The Exchanges

Q Give me another example that either you or your, your students have built. What else?

A Yeah, we, uh, did a big series of lessons recently that, you know, essentially is intended to be a Uh, template and a demo that students can then take and use for their clients. And we call it a dashboard for team operations. And the use case that we showed is actually very similar to what you just described the agency having built for your, um, for your friend. Uh, and it was basically we're a museum. We have a bunch of cool stuff in our museum and we know a lot about it, but like, we need to get that knowledge out of our heads. Into a system. And then we want to generate a social media post every day and make sure that we have really interesting content that we're pumping out on a regular basis. So very similar to the idea. So we built that. We actually, what we do is we build three levels. We build the easy version, the medium version and the hard version, and we show the students that progression. So then they can pick and choose where they want to be in terms of their stack. So it can be anything from air table. All the way up to a more complex NN or make build that's going to be, uh, you know, talking to different APIs and doing more complex stuff behind the scenes. In this case, you could bring in like a buffer or a Hootsuite, for example, to, uh, you know, do the social media posting. So you can kind of sprinkle in as much complexity as you want, but the fundamental val…

AI assessment note: “we call it a dashboard for team operations. And the use case that we showed”

Q I really want to get out of this. Was there a consistent thing that they were asking you for?

A Typically it landed in what we call a document automation project. So a typical physician will, you know, work with a patient. Maybe they have Medical records and notes and all these things, I mean, they need to compile into a useful report for the patient or other, you know, providers or family members at the end of that. And they were saying, I'm spending 12 hours on this document, and I think AI can make that work for me in two hours, right? So, you know, somebody who has a limited amount of time, they're essentially a solopreneur or small business owner as a private practice doctor. Um, they've got some money to invest in speed. And automation, and they value their time a lot. They were very early adopters, even though they weren't techie in purchasing what we now call AI consulting services. So that became a mix of figure out what to build, which of course we love to do making MVPs and all that stuff from the software days, and then sitting down and doing it with a mixture of code and low code tools. Um, and that was what really evolved into our First few large AI consulting projects. And now we've created a much more detailed sort of menu or matrix of service offerings that we do ourselves as well as teach. Um, and it makes that a very robust business for folks who are enthusiastic about AI and also want to help other people adopt AI.

AI assessment note: “Typically it landed in what we call a document automation project.”

Q this area is not mature enough to go specialized and people are still not smart enough or not aware enough of who the specialists should be. They just know there's some AI solution. And is that why a lot of AI agencies, speaking as someone who's helped create a lot of these, is that why a lot of AI agencies are not focused on doctors or focused on marketing automation?

A Yeah, so, you know, we have about, oh, we have more than a thousand people in our AI consultancy program who are building their own AI consulting firms at various levels of, um, you know, points in their journey. Some have been doing it with us for a year and a half, some are newer, right? We actually do recommend that they niche down eventually, because we believe that just like any consulting firm or any agency being able to say, I have a Industry niche and a geographic niche is going to be a useful, um, you know, value proposition to get the client's attention to make lead generation easier. However, we often discover that a new consultant will go in to a business who is super enthusiastic about the idea of getting help with AI, but that client, as you suggested, really has no idea what that even means, right? So one of the things that we teach is like, What does this journey or roadmap for your client look like? What are the easy entry points? What are the premium offerings? And how do you figure out where they're starting and help them through that journey? Because, you know, as you suggested, it is very much, um, you know, the wild west in the sense that nobody really has a good handle at like midsize and large companies on exactly how to tackle this, especially when you get away from companies that have Like an engineering department, right? Which is, you know, I don't k…

AI assessment note: “that client, as you suggested, really has no idea what that even means”

Q experience so that knows all your past writing? Or am I explaining to them that they could use N-A-N? Am I doing something more complicated than that? Where do I even begin? And it's so broad that it's scary. It's scary to, to go into a client not knowing what am I giving them. How do you, how do you limit yourself when you're saying I'll come and do training?

A Yeah, great question. So there's a number of ways to, um, hone it down. One is just with time, right? Like if we know that we have two hours, obviously that's going to limit us versus if it's going to be a multi-day bootcamp. And we have consulting students who do both of those things. Um, we like to start students off when they're giving their first trainings with like an hour presentation that is effectively a AI one-on-one. What is this thing? What is a language model? Why is it able to sort of predict and be smart about what to say next? Right. Why is it, why is it creating these images? That's usually pretty interesting to. 80% of people. Sometimes you'll get a client who requests something more advanced. And then we have, um, a series of sort of idea generators within our community that we have people use to say, Okay. I'm going to go into this real estate firm. What demos should I show them? And then you build them, you know, a demo you can show for 10 minutes and maybe it's creating a listing for a new house or analyzing a piece of data or something. And they're like, whoa, like now I'm seeing like where this thing actually can speed up my life. So you can do things that are industry specific. And also generalized. And you can sort of mix and mash those. And the students who have kind of taken that to another level will even survey the audience before. So if they say, o…

AI assessment note: “So there's a number of ways to, um, hone it down. One is just with time”

Q he's thinking, maybe I want to level up my, not maybe, he's been talking actively about how he wants to level up his people with AI. And so when, so he wants to, he talked to you, I guess, by email about having you train their people. And that's another entry point for For agencies, is it just, I'll come in and I'll teach your people how to use AI?

A Absolutely. And one of the things we see over and over again is the folks in our program and in our community who are really into this stuff and are reading the newsletters every day and are reading, you know, what, what happened with OpenAI yesterday and what happened with Anthropic the day before. They don't believe how many people are complete novices. And are like, give me the one-on-one or one-on-two training. In fact, we had a student go to a pretty significant tech conference the other, uh, about two weeks ago, and he came back and he said, I can't believe how many people had no idea what anything was outside of like ChatGPT, right? Or maybe they'd use ChatGPT a few times. And what we're seeing is that in some ways there's a little bit of a disparity between the perception from what I would call inside The tech community and the reality outside the tech community, which is that like, we're super into this. We're talking about it all the time. Every day we're following the news, but most people are hearing about it as sort of like a cool thing in the background, but they're not really hands on with it yet. So that's why you can still go in and do a great training. And people are like, we are so happy to pay you for this because we need a guide. We need a trusted advisor, right? And we try to build Businesses that allow the, you know, proprietors, whether it's a solopreneu…

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. And one of the things we see over and over again”

Q what you've said. I think it might be a good fit for your company. Can I pitch you? And then once they exhaust their direct connections, they go to second degree and they ask for introductions and they have a similar type of conversation. That is a, that's, that's a model that existed for years. What is it that you're doing in this space that opens doors and starts conversations?

A I think that the model of meeting people and building trust and what I call go out and make friends when I explain it to people, uh, basically still works, right? I don't think that AI changes that dramatically. And I would also add that to some degree, the existence of what I would describe as like AI auto spammers for lead generation actually makes building a human connection in an authentic way. Even more valuable and actually more of a differentiator for you. And what we will do is we will actually, uh, you know, start folks out, as you mentioned with the warm network, right? Have them pitch something that is pretty much like an easy yes for a lot of people. Like, Hey, can we do a training? It'll be discounted. You know, it'll be a couple hours.

AI assessment note: “what we will do is we will actually, uh, you know, start folks out”

Q Okay, and then what would you say that they pay on average?

A Um, I'd say his typical project is in the three to 10,000 dollar range for a fixed project fee. Um, so, you know, he's starting to score enough that this is becoming a real business for him. Uh, we have other students who are more on the engineer side who are selling Like, 80,000 dollar engineering projects, but I hesitate to use them as an example because they had a lot of pre-existing tech skills coming in, right? So they don't fit that archetype of somebody who's relatively new to tech coming into this space. Um, so, you know, the vision that I have for somebody who is an AI enthusiast is over the course of, you know, six months to 18 months, we want to help you build a six-figure business. In terms of the amount of revenue that you're bringing in, basically a one person business, or maybe a small number of partners. And a lot of that revenue is going to come from things like the training to strategy to custom build roadmap that we talked about. So it's not a foolproof system as no business system is right. Like you have to do the work. People will have different luck finding clients. You know, we don't try to make it seem like it's automatic in any way. However, Uh, it is a real thing that is happening to dozens and dozens of people in our program. Um, so we think that it is not just a viable path, but also a path that is enjoyable and allows people to build businesses that…

AI assessment note: “I'd say his typical project is in the three to 10,000 dollar range”