The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Lean AI: How Innovative Startups Use Artificial Intelligence to Grow by Lomit Patel

Episode Date: July 13, 2020

Lean AI: How Innovative Startups Use Artificial Intelligence to Grow by Lomit Patel Theleanai.com

you're listening to the chris voss show podcast we interview the smartest people in the room the ceos authors thought leaders visionaries and motivators to fill up your brain and make you better looking here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube,

hit that bell notification button so you get all the notifications of what we're doing. Today we've got another exciting author from Riley Books. And if you want to watch the video portion of it, you can go to that youtube.com Chris Voss channel, or you can just listen on Spotify, iHeartRadio, iTunes, Google Play, all the great places we have the Chris Voss Show podcast. Be sure to refer to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Today, we have a gentleman. He's written a book called Lean AI, How Innovative Startups Use Artificial Intelligence to Grow. And this guy is pretty amazing. It's Lomit Patel. He's the Vice President of Growth at IMVU.

Prior to IMVU, Lomit managed growth at early-stage startups, including Roku, IPO, Trust and ID, acquired by Equifax, Texture, acquired by Apple, you may have heard of them, and Earthlink. Lomit is a public speaker, author, and advisor, and recognized as a mobile hero by Liftoff. Lomit's new best-selling book, Lean AI, is partic reese the lean startup series now available at amazon and i'm sure all the book places uh out there welcome to the show how you doing buddy doing great chris thanks for having me good good congratulations on the book and uh give us some plugs the dot coms you want us to go check you out at yeah so the best places to find me

uh is on linkedin if people uh search for me lomit Patel on LinkedIn, I connect with anyone who reaches out to me. I put a lot of great content there. I also have a blog, which is pretty much my name, lomitpatel.com. So, you know, that's another place people can reach out to me as well. And I'm also on Twitter. So my handle on Twitter is at Patel, L-O-M. If you want to follow me there. So tell us about artificial intelligence, lean AI. What was this book? What was the overview of this book? What is it about?

And why did you decide to write it? Great question. So the overview of the book is pretty much based on, on my own personal journey at this company where i work right now called envue i've been here for just under four years but when i joined the company uh you know one of the things that um i kind of helped champion was was for us from moving away from just being kind of a desktop app game into becoming a mobile game app. And as you know, on mobile, people don't have that much user attention. And so we wanted to come up with a

better way to try and drive growth on mobile, where we could leverage a lot of our user data and turn that data into insights in real time to really enable us to grow better, faster, and smarter. And so that's where AI really came into play for us. And you've been developing AI for a lot of time. I mean, you've got a very impressive resume that you've gone back here. Where did you grow up at? I actually grew up in England. Oh, did you?

I did, yeah. I spent a good part of my formative years in London. And I came over for grad school right around the late 90s because I was really interested in internet and digital marketing, and there wasn't a lot going on at the time in the UK. So that's what kind of drove me out here. And then once I graduated, ultimately, if you want to work for startups, which is what I wanted to do, you have to figure out a way to get to Silicon Valley in San Francisco. And so I ended up coming here and I've been here for over like 16, 17 years. That's awesome.

Just be honest, though. I mean, you came from London. You just like having the sun around, right? It makes a big difference. I'm telling you. I mean, it's nice to – well, California is definitely – the weather is different from London for the most part. London's a beautiful place.

Yeah, it definitely is. I would – you know, between that and Seattle, I would have a hard time living there. It seems like a wonderful place, but I just get depressed. You also have a podcast, too, where you talk about AI, don't you? Yeah. You know, I've been on – I don't actually have my own podcast. Oh, these are your appearances on podcasts.

Yeah, I've been on a lot of podcasts. You've been on so many, I thought you had one. Yeah, I know, I know. As you can imagine, AI has become a pretty popular topic that people want to talk about. It certainly is. In fact, we have a podcast that's dedicated to it, Spatial Computing Podcast, which this will be appearing on as well. So give us a rundown on what people should know about AI.

Our audience comprises people that are experts in AI and they're in Silicon Valley all the way down to someone who may not really understand the layman. I'm not even sure they know what AI means. and they're in Silicon Valley all the way down to someone who may not really understand the layman, you know, I'm not even sure they know what AI means. Yeah, you know, so maybe, you know, let's sort of use kind of a definition in terms of how I look at what AI means. So the simplistic way of looking at AI is how can you get machines to think and act like

humans, you know, and there's different forms that kind of fall under that. But one way that a lot of AI works is through machine learning. And that's primarily where you can get a lot of data and you can, you know, kind of get the machine to kind of take a look at this data and try to figure out, you know, the patterns of what the data is really trying to say and provide insights. That's ultimately, you know, for me, you know, AI was really about trying to help solve problems or use cases that were really relevant to us, you know, in the business world, rather than try and use AI for a lot of these elaborate stuff that people talk about in the media and creating robots. It was nothing like that. Ours is more like real life use cases where ultimately it's about extracting value that really gives us and folks in business the ability to get more predictable about acquiring new customers and driving revenue right because that's that's what matters about you know ultimately your

business is only as good as uh surviving and thriving if you if you continue to focus on those two areas if you're not growing you're dying that's usually the rule in business that's true i've found um so you've written this book and it's how innovative startups use artificial intelligence to grow. And so you give them, you kind of, I guess, go do a walkthrough in the book of different startups and how they've used AI. Yeah. So, you know, for the most part, what people don't realize is AI does exist in a lot of platforms right now, at least when it, when it comes to like, you know, growing your business, examples being like Google, Facebook,

and all these other places where you spend money. I mean, they all have some form of AI built in, but, but, but the difference is that a lot of that AI is self-serving because it's really about you spending more money with them. And, and, and. And that makes sense because they're not nonprofits, right? And so what I started looking at was how do these different big investment trading firms use AI? Because ultimately, what people don't realize is when you're buying advertising, it's all like an exchange of supply and demand that drives prices up and down on how much you want to pay to get your ad in AI that kind of sits between you and all of these other places where you spend your money

because you want to try to take a holistic view on the entire customer journey of how you're going to acquire customers, how you're going to retain them, and how you're going to monetize them. And instead of trying to run those elements in silos through these different partners, you want to have like a machine that's taking all of this data that that you get on your customers in real time

extract value in terms of where you should be spending your money what's the right message you should be sending that customer and then and then once they sort of you know come into your website or your app what's the right personalized experience you want to give them that gets them engaged in the product? And once you get them engaged, then you clearly want to identify pretty quickly how you're going to monetize, because ultimately you have to monetize the customer

in order to try and drive revenue. And so, you know, all of these actions and behaviors that happen within our product enables our AI to really identify what's the ideal user journey that we want to pivot different users through, as well as who are the right users that we want to attract into the business in the first place, and what's the most relevant messages or creatives and ads that we want to use. And then it's a matter of continuing to sort of build these little habits for these users to continue to keep using the product.

Because as you know, human behavior is pretty predictable. If you get them to do certain things repetitively for a certain number of days, in general, it's like 20 to 30 days, they'll continue to do it, right? There you go yeah gamification of that's what it is sales basically exactly i've always been i've you know i play a lot of video games we have a gaming channel and a podcast for gaming and uh i've always been kind of interested in you know the gamification models you you know, how they deal with us and how they train and everything else.

It's an interesting thing to see not only that in marketing. So you talk about AI growth marketing equals smart marketing. Give us some details on how that can really help you grow, I guess. Yeah, so a couple of examples, you know, based on the entire user journey, you grow, I guess. Yeah, so a couple of examples. You know, based on the entire user journey, you know, one part of your focus is really, you know, most marketing teams have a budget to try and spend on advertising for the most part

to acquire new customers. And so one use case that we use AI for is just have a holistic view across all these places where we're spending our money right now and let us know in real time, should we be spending on Google more than Facebook or Apple or all these like 20 to 30 different partners that we work with based on how those exchanges are in real time. And so what the AI is able to do is it kind of knows, ultimately, an AI is about optimizing towards an outcome.

And so for us, the outcome is two specific success metrics. One is the cost to acquire a customer, and the second is the return on investment. So it's always optimizing towards those two end goals. And it's trying to figure out at any given time, should we be spending more of our budget on Facebook if that exchange is more favorable or any of the others. And so it's adjusting bids and budgets in real time, kind of like buying stocks, like a day trader. I mean, that's kind of a use case, even though people don't think about it. But marketers are like day traders because you've got money,

but you're not really just spending it. You're spending it with specific objectives you're trying to achieve. And so for us, it's trying to get the most best return on that investment. And so it just bids, it just budgets. But the other thing that it really helps us to is orchestrate these campaigns because ultimately, you know, the secret to driving growth

is really to try and run as many different experiments as possible to really figure out what works and what doesn't work. Because what works like today is probably not going to be the same thing that's going to work in a month or depend on how market conditions continue to change. And so the secret sauce is really having this AI machine

that orchestrates, like we used to run maybe a couple of hundred experiments when I used to have a team doing this. Now we have this machine, so we're able to run 5,000 to 10,000 different experiments across the entire customer journey that gets us better, faster, and smarter to really get to ultimately creating the most personalized experience, starting from who we should be targeting with the right ad, with the right message, and when they come into the product to pivot that product experience to match that expectation that's going to lead them to becoming the best lifetime value customer for us. And it's using all these different touch points that we have from the ads that we use to the in-app messages,

to push notifications, to retargeting ads. But all of this is kind of working in sequence and it's kind of just like this flywheel. If you want to imagine, ultimately, it's about increasing, smart marketing is about increasing your velocity of learning as quickly as possible because as you continue to get more data in your customers, you can build better insights on who those customers are. And as you build better insights, it enables you to build better algorithms. That's where AI comes in because it ultimately helps you build a better, smarter algorithm to attract that type of customer, to retain that customer, and to monetize.

And so as you continue to do that, you end up getting even more data because you end up acquiring more customers and the machine just ends up getting smarter over time. There you go. And that's really important, especially in today's world when companies are going to be, you know,

not as rich in money as they possibly can to make sure they're getting the best return on investment on their ads and know what works. i know ad prices have been falling and moving around quite a bit with the with the thing in fact they fell quite a bit on facebook with the with the covid 19 um and uh so you help these companies you've written about these companies and how they can how they can do better on what everything they do. Do you find a lot of companies are adopting to this or there's still a huge amount of companies need to step into this field and master it? Yeah, so less than 5% of the companies right now are really adopting this to

the extent that I talk about lean AI. Most companies aren't really doing it this way. The way most companies are doing it right now is that they've kind of elevated to the stage where they're trusting these different partners to try and use their AI for doing this. But what they don't realize is there's a huge gap between just having somebody else doing it because then they're just doing it that's more self-serving versus you building the layer that sits between you and them which enables you to be able to to do things that are ultimately more personalized to hitting your objectives and goals so yeah there's definitely a lot there's a lot of room right probably give you a better turnaround and you know like the worst thing you can ever do is buy some ad space and the thing gets out of hand and you don't get the ROI

and, you know, you've misplaced like a certain vendor and you don't find out until you spend the money. And then you're just like, oh, crap. That didn't go well at all. Oh, man, if I could have stopped that bleeding that I was doing with that campaign. So it can definitely save people money. And it sounds like more and more companies

need to adopt to it and get up to par. Yeah, I think, Chris, you bring up a good point. Like in the old days, I'm not sure if you ever saw that show, Mad Men, that used to be pretty popular. So like in the old days, I'm not sure if you ever saw that show Mad Men. That used to be pretty popular. But there was a lot of pressure on trying to be like that human genius who comes up with kind of that right creative message that's ultimately going to make a profound difference. And as you know, as humans, I mean, for the most part, you're throwing darts in the air and you're hoping one's going to hit, right?

So instead of having that kind of pressure, now there's no excuse because everything's trackable, right? There's data coming from all over. I mean, you have more – companies have more access to data on their users than ever before. The only difference is the data by itself isn't meaningful unless you can extract value out of it pretty quickly and glean those insights. And so, you know, now instead of putting the pressure on having and hiring these genius marketing folks, you're really putting less pressure on that. And there's more emphasis on the machine to really do a lot of that heavy lifting. And you don't really have to hire a lot of people on the execution side now because now the machine does a lot of the management, the execution ends up providing a much better ROI to the entire business, right? Because you're running with smaller teams, you're able to extract a machine that's able to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And, you know, obviously with COVID, there's been a big impact with with a lot of companies needing

to pivot and work remotely I mean for us I'll give you a good example because a lot of our you know another thing that goes hand in hand with AI is automation because because once once the AI you know figures out what you want to do you want to try to automate all of those levers that it can take action on pretty quickly and not have a manual, you know, interjection at that stage, otherwise you're delaying the whole process, right? And so because we've automated so much of our tasks and processes, you know, we as a business at Enview, we were growing pretty profoundly, but during COVID-19 to what you had mentioned, you know, when prices started to come down, a machine automatically started to increase our bids. So we started to spend, I think it was about 68 to 75% more of our budget. And we've continued to spend more because we started getting more favorable rates and we were able to acquire the

same quality of users at a much lower price and so you know our business has profoundly you know was growing but now it's growing it started growing at a much bigger velocity and you know and we removed a lot of that human in um emotion that goes into like reacting to you know crisis where you where the natural reaction was for most companies the reason why prices went down is because a lot of companies pulled back their budget to really figure out what do we do here you know and and and that was you know during those six weeks we we acquired more customers than we probably did in in the last couple of months oh wow at a fraction of the price.

That's freaking amazing. Yeah. I mean, when you think about it, everyone's online. yeah. And, and,

and that, you know, again, you know, you know, the other thing that, that I didn't have to worry about, and I have a small lean team is that I wasn't dependent on them,

you know, needing to pull all these levers and, and, and, and do the work. All they had to focus primarily, a lot of their focus was on, on trying to just make sure that we kept supporting the machine with the right ads. Cause we started changing our messaging and, and, and the machine was doing all of this heavy lifting, you know, so, you know, that's kind of the big difference, you know, between, you know, the companies that have really done well in Silicon Valley have automated a lot of this thing. They've turned marketing into a true science project where it's all about coming up with hypothesis and then running these experiments

to either prove out whether the hypothesis is true or false but you're doing it at such a volume and velocity that that you know even even you know it's not like you have a hit rate of like you know nine out of ten but what you do have is you you're doing it at such high volume and velocity, your trajectory of figuring it out is a lot faster than somebody who isn't doing it at that rate. And it's probably 24-7, right? So a normal employee would show up 9 to 5 and be like, I'll see you the rest of the day. The computer can run 24-7 and adjust to everything in real time so it's amazing the world i give you one example

sure it is i give you one example of where the machine uh you know where that really comes into play because with us um you know uh right now we're a global business. So, you know, people work on different time zones across the world and, you know, with our machine, you know, you know, it's able to pivot and change behaviors based on where you, where, where it's spending that money, whether it's in the U S or, and in Europe and in Asia, so that so that, you know, over the 24 hours, we're getting the maximum efficiencies across all those time zones without being reliant on, you know, people that were changing these things. And obviously, we had to neglect certain time zones because we didn't have people that

were willing to stay up those hours. So you can be a worldwide business, run 7 it's all computer i mean that's beautiful that's beautiful and you can adjust in real time when prices change uh you can adapt and and uh wow man it's just gonna be crazy the future that we're moving to i think i'm gonna put ai on my tinder profile or something so it can track i I don't know. It'll just let me know when I'm supposed to marry someone. You know what I mean? I like to say there's an app for that too. I mean, that's what these dating apps do, right?

I mean, they use a lot of AI to try and sort of come up with those matches. Because, I mean, there's a reason why they try to ask you about, you know, what are your interests and then they know where you're from and then they try to sort of match you up with kind of the ideal person that could be a good match. I just wanted to call me and just say you just need to marry her and spend the rest of your life with her. This is the one right here.

I know. But what I was going to say i mean i mean i mean uh dating apps is smart enough to know that they don't want to get you matched up perfectly right away otherwise they'll lose you as a customer right they want you to continue to keep dating right keep spinning you think about it that's right i mean i mean i mean keep spinning that's right i mean i mean that's part of the uh part of the hypothesis where you know i'm sure you know it kind of goes into where they're building algorithms where they want to make make sure that you still continue to at least get six months of revenue out of you before you

get hit so they're not going to give me the one they're just going to be a little off the one because they need you know because they you're right If they give me, if they're like, this is your perfect match in the world. We found the one like in the universe that you should hook up with. But if we give you that one, crap, we won't get any more money from you. So we can't have that. It is amazing. Automated intelligence or artificial intelligence and what's going on. But, you know, I, I,

I love artificial intelligence for my dog so they could figure out, you know, when they come to me and start banging, I'm like, what do you want? You want treats? You want to go outside? You want a doggy toy? What do you want? And the, I could, you know, the computer, my phone could just look at him and be like, the dog wants a toy. That would be, that'd be good but no this is really great that businesses uh get this and businesses are slowly adopting them and i kind of figured silicon valley will want to be one of the first people to um to look at that the nice thing about business ai for what

you're talking about for sales and revenue growth is we don't have to really worry about turning into Skynet and doing the whole, you know, Elon Musk is railed on AI a few times. He's like, we shouldn't have robots and stuff. But I don't know. I don't know. He's smoking some stuff every now and then. So I don't know what that's about on Joe Rogan's podcast. Yeah. But those are the things that gets the headlines right so

i mean if your objective is to be in the news and and continue to get publicity for somebody's doing it he's doing it somewhere you want you want to take an extra he's a i'm not saying i would just say he's a great marketer there you go okay all right i see what you're doing you know the political thing no but i i like elon musk most times um so some of his latest tweets so it's been kind of a little out there but i know he was one person who was kind of banging that drum for a while against ai where he was like oh you know it's gonna turn to sky and the terminator and you know dun dun dun every time i into Skynet, the Terminator, and, you know, dun-dun-dun. Every time I watch that Boston Dynamics talk, I hear the Terminator theme music in my head. But, no, AI and automation, this is all stuff that's going to help us in the future, medically, business-wise, everything else.

Hopefully, make our world smarter, help drive our cars. I'm really kind of bummed out with COVID-19 that I was hoping we'd have all you know automated cars by now you know that whole vision of the of the where you pretty much have a disposable car that shows up when you want it you don't even have to own a car anymore i was hoping to help be here by now but uh i guess with covid waymo and a lot of people have had to shutter their projects or at least put them on mothballs until we can get this COVID thing out of control or under control. We have it out of control now. We're doing good on that part. Yeah.

So what else do we need to know about what's in your book and some of the things that you share with readers there? Yeah. So, you know, I mean, the book can be basically looked at in terms of like two parts. The first part is really about really understanding what AI is, how you can really leverage it for growth in your business. And, you know, and the key is, you know, ultimately you need to try and create a culture within a business that's going to, you know, get behind digital transformation. And so, you know, it kind of walks through kind of my own personal journey on how I was able to sort of take, you know, a culture and really turn them into really becoming, really getting behind supporting AI. And, you know, that's important

because ultimately, you know, one team can't really make AI successful. It has to really start from the top. You want to get your CEO and the other executives really behind this. And, you know, getting that C-level support is really important. And then you want to obviously, you know, try to make sure, you know, as other people get involved because you need cross-functional support to be successful, that you identify use cases which i talk about which are not way out there but but but they're like real life use cases that can add tangible value to the business pretty quickly so it's not like you're kind of going on this tandem where you know where you're going to invest into something

and and it's going to take five to ten years for the company to really see the benefit. Because the problem with that is ultimately people are going to run out of motivation to keep that thing going, right, as the costs start to mount up. So think of practical use cases. Think of, you know, and the book really goes into like, you know, what are the right use cases that can provide really immediate good value and then the other decision is really build versus buy you know and and and the truth is now there's so much more technology that's out there that you don't need to go and just build this in silo and build your own little empire of this machine because it can be a big distraction you can actually take a couple of systems that are out there and just connect them together and you'll get a pretty good AI intelligent machine that can enable you to execute on at least 95% of those use cases that you'd want to use it for today. And then the second part of

the book talks more about, you know, once you have AI, you know, how are you really going to grow your business and drive that kind of revenue? Because that's where the marketing piece comes in, and it talks about different strategies on how you can use that. And the other part is how do you build the right team to help support you to get AI to really be able to work as effectively as possible. And the key thing that I sort of touch on in the book is that ultimately it's the human, you know, the future of work isn't really about machines. It's about human intelligence and artificial intelligence working well together.

And there's certain types of skill sets that you need to try and, you know, people, I mean, ultimately people need to start thinking about, you know, how, especially if you're working, is how are you going to continue to provide value to your employer in the future, right? And start thinking about the skill sets you need, because the skill set, I mean, you don't necessarily need to be, you know, a great programmer and go deep into like AI and be a data scientist. I mean, that would be nice. But the truth is, if you can become kind of the person who can kind of, you know,

bring value from the business standpoint, because ultimately it's going to take somebody who can really understand the business and be able to work cross-functionally with all the different teams to really champion and bring these projects, you know, and successfully implement them. That can be a really important role. And then the role about once you bring them in, having the right skill sets to – because the human skill set is going to be more around problem solving,

coming up with the ideas of being creative, as well as relationships and leadership because the machine can't go and make all these relationships with these partners that you work with like Google or whatever. You're not going to send a robot to these meetings, so you need to be the person. I mean, that's where ultimately the soft skills are going to become a much bigger part. And people don't realize, know ultimately the soft skills are going to become a much bigger part and people don't realize i mean soft skills are really important even today if

you really want to move up in your career but in the future that's going to really differentiate you from the folks that don't really end up becoming successful yeah i guess like 40 or 50 years from now is when the robots just go to the meetings themselves and run themselves they're just like yeah they'll be talking to each other then meetings themselves and run themselves. They're just like, yeah, we got this. They'll be talking to each other then, right? That's right, yeah. They're just a CEO sitting in a room with a bunch of bots, robots. So what are we doing in the sales thing?

So what's the title of usually someone who oversees a sales process like this? Yeah, so generally, I mean, what I've found, you know, in Silicon Valley, they have this concept now called a growth team. And what a growth team does, which is different from a marketing team, which is generally what people have used, is a growth team is really responsible for the entire user journey. And so it doesn't just focus on certain elements of marketing, it really focuses on the entire experience from how you acquire customers, how you retain and how you monetize customers. And so within those facets, you know, a lot of the

retention comes into the product experience. So this team works cross functionally with the product team to come up with different ways to improve the product experience, because this team works cross-functionally with the product team to come up with different ways to improve the product experience. Because in Silicon Valley, product plays a key part into keeping customers around. And then you've got all this data. Instead of having different teams working in silos to execute, it's kind of like having this squat team that kind of works cross-functionally across all of those areas. But you have someone who's either like a head of growth or vice president of growth that is kind of like the quarterback who's pretty much responsible for kind of, you know, helping to cultivate, you know, what, you know,

the overarching strategy on how we're going to get the business to grow. And there's different facets that come into that. And AI is a big part of that because ultimately it's about, you know, using your, turning your data into your superpower, right? That's what a lot of companies will come to realize that, you know, right now we're talking about this, but there's only, as I mentioned, you know, the opportunity is really because only 5% of companies are really doing this right now. So, you know, the majority aren't.

But, you know, the question is, are you going to adopt this before your competitors do? Because whoever does, they're going to start going on that flywheel a lot quicker. And they're going to start racing away before you get onto it, right? Yeah. I remember the days when Barnes & Noble used to be like the biggest bookseller. And they didn't get online first, but Amazon did. And, of course, you know, they did probably a lot of different great features. And by the time, I mean, I think it was just a couple months later,

they lost getting online by three or four months. features and by the time i mean i don't think it was just a couple months later i don't know they lost they lost getting online by three or four months and amazon you know and you can see the results right now darns a noble five bankruptcy and amazon's been rocking it um so i i know that we're entering a period where a lot of people are getting laid off and we're gonna you know we've talked to this for years where people need to get retooled and relearn new skills and stuff. So you see this as a burgeoning job industry in the future? Yeah, you know, you know, I do. You know, I think, you know, going back to what I mentioned, you know, soft skills are

going to be really important, but also just having, you know, kind of just a good understanding on business and technology, you know, and how those two facets can interchange. Because most businesses now, especially with COVID-19, are going to accelerate the whole digital transformation because because one thing that technology can help you do is ultimately it you know it can help you become more efficient or or or better execution which ultimately helps you either make money or save money right and and so you know uh that's why i think you know uh like one of the things i did on my team was to try and get the folks that I had and get them to do more training in certain aspects around really understanding how this AI intelligent machine works so that we were able to kind of get them to sort of upgrade and stay relevant as the business continues to grow. And I think, you know, with job skills, it's just like the whole evolution of life in general. You know, as you continue to grow older, you can't just think the way you used to think as a child. You have to continue to learn and evolve based on where you are, right? And so, you know, right now, you know, one of the

best places to go is there's so many online courses around AI automation, you know, just, it's good to learn the language on what that means. And, you know, it just comes down to really just understanding the terminology on how to speak that language. If you can do that, then you'll be a lot more valuable because ultimately, you know, the engineering folks are there to build stuff, but you need to articulate the vision of what you want them to build and how it's going to work. My perception would be a lot of CEOs need to sit down and read your book. A lot of ones that, you know, haven't adopted or adapted to AI or the need to, you know, a lot of CEOs are older guys like me who, you know, teach an old dog new tricks sort of people. And, you know, we've got to catch up on this. Like you say, what we're going through with COVID-19, we're probably a year or two out from a vaccine. If there is one, um, we, we really have to learn to automate everything. Uh, budgets are going to get tight. Layoffs are coming. People spending dollars, economies, you know, who knows what kind of recession, uh, borderline depression we might be in. You've got to maximize every dime dollar you can. And, uh, it's going to be real important. So I imagine a lot of great CEOs and C-class executives should be picking up

your book and reading about it. A lot of people are going to school in the business. I kind of wish I could learn coding, but I just don't have that math brain. God bless people that do because then, you know, my phone works. But everything else really in our world. But what are some other things in your book that people need to be aware of? What do you see the future becoming after this, after we kind of adopt these things?

So, you know, the future is going to be more around, I created a scale in my book, the linear eye scale. And the easiest way to think about that is kind of like the self-driving car. That's kind of the end goal, right? If you get into a car and you kind of tell it where you want to go, it will take you to it. You don't really want to worry about whether it's going to take a detour here or there. But ultimately, you give it an outcome, and it's going to take you to that. And you don't have to worry about it. You don't really want to worry about whether it's going to take a detour here or there, but ultimately you give it an outcome and it's going to take you to that and you don't have to worry about it. And the other extreme of that is where you just have like a car with a stick shift,

nothing that was automated in any shape or fashion, and you have to do all that work. And the same thing goes in business because ultimately, you know, there's going to be all these different use cases that continue to come up right in terms of how can you get your business to be more efficient outside of just acquiring customers and driving revenue it's about supply chain for example you know you know how do you plan better because because one of the other things that we know that's going to happen is that there's more businesses now have to move online, right? Because if we've learned anything from COVID-19 is that, you know, the new normal is definitely going to be different from the way things were. And that's going to profoundly change the whole

landscape, especially around retail, the way you sort of go about brick-and-mortar businesses, how do you become more efficient as an e-commerce business? How do you plan for that, right, in supply chain? How do you plan to get better at customer support? Because, you know, all these different changes in the business. So, you know, AI, you know, ultimately it's about, you know, coming up with kind of the outcomes that you want and then using AI to help navigate you to kind of get to the best way to achieve those outcomes, you know.

So the future is really going to be less about humans kind of doing a lot of the menial tasks, and the machines will do more of that but it still requires humans to to be able to sort of identify what are the problems that we are trying to solve so then the machine can be put put into focusing on on trying to find those solutions i i love the idea too you You talked earlier about the concept of maintaining the front to back in relationships with clients, not only when you acquire them, but making sure they stay happy and they go through the process and utilize your stuff. I see some of that from the different emails and systems that I get where, you know, it's like trying to keep me engaged with the

product and, you know hey there's resources here for if you need them even like i think it's the washington post and some other places you know they have uh in the wall street journal i think they have stuff that they ship me and they're like hey you know by the way you have these uh other products you can interact with and and i'd love to see more of that you know i think the big we had an interaction day with the cable company you know and they're really good about the front part of acquiring your business but good luck you know getting them on the phone thereafter talking to them but we did actually use one of their ai systems

i think um to finally get them to call us back it took about a half an hour for them to call us back but at least i guess we were on hold um but even then we still had to talk to an operator for something that you know i look at half these interactions and i'm like you know really if you just gave me the ability to you know i i knew what i needed to do why do we have to have a conversation do this and and a lot of that still sales because the operators you know she's going to try and upsell you and you know try and convince you to you know buy this or that or whatever um but even then that could have been automated i mean and i would have been a lot happier about the whole process too because i you know even then the thing i always hate is they once you make a deal with whatever the the salesperson is you got to wait for them to type in the order

you got to wait for them to and they're like oh hang on i gotta get a manager because uh i don't know the key code isn't working cable companies are worse with that so i'm all for this sort of this ai data stuff um and and making sure the customer is happy in the end like one of the things that still just drives me freaking insane is when i have to uh call my you know a credit card or a bank or any other place and it's just nightmarish the coding to get through like and a lot of times like i think one time i was just trying to find out my bank was it was recently i was trying to find out my bank was going to be open on july 3rd because i'm like well saturday july 4th i'm not sure the bank's closed on July 3rd I was just trying to find that out and that was like a nightmare to find out and

try and call and I was trying to call a local office and you're just like why why is this just why does that have to be so hard you know and so I'm all for AI making our lives easier making business easier uh do you know I've been an entrepreneur all my life. I've run small and big companies. You know, these days I'm a small entrepreneur technically. And I know a lot of people are that are in sort of my business, whether it's speaking, writing books, like yourself, authors, and everything else.

Is there a lot of automation tools for sales and marketing? Like, you know, a lot of us will run Facebook ads and stuff. Is there any sort of turnkey sort of operations for people that are smaller businesses? Or is this really a game that's made for big Fortune 500 type companies, etc., etc.? That's a really good question. So one thing, as you mentioned, a lot of small businesses, depending on what kind of budget you're spending on advertising, you know, if you're spending probably less than like $75,000 a month,

then a lot of the AI that you get within like Facebook or Google or these platforms, it's probably better just to sort of leverage that. And the best way to do that is just to make sure that you've got good customer data events that you can pass back to them so that you make it pretty clear to them what you're trying to optimize for. So then it kind of helps them to help you achieve

that success metrics that you're looking at. But once you start spending a lot more than that, then you're probably going to start, your campaigns are going to start getting more complicated than the basic ones that you run with these partners. It's going to be, you're going to start adding more partners. Let's say you expand your business internationally, you're going to start adding more countries.

And so the scale and the orchestration of all of this becomes a lot more complicated. And so at that point, either you have to look to like hiring more people or you could potentially leverage a machine and be less reliant on hiring people. Because I'm sure, you know, the frustration that small businesses face are pretty similar to the same frustration that large businesses face, which is managing and retaining employees is a challenge, right? I mean, for the most part, because it's like you train them and you invest a lot of time. And, you know, they, for the most part, depending on where you are, have all these other opportunities too, right? Maybe not now, but to a large extent, you know, there's nothing contractually that keeps them to be loyal.

I know. And so that's a big disruption and a risk to any business too. While a machine is still going to stay there through, you know, and all the learnings and intelligence that you've gotten, it stays with your business versus being, you know, versus risking that moving on when any person leaves. Yeah. I've done that for my business where we used to train people and we almost

became, there were actually competitors that would be like, well, you don't know the business, so you should go to Chris Voss's shop. He'll train you and then come over here when he's done training you. Like literally it got that bad. And evidently, according to OSHA, we can't handcuff people to the desk. So there's that. You know, I asked. But, you know, and so, yeah, AI is super important, the future, where it's going.

Anything more we need to cover about what you got in that handy book there from O'Reilly? Lean AI. Yeah, you know, I definitely encourage everyone to go check the book out. You know, best place to find it is amazon and it you know i mean we've just touched upon a fraction of of all the content that's in there but i think ultimately you know it's a great resource especially for like ceos and founders or entrepreneurs that want to start businesses because it provides it helps you to sort of get a bit bigger vision for your business and where

technology can play a role. And, you know, the reality is we're all small businesses or startups, but the goal is always to grow, right? You never want to sort of just stay where you are. And, you know, the more you can do that leveraging technology, the more dependency that you can get in predicting how to chart that path to drive that growth. And that's very similar to what a lot of these companies that we talk about in Silicon Valley. I mean, you mentioned Amazon. That used to be a startup at one point, right?

But the big difference between Amazon was they started getting all this customer data, and they started building all these legacy AI machines back in the day when it was so expensive. So they started hiring all these data scientists to do that, and that really gave them the competitive advantage. Netflix is another good example. I mean, blockbusters used to be around, but where are they now? And what Netflix started doing was starting, you know, identifying, like, how can we get all this customer data and try to leverage that versus, you know,

what Blockbuster was trying to do was trying to defend, you know. But if you start thinking about, you know, technology, it can enable you to change your mindset from playing defense to actually playing offense and trying to grow your business and you're right i mean they did such a good job in fact netflix is so good like i'll be going through looking at you know results for the thing and it'll be like no y'all watch this video like okay netflix let me down mr reed um yeah but no it really is point on amazon's always point on too especially when it gives you like other people bought this and crowdsourcing that and then you know other people like you bought this you like to buy the crap you like to buy and and then you see other

you know like oh that's uh that might be better there and and then of course now their ai is pushing a lot of their products which is kind kind of an interesting way to do it. But, hey, man, that's what moves products, makes sales, and makes the world go around, if you will. And I like the aspect of what you brought up earlier about how if you don't adapt to it now and adopt, the competitor is going to do it. And then he's going to outsell you, and you may be the one on the chopping block. If you're not growing in business,

you're dying. And, uh, and competitive advantage is going to be huge in this COVID environment here that we're running into in the next year or two. It's going to be probably the difference of survival or not survival when it comes down to it. Definitely.

Definitely. I like that. Well, so let me, give me your, uh, book, uh,

uh, dot coms where people can go find you on the interwebs there. Yeah, so in terms of the book, as I mentioned, people could find it on Amazon, but it also has a URL if they want to go to the URL. It's called the LeanAIOneWord.com. That's where they can find the book. My blog is Lama Patel. I write a lot of content there around AI, business, and growth,

so people can get a lot of good content from my blog site. And also, you know, follow me on LinkedIn, where I'm always posting daily a couple of different articles around what I find that is interesting, that's happening, that's kind of breaking and cutting edge, you know, based on the day. I'm definitely – I've seen your thing on LinkedIn. I'min i'm definitely gonna follow you have a lot of stuff on there and it looks really cool some of the things you have on there so definitely check it as linkedin everything else order the book up from o'reilly and uh all that good stuff thanks my eyes for

tuning in we certainly appreciate you guys being here and lament for being here sharing this great data with us uh make sure to refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Get them to subscribe to the show. Also, if you want to see the video version of this, you can go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button. So you get all the notifications of everything we do. We've got, of course, wonderful great authors from all the different great publishers

and everybody else coming up. So be sure to stay tuned for that. No flipping. Thanks, Voss, for tuning in. We'll see you next time.