FIR 89: SEVEN Steps to PREPARE Your Business for AI !!

Financial Investing Radio

What does it take to adopt AI in my business? What does it mean to prepare my business to leverage AI? The answer may surprise YOU!!

Hey, welcome everybody. This is Grant, welcome to another episode of ClickAI radio. As you know, my previous podcasts had an opportunity to have my son Steve Larsen join. That was a real treat; I have another interview coming up with another business entrepreneur, I look forward to having them involved as well. Okay, so after talking with Steve, I was thinking through what what are some of the things that each organization needs to do to prepare your business to take on AI. And as you know, typically, as a small to medium business owner, you don't have a lot of time. And so what you need is to have the benefits and the luxury of AI. And at the little or the least amount of effort on your part, right. So as I started thinking through how have I seen the supplied, how have I applied it, what have been some of the best practices, and so I ended up coming away with seven items or seven steps to go through to prepare our organizations.

Now, before I go through that, not long ago, there was this research article from Forbes that was talking about preparing your business for the artificial intelligence revolution. So techie right? Anyways, kind of an interesting piece talked about some of the key steps. And I'll touch on some of these because I've seen some similar things from my own experience. And the funny thing about it is, the term AI is such a broad term that answering this question actually translates into, into quite a different answer based on the kind of AI you're applying. So for example, let's say that you're going to apply a chat bot, if you don't know what that is. Sometimes if you get onto a large company, website, and you're interacting with them in your typing something in one of those chat windows, those can many times be driven by chatbot, artificial intelligence, right, where they're looking at the text that you're sharing, and they've got some scripted and guided AI conversational interactions, right? There's that kind of AI, then certainly there's AI as it relates to more machine learning. where it might be doing image analysis or looking for patterns in sales transactions or things like that, right? So the when I say, hey, what are some steps we can go through to prepare ourselves for AI? I'm talking more general, right? I'm not gonna narrow in on any one specific thing, because there are some commonalities that I found across the organizations, and across the kinds of AI that we need to we need to go through so let me talk through these. But just briefly, I wanted to sort of set the stage here.

Why AI? Right. So why, here's this is an interesting piece that came out of a report from Price Waterhouse. When was this year or two ago. They were looking at what is the economic impact of AI, at least as they predict this over the next say, 10 years. And what they indicated was the global economic impact of AI up until through the year 2030. So what about 10 years from now is $15.7 trillion? That's huge. Now, that's not just a US number. That's not just a European number or China number. That's a global number now turns out based on their report, that about 3.7 trillion of that is US GDP impact, whereas Northern Europe has about 1.8 trillion. The other big, big one is 7 trillion from China. So it turns out AI is even going to leverage China's economy more at least that's that's what Pricewaterhouse is predicting, regardless of that $15.7 trillion impact to GDP across the planet. That's a pretty big number.

So the point is, we got to think about what does it mean to my business and what are some ways in which I can leverage this so that I don't get behind on the wrong stuff. of the digital divide, right? We know what that is the digital divide means that I'm at a point where I'm not leveraging technology to help my business compete. And that will become more and more important as the years roll forward. And now as AI is working to become more pervasive, right, it's working to become more as part of the fabric of the way we do things. In fact, I was talking, talking with one of my kids there the other day, and they said, Hey, have you ever you ever done anything with AI? And she goes, Well, in fact, some of you may know her name's Marie. I said, Marie, have you ever done anything with AI? And she's like, No, I don't think so. And I said, Hey, open up your open up your iPhone, and go to the Photos app. And you see your photos in there. Yeah. Enter the search word clouds. And pretty soon she types in the word clouds and back comes a collection of pictures in her iPhone with clouds. That's machine learning. That's AI.

So Apple's already been putting it into the products, right? It's starting to become a natural part of the way in which we interact with things. And sometimes we don't even know it. Now, it's important though with us as business owners to know it, right? We've got to know how can we leverage it so that we can be and, you know, maintain competitiveness? So there's a few things one is the so here's seven, seven steps, seven things to think about, number one, get familiar with the different kinds of AI. So when you're preparing your business for AI, it's actually critical to understand what are some of the different categories of it, how might I use it? Is it around image processing for my business? Am I going to use it for analytics as it relates to my sales predictions? Maybe I need to use it for understanding my you know, my, my leads and the quality of my leads, whatever it is, before you get too far into that understand the different potential Ai solutions that are out there. Okay, so that's step number one, just get familiar with the playing field. Step number two of seven, consider your business questions. So I started to articulate some of those think about what problem your business is facing. And think about a potential AI approach that might help you with it. Now turns out that the kinds of questions that you ask will actually impact the answer in terms of the way AI is applied. I'll give you an example. So if you want to understand, Hey, is this particular sales sale strategy, right? What do I think the potential revenue opportunity is? When the answer is more of a number, then that's one style of questioning and one style of AI. Whereas if I say something like, what kind of behaviors influence refunds if I'm going to get higher refunds or lower refunds, right, that's my Have a yes no kinda kind of question. And so that you don't have to really worry about that too much whoever you're working with though, when you are applying the AI, they'll they'll look at that closely. So that's step two, consider your business questions. What are they number three, step three. So determine then what kind of AI you think you're gonna maybe need. Right? Now, you don't have to become an expert at it. But you might be able to say, Well, I know for sure we're not going to be doing any AI on the iPhone, for example, right?

So you're able to break down and choose or, or D select, if you will, areas that aren't interesting. Number four, all right. Now this is critical part because, as it turns out, this is typically done impacting your whole team. See, when you apply AI, the fourth step is to get others involved. And so you want to understand from the perspective of your team, what will happen to your processing What will happen to them, if you actually go apply some AI? Will you likely have to change some of your business processes or change some of the ways in which you're doing business. And a lot of cases, what I see is that AI will point out not only the good things that you should go do more of with high probability of success, but we'll also point out, here's some behaviors, you should stop right that it either means that you're not going to get the lead, or it means that high probability that you know, you're going to get more refunds from this or you're not going to close as much in terms of business. Now, when you do step four, you need to understand the impact to the rest of the organization. Now, you may be a one person, entrepreneurial or small business owner team, you might have five people. In any event, you need to understand what's the impact to everyone's processes. That's number four. Number five, is now that you've taken a look at what kind of AI I might use. What am I doing business problems, what might be some of the processes and the impact to my team? Now you're going to prioritize them.

That's Step five, you got to prioritize, he can't go do all of it. It's just too overwhelming. So not all AI answers, whether it's patterns or predictions are weighted equally. That's one way to think about prioritization. But another is the impact to your business processes. Sometimes you might look at an AI prediction and say, Well, I realize it's telling me I could probably get a 20% growth here. But the changes to some of our internal systems or processes or whatever my mean, might be more than what we're willing to take on at this point. So you actually want to go pick whatever is the right subset of the AI prediction, you should go after, don't go try to do all of it. It'll pull your hair out. All right, here's number six step, step number six, actually, step number two Six I find is where most people tend to start, right? They tend to start thinking about their data, right? So step six is review your business data. But you notice that, in reality, what I found is you got to understand the potential of the AI capabilities, and then the business problem you're trying to solve, and then the impact to your business. And now let's go look at the data right, let's go examine what areas of the data we might have available or may not have available to help us answer those questions. So we need to understand what the data looks like at that point. So that's step six, take a look at it. And your data will most likely come from multiple places or systems. You might be getting your ads out on Facebook, you want to understand that information. You know, certainly you might be using something like a Click Funnels or something like that for for tracking your sales or what have you. Or, or if you're doing high ticket coaching. You might be using something like tribe or whatever it is. The point is you want to pull off Those together to tell a story of the journey of your customer from when you first reach out to them through the ads all the way through to you capturing them, and then even into the high value part of your ladder. Okay, so that's understanding the business data. And then last but certainly not least, it's as you get the AI predictions. And as you get the information, certainly, you need to be preparing your business, to revise to pivot to adjust. So even before you ever get it, got to get people whether it's your own mindset or others into the line of thinking that you're going to be taking a consistent regular pulse of evaluating what are the things that the AI can see that we're not seeing. And then be open to now let me make some adjustments, make some adjustments to the business so that we can leverage the insights from that, but you have to have a mindset of being willing to make those adjustments. So just setting Business up, you know, it's funny, I was talking with someone the other day and we were talking about those companies that weren't willing to make change. And where are they today? Right. And we all know the stories of Blockbuster Video, right and, and other such companies that have sort of disappeared right from the horizon because when change was presented, it was fought against and justified against rather than embraced and making adjustments to your business model, or the way you do business. So AI helps you to create an evergreen business, one that can continue to pivot and revise and readjust so that you can be competitive as the technology and the world around us changes. Alright, so those are the seven steps. So to back up, I started by talking about how Price Waterhouse says hey, this is a $15.7 trillion Game Changer right the AI over the next 10 years is going to impact the global domestic product. numbers across the world by 15 over 15 trillion. That's a lot. So what part of that will be yours? What part of it? Will you actually be realizing and retrieving the revenue because you're taking advantage of AI for your business. Alright, so those are the seven steps through that. Thank you for joining and until next time star working on your seven steps.

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