Business Innovators Radio - Episode 38: Assessing AI Readiness of Your Construction Company with Matthew Loughran

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Part of the Construction Executives Live Series Assessing AI Readiness of Your Construction CompanyLearn how small construction companies can leverage artificial intelligence without technical expertise. Join Matthew Loughran, founder of Craftsman AI, as we explore practical strategies to assess your AI readiness, understand fundamental technologies, and implement powerful solutions that can transform your business—no IT team required.In The Zonehttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/in-the-zone/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/episode-38-assessing-ai-readiness-of-your-construction-company-with-matthew-loughran

Welcome to In The Zone and Construction Executives Live, brought to you by U.S. Construction Zone, bringing you strategies for success with construction innovators and change makers, including In The Zone peer-nominated national award winners. Here's your host, Jeremy Owens. Hi there. Welcome back to Construction Executives Live. I am your host, Jeremy Owens, owner and founder of U.S. Construction Zone and three generations improvements out in sunny, northern California. a great show today. Happy holidays. Thank you guys for being here. Merry Christmas. This is the season for joy for many of us. But I wanted to just kind of from the top, you know, we're talking about AI today and it's supposed to make our lives more efficient, easier, you know, especially in business and in a lot of times in life. But it cannot replace human interaction. And I don't think anyone's arguing that it can. So make sure this holiday season, you're being kind to each other. Maybe this is the year you don't talk about politics at the dinner table.

And this is the year that you reach out to that long lost friend or that person who is alone for the first time this holiday season. So let's be kind to each other. You know, with that being said, let's get into a great show today. We are sponsored by the great team at build12.com. Take a look at that app. Reach out to Les and he will give you a free demo. I have been using Build12 for the last year and a half or so. It has really helped make my business more efficient and including AI tools in there as well. So take a look at Build12.com. Our show today is called Assessing AI Readiness of Your Construction Company.

Today we will learn how small construction companies can leverage artificial intelligence without technical expertise. Join Matthew Lockerun, founder of Crossman AI, as we explore practical, strategies to assess your AI readiness, understand fundamental technologies, and implement powerful solutions that can transform your business with no IT team required. Matthew Lockren is, first of all, my friend, he's founder and CEO of Craftsman AI, empowers small and medium-sized businesses to leverage AI for competitive advantage. His solutions drive sales growth and streamline operations with accessible, user-friendly AI tools. He has 17 years of experience across many fields, fintech, AI, Web3, Health Tech. He's been all

over the place. He often helps people with their startups and as an advisor to innovative tech ventures and nonprofits. He also champions responsible business practices and groundbreaking customer acquisition strategies. Please help me welcome. Matthew Lockhart, Matthew, thanks for being here. Thanks, buddy. Great to be here. Yeah. So, hey, let's just get started. I mean, I know you've been all over the map in terms of industries and, you know, I guess what got you kind of into the AI field and maybe even a little bit more into the construction field as well. Sure. I've been working in the AI machine learning space on an office since 2017, 2018, primarily started out with a fractional CMO role of the data science

company. So I've seen a lot of things early on when it came to the space well before the chat GPT era. So I had some early exposure with that, which actually helped a lot from the building blocks from the technology that I can understand and then how I can help small businesses nowadays is I think is the most important aspect about that. In regards for construction, yeah, I mean, we've been, you know, working together here for the last couple of years, right, and getting really exposed to the entire industry through U.S. construction zone as well as other small businesses in the space, both from how do we tackle major issues like mental health and labor shortage, right, to empowering small construction companies with better tools and resources to run their daily operations.

Yeah. So I've seen both the enterprise as well as the small business side of things. Personally, I love working with small business owners. I love working with them because they put the heart and soul into their companies every single day. It's a lot of the time that's built off their specific reputation and what they're doing especially. So being able to assist and help them with that, it has been great. Awesome. Yeah, I think the one question most of us have about AI is, are you fearful that it will take too many jobs or become too powerful?

So there's a lot of myths about AI, and one of them is what you just said, right? It will take all your jobs. I don't look at AI as a job replacement for many aspects or many types of jobs, but it will augment. So what do we mean by that, right? So it would be looking at AI as really, I'd say a co-pilot in many instances to help increase efficiency and automation. and just depending on the role, right? Depending, I mean, if you're laying brick or concrete, AI is most likely not going to take your job in the immediate, you know, 15, 20 years.

Although there are 3D printed houses nowadays, but in reality, you know, for the majority of folks, you're totally fine. But we're looking at business operations and so forth, there's a lot of things that you can use AI to help augment and help support. We can go through some detail stuff here a little bit, but everything from sales, marketing, to customer service.

It's kind of a game changer, especially with, in an error where people want access 24-7 and instant answers. Right. This is where you can actually leverage AI to, you know, increase your efficiency as well, as well as customer communications.

Yeah. What about the thing about being too powerful? Are you kind of on that camp that it will need to be regulated in some, shape or form. And obviously we have other countries doing their own thing with AI as well. So how do we manage that part of it? Because that's where it kind of blows my mind is what could happen if, you know, I think that's where a lot of people struggle with letting it go a little bit too loose. Yeah. So we can take it back for a step and for a step, right? So there's really two types

of AI. There's narrow AI and general AI. Okay. So narrow AI. is things that you use on a daily basis, right? Think of Siri, for example. Right. Right. That's a form of narrow AI. It has a specific function, right? If you have something that's attached to your inbox that might, you know,

clean your emails or filter out spam, like, that's a form of narrow AI. Right. There's a lot of aspects of this that have been used for a very long time and that are currently in existence now. When you're talking about too powerful, you're talking about general AI, artificial general intelligence. So there's a few different camps on this. The main thing which a lot of people have, like so, for example, right, open AI, right, is really pushing for, you know, how fast can they get to artificial general intelligence. So that equivalent is in a machine acting as a human, right, from a human level intelligence. Right.

So with that, what determines human level intelligence, right? I've met a lot of different humans, right? We all have different levels of intelligence. Right. But what's going to be the benchmark, right? So there are some different ways that, you know, what tests will have to be implemented and what that will look like. Right now, that doesn't currently exist, the general intelligence factor.

There is a lot of, you know, progress towards that. And a lot of it has really happened because, of the increased capacity for computing power. So you have companies like Navidia coming out with more and more chips, the ability to actually process things much faster. We're seeing quantum computers starting to hit the market in the next year or so as well. So things will be rapidly changing in this space as they have over the last 12 to 18 months as well. So change will be constant.

and the time and quickness of that change will also be constant here in the near future. I don't have a specific date on when that, you know, generally I is supposed to hit. But I think Ray Kurzweil in his last book with the singularity effect is supposed to be like 2049 is the projection. But we'll see if that's accurate. I think the scary part for me is like you said, like the rapid growth. I mean, our growth that we're seeing now is. a spec in comparison to how rapid it will be in like, say, five years, right? Like, it will be so quick to keep up with.

I mean, obviously, there's your industry, right? It's like, how do you keep up with it? And how do you, as a business, you know, have all the tools on the ready to assist those businesses that need it? Yes, actually, a lot of things I do with kind of small and medium-sized businesses is kind of work strategically primarily, a point of just first understanding, do they even need AI in their business? Just because it's there doesn't mean you need it, right?

It's like any other business decision. There has to be strategic alignment with what you want to put in place to achieve your business goals. I mean, in most instances, there's a way to implement AI for efficiencies and things to that nature. But in some companies, there's not. They're moving pretty, pretty swift or agile. And it actually might end up just being a bottleneck for certain aspects. Right. You know, there's also a lot of other things that come along with that, right?

Maybe they don't have the company culture that would adopt. Yeah. Which is a major barrier in both large companies as small as well as small companies. Yeah. It's because you have, you know, maybe an executive that wants to push it and promote it doesn't mean that they've built a culture of innovation or a culture of acceptance to actually have the people internally, as well as maybe external consultants come in and train on products and understand how they work, provide the upskilling for the people within the organization so they can actually receive the benefit

from implementing the tools properly. The last thing you want a company to do is spend a bunch of money in developing artificial intelligence tools and they just sit on the shelf. Then you don't get the ROI. You don't get the actually efficiency. upgrades. Right. Yeah. Yeah, and switching gears to the construction industry. I mean, obviously, we have a different set of challenges in our industry. We're a little bit slower to adopt technology. I think when you think about AI, we've got to be kind of near the bottom. For a lot of us, it just takes us a little bit longer to grasp those technologies. So I guess what made you kind of get into the construction space or just that that we need it?

Um, yeah, twofold, right? One is, yes, you definitely need it. But secondly, I really like working with the types of individuals in the space. You know, there's no BS. You're straight to the point. Yeah. You're busy, right? So if we can, you know, if I can help you create a specific tool for your organization to help you claw back six hours a week.

Yeah. That's worth a lot to you, right? So a lot of people in your space, especially in that small. medium-sized construction company. They're out on job sites. They're doing a lot of different things and managing to wearing many, many different hats. Which is also, right, time away from their families, right, time away from coaching

Little League, whatever that could be. Right. And just providing them the tools to go ahead and claw back time back is rewarding, both for myself as well as clients. And then it's interesting when you see people that aren't overly technologically savvy. And you kind of demystify AI, you take it from up here. I'm like, no, no, all you have to do is this. Right.

And they kind of unlock some stuff where they're like, oh, my gosh, that was fascinating, how fast that happened. Yeah. That to me, that's why I like working with small businesses. Yeah. Because you can see the reaction firsthand, and then you see it reverberate through their organizations. Right.

I mean, you definitely said at the time for us is the number one thing. if you can prove that you're saving time. And because we have people shortage and labor shortage, you can't always replace, you can't always use people to get what you need. So when you can create those efficiencies, we get super excited. So yeah, I mean, you definitely nailed it there.

I mean, so how do you, what does it mean to be like AI ready or how do you, what are some of the indicators that we look for in an AI ready company? It's really five, kind of components are being AI ready. One is really going to be data readiness.

So what I mean by that is think of, think of your chef, right? You can be the best chef, but if you have, you know, lack of better work, crap ingredients, or are you going to get garbage and garbage out? Right. So think of data in the form as the ingredients for AI. So how are you currently collecting bait data in your business? right? Is it customer data? It could be sales data, website analytics. Do you store it, right? Is it a pad and paper? Do you have a CRM system? How well can you get kind of organized in your own

business is kind of step one, especially when you kind of take it down out of the enterprise and into more that small, medium-sized business level? Right, right. You might be using three or four different types of technologies. Do they talk to each other? You know, everything's kind of of sitting in different silos. Yeah, definitely. So kind of how do you, first of how can you, you know, actually properly access that data? So then it's usable for AI.

All right. Next, we can probably look at like a technical infrastructure. And what I mean by that is like, idea of systems that are you can scale. If you're using things that are maybe homegrown or you built them internally, like is there the technical infrastructure there to actually scale that? Now, A lot of small medium-sized businesses, they're using programs off the shelf, whether that's a CRM system or ERP, something like that.

So there's typically that the technical infrastructure doesn't tend to be a problem there. But the biggest one is actually workforce and skills. So I kind of chatted about this already, but understanding, is there a level of internal understanding about technology to then use and leverage this information to the best of the, ability for the organization, right? How open is a team of learning and adopting new technologies? Sometimes you just have cultures that are just closed culture when it comes to technology, right? They do it one way and this is the only way they're going to do it. And that's most likely, you know, AI's not going to be a solution within that organization. Right.

You know? And then also a big one you can look at is really what's the ethical and kind of legal preparedness of an organization to, implement AI. Just from the like the base level like do you have a data privacy policy for your organization? All right. How do you store customer data, right? Just, you know, strong suggestion is just make sure you're compliant with data protection regulations. You know, I'd suggest like getting compliant with the GDPR if you're dealing with anybody in Europe or even just implement those state that as part of our U.S. business. Or CCPA is another one that's specific for the state of California for data privacy,

which is a similar version of what GDPR does. So just like kind of those bases on readiness is something you want to look at. I mean, I have a free data readiness assessment. Anybody can take as well. So construction businesses, et cetera. Of course, it's an AI driven survey. But you'll get a data readiness score and give us some ideas. of what you need to work on as well.

Yeah. I mean, that's at ready. Crafts from AI.com. Okay. Shoot over there. We can put that in the notes. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I'll put that in the comments of this,

and then at the end, we'll give you the email to everybody so that they can reach out and get some of these tools because they're definitely powerful. And kind of as a leader in this space, you know, what are some of the biggest misconceptions, especially in construction?

Because I think there's a lot of them, and I think, you know, like you said before, if the leaders aren't willing to make the changes, right? You know, those misconceptions are just going to live on because a lot of us are, we kind of live in that my way or the highway kind of management structure. So it can be a little bit, if the leaders don't see the value, then it's not going to happen. So I would take it back, right? If we're looking at from a culture perspective, I would ask you literally like,

how important is gaining back five hours a week? right it may become maybe you kind of you change the narrative a bit with some folks and then you really start looking at well what are maybe three to five specific bottlenecks within your business right and then you start developing okay well what types of tools that are you currently using right do you currently use a CRM system do you currently use you know a maybe a phone system a VOIP system right there's ways you can add a to your existing workflows without a big technological lift at all. Yeah.

That can actually, without a lot of investment either, that can actually help you automate as well as, you know, drive some efficiencies. There's a lot of things you can do with that to, again, gain that time back, right? Where, again, you take it out of this, this is up in the pie in the sky. Yeah. Yeah. understand and then you just focus in on a small use case. So every time I'm working with an organization, right, the goal is to start with,

it's really to start with the pilot project, right? You start something small. What is this one problem that we think we can solve with? Right. Right. And it's very, and typically it's like instant time to value because as soon as we implement, it's, oh, gosh, okay, that's done. And then you, then you see the, oh, my gosh, that was that easy.

Let's, what's the next thing we can do? Yeah. But you always start small, right? You start small. So, I mean, you're not going to be an entire AI-enable organization right away. You might never be, right? It's just a point of understanding where it makes sense for each individual business. In the construction space, especially in the, if you're doing like remodels or thing like that or any commercial services, a lot of times you're spending a lot of money on advertising, right, and reputation building and so forth.

So every time you miss a phone call. from a potential customer, right? Or maybe they're calling after hours or things like that, right? That's money that you've lost in many instances. You can have a 24-7 after-hours AI inbound call agent that can answer every FAQ that you have for your customers, as well as take down information, schedule appointments for you. That's all very doable and not expensive to implement.

But can solve a major issue for you. as an organization. Right. Or maybe you have been purchasing leads and you haven't, maybe your sales team doesn't have enough time to get back to them in a timely manner. Right. You can send, do AI automations where you're sending a text message directly to the client. They're having a conversation via text with an AI agent trained on your business to act as a

qualification or appointment center. Right. Right. To then look you out for it to go and do an assessment. assessment or something to that nature. Yeah. So there's a lot of different avenues to implement tools very quickly that gain a lot of value in some way for an organization.

Yeah, I think that's the biggest demystifier is just that it's for large businesses only or that, like we said before, that you need some sort of IT department or specialist to be able to implement these things. And that's just definitely not the case. And I think the other one is the fear of losing personal touch. So how would you kind of recommend that balance of, you know, in-house expertise and then the outsourcing of AI? Like, how do you strike that balance so that people aren't feeling like they're not, they're losing the connection to the client, I guess. Yeah, well, it comes back to what we chatted about earlier, right, about the, this business specifically is built on relationships in many instances, right?

So you never want to lose that, especially in the, you know, in the small, medium-sized. construction business. So kind of you strike that balance. I think you need to understand is what use AI to help filter out the noise, I think. And just depending on what part of your organization you want to implement it in. Some organizations might want it where it's a customer service program, right, where it's, you know, instant answers may be a chat bot to knowledge questions and things to that nature, right?

Or maybe it's maybe you've just installed a product some, at someone's house and there's questions specific around that product and they can really just go to your website and ask the questions directly and get instant answers right again people expect 24-7 instant access it doesn't matter what size of the business you are anymore like we live in this in this google error of instant gratification of i hit search and i get what i need so just having that capacity uh is is very big Right. But there's a lot of different avenues, but where do you not lose that human touch is? I would suggest if you're using AI from a marketing and sales perspective and setting example, right?

Use it for qualification, right? Because of your time is so valuable as a small, medium-sized business owner in the construction space, if you're doing all your sales calls, maybe you're a founder sales-led organization, right? and you're going out and doing all your appointments, wouldn't it feel better to know that those are already being pre-qualified before you get there? Yeah. Right? Saves you that 20-minute drive. It saves you the 30-minute drive, you know?

Hour and a half. Hour and a half drive, right? So understanding, like having a validation layer of AI can help you a lot because then you're actually building relationships with individuals that are actually in the market for your services. That's just one example. But it's never going to do everything for you. And you don't want it to, right?

It's not there to kind of take roles. It's there to help augment so you can be more efficient. Right. So kind of to piggyback off of that, how do you approach customer acquisition strategies when working with those companies that just are hesitant to embrace, embrace these new technology, especially with AI? Like, how do you even, is it like a hard know right from the beginning or how do you kind of get through to them? Again, right, I think you look at is what's going to save them time and money.

Yeah. Right. Understanding, well, maybe they've, maybe they've been spending money on Google Ads for the last two years, right? Yeah. They understand what a cost per lead is for them. They understand what they, maybe they have a process where it goes to a salesperson, they send one email, they send a text message or make a handful of phone calls. And they might be sitting on like a pile of leads.

that just haven't been properly worked. MIT put a study out not too long ago about the actual process of contacting leads, right? It's gone up where you need something all like 17 touches nowadays to actually get through. So if you look at most sales organizations, large sales organizations as well, they don't do that, right?

I can train an AI to do that, no problem. And their feelings don't get hurt when they get told no. There's no rejection issue, right? And you can actually then sort through your pile of old leaves and your old database and actually warm those up for those that are actually still interested in the market as well. Yeah, that's such a big one. I mean, I think a lot of us are to the point where we do have those CRMs and build 12. Like I said, I use that one.

And it's great for those efficiencies. but, you know, the mining of that data and the contacting those old leads. And, you know, I guess if you really put it in terms of dollars for folks, it really changes. You know, when you have a cost per lead of $250 and you talk to your staff about what would you do with $250, you know, would you see that lead through a little bit more? And I think as a business, we tend to shut off after, you know, no contact one or two times. throw in the database and we'll see what happens later and it just sits there and those are people that are you know maybe they're lower in the in the cycle of buying but they are buyers they need your

products or service and we just we check those away so quickly and I think that's where I think we we really struggle as an industry yeah I mean you start you kind of you can use a just AI to start mining gold for you right at your database um and again there's ways to do that they're super inexpensive as well. Yeah. What are some of those fundamental AI technologies? I mean, we'll let's kind of get into some of those. Like you said, start small. You know, there's some low hanging fruit available to us.

So let's talk about those to start here. Yeah, absolutely. I think maybe take a just so people can understand, like maybe some key components of AI as well. Yeah. So you might hear like these terms just so I can kind of get some education here. like some machine learning, for example, right? Think of machine learning as a way where, you know,

there's programmed done for each task, right? So machine learning algorithms, the use systems to then learn from data to make predictions or decisions. So if you've ever watched a movie on Netflix and you saw a recommended title for you, right? That is basically machine learning, using your past experiences, right? and then recommending something. So think of you can do something like that, maybe with customer or buyer behavior data, right?

You might hear something called NLP or natural language processing. This allows computers to understand and interpret language. So this would be similar to like your Alexa, right, or your chat bots as well. So they can understand that human language and get it back to you. Then you have things like computer vision. This allows machines to basically see, and interpret visual information.

This could be everything from you uploading an image of a product and asking, you know, an AI like, what is this product or find me the user manual, right? To things such as like, you know, official recognition as well. So there's a lot of different avenues where these kind of types of technology get used. Right. But ways that kind of AI can instantly get. implemented into small businesses, I think is what kind of most people are thinking about. Yeah.

So just a couple of things like customer service 100%. As I said before, you can use 24-7 support, both from a online bot perspective that someone can interact with via chat or via phone calls as well. Those are not hard from a development perspective to implement for a small business. So if it's using an organization like myself or plenty of others, some of your tools might even have that built into them as well. I've seen a lot of different technologies, you know, CRMs and stuff starting to roll out some of these solutions directly inside of that as well.

From marketing and sales perspective, as I said, kind of that personalized recommendation engine, right? So depending on the types of services that you, that you currently sell. Maybe you have a series of past customers and buyers. Maybe you can start using AI just helping narrow down a couple of things. One would be, one of the similarities between all your different buyers, right? Is there a specific age demographic location?

If you're in a residential space, is there a spike for solar, whatever could be, right? That can actually help you narrow down who that buyer persona is or that person you want to market to to maybe shrink down and tighten up your advertising spend as well. And you can do that with, you know, Facebook ads or whatever type of ads you want to run for that. Operations and logistics, right? Maybe you have a supply chain that you're actually very in tune with that requires, you know,

materials coming from different areas. You can maybe set up some monitoring solutions. You can understand, you know, if you have a couple different supply houses that they can, kind of signal when things are in or out of stock, they can actually help you from an ordering perspective as well. Predictive maintenance. So if you maybe install, I don't know,

commercial HVAC systems, for example, or something to that extent, right? Maybe there's some predictive maintenance programs you might want to implement. So sensors that are reading information off those HVAC machines, you know, or elevators, whatever it could be. You can use AI to help support. in that area. Other ways in small business, fraud, finance, right? There's a lot of different things where you're trying to collect money as a small

size business owner, right? Yeah. You can start deploying, you know, better invoicing solutions and things of that nature. HR as well. Maybe you're a small shop and you're not only the owner or maybe you're the HR manager, right? So maybe you might need some assistance. doing things as simple as like maybe writing your core values, writing a job description,

things like that that could be very time consuming as a small business owner, but from an AI perspective, it could be very easy, get you 85% there in the first draft, and then you make your modifications. Yeah, that's huge. I mean, all those things. I mean, we could use all of those things.

I mean, definitely, I've used Craftman AI before. So we'll get into that a little bit. talk about some of those tools. But, you know, can you talk a little bit about some practical, practical examples? I know you kind of talked a little bit about them, how they successfully implemented AI without, again, without any IT team or IT specialists or anything like that. Can you give us a couple examples?

Sure. I mean, there's, well, except from the basic level, we offer a few different services. Right. Cressmona, we have a toolbox that's directly for kind of the, DIY person. But then we'll have things as well. We'll implement programs for companies. I mentioned, I kind of touched on a couple previously,

but one of them is where we'll take an old leads database. And we'll reactivate that database via an SMS program with a custom AI agent that's built to interact with those leads. So again, I've done this across businesses in Solar. HVAC, you know, insurance. It doesn't really kind of matter the business. But they typically spend a lot of money trying to generate new leads, new leads, new leads. And they don't get to them, right?

I've had a program where I've done this where it costs the business owner zero dollars. Or I mean is I only get paid and my company gets paid when they make a sale. So we're a full partner, we'll invest and develop the entire AI upfront, the entire, you know, AI agent. the mechanisms and systems for conversation, the CRM, and then post data back to wherever it's going to go, if that's going to go into their CRM system or XYZ. And we've done that at a way at zero upfront cost to the business owner. I'm not saying we do that all the time,

but we've done that before. And it works out because they've already paid for this lead once, right? It's just sitting there. And if they can see dollars coming on, off sunk cost. It's complete upside for them at that point. Right. So that's a really easy program.

Another one is we kind of have done things where it's completely done for you marketing services. So content marketing as well. So we'll build out a custom AI content engine for your company in your specific tone of voice, right? Highlight FAQs your customers might have, help you out with content marketing, both from a blog and article perspective, as well as to your social media, etc., which then saves that maybe small,

medium-sized business owner with one marketing manager a lot of time and money, but then frees up that marketing manager to do higher-level tasks, right? Also maybe do additional personal reach-outs and things in that nature, help build relationships instead of busy task work. Yeah.

Those are probably the two of the very, simple ones that have kind of hit completely, you know, I'd say time to value is instant when they kind of use those because it's just from the clawback on time freedom, but also the return from a monetary perspective. Yeah, I can tell you a little quick example of how we're using it at three generations is the social media and content space. I mean, it's such a behemoth right now. I think for a lot of folks in construction, especially when you get in that small business side is that the time it takes to write a blog post or the time it takes to figure out what your social media content's going to be is vast. And that's a person usually that's taking

care of that. And I used to write blogs back of the day when we didn't have AI. I would write everything. And it took a long time. And also it was something I would sweep under the rug because of the time thing. You know, I didn't have the two hours a week to invest in the content strategy and it's so important Google wants to see continuous content and social media wants to see continuous content so speak a little bit about

the three generations experience and how you're able to help us with the blog post but also how does that spin into everything else like social media and all the other ways we could use it all with one I guess like one question one frequently asked question

can really generate a blog post yeah so I think I think it's interesting to, there's a few different ways, right? So let's take a step back. So most organizations that I meet that are in the small, medium-sized business space, their use of AI at this point is just chat GPT. Yeah. Right?

That's pretty standard for folks when I meet them. And it's not just in the U.S. I just got back from Asia and did a full workshop in Asia for about 30 or 40 businesses. And they were at the same same level. It didn't matter what country they were from, what industry. Everyone was like, okay, well, we know we need to use AI. We don't really know how to use it or what's implemented for. But we know there's this chat GPT.

But then I don't know what I'm supposed to ask chat TBT, right, is the next hurdle. I know I'm supposed to use it. I've tried doing this, but what do I ask it to get the stuff I need? Right. So that comes something called prompting, right? So understanding what to tell it and give it parameters so you get the proper information out. as well. Right. So part of the toolbox program that I've built for Cressman AI is you don't have to do any of that. It's already done. What I mean by that is all the prompting is done behind the scenes. Right. So as a business, you have to come in and basically fill out a form. If you can fill out a form, you can use AI. Yeah. Right. That's the easy part about this. Right. So for example, I've built one in there that's a competitive analysis tool. Right. So all you'd have to do is come in and put your website in and the website of your competitor.

Now, behind the scenes on that is about a decade's worth of product marketing expertise and competitive analysis and things I've done in the past that I've just built into the back of the tool. So it will automatically go out, visit those websites, put together a marketing positioning report, provide you with verbiage to change on your website to better position yourself in the market. against your competitor, provide you weaknesses and threats and so forth. All, and all you do is put into websites. Right. Right.

And then you had a full, actionable program for your company instantly. Right. That's what I'm saying, like time to value is instant because that just saved you. Maybe, I mean, someone who is used to do product marketing for a living.

That would be a week's project for me. Right. Right. I do it instantly. You know, so things like that. But same thing. If you know,

like content-wise, Like there's content tools that are very similar with I've done, where it's asking for one specific thing. And you don't have to think about, because you're around it. You don't care about what question to ask. You just want what you want from the end product. Right. Right. So, and this point of this is to save you time, not to cause you more frustration and stress of having to talk with chat TPT and have it not understand what you need.

Right. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because I think. this struggle with a lot of us is we know what we're supposed to do. We know we're supposed to do blog posts. We know we're supposed to do social media content or no, you know, when we get jump on these webinars or podcasts or live shows and there's a new thing, oh, you should be doing this. Every best, the best companies are doing this. And so it just tends to, it just keeps piling on, right? And even the smallest thing about the core values. Like I use his tool and I created a core values.

something that's been on my mind forever. Like, hey, we really need to have something on our website. Just never got around to it, you know, which is dumb, but it's also just, it shows you an example of like, hey, it's just, that's one that slipped through the cracks. And to be able to put in some key terms, some things that describe three generations to the core, put it in the tool, like you said, in a form base, and then get a detail analysis back. It's, it's save me so much time and thought, but it's also.

when I read it, it's like, yeah, that's us. You know, so I think people have that, that thought that it's watered down. I would, I would disagree because of the prompting that it, like you said, the back end prompting is working for you. And it came back in our voice, in the right terms, in the right structure. And you're like, oh, dang, you know, it's like, it really does help. But even that tool, right, if that gets you 85% of the way there. it's done its job, right? Because then you really change it to be as specific and unique to you and your organization as possible.

Right. So it's not going to be a cookie cutter and generic to everybody, right? It's still going to, again, for that tool, it's still going to go and pull information from the web about you and the organization and compile stuff, you know, as well as with the information you put in. Right. And we built that tool based of a conversation we had. Right. about you saying, oh, my gosh, this is so time consuming and frustrating. I'm not sure how we're going to be able to do this.

So I don't have time for this. So like, okay, well, if you've had that problem at 3G, I'm sure other people in this industry have that problem. So let's just build a tool for it. We could have, we could have changed the name to this to, I don't have time for this. That is it. That is it. And I think that's the small business plate.

When you're at that, that level, where you, unfortunately, it falls on the owners to get things done. And yeah, that's the position I'm in at three generations. And yeah, I purposely put myself on that position, which is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is I have ultimate control. The curse is I have ultimate control, right? And that everything does fall on my shoulders. And, you know, I'm a, I also am curious by nature.

Obviously, that's why I have a podcast. Like, I'm curious of what others are doing and I'm curious how they're doing it. And so I want to learn and know what they're doing. But then it also piles on to my to-do list, which is, you know, is as long as eternity. So it's just, it's interesting that it's such a time saver and it's a perfect time in my life. You know, getting a little bit older and I don't have time for this. And it's just, it's really, it's a great time to honestly to have a business and to have these tools. because, I mean, even back seven, eight, ten years ago, it was so little, you know, it was, there was nothing available.

Listen, it's, if it's never been a better time to start a business. Yeah. Then right now. Right. The ability for you to leverage AI to actually run like multiple departments as a small like one, two, three person shop. Right. Depending on your industry. you can scale very fast with limited, I'd say, overhead or human capital needs from a very new, fully focused organization.

Yeah, I mean, there's so much opportunity in that space as well, just kind of if you're maybe not in construction specifically, but maybe some of that service in the construction industry as well. Yeah, no, no doubt. I mean, I think one other thing, you know, on the crest, AI tool is, you know, besides maybe contacting you and checking out some of the, some of the tools that you have, which, by the way, are not costly. So that's the thing I think the other misconception that a lot of us have is like, we're looking at our marketing budget, which is getting absolutely hammered this year. And we're going, I just can't add another thing. And it's true. There is a feeling of that because we are getting a little bit of, you know,

technology is hitting us, you know, hard and fast right now. And, you know, a lot of us have bought software and we bought CRMs and we bought all sorts of shit and not used it. So I think that we're at that level where we're like, okay, I need to start getting ready of some of this stuff. So I think, you know, I guess going to your website, this step one, but what is the first step somebody should take in a position of a small business going like, all right, what do I do now? Because I think the implementation part is where we struggle to is like, okay, I just got off that webinar.

I got to make a couple calls. You know what I mean? And then before you know it, it's gone. So what's step one? I think step one is you need to take 30 minutes and assess your business, right? Like write down three to five problems you have in your company. Right. That's step one.

Like you shouldn't even going up to sign up for anything or at all, right? Just section off, put 30 minutes in your calendar. It's me time. Yeah. I need to actually look at a strategy for myself and my business, right? I mean, we're coming to 2025 in a couple weeks, right? I bet you there's plenty of people that haven't done any 2025 planning. Right.

Right. You're just going to roll through with whatever we did last year and try to make it better. Right. So just actually step on, just try to get a strategy plan put in place for your organization. Yeah. And just pick a couple small problems that you might want to fix. And look at those problems that are going to increase your time capacity. Right.

You can always make more money. You're never going to get back time. Right. So what is important in your life that you want to actually spend more time on? And maybe it's work and you want to work 24-7? That's great. You know, that's good for you. most other people it's not.

So to me, that's actually step one. It's nothing to do with tools or technology or anything. It's get your plan. After that, if you want to go do it, it's free, I'm not going to call you to try to sell you anything.

Go to ready. dot craftymanai.com. And take a free readiness assessment. At least it'll give you something to work off of. It'll give you this idea to think about some of the questions you need to ask yourself when you're looking to maybe look at this type of technology. Right. Right.

So that would be like a very simple program. Yeah. Again, you can go to my website, but like there's, I have programs there that are for small business owners. Like this isn't, I'm not, I'm not an enterprise company. I don't want to be an enterprise company. I don't want to work with enterprise companies. Right.

Right. So with that, there's completely the do-it-yourself program, right? You can pay one monthly fee of unlimited. access to every tool in the toolbox and or that's you need a full strategy for your business. Yeah. You can do it. They'll build you a business model campus directly inside the program. Right.

Maybe you need sales coaching. Like maybe you're not closing deals. Maybe you have a sales rep that you don't have time to give them coaching. Give them access to the sales coach that's inside of there and have them pitch and give them how to help define their discovery questions and things to that nature. There's a whole bunch of tools that range from marketing and sales, HR strategies, depending on who's using it. And I had more all the time.

And then that would be one, right? That's just like a tool, I should say a toolbox full of tools for a small business owner to access. There's other programs. I mentioned the database reactivation program is another program that I do with the organizations as well. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And we'll put all these in the comments, too,

so that you guys can access some of these websites and information because I think that's a huge one. So coming up on this next year, you know, at the tail end of the year, what are you working on at Craftsman AI that you're excited about this next year? And I know that, like you just said, you're adding things all the time. And a lot is based on conversations you have with contractors because, hey, you've never been one. So you're like, you get that problem.

You're like, I can help you that. You know what I mean? And it's like, so just having the conversation, What's cool is like you're able to pivot and add pretty easily. But is there something that you're really excited about rolling out this next year? Yeah, but I mean, it's actually nothing to do with Creston AI. All right. So I'm running a local tech week here in the Northern California region.

That's coming up in February. So that's going to, we're actually going to have a hackathon for like the department of government efficiency program, if you will. What a hackathon is for those? Yeah, yeah. So we'll be working with local and probably state government on this as well. And we'll try to actually solve some issues. So a lot of this is kind of do more with less, which is most small businesses problem as well.

And we'll try to put together some tools coming out of that. But that event will be a full five-day event, hackathon, just one section of it. We've got some great discussions, great pocket events happening around North California, specifically here in Folsom, California. And then this year in August is my next TEDx event that I run. And this one's going to be really interesting. The topic is Horizon 2050. So it's really about the next 25 years, how will that shape the future of humanity?

So this will really focus on very much emerging technology, like stuff like CRISPR and Gene editing the climate tech to what does government look like in 25 years from now? What does education look like in 25 years from now? Yeah. Right. So it's really understanding kind of the current horizon. I don't know. Will we even be here in 25 years from now based on what we're currently seeing around

the world? There's a lot of things happening, right? Yeah. So those are probably the two big events I have coming up this year. Craftsman is going to be there. And I'm definitely, you know, we'll sure I'll pop out some digital tools and so forth. I have some more education stuff and seminars I'll be doing. Most of for small businesses, those would be a lot of fun.

Just because I get the chat with everybody one to one and really understand problems, right? Because my whole thing is if I can understand common problems across industries, I can create tools and that everybody can use, right? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, kind of thinking about that TEDx event and that crystal ball, a couple last questions here regarding that crystal ball. I mean, we didn't talk about IoT and some of the other kind of tools that are rolling out in the construction industry in the next decade.

So let's start with that. What do you feel in terms of the IoT and the construction industry, what do you feel AI will be doing? Yes, IoT will be massive. So IoT is Internet of things. So think of this as like sensors everywhere. Actually, this eventually right here, this device will be a complete AI-enabled device in the very near future. So there'll be something called Edge AI.

So everything will be able to run off a small device, just like that, which is a game changer when you're looking at access, you know, where you're giving instant data access. And if it can, something that can make a decision on the ground in real time to trigger something that can be anything, right? So think of it as soil, for example, right? Maybe when the sprinkler should flip on for a farm with sensors inside the soil, right, from water conservation and things of that nature. So there's a lot of different areas when you're looking at IoT and a lot of different, even in construction, maybe you're building high rises and there's certain things that, you know, from a safety perspective.

Maybe the wind hits a certain threshold up top and automatically shuts things down because the safety issues. There's a lot of different areas. We use IoT. That'll be huge in the new future, especially when we start getting to smart cities as well. So there'll be a lot of things in that realm. Okay. So what about the crystal ball, let's say 510, and maybe we go all the way to that 52. So, you know, what's our life going to be like? And maybe let's just keep it construction related because it gets too wild otherwise. You know, I mean, like you said earlier, like I, you know, me being in remodeling, I feel a little safer.

You know, I don't, I don't see robots swinging hammers anytime soon. So there's a lot in remodeling that makes you feel, you know, a lot of job security. But everything on the back end of what we're doing, you know, obviously we have manufactured homes. We have everything, you know, a lot of things are going to be built offsite and brought to you. But what are you, what are you kind of going to project AI? I was actually, I was going to chat about that, right? You'll probably see less,

was that stick in pole houses, right? Yeah. The manufactured side. If the quality is there, right? So I think that that quality increases and the economy is a scale increase, the affordability will be there as well for that. Right. And maybe it might just be more into specializations of installing and connecting trades

at sites because that's not going to be a robot, right? Right. Obviously, you need to run inspections and all that fun stuff. You'll probably see a lot of stuff in the near future running around compliance with building codes that can be augmented with machines and AI to help provide maybe contractors right off the bat, things that they know are going to be out of code instantly before anything comes up. So you can get assessed. You can probably do that. Probably now it's a capacity with like a photo of certain things. it'll probably maybe match it to a building code.

So things like that can be very near term. In that far future, I don't know. It gets a bit wild. Yeah, who knows, right? I mean, that's what's cool about the TEDx is like you can find that expert in that field that can really kind of see the future a little bit. And it can be wild. It could be, it's hard for us to fathom sometimes.

I mean, what our kids are going to be seeing. in their lifetime is going to be far superior to what we have. So, you know, I don't think they're going to be driving and might be flying. I mean, who knows how they're going to be transporting around. But it's interesting to kind of get into that topic. So that's a good, good topic to get into on TEDx. Very fitting. Yes.

Yes, I'm excited. Well, Matthew, thank you so much for being here. It was great having you on and getting all that information about AI. Tell everybody how to get in touch. with you. Sure. I'm on LinkedIn as well. I think this is going out on LinkedIn live as well.

But Matt at CraftsmanAI.co. Or you can actually get me a Matt at TEDx Folsom.com. Those two email addresses, probably the best ones for me. And then feel free, you know, poke around CraftsmanAI.co. And again, I'm not going to, if you fill out the form, have some fun, you know, I'm not going to be beating your phone down and calling you. Feel free. If you want to get in touch with me and you want to chat,

I'm more than welcome to, you know, book a 30-minute console. We can chat for free. I'm fine with that too. Awesome. Thanks a lot for being here. And Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays. We'll see you tomorrow at a Christmas party.

So I think we'll be just fine tomorrow. Yes, we'll be merry. All right. Thank you, Matt. All right. Take care. All right. Thanks a lot for joining me in another episode of Construction Executives Live.

Again, happy holidays, Merry Christmas. This has been a lot of information about how AI can to really build your tools. I think as we end the year, if you're watching this episode, you're listening, you should be excited about your future. You should be excited because you have tools at your fingertips that can help you in your business this next year. As we have leads that are harder to get and our cost per lead and our cost per sale

continue to rise, these problems can continue to climb. So we have to get in front of it. And use someone like Matt to help you with your business. Get it ready for this next year. and you'll feel better about your goals. You know, write down those three, four, five things that you struggle with and go find tools to help you with them because, honestly, it's usually not going to be you. Don't write the goal down that's going to put more on your shoulders.

Write some things down that you can get help with, and AI can help you with that. So thanks so much for being here. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and we'll see you in 2025. Bye. You've been listening to In The Zone and Construction Executives Live with Jeremy Owens. Be sure to subscribe to In The Zone. and stay in the know with the best minds in the construction industry. To nominate an innovator or change maker in the construction industry,

connect with your management peers and stay up to date with construction industry news. Be sure to visit usconstruction zone.com.