all of this on the front end. So AI does this heavy lifting, they do the research, they do the analysis, they organize all of the data, and then we have human beings connect with the people, connect with the contacts, connect with the leads, connect with the the prospects. Then on the back end, AI reports what happened.

10:51 And so again, the human is doing the 20%, the AI is doing the heavy lifting, but it creates so much leverage. And what we've been able to promise most of our clients, depending on their their um their ICP and their offer, we guarantee them a 10x return. We'll give you 10 times our service fee in in like nobody can do that, but we've figured out a solution for that.

11:15 So, like that that's one example. Another one is just simply coming in where we have to do technology builds, whether it be a CRM build out, it's some API build, we're doing you know, website or or you know, any type of large integrations, building big workflows. It used to be that you have a human being who has to sit down and we have to architect this whole thing.

11:36 And now we just tell we just we're having a conversation. You and I talk to each other, we record the conversation. I understand what you need because we chatted it out. You're like, yeah, I'd love this thing to do this, and I'd love it to do this, and I want it to talk to this tool, and I want this person to get this, and I want the reporting to look like this.

11:51 And that conversation fed to AI gives us back an architecture for whatever it is that we have to build, the tools that exist, the instructions for the connection and the API and the workflow, all that stuff. And then the team goes in and we use as much AI as we can to build it, but we've got that 20% of that human who oversees to make sure, hey, this thing functions properly.

12:13 It's doing what we need, it follows the flow that we're looking for, the right people are getting the right pieces and all and all of that. So that's a couple ways that we've been leveraging AI with the people.

12:24 Yeah, it seems pretty universal as well. So, and that's a very clear answer. Now, one of the things somebody might listen to this might be saying, like, this sounds great, but what happens when the AI gets something wrong? How do you guys kind of mitigate it, mitigate that? Is that the the last 10%, the human eyeballs on the output before it gets sent?

12:44 Uh yeah, absolutely. So no client gets anything that hasn't been reviewed in our own, you know, our own QC uh process. So there's typically multiple eyes on every single thing before it goes out. Okay. There's usually multiple groups of people. And so somebody who has a di different, so if you're doing something like kind of heavy tech related, whether it's, you know, the these workflow builds and all that, you'll end up with somebody very, very technical that's reviewing a piece of that.

13:11 But then you're also gonna get somebody who's very much more on the um the operational, you know, use case of it. Yeah. So I I we always joke, and and it's it's kind of a fun joke in our in our company, right? So you've got the people who are into operations and communication and really working with people, they're the people who are gonna use the tool.

13:31 So that's one group of people. But then you've got kind of, you know, what we always call the nerds, right? Who can do the technique, the technical builds. They can do that kind of stuff. They also need to see it. So they review it functionally, it does everything that the that the build says it's supposed to do, but then operationally, does it actually function as a normal human being, not a nerd, would want it to?

13:53 Because it's like it's technically right, but it's functionally obsolete. Somebody's got to do that. That doesn't work. Yeah, we got to get it so the people who are gonna use it who don't understand how it was built, they've got to see it like that. So we always have two people, you know, in that sense that are doing the QC.

14:09 So for the listener, if you're a decision maker in your organization and you guys are thinking about how can we start to leverage, you know, AI to code custom applications or rebuild our CRM and that sort of thing, I think Joe's advice there is like standard. You should be doing that. You definitely got to have both the technical to make sure that the thing actually works, but the user needs to be able to say, wait a minute, I don't understand how to use this.

14:31 If you don't have both sides of it, you end up with a big miss. So let me ask you, Joe, and in a situation like that, that revenue recovery, let's say, a typical client for you guys, what does that kind of setup or process cost them? And how long does it take before a client should expect to see a result?

14:48 And I know that the difference, if I asked you this two, three years ago before you know generative AI was in the organization, it would be a different answer. But what does that look like today?

14:57 Yeah, so our the way that our you know our service is priced is we're $3,000 a month and it's a one-time, $1,500 build, right? So we do a one-time setup where we build everything out, connect every tool that we need access to. We are typically within seven to 10 business days, we're live and talking to your prospects.

15:18 From there, because we've just got a team that's doing that five days a week, usually by by 30 days, we're hitting our our kind of target. But our promise is that within 90 days we'll hit that kind of 10x uh return. And what I mean by return is obviously we're not doing the sale, we're doing the we're we're setting up the opportunity, the reactivation, exactly.

16:29 So what we what we promise is that hey, your team's gonna do the sale, but we're gonna load them up with the opportunities. And so that's what we can guarantee. I can prep that, I can, I can position that. Um, but within 90 days is our promise. We've never missed it, we've never even come close. Typically, we can get dang close to it, depending on the sales cycle um and kind of how it takes to get a contract signed for whatever service.

16:55 Yeah, we can usually get there within 30 days. Um, but I always say 90 because, but but that's how the service works. And then we've got a team with that has a team lead. So we've got a group of individuals who are doing the doing the work, but they've got somebody overseeing them. So again, there's always the QC piece of it.

17:11 We've always got somebody watching and reviewing and doing all that.

17:16 So, and again, for the listener, like kind of my takeaway from that is that um maybe you don't have the human or maybe the human you have on your team, like they already got a job, right? And if it's something that fits into their day-to-day workflow, maybe it's not that big of a lift. But something like this, like that reactivation that's not currently happening, who's gonna do it, right?

17:36 Is it gonna be your marketing team? Well, not really. This isn't it's not really a marketing thing. It's something that sits to me between marketing and sales. And your sales team, they'd love to do that, but they probably don't have the time to chase up these leads. They don't have the processes or systems in place to create that that sales operational environment.

17:57 So this is uh, I mean, I think for most of the listeners, that's a pretty exciting return there.

18:02 So let me ask you here, let me just let me just give you one little piece that I've noticed about this service is like you say that it sits between marketing and sales, and I and I agree with you. And so if somebody says, well, my sales team should be doing this level of follow-up, right? Which we hear a lot.

18:17 That's one of the first things. Yeah, our salespeople should be following up like this. The reality is you're spending a lot of money on the front end marketing and advertising to bring in opportunities, you're spending money. And if the sales team is focused, unfortunately, on these kind of like dead deals, these dead estimates and quotes and proposals and things that already went out that they're like, these should be done already, right?

18:42 If they're focused a hundred percent over here or even you know, 80% over here, all of this money coming in doesn't get the attention. What I mean, money, all this money spent on advertising and marketing, this inbound lead flow, yeah, that gets ignored. Yeah. And it's actually, it's actually a weird negative cost effect when you ignore the front end lead flow and you're only focusing or they're spending a significant amount of time focusing on the back end.

19:08 And so when we started putting people in place for this, what we call revenue recovery, but really, I mean, it's it's it's lead follow-up, it's opportunity follow-up. When we started putting this in place, it made the lead team, the sales team more effective on the front end because they had something on the back.

19:25 So they're they're selling deals, yeah, even when they're not selling the deal, right? Because we we bring it back to them and it's like, hey, go close that. Um, but what I don't want people to do is think like, well, I shut off the front end marketing and advertising. You don't shut it off, you put somebody in place to take care of what you've already spent money on.

19:45 And then it lets the the same system flow the way it always has. We just pick up all of that lost revenue on the back. So I just wanted to share that. Okay.

19:55 So now I'm gonna kind of like I guess switch gears a little bit. Tell me about a situation where uh an AI staffing implementation that you expected to work but actually didn't, that it failed, and and why?

20:13 Uh doing the wrong things. So tell me more. This is this is the thing that I see probably the most with people using AI right now. AI is an amazing multiplier. It is amazing. The problem is that it does everything, it does cool stuff. And so what you end up with is people who get an idea and then they run on it and they're doing, they have people doing AI builds, and they're we're gonna implement this thing with AI and we're gonna do all this stuff.

20:40 And the reality is that thing that you worked on has zero impact into the business. Oh, yeah, and so you end up you're building stuff that doesn't matter, you're wasting time. So we get people who will hire a virtual assistant to help them create an AI workflow that helped it's supposed to help their business accomplish XYZ.

21:04 The problem is that XYZ is just fine the way that it was. And so now what you created is a new automation, a new tool to do this task or do this, you know, part of the business that still requires a human being to spend just as much time reviewing inputs, outputs, and you didn't need to build it. You could have just let everybody do what they were already doing.

21:30 So I think that the AI world, unfortunately, is a lot of people building a lot of stuff that isn't necessary. And there's no monetary gain in the business, whether it be by more capacity, better output, something that drives revenue, something that drives efficiency. They're just trying to like figure out well, if I have these two people over here, we build this workflow, can we get rid of them?

21:58 But you didn't get rid of them because somebody has to put the input and check the output. Nothing changed. You just added one more variable. And now who's gonna maintain the AI? Yeah. Now you need somebody to build.

22:12 So you know, I'm gonna add to that. I was talking to the Uber driver on the way from the airport uh in St. Louis and found out I was there to speak about AI, was telling me about how they were using AI, they were starting a business. And the like he asked me, like, what do I need to know? And what immediately popped up to me, because I've been guilty of it, and I'm sure a lot of listeners are as well.

22:32 I you have a lot of it's like you said, it can do anything, and you have all of these things in process. But unless you actually execute on the great idea that AI gave you, or you actually deploy the tool that it gave you, it you get stuck in this environment of where if you're trying to do this yourself, especially as a strategist in the business or somebody who's leading teams, like you end up creating all of these opportunities that don't get executed on.

23:00 And I think that maps very closely to building the thing that doesn't necessarily move the needle, especially entrepreneurs who are just dreamers. Yep. Like I am an idea guy, right? So my love in business is zero to one. Once at one, I gotta give it to somebody else. I don't want to do anything. I want to go back to the idea board, I want to write it up, I wanna give it to AI and come up and map these plans out.

23:28 I want to get the first batch of customers, and then I want to hand it off. And so the AI is wonderful at that.

23:35 I've I've got a question, and it's um uh kind of an awkward question. I guess to ask in your situation because you sell AI skilled staff. But there's there's listeners here, and they're probably asking, well, look, when should I train my own people that I already have on this stuff? And when does maybe augmenting them with a VA or just hiring a V out VA outright to maybe fill a lane in our organization that is empty?

24:01 How do I tell the difference when it's time between the two?

24:06 I would say you need to look at the skill set of your staff. So one of the challenges is that we can't just grab any person and hire them as a VA and then make them, you know, be AI enhanced, right? Or AI enabled. They have to have that type of a personality profile. Right. And so somebody who's just very much like they just need to be on the phone talking to people, they need to be in communications.

24:34 They're not necessarily going to be the greatest with using AI. That doesn't mean that we can just train them to be perfect. So I would look at your staff and make sure that if you're going to try to enable your staff to use AI, first of all, do you have the right people? Because it's a different game when you're like, I want my team to use AI, I want them to leverage it, I want them to know it.

24:55 But does it even make sense? Like I use AI a lot. Guess what I'm not going to do? I personally will never go set up an open claw or a Hermes or um set up a harness of any sort. Like, I'm not. But you give me something out of the box, like a Grokbot or a Victor or something like that. Like, I'll run circles around most people.

25:15 Yeah. But that other stuff that's hyper technical that it doesn't even make sense. I nope. Give me something out of the box that is that, and then I'll use it. Yeah. So I think that understanding who your people are and giving them the best opportunity to win. And that might be, I've got this really great person in my organization.

25:35 They're phenomenal. But the truth is, I'm not going to make them AI enabled to the degree that it makes sense to train them. So how much effort are we going to have to put into training them? How much time, how much cost is going to go into it? Versus, is it just cheaper and faster to give them support with somebody who's already trained and built into that knowledge base?

25:56 Like that's easy.

25:57 That individual's good at what they're already doing. Uh, if they knew AI, it wouldn't hurt, but but taking them off of their eyes off the ball so that they can learn AI may not make sense, but having somebody who is that AI-enabled supplement to their role is probably a better fit. I like that a lot.

26:16 Yeah, it's it's if it's very much like the sales guy who's just a killer. And then what do they do? They turn him into a sales manager and he shits the bench. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, so that didn't that didn't go well. And I think that people who have A players or they have B players that are good at what they do, they're efficient, they're functional, they get things done.

26:38 Then you just want them to use AI. I don't think that it necessarily correlates. I think what you'll end up doing is killing production or value or output on the other side just because you wanted something that wasn't necessary. You could have just taken a couple bucks and got somebody to step into that lane who's already AI trained, they already understand it, they already like it.

27:00 That's another thing, too. If people don't if people don't like it and that's not what they want to do or how they want to function, that you're not gonna win. Yeah. So that's how I would I would probably play that game.

27:12 And I think for the listener, I think that's great advice. One of the first things, you know, Joe, what are the we hear people say we'd we'd love to use AI more, but we don't know where to use it because we can use it everywhere, right? And what I always tell them is, especially at the staff level, work with those folks and identify the parts of their role that they're not good at and they don't like anyway.

27:33 And if you can introduce AI into that particular activity or process, we see that the people who might have been hesitant or nervous about, oh, is AI going to take my job? When you can, and for the listener, like if you've got a team, this is where you start. If you can have AI handle the workflows or processes that they don't like and they're not good at, they start looking around going, hey, this AI stuff's pretty good.

27:55 Let's do more. So very much tracking with what we're seeing in the real world. Yeah, so I I got a question. Um, and it's uh one actually one of my favorite parts of the show. And I think that for most listeners, what I notice is that everybody like, what tool are you using? What's the new and you've mentioned a couple here and that sort of thing.

28:12 Sure. But um like, what's one task? We we talked about email, totally agree. I've got uh, and for clients out there, please don't listen to this part. But agents honestly are handling. I still say yes, send it, but they're handling the bulk of the drafting and the replies and that sort of thing. Um, with with human in the loop, of course.

28:31 Um so we we that's very clear and that's a universal activity. But for you, um, what's one task outside of email that you used to personally do uh that you've now handed to AI and you feel like, hey, like that was a good call?

28:46 Oh, that I personally do. Um probably a ton of report, like review reporting and trying to come like trying to really understand reports because we have multiple companies, we have all these different divisions within each company. And so when we get to the point where it's like, I gotta understand all the nuances and what's going on in each division of the company to then say, okay, here's the next move that we're gonna make.

29:11 Here's where we're gonna allocate financial resources to either grow this part of the company or um add on taking all of the data and distilling it down instead of reviewing all of the data, I no longer necessarily review it. What I do is I actually just take summaries. Yeah. And that's been a massive part of the business.

29:31 Um, in understanding that that like I don't actually have to read all of this data anymore, I don't have to know every number anymore. What I need to know is just the numbers that make the most sense, and then putting it into actionable items, right? So if my AI tool, right, my personal built Claude or Grok bot or whatever, if it knows the direction that I'm trying to take the company, right?

29:57 We've had many conversations around the goals of the company and and where we want this thing to be, and how many, you know, team members we want, and how many clients we want, and you know, our ICP and it knows everything about everything that we're doing. And then we draw these numbers into these tools.

30:12 We can then identify, okay, here is a fair path, here is um a status. You know, you're moving towards your goal, you're, you know, excuse me, you're stalled. Um, here's where there's a breakdown based on data, right? It's based on numbers, it's not based on opinions or feelings. But then you take that information, and now you can actually have real conversations versus, well, I got something out of the data that you know that took me five hours to figure out.

30:41 Now it's just it's summaries, it's quick numbers, it's it's all of that stuff that I think has helped me become more decisive faster. Yeah. So less analysis and more decisions faster, which lets us try new things faster. Oh, I like that. Which lets us grow faster. Yeah. So we just literally right before this, I had a call and we were talking with a, you know, an advertising agency, and we were saying, Hey, we're doing this stuff over here.

31:08 You guys are really good at this. And, you know, they're pitching all their benefits and all these things, and we put them into a model that we created with AI, and we just said, Hey, based on us doing this and our channel partners here and all the things that we're doing, would bringing this in help us?

31:22 Here's the cost. Here's the here's what we're gonna pay in ad spend, here's what we're gonna pay over here, here's all these, these, these metrics that we're gonna have to deal with. Does it financially make sense to make this move just on data? That's a nugget. And then that's a cool one. So that's a nugget.

31:40 Yeah, again, that lets us make a decision faster than us trying to sit down and figure it out.

31:45 Yeah, and I know for the listener, there's everybody's got those decisions that are in the inbox or they're waiting for the meeting on Thursday or whatever the thing might be. And being able to do that level of crunching of uh and synthesis or analysis or whatever, and be able to go into that conversation with a pretty clear, like, hey guys, here's our options.

32:05 This is the one that I think is the best option, rather than throwing it on the table and go, okay, guys, what do we do with this? Right? Like, what do you think? Strong, strong positioning.

32:14 Yeah. So we bring everything through. Um, I think Dan Martell brought this up. It's a 1-3-1 model. Have you heard of this? Uh-uh. So you have one topic, one problem, one issue, three options, and then the one recommendation. So great framework. Okay, I've got this. Hey, so so we're gonna bring in this dialogue.

32:34 This is gonna be a conversation we're literally gonna have next week on Monday. We're gonna bring this conversation in, and it's gonna be we have this ad agency that we're considering doing something different with that we've never done before. And then here's the cost, here's all of this, here's here's everything.

32:50 So then do we bring them in or do we not? Right? Here's three solutions and you know, three ideas and how we can do it, and then here's my one recommendation. And everybody in in the mix has to bring that one recommendation with it. So we've got one, three, one that we bring to the table. And so everybody will have their one and we get to discuss those.

33:11 And so we're not, hey guys, here's an idea. What do you think? It's none of that stuff. It's like, hey, here's a problem. Everybody's on board with what that is, everybody's got their one that we're gonna discuss and and and work through.

33:26 So um that's something that I'm gonna actually include that in the show notes as far as okay, is that that framework? If you had that as a uh as like a quick prompt that you could, or if you're building skills as a listener, if you're building skills in the LLM of choice, if you had that uh framework, that makes it like I like that a lot.

33:45 That's yeah, give me all the data, and then not just, hey, what do you think? But hey, give me this output here. Um I'm actually gonna use that this week. That's pretty pretty solid stuff. So, Joe, um, you know, there might be uh there certainly are, there's listeners of this right now that are employees.

34:07 Um, they may they maybe have aspirations for leadership. Uh, they're obviously interested in upskilling with AI if they're listening to the show, they're probably using the tools. Um, and they may not have as much concern as some of their peers about what's going to happen when the company starts like really pushing AI or we start to get agents and this sort of thing.

34:25 Um how do you recommend that those individuals who could be subject to uh a disruption, I guess, in their economic viability because of AI, what can they do? What can they how how do they prepare for tomorrow?

34:43 I I well, I think first is accountability, and this is kind of a weird probably direction to take it, but accountability is huge. You have to understand that you're you're an employee and you're sitting in a seat and AI's coming for you to some degree, right? Whether it's like you know, you you've got this fantastic job and you think it's great, and and I mean, we're dealing with this like with with VAs, right?

35:08 So this is a real conversation that we have all the time. Here's the reality AI's coming for you. Whether it's coming for you in a direct replacement or it's coming in and it can cut out 50% of your uh of what you do, it's coming. And so again, I think that you you you have that same we talked about it earlier, which is like, you know, not everybody's gonna adopt AI.

35:31 I get it, but also here's here's as the person, as the company owner, I don't want to force AI on the wrong person because that's not good. It's not it's gonna reduce output, it's not gonna be a good work environment. However, on the flip side, if I'm the employee, I'm sitting here realizing no matter what I think, no matter what I believe, no matter what I like, AI's coming.

35:52 And it's coming faster and faster, month after month, quarter after quarter, right? It's it's it's accelerating. Three months ago, four months ago, you didn't have Grokbot the way you have it today. And and for those who don't know what grokbot is, go do some research. So so now you've just got this tool that has its own computer, it's got its own tooling, and you literally just say, go do this, and it does it in its own environment, not on your local computer.

36:19 So it doesn't matter. I'm on my phone and I'm like, hey, I need to do this, let's go build this thing and let's do this and send it over to this guy. Done. The employee sitting in the seat just has to understand if I choose not to go chase down and learn this AI thing, there is a very high probability I will I will be gone.

36:39 It is your choice. Yeah, so you have to own the accountability. So the one thing that I hate more than anything is somebody blaming the system and blaming the company and blaming and blaming anybody but themselves. We are a hundred percent accountable for ourselves. The tools that exist today can only make you better, they will only make you faster, they will only make you more valuable.

37:05 Because here's the reality whatever role you have in your job, if you have that role plus you know AI, guaranteed more money.

37:15 Guaranteed. Yeah, that's what I tell people. I'm like, let people know that you're good at AI. It there's nothing bad that will happen to your career, right? Like, that's right. Hey Chris, you know AI? Can can you join this meeting? Hey, Chris, we had some ideas about AI. Can we get your opinion? Like, so and again, this is I don't care if you're uh you know high-level executive or you're just starting your first job.

37:36 If your reputation within your organization or your industry or your network is like, oh yeah, I know somebody who's pretty good at AI. Let's let's see if they're available, right? Like it good things happen.

37:46 And here's what's amazing about it. I'll just give this one little this little snippet because people people think it's daunting. You only need about a hundred hours to become probably the top 10 to 15 percent of everybody. Yeah, a hundred hours. Yeah, and guess what? Everybody has a hundred hours. We can figure it out.

38:08 And it doesn't have to happen this week. No, it's it's not in one week. What I'm saying is you do it over a month. Yeah. You do four, you do four hours a day, three hours a day, and it's the it's the nine to midnight, right? You've got that window, nine to midnight, that three-hour block where family goes down, they go to bed, you sit, you nerd out for three hours, and then you do that every single day for two months, and you will be in the top 15 to 10 percent of people who use AI today.

38:38 Yeah, and you know, I'm gonna supplement that. So uh my wife had never really seen me speak before she uh came to the Vistage Executive Summit that I was at in St. Louis, and I, you know, I got great scores from all the attendees and and AI speaker. Anytime you go anywhere, if there's options for breakouts, like the AI room is always packed, and that was the case here.

38:58 Um, but she said at the end of it, you know, she said, hey, listen, you missed one thing. I was like, what was that? She said you you missed letting them know how easy this stuff is, right? So if you're a listener and you're like, I I know I need to do more, I need like don't you I'm not technical, Joe.

39:17 I don't know what your background is, but you're probably not a you know an uh the propeller heads. Not a developer. No, I'm not. Yeah, I'm a dropout. So and would would you say that because you you you made the commitment to learn it, because you but would you say that it was hard to learn AI?

39:34 So here's my trick. I don't ever go into anything and think like I gotta figure out how to learn this. I ask AI to teach me how to learn it. Boom. So I learn differently than somebody else, right? I'm extremely auditory. And so, you know, I don't know if if if everybody understands, you know, you can be kinesthetic, different modality, you can be auditory, all the different modalities, right?

39:57 And very visual and so forth. I'm very auditory. So I prefer to listen to audiobooks and I consume things that way. In, you know, before I dropped out of college, when I was in college, I could just sit and listen to a lecture. I didn't have to write things down the same way. I'm just very auditory. So I talk to AI a lot, and I want the feedback in audio.

40:19 So when I needed to learn how to use something, I go into AI and I say, hey, listen, here's my here's my modality. Here's how I like to learn. Here I listen to audiobooks, I do this, I do this. One tool that's been shifted, and I forget what they call it now, but it was it used to be notebook LM and it's owned by Google.

40:37 It's free. It's just notebook now. Yeah. And now I think it's notebook. You can turn any topic into a podcast. So you go in and you say, Hey, listen, I need to understand just what the heck AI is. How does AI work? What's the difference between Chat GPT and Grok and Claude and Gemini and any of these LL, you know, kind of these large models.

41:00 Yeah. What's the difference? Explain it to me from ground zero to get me to like level one and turn it into a podcast so I can listen to it on my commute to work. Yep. Great. Yep. Oh, okay. I need instead, I need it turned into a book. Because I like to read books. So turn it into that, it's into a PDF.

41:21 Next thing you know, you've got your you print it out, you put it on an iPad or whatever, you sit down in the evening and you literally read it like a book. You can do that. Put it into chapters, put it into a story, put it like everything's available to you so you can learn it how you need to learn it.

41:35 So your wife's right. It's freaking easy to learn it because AI will let you learn it any way you want.

41:43 So I think that's a fantastic tip. So for the listener, if you're not familiar with Notebook, used to be called Notebook LM, as Joe mentioned, I think I think they just call it Notebook. It's a free from Google. So if you could just you know go to Google and say, hey, go to Notebook. And when he's saying that it will turn it into a podcast, it's literally like an NPR podcast.

42:01 It's got two uh two voices. They go back and forth conversationally about whatever topic you tell it to. Or I had a friend, he um ran generative AI at Nike, and he said, you know, my my tax returns were insane. He said, I put my tax returns into it, and I listened to the podcast as I explained all the deductions and all of the benefits that we're getting and all that kind of thing.

42:24 So um, great idea. And if you don't know what the modality, go ahead.

42:28 Yeah, I was gonna say, and you can call in. So a lot of people don't realize this. So it's like a live, it's like a live radio show. So you can literally just send a message in and ask a question, and the conversation will actually shift to address the conversation, move in the direction to make sure that topic's covered.

42:46 It's like it's phenomenal. People are are sleeping on this for sure. Um, but yeah, it's amazing.

42:52 And what so and when Jesus Joe says like you could turn it into a podcast, like it you simply push a button that says audio overview. Like it's not okay, let me go learn how to turn it into a podcast. No, you push one button and it does it. And that that call in, they'll even say, Oh, look, we've got a listener here.

43:09 Listener, go ahead, right? Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Um, but I love that, and thank you for for mentioning that. I've created, I don't know, dozens of notebooks, but I just it's one of those things that I just I always forget to use more of. So as a listener, if you're not using it, it will blow you away.

43:25 A, it'll blow you away what's possible with that, and that it's free. It's insane. Um Joe, I've I've enjoyed the conversation for sure, and I think that this is a topic that will get revisited on the podcast. Uh, like the the human, like where does the human sit in this this new economy kind of environment?

43:44 Um, so I appreciate that. Um, how can people find out more obviously about about level nine, about but maybe your positions in particular about kind of what you're seeing in the marketplace and those sorts of things? How can they stay plugged in?

43:56 Yeah, stay plugged in. I mean, I've got a YouTube channel. We're just now kind of really starting to put some more content on there. So just search Joe Rare on there, um, as well as any of the socials. We're we're starting to put out a lot more content. And then um level number nine virtual.com. So level9virtual.com.

44:11 If you guys need to email me, Joe at levelnine virtual.com, pretty easy. Um, I have an EA who answers all my emails. So if you get something, it's a human. Yeah, she sits down. So I'm I'm very I'm not I'm not a hundred percent bought in on having AI take over my email. Um we've got a really good system with a human.

44:31 We leverage AI for drafting, we leverage AI for some some components of it, but what I love is I love that we're still very much a human first company, and all of our operations are human first, enhanced with AI. So I don't want to, I I I love the human experience, and I will I will stand by this till the end of time is that I don't have any desire for AI to take over the human experience, and so I want that first.

45:01 What I can tell you is that so far in business, humans beat AI a hundred percent of the time. AI is phenomenal for capacity and it grows and it expands anything that can be done. But when it comes to the actual uh, you know, the experience of doing business with a brand, humans win. They still do. And I think that the further the pendulum swings to this technology-enabled technology first approach, I think that the there's gonna be resistance against that because people want relationships.

45:40 We do business with people we like, we you know, we engage with people we like, so don't negate the human element of your business. I think that that would be detrimental.

45:50 That is a clip that uh listeners, you're gonna see that clip on our social channels. There we go. Good. Joe, I appreciate you taking time out of the day, running your business, and that's something to come and share with the audience. And um, again, I enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed the perspective, the the human first, the 1080 10, uh, tons of takeaways from this episode.

46:11 So um, and then for everybody listening to this, I just want to drop a quick if you haven't been to the Using AI at work website recently, usingai at work.com, um, like we've been able to leverage AI over the past 120-something episodes that we've done, and we have created incredible summaries, uh, like in some cases, specific like workbooks and things related to the things that were shared in the episodes.

46:36 So go there, not just to catch up on you know past episodes or the current episode, but go there to take a look at all of the resources. And if you have somebody that you know that is on the journey, on the AI journey, maybe they're you know already doing great things, they'd love the show. If they're brand new, they'd love the show.

46:51 So please uh you know share it. And if you got a second, take time to uh to leave a comment uh on whatever the podcast platform is that you're using, because that is how more people can find out about uh how to use AI at work. So everybody, thank you so much for joining us for this episode. We will see you next week with another fascinating discussion on how to use AI at work.

47:11 Thanks for tuning in to using AI at work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work.

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