One of my favorite new podcasts on AI is The Artificial Intelligence Podcast. The guest on this particular show, Is AI Disrupting the Mergers and Acquisitions?, is Brett Story. They really make some great points, such as:

• You need to have a process to automate. If you don’t have one, your AI adoption will stall.
• Ask yourself, “What daily tasks can I replace or have the AI do? What can the AI do to enhance my workflow?” If you can’t answer those questions, then you’re not ready to use AI.
• People don’t care how AI works, they just want it to work like a microwave warming up a burrito (this had me laughing out loud)
• Are your AI solutions paying their way in the revenue or value they generate?

Some questions that come to mind include:

Some folks may be paying for AI, but are they getting value out of the cost? If not, why are they paying for it? How can they close the gap?

Ok, enough of that. Here are some of my quotes. Listen to the podcast to get the full context.

My Favorite Quotes

Some of my favorite quotes:

“There are aspects of our business that I am certain will never be replicated with AI, but it is increasingly a very impactful tool, especially for small firms like ours that are resource constrained to give us an advantage in the market.”

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“…it’s just what daily tasks can I replace or have the AI do, or have the AI enhance that makes me more productive? It’s really that straightforward.”

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“It’s really just down to what problem does it solve. I think that’s a really cool approach because so much of what I see in AI is all hype and excitement. And there’s almost an inverse correlation, which is now interesting something. Is it how useful it is? Like everyone is constantly interested in AI video or using AI for social media.”

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“It either lets you eliminate a slow process or speed up a process. But if you don’t have a process, and this is the same area.

I read it as a lot where people go, we wanna automate a process. What’s the process. We haven’t decided the process yet. You’re just gonna crash faster because if you don’t have a system that works, it’s really hard. I was actually just before this call, I was talking to someone about having an AI write articles in your voice.

I said, you have to write three articles that are perfect. So then it has something to model and goes, this is a perfect the number of times I work on something. And I always say this to a client or anyone that they go, I don’t, I’ll know I like it when I see it, I go, great. This is gonna take six months instead of a week. Because if you don’t, I don’t have an ideal output to model, it’s so much harder.

Because I’m guessing and I’ll keep guessing and I guess eventually I’ll get it right, but it’s so much better if you go, this is the perfect result. Get an AI that gives you a result like this. That’s really work well. But I find that there’s this almost belief that it’s like a magic button, like the enhanced button in every movie where you just push enhance and now you can see all the mysteries that you can push AI and it can solve a problem, but it doesn’t really do that. It accelerates a solution already have or improves solution or proves automation.”

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“You already have to have a process. And when you try to skip, that’s when you hit a lot of problems, but you’ve figured out what you like, figured out what works. If you make content, you like, then which content that I like work the best. And then you can really replicate that. That’s why some people get amazing results from AI and some people don’t.”

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“One of the things I run into a lot is that people don’t really care how it works. They want it to be like a microwave. If you put in a frozen burrito, you push a button and the burrito ready comes out. And it’s really hard to have something that works forever.”

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“it’s pretty binary and you hit on one of them, which is knowing that they need to do something and paying it lip service and maybe even spending money, but without any really defined objective and set of problems they’re trying to solve. So that would be bucket one, the, people who are recognizes the recognizing the trend, but have no real defined strategy and could certainly avail themselves of working with someone like you to refine it The other bucket is the ostrich with its head in the sand, who is it either maybe an old school industry where they don’t see how it applies, or they’re of a certain demographic where they’re just scared of it, or some combination thereof where they say, this is all hype. It doesn’t apply to me, and I don’t need it.”

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“it gives you the agility of a smaller team. So you don’t have to go through layers of decision making, but also that ability to do that deep research to do things faster.

There’s more and more. You can have one AI tool doing one task, one AI tool doing another, multiple things happening at once. And when I try when I talk to companies or employees, they say, if you had an account, and you have two, you can choose from one accountant uses spreadsheets and one uses an Abacus. Which one are you gonna hire? They both know everything about numbers, but one could do 10 tasks a day and one could do one.

It’s really that accelerant feature, which all comes down to, and it like allows you to have different areas of expertise and stay really ahead and really also have that leanness when it comes to overhead. Because once you are employees, then it’s like, I gotta I gotta generate enough revenue that they’re worth more than they’re costing.”