Technology, Connected - The AI Business Playbook - Ajay Malik, CEO StudioX AI

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Shopify. Duolingo. Box. Meta: Don’t give it to a human until you’ve asked the machine.This isn’t disruption. This is displacement. And if you’re not ready, you’re next.Ajay Malik helped run Google’s data centers. Now he’s building AI agents that kill the corporate time-suck at its source. Emails? Scanned. Contracts? Summarized. Cameras? Watching. Support tickets? Prioritized before you’ve had your coffee.Forget the whitepapers. This is what it looks like when someone actually builds the machine that replaces middle management.The question isn’t should your company use AI.It’s how many people will you need once it does.--LinksStudio X: https://www.studiox-ai.com/Ajay Insta: https://www.instagram.com/ajay.malik.official/Thinking On Paper: www.thinkingonpaper.xyz--Timestamps (00:00) Disruptors and curious minds (00:45) Introduction to AI and Its Impact (03:47) Ajay Malik's Journey with AI (06:59) Core Capabilities of AI (09:58) AI as a Partner in Decision Making (14:20) Trusting AI in Business (15:32) Practical Applications of AI in Business (18:47) The Role of AI in Enhancing Productivity (21:49) Creative Potential and AI Hallucinations (24:35) Engaging with AI for Business Growth (29:27) The Emotional Aspect of AI Communication (30:06) Studio X: No Code AI Solutions(31:49) Connecting Knowledge for AI Utilization (34:48) Integrating AI into Daily Workflows (36:05) Managing AI Agents Like Interns (40:09) The Responsibility of AI Management (43:17) AI Applications in Business Operations (45:37) Navigating IT Concerns with AI Implementation (48:56) Maximizing Impact with AI Tools (51:39) Knowledge Transfer and Employee Concerns (54:49) Preparing Future Generations for AI 

Disruptors and Curious Minds. Welcome to another episode of Thinking on Paper, where we dig deep and unpack technology and what it means for us as humans. We keep humans in the mix. That's what drives us. We're powered by curiosity. We hope you are too.

Today we're talking about AI. Mark, who are we talking to? What are we diving into? Let's get going. Couldn't get any more tangible. My goal of today's show is that I want at least one company that isn't using AI to be using AI, thanks to listening to this show.

I was in Paris last week. There was a very interesting talk I was listening to by the head of the Cardano Foundation. And he was paying a picture of trillion-dollar companies, not too long in the future, that might have 10 employees. We're not there. We're here.

And today we're talking to AJ Malik, founder, CEO of Studio X-A-I. He's a technologist. He's a business futurist. He's an inventor. And he's going to be outlining the strategies that companies can use today to start using AI. Welcome to the show, AJ, it's a pleasure to have you here.

Thank you for thinking on paper with us. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Very excited to be here. So, Aj, before we get going, tell us about your personal aha moment with AI that you had and how long ago was it and what drove you to do what you're doing today? Wow. So my first aha moment was a long time back, okay?

That was 1989. That was my first year, final year project in my computer science when I did from IAT India. And it was impressive. I worked on building an expert system. Okay. But then, of course, as you know, we know, all know, AI almost disappeared from the world. People call it AI winter. But AI disappeared.

And what I was really excited because it could reason. It could provide me a solution based on rules and based on messages that were pre-built. And it worked. And, you know, those were 10 megahertz computers those days, okay? We are not talking 4 gig or 5 gig speak. 10 megahertz. 10 megahertz. Old early days of 1890.

Wow. Yes, I am old, very old. Those days, you know, you know, programs fit in floppy disks. Probably nobody knows floppy disk. 360 kilobyte floppy disks. And it had full compiler programs and everything. And now five DVDs are not enough. Anyway, but my second aha moment, that happened.

in Google at my time in Google. I was responsible for engineering and architecture for nine data centers, the corporate network, and data center cannot be built in a second. It takes time. It takes months, you know, there are negotiations, cities, fiber. There are so many pieces involved in it. And the network traffic was growing. Every six months doubling. So how do you stay on top of it? And the process was AI. It was not even called AI. AI. It was just like, hey, we need prediction. We need to make sure that we can be ready six months in ahead to give orders for what I expect my capacity to be in six months from now. That was like, oh my God, that is cool. And this is how you are always staying above the curve. And that is

what every business needs. I left Google. I was so excited about AI. That's why I said it was my biggest aha moment. I started my company. And the reasoning was, because AI can do wonders for business. AI has two parts. One is how it helps your business, how you can be ready for business, how you do not make wrong investments, how you spend the money right way, not waste.

And on the other side, AI is about creating more content, which is what people talk about today. Ajay, let's break this down for the listeners that are either working for companies or may have their own companies that aren't really familiar. They've heard AI,

they've heard all these talks and stuff. And what are some key areas that they could think about exploring to bring in AI? You hinted on a couple, but like what are some more tangible ones that we could like really break down and say, hey, this is something you could try today. All right. Let me just before saying that, say what are the core capabilities of AI so that people can think like how I can use AI? I put it in four buckets. It can recognize patterns.

It can make decision. It can process information. and it can continuously learn. I think if people put those in four buckets as the capabilities, then you can start thinking in my business, is there a pattern that will help me? Is there a pattern that will help me for predicting? Like, I can do my inventory management better,

I can do my sales calls better, my lead generation better, or my product development, testing better, or whatever. Or can I do decision making? How do I make the decision? When Amazon comes and says, hey, 35% of the people who bought this product also bought this, that recommendations. And is there somebody else? Is the all as a business owner or manager or whoever, responsibility of making every decision is too much and being the fear of being wrong.

So having an advisor on the side, and that's what the role AI can play. Information processing. There is a lot of information. I have data in my contracts, data in my contracts, data in my business. documents, data in my databases, my IoT devices, my non-IOTE devices, my tax returns, my passport. We have information so much. My WhatsApp messages, SMS messages, emails, it's infinite. And the last point is continuous learning. I need an advisor who works with who is not static, who is not like, hey, you know, like when cloud AI comes and says, I have my information from 20, 24, September,

Hello, that's not a gold medal. Go ahead. I need it up to date. I need the information now. AI can do that. And I think they all models are working on that. So these are the four core capabilities. From what you just said, Aege, and to answer Jeremy's question about where could a business begin with AI, from what you've just said, the CMO, the CFO, the CEO, HR accounting, doesn't matter everywhere, anywhere. Anywhere, everywhere. AI is solving human problems.

Think like this. What is that which you are doing repetitive? What is that that you are doing a lot of time? Hey, we make this podcast and then every time we make podcast, we make shots, we write them, we write a page, we write a summary. You know, those are standard things. Anything which is boring and I don't want to do. Every morning I look at it and I have to scan through all my emails and to see which

is right, which is spam and go through my 200 emails that arrived last night and go through and to figure out what is important for me. It's boring. I need to do it, but there is no easy way. Or think like, what is? Man, it is so much work to do. I have to look at this. I have to look at this.

I have to look at this. There is a process. There are so many documents. I have to open those contracts. I am like already tired even thinking about it. And if you have things like this, or this is like simplest, whatever is repetitive, whatever is boring, whatever is tedious.

And whatever has a big process, you have a lot of moving parts. I need to see this. I need to see this. I need to see that. Whenever you have things like this in these four categories, yeah, I can help. In your buckets that you mentioned, the one that the one that jumped out is this idea of we make so many decisions. Some studies say that on a daily basis we make 30,000 decisions. And that's one decision was me to make my hands go like this.

Some are small and some are big. But 30,000 decisions. It's why Steve Jobs wore the same turtleneck every day. There's decision fatigue. But silicon and carbon, this little gap between the things that we're talking about right now, is trust. How do we trust the silicon to make our decisions? People are wary about that. People are like, okay, well, this all sounds great.

But if I put this thing in and I push this button, can I trust this AI with my career? How do we get around that? Very good question. I had so many discussions. even in my team. Even we have sometimes, even today, very heated discussions. It's I call arrogance of the human mind. I am better.

I am better than machine. I am better than others. I am better at making decisions. How the AI became really picked up. So I think 2014 or 2010, I'm forgetting the year right now. But in and are the models, AI models which do based on image. They can do image analysis and they can look at it and tell. It's a dog, it's a cat, it's a red light, it's a green light or whatever it is.

There was a test. There is a test in Germany in which, you know what, the cars are going on the roads, and people are following the rules. It's green, okay? And first time, the AI, computer vision product, did all the, they were driving, and computer did better than humans. Humans make mistakes. We think we are better, we are superior, but we make mistakes.

And we say, oh, yeah, I made a mistake to erase humans. and we move on. But we are like, AI, AI made a mistake. How did AI make a mistake? AI cannot make a mistake. So what I'm trying to say is we have to see it like this AI as a partner, as an assistant, and which has proven to do better than humans. And that's how the AI started becoming successful.

AI was able to process a lot more data, provide a lot more results, and on average they were better than humans making decisions. So will I be able to make some time better than AI? of course. Will I be AI do better than me? Of course. Will I be equal sometimes? Yes. So it's just a partner. Treat it as a partner. So with that, were you saying we should give AI a little bit of grace in that it's not going to always be right all the time? Just like I would give Mark a little grace when he's not right on something or he would do for me, we're human partners on this podcast. Is that kind of what you're saying? Yes, exactly. It will be. There will be errors. Errors are on both sides. But now you have a partner. And, you know, you can brainstorm and you can decide and you can go from there. You know, when you use clard, chat, GPD or everything, they say, fraud can be wrong. Chad GPD can be wrong.

It can make errors. And we have to just treat it like AI is AI not super intelligent. Humans like to have somebody or something to blame, to direct the frustration, to direct the anger. And if a human makes a mistake, it's very easy to find that outlet. if the AI makes a mistake, it's not so easy to have an outlet at all. So just from what you were saying, your message to, so I'm from England.

In England, Jeremy, you might not know this, but got a lot of old companies in England. Hundreds of years old, they have a lot of data going back, literally centuries of information that they keep on paper ledgers in the back office. And your message to them is that today, in April 2025, AI is precise enough, accurate enough, and good enough that they can trust it now. with their data. Yes, and be the human in the loop.

You know what? That's it. And that human in the loop, keep it. And the human in the loop will become less and less maybe, but it is still important. It will be important. But we have a partner now, and we have to use it because it will help up.

You know, people say this. Hallucination, very common word. Everybody talks about hallucinations. What isn't hallucination? Creativity. And creativity gone wrong. More creative. If you are not creative,

I can tell you, you can definitely never hallucinate. Hallucinate is just next level of creativity. And sometimes it goes wrong. It's like I start making a painting and I paint. And sometimes painting goes wrong and really wrong. The creativity is needed. Humans, that creativity is there now. Use it.

And it will make mistake. It will go further. It will be extra creative sometimes. And you have to stop it, control it. It's like, you know, you do it with anybody. This is, that's a really cool point. I've never heard anyone talk. about hallucinations as happy accidents. I think that that's a really interesting thing,

interesting thing to think about. So let's point back. So maybe if you know the CEO of Shopify or someone else can introduce us to, to him, one question might be, okay, I need some headcount. Aj, you say, hey, prove to me that AI can't do it. I do some research. I come back. I'm like, hey, Aj, actually, it looks like AI can do it. I don't need headcount. I go back, start doing my work. I get AI to do some of that work. It causes. a massive error. It leads to an hour and a half of network downtime at Shopify. You call me, you're like, dude, what happened? Why did you bust the system? Like, can't believe you did this. Do you know the risk, the money, all that stuff? I'm like,

yo, the AI did it. Like, you told me to let the AI do it. There it is. I'm sorry, man. You yell at the AI. Like, how do we manage that piece? All right. I do not know what exactly he said, the Shopify CEO, but I would say it's not about them. do replace yourself or replace the work by AI doing it. It is use AI to remove the repetitive, remove the boring, remove the tedious, so that I can get velocity, higher velocity, higher productivity, higher quality.

There are the benefits. I want what the mandate is about, improve your productivity, efficiency, velocity, quality, reduce your costs, do all those things. Use AI in your job. And once you are using AI, I bet you, I work with companies. I have worked with many companies.

You know, AI is always about job loss. Everybody starts thinking about job loss. AI is not necessarily about job loss. You know what? This company started using AI for court management, for sales and for other things. They have more work. They had to hire more people to support the business increased because of using AI. So AI is not necessarily about job loss.

AI is about improving and increasing what you were doing. You see? And the way, so coming back to the original point, what can businesses do with AI? Business is all about focusing on the top line or the bottom line. Can I add new line items in my purchase order, in invoices, or can I justify my premium pricing? Can I increase my prices? That's the key as a top line. Bottom line is all about can I make my operations smarter, leaner, more predictable, more scalable, can I do more with whatever I have?

So do better. So top line or bottom line. And I think business should look at exactly like this. Don't jump into it, what neighbors are doing it or what you are hearing. Others are doing it. It may or may not be even useful for you. Look at your business. You know your business better. You know what? Like humans have DNA. Every business has a unique DNA. How it works, how it operates, what it wants to achieve, where it wants to grow. Everything is very unique about every business. Look at it. Like these are the capabilities we discussed. And what will Help me. Do I want personalized experience for my customers?

Do I want to add a co-pilot inside my products? Do I want predictive alerts? Do I want some coach inside my product? Training? Think like this. Think like what will help your top line. I tell you this. Go today to chat GPD or cloud.

Write down. Write down two paragraphs about your business. What you have done so far, either your job. This is what I do. We do this, this, this is what we do. this is what I would put it. Just write down what exactly it is and say this. Give me ideas, AI ideas that I can do.

Give me tangible ideas. I do not need fluff. I do not need ideas which will take years to complete. Put a time scale in immediate, three months benefit, six months benefit. Process ideas. Ask, it will list them. I'm telling you, there will be some ideas you will love them. Everybody will love them.

So keeping humans in the hunt, the art of asking a great question. question will still be a superpower. On your point there, Jeremy, one of the things that personally I've been looking into is what RJ has just explained, probably for a lot of businesses, requires a third party to come in and help them to ask the right questions, to use the right, to prompt engineer, to build the picture, to use the AI, to understand the back and forth and the question structures to ask them. Yes, it is a new job.

You can use the human advisor. You can use the company like me or they're so. many companies out there. Everybody's doing AI. Or you can go to AI itself and ask, what can I do? And talk. Have a gender discussion. You know what? It is fun. It is fun to engage. I sometimes worry that will we start talking to AI so much? I am emotionally attached to my AI when I'm working with them. And I am like sometimes saying the bad words, sometimes saying the good words, sometimes saying thank you. And people are like, wow, AJ, you are very polite today to the AI. And it is like different. So if you're listening to this and you haven't listened to our episode with Kevin Kelly,

one right before this one, the emotional aspect of AI and communicating with AI. We dive deep into that if you want to check that out. But let's, Aj, you've stated a pretty good case for businesses should start to play around with this stuff. So can we start from a, from a, from a, from a studio X perspective, this idea of no code AI agent. Can we start there as a, is a jump off point? And like, what is that?

What could it actually do step by step? from creation to using it on a daily basis. All right. I will go over this. It's not a sales pitch. Okay? It's okay. You know what?

There are many people offering production services. We are one of them. We think we are special. But, you know, it's everybody has to decide and make your own choices. Okay. But tell you, right, how Studio X helps and what you should be looking for. Okay. In any other product when you are selecting.

In the Studio X world, our whole promise is you can use a cloud-based product. or you can install it on your premise. You know what? I'm worried. I don't want to put all my books, all my everything, all my personal contracts in cloud. I'm kind of worried about that concept. So you can run everything on premise, so you can decide first thing.

Hey, I'm using a cloud version or I'm using a non-cloud. Even though we are encrypting data at rest, data at motion, we are doing all the right security things, state of the art stuff, but peace of mind and sometimes business requirements. If you are a government or defense contractor, you do not want your data in cloud. You are not allowed to.

So things like that. Then second step, start with a core of your business. Core of a business is knowledge, all my data, all my documents, all my contracts, all my system. Where is all the information? Like for this podcast, like for your team, all the thousands of podcasts so far and all the information about them. And just imagine you say Studio X, I install it, whether in cloud, I connect it to my data

source. That's all you do. Connect. Within five minutes, you have connected your data source. You have put all this is my confluence, this is my sharepoint, this is my uploaded documents, this is my W-colon drive, C-colon drive, whatever. You put everything. Knowledge is there. Once the knowledge is there, your AI bot is ready.

You can talk to it and it will answer anything. You can say, hey, which episode we had a discussion about emotions with AI? Emotions or any other topic you can ask or give me somebody of those topics or give me 10 podcasts which were similar or anything. You can find all the information. Step two. more AI agents around it. Rules. What can I do?

You know what? Let me connect my email. And then what will happen is every time I send an email, every time an email comes to Jeremy at thinking on paper.com, what happens? It will check. I will send an email to Jeremy myself. And the email I will say, hey, every morning, look at all the emails arrived since yesterday. And just make somebody off the top three things I need to do or five emails I need to respond

and just text me at this number. Done. Suddenly. So basically, start. using StudioX, you add the knowledge, knowledge can be in your emails also. Email is your running knowledge all the time or tickets, support tickets. You can create rules and you can create simple rules by using human language, specifying it and suddenly AI becomes part of your workflow. Now you are offloading your task and start offloading your task, whether it's emails,

whether it's sales or, hey, I got a bill of material and I need to look at all the products and see what is the price today. Check it all the web on this. So it's what StudioX enables. You do natural language conversations using the channels you already know, email, WhatsApp, SMS on your knowledge and connect it to your live knowledge, whether it's email or it's whether your ERP systems, a customer database systems, or everything you connect it. Suddenly AI becomes part of your workflow. You start creating workflows. That's what you will do. Within a week, I think you will have a lot of AI elements in your business. Within a week.

Yes, that's the thing. Yes. The key is, you know what? A lot of work has been done by Sam Altman and all the people, smart people in the world. We don't have to invent the AI. We will use it. It's like this, Microsoft Excel. You know, like people move their books.

Everything was on paper. Thinking on paper. Everybody was writing everything on paper. And they moved to exit. AI is just new software. Use it as a tool. You don't have to create Microsoft Excel. We don't have to create visual basic programming language.

We just use the Excel and we can do. do wonders. Same thing with the AI now. AI is the next level. AI is the new software. That's a great explanation using us as an example and you've actually sparked some ideas from me already. So thank you for that. All right. So if we're using, if we're spinning up these agents to offload some of the remedial tasks, the repetitive task, the crunching task, and we have them set to do that and send us outputs that we can now, as is Packy McCormack and in most human wins talks about us moving to a higher level of abstraction using these new tools and new information to build new things. How do you manage, how do you manage an AI agent? Like if we had an

intern, if we brought an intern into thinking our paper to do all of that stuff for us, we have to manage that intern, set expectations, we have to check in, we have to make sure it's doing the right thing. What are some keys to managing AI agents? I love this question. Okay. And two years back, I told my team, we made a company policy. We said the skills, we said the skills, is not a differentiator anymore that I know C, I know Java, I know programming, no, use AI for that. So don't come to me here and say, oh, I do not know how to do that. No, you know. You know how to do that. You know this question that I do not know how to do that is not a valid question. It's not a statement. You have to just do it. You have to just go to AI and figure out five minutes and you will

know the answers. And the second part, I said, everybody in the company from today is a man You have one engineer reporting to you and that's AI. Everybody has it. So you are not alone. You are not just working by yourself. You have an AI engineer. You have an AI working for you and you can get a lot of things done. The beauty is this person doesn't talk back.

The person works 24 by 7. Doesn't have attitude. Does not have get stressed and does not. It always helping you. Anytime you are not satisfied, you just see new chat and move on. And this starts fresh. And then the third thing, which you are asking, and that comes naturally, then how do I know? How do I manage this?

Is my employee, the AI, working well for me? Is it doing what I want to do? And how do? So the good part is you do not have to do when you are managing AI. You do not have to follow the standard processes or like California policies for performance improvement plans. Each are reviews, yeah. HR reviews and anything. You are the reviewer.

And use it. And if you are not satisfied, learn. how to talk to it. That's the difference and that's the biggest thing in the world. There is a concept of prompting how to talk to it. AI is like a seven-year-old child

with the world information on its fingertips and ready to please and very creative. It will leave no stone untone to give you an answer at high speed with the knowledge it has. But if your question is not right, you will get an answer. But what do you do in that seven-year-old

starts running down the hallway screaming with scissors in their hand. Well, it doesn't, doesn't it? Because you program that all in. In fact, the HR yearly review is done by itself. And so because it's continually self-learning, you don't actually have to worry with the seven-year-old running down the corridor with the scissors because it's all been programmed to not do that,

to iterate, to compound its knowledge, to compound his experience, to compound what it's doing correct. And in fact... You use it. This is the point. And you change it. I'm starting you chat if you don't like the screaming. It's his own.

How do you have. Well, what if, all right, so what if, all right. So, what if, I know. Sorry, let me just say one thing. Okay, so you are responsible for asking the right question, giving the right directive. That's what I was trying to say. So you know what?

It's not like I see bad in the other people. It's because I am the bad. Okay, don't blame the AI. Don't start looking at it. Learn how to use it, love to how to instruct it. Well, it will learn with you. It will grow with you. But you have to learn how to ask.

And you know what I'm telling you. The better you ask, better answers. That's a really good point. Again, keeping humans, what, Mark? In the hunt. Keeping humans in the hunt. So you're, so you could actually prompt an AI in a nefarious direction, obviously, right? And if you do that, the responsibility is on you. But the coupling and tracking, right, I'm just thinking about like, all right, we're, we're society. We're a microcosm. It's me. It's Mark. It's you. And, you know, you and I, Ajay, We use our AI and it's great. You know, we do AI performance reviews and they, it's awesome. We do it for the right thing. And Mark's like, hey, as you grow up AI, I want you to rebel against me a little bit at 5% a year. And the AI would in turn do that, right?

Or find ways to do that. So Mark could be down the road cultivating this AI that is, is aiming to eventually supersede you in a way. So it is all about. That's one of those things with like, it sounds really nice in high. insight. It's really romantic. It's like, yeah, we should all grow up and rebel. Wouldn't it be great? And if that's your kids, okay. But if it's an algorithm, you don't actually want it to rebel, you wouldn't program that self-destructive rebellious. But it depends. As Jeremy is saying, it depends. What you want to get out of it. If you really wanted it to rebel, it's okay. You

know what? My top engineer, last year, he said one thing. And that was so, you know, he's so good. Okay, he's like 10, 10,000 times better than me. So I am like sometimes, I am also very very passionate and I'm arrogant and all the humans, everything worse than normal human. But I caution and I want something, want and I go after it. And then he said, Ajik, it's okay to challenge me. You don't have to stop. It's okay. Go for it.

And that is what it is when I see, when I are here when Jeremy is saying, it's okay. Let me I challenge you. Go for it. Because you know what? Maybe something else will come out which we were not thinking. And if nothing else, you know what, new chat. and move on. Okay.

So you will be. But, you know, we're talking more like AI like this, but you know, just coming back to the business, right, the applications. So we talked about,

like you can do applications for top line or bottom line. Top line applications are more around like, hey, how do I do? Personalize experience, voice control, predictive alerts, coach built in product,

co-pilot built in product. Or the bottom line applications could be real-time monitoring in your manufacturing. A lot of people companies have their cameras, you know, monitoring their factory. But just imagine those cameras could monitor more. That images can be fed to a software, that software can do something more

without any having investment or something and it can look if the machine is down. If a person is hurt, every person is an area they should not be or if a person is lifting a big glass wrongly or something like that. AI can help in those operational things start thinking like how AI or computer vision will help you with quality control, how it will help with the safety, the business, how it will help with, or maybe it will help with your customer support agents. You know, people don't want to talk to bots. I understand. People do not want to, like, and you know what?

And everybody is very hot on talking, like voice bots. Young people talk with fingers. They don't talk with mouth most of the time, right? So you want to. It drives me crazy. So I don't think they are looking for a bot to talk to. They just want chat. So if you are looking at that, so agent assist, like I talk to a customer support agent,

but the customer support agent now uses the bot to help. So not the end user. So you can help your customers in so many ways, unique ways. Enabling your customer support people to be better, enabling your troubleshooting, your service team to do better, enabling your sales team or inventory team for demand forecasting to do better. Things like this. So there are many applications.

Start thinking in those. Okay. So they get excited. They're like, all right, I believe in testing some of this stuff. And they go back to their boss. They're like, oh, I found this thing. I think it's great. Boss is like, yeah, that sounds kind of cool.

You know, what do we have to do? Well, all we got to do is, you know, put this little agent on our, on our computer. We got to feed it with some day. And the IT department goes, yo, hold on. We're not putting anything on our computer and we're not sending our data anywhere. So how do you navigate internal IT departments? 100%. And this is why I said if the company is not, even if they are cloud friendly,

AI is a bigger challenge. Because AI is using your knowledge. knowledge and that you know what and it's not about the company it's not about your vendor like when i am the vendor to my customers i have all the best intentions why will i try to mess it up and so there are all the small companies big companies in open a i they have a cloud and everything they have the best intentions in the world but there is a 400 billion dollar industry that's called the cyber hacking industry these are the individuals or teams sitting in some room somewhere around the world and their whole job is to hack the hell out of the system.

Find that information. Find my phone number, your phone number, last purchase for your credit card or your social secrets. So many things they want to find out. Those people will go after the cloud. And if the AI, you are putting information and that cloud is hacked, your information is hacked. Very private information. So IT is not wrong when they are like, I don't want in that direction.

Okay. That's why I said earlier also, and we do it in Studio X also, think on premise. Try to put like 20, A.m. tools. We are using AI. We are using AI for recording meeting. We are using AI for video. We are using AI. Now you have 20 tools you are using. You have exposed your attack survey surface 20 times. There are 20 places you are connected. You have to be careful. And that is the thing. And then there are you have to also focus on the ethics of the AI company. Are they using your data to build models and learn and become better and sell those models? Because at the end, that is a very risky

proposition also. So you have to think those two things. So I always say, try to find a solution in which your data doesn't leave your building. Try to see that. If it's not possible, make sure the company you are working has strong privacy and ethics policies. You need that. I will not, I will not tell IT, oh, no, it's okay to let it go. It's AI. These are some of the most succinct and tangible takeaways, I think, that I've heard on implementing AI into business. I, I think, Mark, your point in having you, the listener, test some of this stuff out. I think there are some great nuggets that you could pull out as an action roadmap if you're interested in this. I think you've been spot on me.

The 80-20 principle, okay, for listeners, for businesses which are listening to this, they haven't started yet with AI or they've used chat GPT, what is going to be the biggest bang for their book across verticals, so across marketing, across finance, it doesn't matter in manufacturing, whatever it is. What would be the one or two AI tools that they should introduce first just to get the maximum impact as quickly as they can? I have a guess on this one. Go ahead. What do you think about customer support? Customer support is amazing, although before that I will add knowledge here. Enterprise knowledge search, business knowledge search. Knowledge is so crucial, fundamental to your

business. It is needed when you are sick for somebody else to take action. It is needed for you to take better actions. It is needed for decision making. It is needed for your better inventory, better production, better demand, better sales. Your knowledge, you have knowledge in two types. The text knowledge or image knowledge and the other is the number knowledge, which is like the numbers, the sales results, the inventory and product, all those things. To those things. I think I would say first go for knowledge, enable knowledge, enterprise knowledge search for your business so that you do, you have the answers. You are no more looking for. or hey, only Bob knows how to get me a chart on this or only Bob knows this data.

Get that information. That is the first part. Then all these things come immediately. A customer support, agent assist for your customer support, support for your service team for troubleshooting, support for your operations to do better inventory management, prediction. All those things will come after that. I think first step would be knowledge.

I think that's the most important application because that makes your customer. because that makes your company, it's like this, all your company is inside with an AI agent, which is there for future. Even 100 years from now, it will have that knowledge. So you have just suddenly transformed all your company knowledge and remove the dependency on one or two individuals or 20 or 200 or some computers into a thing which you can rely on for future forever. Here's really interesting. And that's great. Now, knowledge and implementing training programs, right, for new employees, onboarding programs,

programs from new employees, things that new employees can go to and be like, hey, has anyone else ever dealt with this situation? Here's the human side of this. You know, so they, you know, what happens to Jim when he gets hit by the bus? You know, Jim knows all of this stuff. He's got 30 years worth of experience. And now you're like, yo, Jim, can you spit out everything into this repository so we can, you know, we can use that experience. And then Jim starts to go, wait a minute, I'm actually getting pretty old right now. My stuff is valuable. My information is valuable. Should I, you know, we can use that experience? Should I? just freely put it into this model so they could extend Jim and when Jim retires or when Jay, hey, we don't need Jim anymore because Jim put all his knowledge in here. How is that going to, I don't, how are people going to navigate that as owners and also as knowledge holders? It's a balance. It's a balance. You'll be surprised how many people actually want to offload their knowledge

so that they are not the bottleneck. I want to like tell everything so that nobody is always bothering me and I can do what I want to do. Even the senior people or sometimes people, Or sometimes people really genuinely care and hear, man, I will be retiring in one year or two year. I need to make sure the knowledge is there somewhere so the business can proceed without me. And sometimes it's the mandate from the CEO. Thou shall do it.

And you do it. And you know what? Fear of job loss is natural. But job loss will happen for other reasons. Job loss will happen for economy going tanking. Job loss will happen for so many things. I think by adding the knowledge, enabling other businesses to use your knowledge, other people to use your knowledge and move fast.

27% of sales deals do not happen because there was a slowdown in the information. Just imagine that each business can be now 27% faster. And that will help you ultimately. Tell me one thing. If you are enabling the business and business is growing, will you be fired? No. Company needs you more and company needs more people and it's not going to be easy. One point which we keep missing and we should not.

Human in the loop. You are that 15% that. It uses the AI and knows if the AI is doing it right and is always working better. So, and you are improving. You have something else. I don't think people should be afraid of it. But if you're doing really, if your job is really, really, really boring, repetitive, and that's all you do, you should be worried.

That's a lot of people. I refer to it now as almost collateral damage that there will be. We had David Bianchi on a few weeks ago, Hollywood actor. He was saying AI is not fair. The distribution of AI will not be fair. There will be casualties. You are incredibly optimistic, RJ. You're incredibly hopeful.

I don't think we've had anyone on the show who is as pro-AI in the business world for you. So just to end this, I want to ask a question about the future workforce. I want to ask a question about my kids, listeners kids, and my daughter is nine, my son is six. In 15, 20 years time when they're in the workforce, things are going to be different. What would you suggest parents try to do? to orientate their children, to focus their children's attention to, where should they be thinking about education? How should we be thinking as parents? Who are, and I know you said we shouldn't be worried, but we are, so what should we be thinking? All right, so I will start like this.

As a parent, if you think your child can see better, you get the eyeglasses, and that's how your child performs better, because the child needs eyeglasses. Or sometimes you think, oh, no, you know what, they are these, what are those, you know, those blue light glasses, they will make you do better with computers and things. You don't really need them, but if you have them, they are better. Or things like that. Parents do that. AI is like that.

Treat AI like a tool to help your children and enable your children to use AI. Do not be the one like, oh, don't use AI. No, no, no, no, no. Okay, let them use AI. Use AI and become proficient and efficient in using AI. Because you will be the master of that AI. You have to become the master of that assistant. how to use it, how to get more done from that.

That is one thing. Expose your children with AI so that they can use it. That is first thing I would say. Second thing is that human in the loop, that 15% is about problem solving. That human in the loop is about the human connection and problem solving in context of human relationships, human context. So you have to really make sure your children are more focused on that problem solving. That's the next layer, which is will be always different. and as a human we will always keep doing it.

Keep doing it. Even if AI does it, you know, I do it all the time. My personal productivity with using AI 25 times. And I believe when you said, Jeremy, that there will be trillion-dollar companies with very less people. It will happen. But the key thing is, there is still, you know what?

Sometimes I'm sitting with multiple AI agents and going into different questions and same questions and that problem solving. That is the skill. Please focus your children to learn that. That is the most important thing. just them learning the Pythagoras theorem or like, you know, the sine, cosine, the tangent, the theta, the technometric formulas and all those things, they're okay. And I think education, education is important, whether you do traditional systems, college systems, school systems, school systems, work from home systems, study from home system, whatever, doesn't matter.

But education is important. And I will say education of AI and how to use AI, important, use it. That will be important skill. And that monitoring, that is the AI doing right, there will be tons of jobs. jobs in that, trust me, that monitoring AI jobs are going to increase tremendously. Asi, I couldn't agree more on a lot of this. I think about this a lot and, you know, the next iteration of the human condition in a way. And I think, I think tenacity and grit are going to be important because like you said, you challenge your employees, your organization, you have the

ability to understand and know everything. So go figure it out. Go find it in all of that. So moving through the beginner's mind, Mark, I know there was a lot of chatter on LinkedIn this week about us being big proponents of the beginner's mind. It's not comfortable to be in that spot. It's not comfortable to think on paper sometimes. But I think that is a tool that that is a capability that we can cultivate today that seems counterproductive. Right. It seems like, oh, technology is just going to do all these things for us. But we need to cultivate these very human capabilities to make sure we can use technology to the to our biggest advantage, I think. Picking up what you're putting down, man. That was great. All right. Very nice. No, amazing talking to you guys. Really. It was fun. I enjoy talking about this and I enjoy talking in general. Thank you. Well, we enjoy talking to you. And disruptors and curious minds, if you're getting to the end of this episode and you've listened to it, I need you to forward it to somebody that really wants to understand AI because the nuggets that were dropped by this gentleman here today, the tangible action plan to try and test and learn and get better is in the middle of this episode. So please send it to someone here. who needs it. You can find us always thinking on paper. We'll share a bunch of information about Ajay and Studio X and some of the things he's doing. We have a book club. We're reading

Irreducible by Frederico Fajin about consciousness, AI, the difference between carbon and silicate. We're in the middle of all these different worlds. Like, subscribe, hang out with us. Be curious. Day disruptive. Think it on paper.