The Vault Unlocked - How Businesses Really Use AI to Scale (Most Are Doing It Wrong)

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

Most business owners know AI is the future, but for most, that future feels paralyzing. Between flashy AI tools, confusing jargon, and headlines about mass layoffs, they freeze… or worse, plug in automation they barely understand. Jeff MacPherson isn't selling AI as magic. He's building future-proof companies by turning their real-world data, systems, and people into scalable intelligence assets. Through his company Moment37, he helps businesses earning $2M–$25M integrate AI into operations, without replacing their team or breaking what already works. His approach doesn't start with tech. It starts with training the models on your mission, team, and processes. His "Top Framework" (Team, Org, Purpose) lets companies inject AI where it matters, and leave everything else untouched. The result? Profit increases of 20–40% within 12 months. No hallucinations. No hype. Watch as he breaks down the real work behind AI success: -Leadership alignment before code gets written -Why the right prompt can unlock (or break) entire workflows -How companies accidentally "train AI to be stupid" by dumping disorganized data -And why "raise the floor, not the ceiling" is the most human-first AI philosophy in the market This isn't a glorified Zapier setup or a custom GPT skin with fancy branding. It's operational intelligence: structured, implemented, and optimized to grow with your team.

You're listening to The Vault Unlocked, where the real secrets of success are revealed. Every episode, one founder, one confession, one strategy that created income, scale, and unstoppable growth. The code is cracked. The vault is open. Here we are. How are we doing, Jeff? Good, how are you? Good to see you. Good to see you too. I'm excited because I know what you do is where we are right now in the world. People are scared. People are excited. There's so much happening. So Jeff, tell us a little bit, what it is you do, where you're working, all of that. So we're in the fun world of artificial intelligence, the buzzword that's out there, everybody wants it. Nobody knows where to go. So we work with businesses to help them integrate AI

within their organization with their business to help them drive profit. We believe both businesses have both demand and fulfillment. And AI can help uplift the team that you already have. So it's like we join businesses, work with them, partner with them, call us your chief AI officers to be able to integrate AI to generate profit within the whole organization. Yeah, I love it. Let's talk, before we jump into the pitch and who you, you know, really who you focus on. I think it's merits for the talk about AI. What, like, you know, as an expert, I'd love to know, like, what are you seeing where we're at today? Where is this thing going? How fast are we moving here when it comes to AI? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's really,

funny because it's super important for all of our businesses, but it's one of those things we joke about. It's one of the biggest decisions you're going to make for you and your decision. You have to be extremely patient with it because the foundation of the next phase of your business is make or break, really. Because if you get it wrong, you could be so far behind in the AI terms. AI moves extremely fast. It really does. We believe there is a lot longer than what people what people think when it comes to just like fully automating a whole bunch of processes and like replacing people in your team as like even for us we haven't really seen it where the AI world and where we're seeing is most people don't really know what to do how to do it so there's a lot

of the disconnect in there as well there's a lot of stuff that we see where people don't actually know what the difference between like an AI automation is and what AI actually is and combination is just a functionality that you use to be actually use AI. So there's a lot of these overwhelming disconnects on what the market actually is teaching, showing, and doing to like what business owners are actually adopting. Yeah. And I think it merits to deep dive in some of this because I think it's very important. I was very excited for this because I know again, AI is like this,

we talk about the hot topic. And I can tell you right now not being the expert of AI. It's not a trend. This is, this is happening whether we like it or not. I mean, we know it's been around for a long time, but at the speed it's been moving, it's pretty crazy. I was just reading a stat still that, like, in America specifically, like, there's still only about like 20% of the people are using like Jack GPT and Gemini. And there's still people that are not even using tools like that. Yeah.

I mean, I don't know what the stat is off the top of my head, but it is significantly low. And we do, I mean, as you know, it's like we do a lot of speaking engagements. We do a lot of workshops and stuff like that. and people are just starting to adopt chat chvety. And I think, I don't know if it's, and it's hard to say because even like with the clients that we work with, they could be the exact same business on paper, but it's more of a mindset that becomes the avatar.

You're asking like who we work with and stuff like that. So it's really confusing for even us sometimes and other businesses on how to, how to work with them. But in terms of like adopting tools, adopting chat cheap, the big thing that we've noticed is you've got to start with your foundation, because it doesn't matter the tools or technologies that are on the market. It's like our businesses ran pre-A.I.

And now there's AI and everybody just believes their business is going to run different. So if you start back to like your roots, I'm like why you started, why people pay you for your services or your expertise and start training AI on that stuff, as the technologies progress, it's only going to uplift your business. And that's where we try and get people to focus on. So how do you train?

You said train the models, right? Like, I mean, I mean, what does that even mean? I'm just to say someone's listening, they're like, we've already lost them with the terminology, AI models and automation. Like, can we understand what AI is, what GPT is and how that's really not AI? And, and then what, you know, a GPT, you know, agent might be. And then what it is you guys are actually doing. Because I know what you're doing is very different than just connecting a business into a cookie cutter or GPT platform

and then putting some colors on it and saying, here you go. Yeah. So I mean, to give some examples, so it was like, let's say like a chat bot, like a customer service chatbot. These things have been around for a long time. There's AI functionalities to it where like it will respond with your business information and be able to communicate with the people. It's like even before that there was what they called like if this than that. Yeah.

Yeah. And like that's what I was doing like that business that at this my software company that Facebook incident. We were doing if this and that. So like conditional training to an extent. So it's like that's an automation to us. And yes, there's AI functionalities to it in terms of like it can communicate on your business. It knows the information.

It can do that. But where AI becomes extremely powerful is when you start analyzing those conversations and start doing the next step with the actual information that's in it. So to give you an example, it's like as customer service is coming in, it's like you're getting a whole bunch of information. FAQs, how does this work? All this fun stuff. If you can take that, analyze it and turn it into marketing content and allow it to kind of predict the next. thing, that's when you really start leveraging the data that's already living within your business. And that's where people are missing. Yeah. Okay. And so you and you mentioned

foundation stuff. And I'm thinking that's what we meant by foundation is first, we got to train the AI. And this AI, let's call it, artificial intelligence. Where are we training this? Where is the information going? How is the information is getting there? Where it's stored? How does it connect to my business? Like, give me a little bit of what that means. So we have a framework. We call the top framework where it's like train AI on your team, your organization, your purpose. So it's like your mission, your vision, your product, your service.

Like the stuff that you know as like a CEO as like leadership team, the most important stuff. Like your basic SOPs, like these sorts of things. It's like that is what we call the top framework. Your team, your organization, your purpose, those things. It's like you can upload these documents to the chatch EBTs. You can use these tools that are out there. And then you can start doing your day to day to

task writing website copy writing emails doing these things but it knows about your business so it's like the more it knows about your business the more can help you actually uplift it just like hiring somebody to your organization if you hire somebody and you don't give them the right information they're not going to be able to do their job right so why should AI do the same thing and this is a big misconception in in the AI world is it can't read your mind it's good but it's not that good and if it doesn't have information you don't communicate to it properly we we kind of look is like it's hiring an intern at best when you first start working with AI.

So it's like if you look at an intern, how much you have to communicate with them, how much information you need to provide it. But the difference between an intern human and AI, if you give it the right information, it will learn much faster and then it will start doing more things. Yeah, I got that. So what I'm hearing, though,

the one of the underlying keys to AI, I guess what you're doing is, is it comes down to the information that you give it. If you give it, like, shit in, shit out, sorry for the swearing guys, but like if you give it shit information in, it's going to give shit information out. So it's not really making sure

I'm going to assume that the business that you're working with, they have to have their SOPs. They have to have a clear understanding of who they are, where they want to go, what's working, all of all that processes. So that when you feed the machine with AI, it knows exactly what you're doing and where it's going.

Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah, like I mean, as simple as like your mission and vision. Like what is your vision for the business and in the next three to six months. Like if it knows that, it can, it can help push towards that. Something as simple as like, does your,

does your company have like definitions that you use? Yeah, terminology. Terminology. Instead of customers, do you use the word client? Like, the simplest things that we just take for granted for, AI can't read that information. So terminology is important. Like the back to the real root foundational stuff.

And I mean, you don't have to go and do it all at once. But in time, those are this, that's the sort of thing that you're going to train your own AI system. And it's not, you're not training a model. You're just teaching it about your business. It's like the more information that you give that, the smarter it gets,

the faster it gets. So it's like we can see it's like 30, 45, 60, 90 days before you really start seeing it. And the problem is businesses are coming in. And yes, there's some aspects where you can plug it in and it works right away. But you need to work with it. It just doesn't work that way. If AI worked that way,

everybody would have a really, be doing it. Exactly. So it's a little more sophisticated and people think, but the long-term gain is just, it's unprecedented right now. Yeah. So what I'm hearing so far from you is what your business, what you guys do is you guys work with business owners who know, they know one thing for sure is they need AI or they know that AI is the thing of the future. And if I don't get in on it today, I'm going to be a thing of the past. Correct. Is that what I'm hearing? Okay. So we say it's like we teach businesses how to be become AI first so you don't get replaced by a business that is AI first. Yeah, I love it. Okay. So teaching, so if I'm a, if I'm a business owner and I don't know anything about AI and I'm scared, but I do know one thing about AI is like, I need to somehow implement it into my business. Correct. I can reach out to you guys. You guys are going to show me and tell me everything I need to do to make that happen. Is that correct? Yeah. So we don't, we don't consider ourselves an agency. Like we do done for you work, but because like we're training on your systems at the end of our working period, sure, we can still

be there and be your advisors and stuff like that. But it's like once your business is set up and your team knows how to use it, it will grow with you. And that's the power. Because your team and your business information is the asset. It's just being able to unlock that with the technologies that are out there. And we just, we set it up in a way. So it's like you can run with it and your business can continue to grow.

So you set up. That's what I wanted. So your company will set up the AI based off of my business so that it's there to help me run into the future with it. And you guys are doing the scary part. which as a business owner, I don't know what I'm doing. I have no idea how this works. You're going to educate me.

You're going to lead me. You're going to ensure that I'm doing this properly so then I can set my future proof my new AI business basically into the future. Correct. There's the three problems that we talk about when we're speaking to the clients is like, does AI know about your business? And that's like training it on that top framework that I was saying. It's like what tools and technologies do I use?

Nobody knows because they're releasing new ones every single day. And it's like once you do that is like how does my team adopt them? Because there's a lot of friction with teams and a team adoption because you're breaking habits. And it becomes a little scary because everybody thinks it's going to replace their job. We don't come in. It's like we're here to raise the floor, not the ceiling. That's what we say. Enhance your team not replace them because that's where AI is.

Yeah. And I believe that. When I'm hearing all these people saying, oh, AI, I fired 200 of my employees, you know, using AI. I'm calling bullshit on that. You fired maybe a couple employees who should have been fired in the first place. AI or no AI included. Now you've entered AI and like in what I look at it is like we buy AI, you know, Chad Chip T for every one of my employees.

You know, it's mandatory. You use it. If you're not using AI, you're not really should be on my team. Not because I want you to depend on AI. Not because I want you to stop thinking. I want you to start becoming more efficient, more effective and getting more work done. Yeah. It's it's, it's, there's an aspect and we see it all the time.

It's like when it finally hits that right brain aspect from left brain to right brain. It's like when people really truly see the unlock for themselves, because there's different levels to it. Like somebody could just like ask it a question, spit on an answer on chat, TBT, and it's like a breath of fresh air. Or there's really complex people where there's like a whole workflow and automation and systems and predictive and all this stuff come in. And then that's her unlock. So there's different levels to it. But it's like it's just we've figured out a way to unlock that right brain for each person so they can feel their own effectiveness changing. Because it will progressively get easier and easier and easier as time goes.

So we know what the product is. The product right now is what I'm hearing, right? Is you help business owners get AI built into their business, future proof their business for where we're going. That's number one. Who you're working with all business owners, certain types of business owners, online, offline. What type of business owners are we talking about here? Founders. Yeah.

Enterprise. Small business. Small medium, small medium. Small medium size business. Small medium size business is online. offline, traditional. Preferably online.

We have work with like offline. Yeah. But we're getting here. So your idea of client is you are a founder. You have an online business. What's what revenue are they at? Like small business.

So 25 million. Okay. So your business going between two to 25 million and you know that AI is the thing of the future and you want to automate your business. You don't know what you're doing. You're overwhelmed from all the information, which is a lot of information out there

and you're basically, you're getting like almost scared meets paralyzed in what to do. Yeah. And we call you guys. Who are you guys again? What's your business? You never even told us.

What's the business name? Our business name, we actually just went to a rebrand, Moment 37. So Moment, you call Moment 37 and they're going to take your business from no AI to fully integration of AI and help you and your team become better.

I love what you said. We're not here to raise the ceiling, we're here to raise the floor. Enhancement of your people. So if you're someone, when I'm hearing, if you're a business owner right now and you're thinking, I hate AI because I don't want to replace to humans, you know what I mean? These people have feelings in homes and people they need to feed. You're not that type of person.

You guys are like, no, actually, let's enhance them. Let's give them an opportunity to keep their jobs before AI actually really takes over. Now, I say that. How far are we away from AI really? taken over a lot of our jobs here. Again, we think it's a further way than what people think, because there's also aspects of like businesses who don't necessarily want to grow and they want to stay stagnant. I mean, like you need quality assurance on these things. You really do. It's like, you're not going to have necessarily AI take payment processing and like handle refunds and stuff

like that. Because if one person knows how to hack the prompt, it's like you could refund every customer. So there's a lot of quality assurance that comes in there. It's just like, does AI do 10%, 20%, 60%, 90%, 95%, but we still believe there should be some sort of quality assurance aspect. And that's why it's like when we're going through the process of onboarding a client, it's like, what are your goals? Because we believe in like 12 months time, we can help unlock 20 to 40%. So if you're not willing to like grow with that as well, it was like maybe you're

not a good fit for us either. Because it's a business that just don't want to grow. They just, they're happy where they are. Yeah. They're stagnant and they're good because they got five years on their, you know, in their vision and they're going to sell or end it and that's all good. I get that. You don't need to speak with those.

These are businesses that want to be, you know, into the future. What are some of the objections? So if you're on a phone call with some of these business owners or if there was a business owner listening to this right now and they're still sitting there going, I don't know, this is for me. All I know is I need AI. Like what would you say to them? What are some objections that you commonly hear?

One objection is, oh, I could just do this myself. That's always a good one. Okay. And I think it just comes like, because the markets make it seem like it's so easy. It's like you can just go to chat CBT and like you can set up your whole organization. It's like setting up all these technologies. Like there's a lot of stuff in behind the scenes that people just don't see.

That's that's a huge objection. Typically with that one is like you just go let them do it. And they find out relatively quickly they don't want to become a dev shop. Okay. Well, let's talk about that. So you're on the call or you're, you know, in person and you're getting that objection. because this is what the pitch me is all about here, right? And I don't believe in let them go do it and let them fail and then come back.

What is that? That's not sales. Come on, man. How do we handle the, hey, I can just do it myself. What are ways that we can operate where they go, wait a minute, I could, but I know I won't. Yeah, I mean, part of the objection handling is just having them see, because everybody deals with the hallucination factor. It's like you've done it.

We've all done it. It's like you start talking to AI and all of a sudden it starts to hallucinate. And that's part of the issue. It's like if anybody could do it, you would. So let's talk about that because I can tell people probably listen and don't even understand what you just said there. I get it. But I want to make sure everyone understands the conversation. So and this is a big one of my biggest challenges.

I think I messaged you earlier and was like, dude, this is killing me here. Is the hallucination of AI? So how would you describe that, you know, in layman's terms? So we use, when we do our speaking engagement, I actually get a whole bunch of grown adults to play broken telephone. Yeah. And it's very similar. So it's like, or aspect, it's like, okay, when we first started this podcast is like,

what was the first two sentences that you told me? So as the information continues to fill up, it's like the beginning you start to forget. Yeah. It starts to forget what it's, exactly. What it's, what the information actually was. It's there, but how to access it is a different thing. And then the aspect of broken telephone is like as it has to jump from platform to platform to technology to technology to person to person, it's like you lose information in it.

So it's like if you've got too much information in one bucket as well as then you have to push all that information from spot to spot, you can see the information starting to get lost. And that's where hallucination starts to come in. And you guys know how to prevent that? Like that's what you do? How does that? How do you guys do that?

I mean, that's where our, that's where our technologies and our skill set come in. Like, there's technologies on the market that you're able to connect these things, and it's just optimizing your data. And it's like there's retrieval process. It's like rag is the terminology that goes in there. And like there's more technology that comes into it. But basically in layman's terms, it's like chunking processes. So again, like slightly out of my pay grade in terms of the tech side, but it's like it takes

the information and it chunks it. And then it looks, then it's not like looking it up. It's like going in, retrieving it, analyze the information and then pulling it back in. So there's ways where you have to set up your databases properly. It's like there's ways that you have to structure it properly. And there's ways that you have to continue to optimize it and optimizing the prompting. And then the aspect of when you're building an agent or even talking to AI, talking to it properly. So we had a training with one of our clients and they were talking to the AI trying to have it to get the information within,

that was on the web, get me this information so I can do this. But it was as easy as instead of saying, get me, generate me. Because they wanted it to generate the information. So it's like that little terminology made it work. So actually wasn't the information. It was how they were speaking to it, which is a huge part of the process. I love it because I'm just thinking we started this with the objection I get is, oh, I can just do this on my own. And you just said to me, that's what business owners think they can do is understand what you just said.

implement it properly on their own? I don't think that's the case, is it? Well, we know that's not the case. So the objection is I can do this on their own, I think, comes more of like, I'm afraid that it might actually work or I'm afraid that it doesn't work or something. Because to do it on my own, you know, simple rebuttal that I would say is if you can do it on your own, like, why haven't you so far? Yeah, which you're 100% right.

And to do it on their own to the other aspect of not even on the hallucination is like, Everybody wants this billion dollar exit. Everybody believes they're going to have this $100 million exit, especially if they get into AI. I mean, AI is built on your information, your people, your information and your processes. It's in the odds of, as you know, like selling a business is very, very slim. Yes, you do have a little bit of a, if your business is good and you set it up properly, the odds of you selling it with AI is a little bit different, but it's very competitive still. So why your business is over somebody else is.

Yeah, no, absolutely. We know businesses that integrate AI are more sellable today than ones that aren't. But it goes back to you. You just said it again and you said it twice now. It goes back to right at the beginning information in information out. So I want to understand, do you work with the business owners and make sure that the information that they're going to input is the proper information? And they're not just putting shit in and shit out. Like, are they getting that type of service from you?

Yeah, because it's like curated data. So there's a lot of businesses that do. And like this is why we fall into that two to 25 million. Because when you get into enterprise, you get into like large amounts of data. It's possible. Yeah. The big data stacks and all that stuff. But it's like we don't go into like into your Google drive or into your notion or into your air table and just like dump everything into this AI system.

Because just like, just like humans, you can like some of the information you just don't need. So you can actually, the thing is with AI, you can train it to be stupid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can train it to be stupid. So like data dumping everything in isn't always a good option if you don't know how to do it. So it's like we collect the relevant information.

And then when you have your functionality, like your AI automations plugging into it, then it starts learning the new stuff that's relevant. I got it. So it needs the foundation. And then it needs the new stuff and let it train with you. So in a in a nutshell, what like what's the, how do you present this offer? Because I'm hearing, I'm hearing a lot of different things. and I'm seeing a lot of work right now.

Like, well, you just said to me there, I was like, ooh, this is a lot of work for me, you know, being transparent and you're like, I'll have to go through my Google drive and figure out what I want, I don't want, all of that. So what's the offer where people like say, this is a no-brainer? How do you position that?

So, I mean, we actually go through and we help businesses, like we work with the leadership team before we even get started because we need them to understand what's about to happen to their business before even getting started. So we do a training. with the leadership team to have them understand what's possible, what's not,

because that's another thing as well, what's not possible. And then the tools and technologies that you can use with your business information for you to essentially move forward with AI. So it's essentially, we don't like to call a roadmap, but it's essentially a roadmap. It's a plan of action that you and your team can move forward with. The presentations there is like, hey, yeah, you can do this on your own, but we're going to do it faster, better, cheaper when you work with us. So it's like, but we need businesses to understand what's about to happen next because over

the last year and a half, the biggest thing is I explained to you, Kavon, then you have to go and tell your leadership team what I told you. It's like we're learning how to communicate it on the daily basis. What's the odds of you being able to communicate to your team as well? So things are lost in transaction. They really are. The hallucination factor. Yeah, it happens in real life.

It happens in real life. So you're at, I want, you're at, you know. You're in the elevator and someone says, what is it you do? I want the elevator pitch because it's still complicated. I want, what's your cleanest elevator pitch here? I mean, we help businesses integrate AI into their organization to increase 20 to 40% profit. There we go. That's it.

So if you're a business owner, you know right now that your business needs AI. You know the future is AI, but you have no idea where you want to go, what to do. You not even know how to use GPT properly. but you know your business needs it. They're going to reach out to you and you're going to help them integrate AI in their business so that they can increase their profits by how much did you say?

20 to 40%. 20% in revenue as a result of working with you. So if someone wants to work with you, where are they finding you? Moment37.AI. Moment37.ai. We will also be posting that in the show notes for anyone that's interested.

as we come to a conclusion here, Jeff, tell me a little bit more. Like if you had one last thing to say about AI and where we're headed, what would you say? Be patient, as hard as it is. It's like be patient, step back. The big thing I've mentioned it again

is like our businesses ran before AI was here. Yes, AI has been around for a long, long time. But in these general terms of the hype and what people are doing, it's just look at your team, look at your organization, look at your team members, and have them understand what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. And it's like, don't try and do add AI into your system that has never been there before.

It's like, go back to the foundation, go back to your people, go back to the information within your business and look at your processes and start there. Just start there, slow and steady. So go back to the foundation. Be patient. Go back to the foundation of what your business is before you just jump into AI. Because AI is not going to fix your problem. it's going to amplify what it is you're doing. So if you have a problem, it's a bigger problem.

Correct. If you have the right stuff, the right solution, the right input, it's just going to amplify that. Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah. And that's what you're saying. It's like, I fired 200 people. No, those people probably should have been fired a long time ago.

Yeah, exactly. AI didn't do that. I love that. There you have it. The AI show. I was super excited to have you on here. And for anyone that's interested, we'll have it in the show notes. Amazing.

Thank you again, Jeff, for joining. Thanks, Kava. And that was another episode of the, Vault unlocked, where proven builders, real strategies and unstoppable growth happens. Subscribe now. The next unlock could be your success. The code is cracked. The vault is open.