Nicole Donnelly 01:24
I’m Nicole Donnelly. And I’ve got a marketing agency called AI smart marketing and we have been using AI for eight years. And we want to feature our EO friends on these zooms, who are doing really cool things in AI and Nathan was posting about what he’s up to in customer service and a lot of people seemed interested so he’s gonna give us a sneak peek inside of caffeinated CX, which is an AI customer customer support tool. He previously founded saucify The fastest growing product sourcing platform that helps hundreds of companies manufacture products around the world. In the past, Nathan has brought dozens of products to market around three ecommerce companies sold one and has been a part of projects on Kickstarter raising over seven figures. I feel like you would get a whole session worth of questions out of that too. Nathan writes for business media outlets like entrepreneur, next one. Oh, there we go. Thanks. And can also be seen on CNBC Nathan used to live in China and speaks Mandarin fluently and when he’s not traveling or selling software he can be found mountain biking, sailing, skiing, fishing or hiking.
02:52
So Nathan is joining us from Utah today to talk about how he’s using AI to help expedite customer service responses and my touch on some SEO as well. So I will let you take it from here.
03:11
Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Nicole, and thank you everyone for joining in and I can kind of just start with a brief introduction on you know, my background and how I got into this. As Nicole mentioned, I founded saucify, which is a b2b supply chain software with four offices in Asia. And so you know, I originally got my start as an entrepreneur helping other businesses source products. And you know, like many businesses support for us in q3 and q4 was pretty crazy. And saucify actually went through Y Combinator. And so we had early access to open AI for those that don’t know Y Combinator. It’s like the startup accelerator. program that’s, you know, been the first investor in like Dropbox and Airbnb, and Stripe and a lot of, you know, just incredible startups. And so, open AI is founded and led by Sam Altman, who was the CEO of Y Combinator at the time and so we got early access to GPT three. And so at the time, we were running support on Zendesk and I built like a simple you know, kind of plugin for our you know, customer support tickets to basically be like responded to by GPT three and it just helped our team work so much more efficiently. And so when I sold saucify, I just became really interested in AI and how fast it’s moving. And so, I use AI like in every aspect of my business right now from SEO to sales to support I mean, you name it. But I think a lot of businesses, you know, basically have like ebbs and flows of support tickets. And it’s really hard to augment your team based on, you know, an increased number of support tickets without, you know, sacrificing response times. And so I think that’s really kind of a key of where AI can come in to improve full resolution times. And really, I think that’s like, the goal is how do you, you know, evolve and, you know, enable AI to be a driver and support superpower your team because I think, at least the way that I look at AI is more so around super powering your team, not necessarily replacing your team. But I want to make this as interactive as possible. So like maybe in the chat if people can, you know, answer like what kind of support team do they have right now? What like software support desk are you on whether it be like fresh desk or the OHo desk, or Zendesk, I mean, there’s so many of them, and everyone is like really trying to push the ball forward. So it’s pretty cool to see kind of what software everyone uses within the industry. So you know, basically to develop caffeinated CX we took an approach of both fine tuning and prompt engineering and so fine tuning is basically how to, you know, fine tune a model based on a company’s rule set and guidelines like when you onboard a new support rep. What you know, Knowledge Center do you use to get them up to speed and that I think really is the key. But, you know, at the end of the day, the more context that you can give AI more powerful it’s going to turn to you know, respond. And so, you know, for us, we focus on these core aspects in terms of auto filling responses for your reps, taking notes, summarizing tickets, I mean, I don’t want to kind of go over our feature list, but what I do want to do is really dive into like tools that I’ve used from an AI perspective, to grow caffeinated and grow some of my other businesses. So like, lately this tool by word.ai has blown my mind. I’ll just give an example real quick of like, what’s like a keyword that someone you know, that’s tuning in would want to rank for on Google like maybe, I don’t know, like what kind of keywords your business would go after? What was that?
07:12
AI for marketing?
07:14
Okay, so as for marketing, so what this tool does, is like literally not only generates the articles, but also can publish them on your like CMS, whether it be WordPress or web flow or whatever it may be. And so he could come in. I guess you can make them sign up but I’ll sign up real quick.
07:40
Let’s see the article is generating I think it might generate without me signing up, but I can also log in because I’ve got out and so you know, basically what this tool does is just automatically generates an article based on you know, your your website, and it’s like just pretty incredible to see. It just jumped to the case study of what they have. But basically there’s a company casual, that literally grew to 750 sessions per month using byword and all they did is basically publish a ton of articles over the course of six months. They published a bunch of articles good over 700,000 Organic sessions. And, you know, we can kind of dive into their high level strategy of how they did this, but it’s similar to the approach you would take with SEO in general. But I think what’s crazy about byword is it basically takes the whole approach that you would take like with your kind of SEO, team or agency that you work with, and structure campaigns around that to really understand like, how to keywords like how to calculate, you know, Ebro in QuickBooks, stuff like that. And, you know, basically really get specific around keywords but it’s pretty crazy because this tool is not just like, like a jasper or like writing articles for you. It’s actually basically doing like, the whole SEO strategy for you, which has been pretty insane and in my mind, I mean, I’ve used them on one of my websites and it’s, you know, starting to pay off I think right now there’s this whole question of like, is Google going to penalize AI written articles? And, you know, so far, we haven’t really seen that to be the case with byword.ai. But, you know, eventually it could potentially, you know, hurt you in some sense, but you can always use tools to check like, what’s the validity of validity of this article being written by AI or not? So this has been one of my you know, kind of favorite tools lately to utilize. Another one that my sales team is using is lavender.ai. I don’t know how many people have heard of lavender. But basically what lavender does is come in and I’m not associated with like any of these tools like Byward or lavender lemon I’m associated with it’s caffeinated. But these are tools that we’re using a caffeinated to just improve our process so much. So lavender is basically a tool to judge how your emails are in terms of personalization. So it enables your team to just write and generate a lot more accurate, accurate and captivating emails. So you know, we can kind of listen to this just briefly.
10:48
We can’t hear, I can’t hear. Okay, well, I checked out lavender. I think it’s really cool. It’s helped our team quite a bit. Another one that we’ve been using, which is pretty neat is instantly.ai. So with instantly I guess the question for the audience. is how many people are using like cold outbound like people send cold outbound emails? And if so, like, what is their approach to that? What’s cool about instantly and how it’s worked for us is basically like the hardest part I think of cold outbound is warming up the domains and getting those emails to work. And so instantly, AI actually warms up those emails for you and then can really ensure that your like, like percent of emails that land in the inbox is very high. And so you can warm up as many emails as you want. Pretty cool. So use like a bunch of different domains and warm up your emails. And it’s, it’s worked pretty well for us. I mean, obviously, without bound, your conversion rates gonna be much lower. But you know, at the end of the day, like, you know, you can still get some pretty good sales with it. It’s just been a super easy system for our team. To you know, kick off an outbound strategy. So right now we send about 5000 emails a week. And our process is pretty simple. Like we go to Apollo or like Zen leads, there’s a bunch of resources to get you know, leads, and you pull that list you verify them with like a site like never bounce or a lead verification tool. And then you upload them into instantly. And then you can have let’s say, like five domains, and so each domain is sending like 1000 emails a week. And your open rate and conversion rate like depends on the content and your copy and your offer of course, but it’s worked out pretty well, pretty well for us, so I would definitely recommend checking it out. And then another tool, I guess, any questions?
Nicole Donnelly 12:45
Yeah, I wanted to ask you. Do you use AI to write your emails? And also, can you tell everybody like explain a little bit about warming up a lead and why you would need to do that and how, like, a little bit more about why for this part for those who haven’t done it before?
13:07
Yeah, yeah. Great point. So for emails I do use lavender. Just to kind of understand like the accuracy of my email and how personalized it is. I don’t personally use like a tool that automatically responds to emails for me. So that’s, I think, eventually probably something I would look at but right now I still type out the vast majority of my emails and then with instantly what’s cool, is basically when it comes to cold email or cold outreach, you need to warm up domains and warming up domains means like, okay, they aren’t just right off the bat sending a bunch of emails, they’re like, you know, basically, age so they’ve been, you know, sending emails for some time you’re receiving emails for some time, and they, you know, aren’t just like, immediately sending a bunch of emails right off the bat and so instantly does a good job of understanding how to warm up your emails and then also how to judge like the health of your email domain, which is pretty cool. And then It centralizes all your emails in one inbox from your outbound campaign, which is pretty cool. And you’ve got really straightforward Analytics, which I love. And it just like, enables you to I think start an outbound approach a lot more efficiently compared to like, having to set up all these emails yourself. So then useful for us. You know, but I mean, outbound is not I would say, like, not the best strategy, but, you know, it’s worked. It’s work. So definitely worth checking out. And then high, high price is like, probably one that a lot of people haven’t heard of. It’s really more so around personalization in terms of this, but in terms of like personalizing all of your, your your messaging so like for example, high prize enables you to personalize this image enables you to you know, personalize any connection requests. Like it’s, it’s pretty crazy, like the amount of personalization that hybrids can have so it’s pretty cool like when you get an email or message inbox and it has, you know your name on it like that. The open rate and conversion rate is usually quite a bit higher. And it’s pretty neat too, because you can not only personalize images, but you can personalize like LinkedIn outreach, email, and you can also personalize like your website without like having to recode it which is cool. As well as marketing video so like, I guess you won’t be able to hear this. But it’s, it’s, it’s saying like my name, which is pretty cool. In that video. And so, it’s a lot about personalization and using AI to personalize your outreach for your customer interaction at scale. I think in today’s world, like personalization is such a key to conversion. That it’s worked wonders for us. Like so you could do it on a webinar with onboarding. You know, video sales like there’s so many ways to use personalization. I think it’s a great like both marketing and sales tactic tactic. Oh, it’s in on your website, too. You can use it too, which is pretty crazy. So like, you can personalize the call to action on our website and integrate it with, you know, pretty much any CMS or E content of site that you might be working with. And so those are kind of the main tools that we’ve used at caffeinated from an AI perspective to grow. Does anyone have any questions on hyper eyes that I can answer I can.
17:03
Any questions
17:05
Yeah, I could ask them. Are you using just the contact data out of follow to personal life or any other sources of data with which to personalize?
17:17
Yeah, so what’s cool about Apollo is you get so much information on a business right? Like their location, their team size, like estimated revenue, like you get so much information and so like, one of the things that I’ve found, like kind of quirky, but works is like just looking up like using auto GPT to look up like best pizza pizza restaurant in like the city that they’re in. And I kind of include that in the emails like, hey, like, by the way, have you been to, you know, insert pizza restaurant and you know, it just makes it even more personalized? And they might be like, Oh, I haven’t been there, but I was wanting to try it or whatever it may be. So I feel like honestly, in general, like the more personalized you can make it and you know, it’s pretty easy to make things personalized with AI right now, better your conversion rates kind of be so with Apollo, you know, we get the leads from Apollo and then we use never bounce, which is basically just like verifying that the emails religion and you know, it’s pretty cheap, like their pricing. I think it’s like it’s an ad box for 10,000 emails. There’s a lot of solutions like never bounce. Never bounced is actually acquired by zoom info, which is really zoominfo is a competitor to Apollo actually. So pretty interesting tool, but the way that we go about it is you know, basically figuring out a target through Apollo whether it be like for us like a head of customer support, or you know, SEO type of title. And then you know revenue size most businesses we target or like five to 100 million revenue, mostly SAS or E commerce or insurance or FinTech businesses. And then we create campaigns and try to personalize them as much as possible. So these are kind of the main tools that we use from sales and marketing strategy and yeah, by was been pretty cool to work with to and then from a support, you know, side, caffeinated is obviously what we use on Zendesk. I can pull it up, you know, real quick, but this is like your Zendesk dashboard. It’s very similar to like intercom or Freshdesk or whatever support system you may use. And we just train our AI based on how you’ve previously answered tickets to pre fill responses like this. So you can come in you can add, you know, rules to your AI. And you can you know, basically enable your reps to when they have a ticket to just open a ticket. And the response is prefilled with AI which is pretty cool. And so you can summarize long tickets, you can take notes on phone calls with AI which is pretty cool. You can understand like sentiment and NPS scores and we’re constantly constantly updating this but the way that it works, the back end just to kind of give you I guess some infrastructure insight is number one, we full kind of your support rules from your knowledge center to understand like, Okay, what is your refund policy? What is your cancellation policy, whatever it may be, and then we train your AI based on your support rules. So it generates a very accurate response. Based based on you know how your support Web rep would respond. We don’t we don’t ever respond on your reps behalf like we’re not a bot. We’re just trying to empower your reps to be a lot more efficient. And most businesses have been able to see the reps handle three times as many tickets in the same amount of time, which is pretty cool. And our goal eventually is to actually enable AI to perform the support function. So instead of having a customer service rep has to go into, you know, Shopify or Magento or, you know, whatever you use to manage orders, you know, the AI could actually, you know, refund or cancel or handle a return, you know, whatever support function or task needs to be performed. That’s, you know what are what are AI manual, so, then, you know, pretty amazing working on this, and, you know, we’ve been working across so many different industries, which has been pretty cool. I wish we were just focused on like one niche, but we have customers and like ecommerce and SAS and fintech and concern slants and it’s just
21:39
all across the board.
21:40
But yeah, I mean, most of our growth has stemmed from like inbound, you know, so we started using byword you know, we use instantly and lavender and you know, really as much AI driven software’s we can. And it’s worked out for us, you know, we’re growing quite a bit and I think really like aI right now. I think a lot of people are are nervous of is AI going to like, you know, replace me and I think the right way to tell your team and kind of addressed this, your team is, AI is going to enable each team member to be even more powerful to have real superpowers to just perform at an even higher output. Because I think there is you know, a lot of team members that are a bit nervous and scared by AI. And I think kind of the key approach that we found is just enabling team members to be way more efficient with the way that they work. And I believe that’s the way that we found a lot of success pitching AI and using AI in our business. So I’m curious, you know, what are some ways that you’ve been using AI in your business, we’d love to hear how people are currently using AI and if they’ve heard of these tools before.
23:07
We’ve been having a class with Apollo and trip and phi and limbless. Have you I mean, I know we’ve caffeinated you don’t use AI to actually reply. Have you? looked@reply.io or any of those cold email out bounds that are trying to use AI to actually manage the responses that come in via email?
23:34
Yeah, I mean, so we haven’t looked@reply.io Exactly. But I mean, I think there’s definitely a lot of strong approaches to using AI to you know, optimize your response and just, you know, automate boring tasks like they say on their website. I’m curious how have you used it?
23:54
Look, we haven’t used the AI sighs that’s come out. What you know, we’ve used the platform’s but not the message. response that’s recent via AI. Yeah.
24:14
I was just gonna say I’ll put my camera on but I was COVID. And I’m in my pajamas.
24:17
Ah, yeah, I mean, I don’t know. I think like, like, for example, with laughter. I think they aren’t necessarily like writing the response for the reps. They’re just kind of giving a grade and helping the reps, the sales reps, you know, improve their response. I think like for for AI to be very specific to your business. It needs to be trained on your either previous emails or your Knowledge Center. And so like, you know, with caffeinated, we like when we were just using, you know, GPT three when I built this at saucify. We, like literally just, you know, the responses were good, but they weren’t great because there wasn’t enough context for the AI to go out off of right. And I think when it comes to accuracy and comes to like, really generating amazing responses with AI, you know, the AI needs to have as much context and data as possible. And that’s where, you know, you sort of prompt engineering and, and fine tuning and all that and that’s where that, you know, methodology comes in. But at the end of the day, like I think it’s just a matter of time before like, AI becomes more and more accurate, like I know, like, open AI is releasing. They’re releasing like a business plugin for, like, trained off of your website. It just came out in TechCrunch. Yeah, so they have they’re about to have a business plan for chat GPT which basically would enable them to train a kind of, you know, widget or bought, if you will, based on on your website, you know, for enterprise customers, and so it’s going to be called, you know, chat GPT business, and it’s for professionals who need more control over their data as well as enterprises seeking to manage their their end users. So I think it’s going to become basically a plugin for any business to have like a, a chat driven Knowledge Center about their business, which is pretty
26:36
cool. I just chatted checked by stock CO which just uses standard TBT I API, I think we’re pretty easy to just create an account put in your domain and grades itself on your website. And then you can, you know, iFrame a chat window into your site that you know, will answer questions based on your site content. Yeah.
26:59
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is awesome. Yeah, I’ve seen this one. And I think it’s great too. But I think what open AI is doing natively, you know, might make chat base kind of obsolete.
27:13
Yeah, that’s one of the things that I we’ve talked about a lot because there’s so many little tools to do little things. And I think Chad GPT open AI, they’re going to cannibalize like a lot of these tools that are built on them, because they’re going to be able to do it inherently. And I feel like we’re gonna get down to where it’s a few big, you know, learning language models that that will the majority of the functions, and we’re gonna get it to where we could just speak it and it’ll create something for us. Amazing.
27:52
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s not I mean, honestly, I think the best use case for AI has been like these, you know, businesses that already have distribution, whether it be HubSpot or notion or clickup. And they can, you know, really simply add AI to their tool set and just, you know, basically enable their, their customers to have like aI within their product at the click of a button, which is amazing. So, I think like, that’s definitely a huge key. I think there’s going to be some big wins in AI when it’s really focused on a specific data set. Like, you know, the reason I have conviction with what we’re doing at caffeinated is, you know, open AI isn’t gonna go you know, plug your Zendesk in with your Shopify and perform support functions for you on your behalf like that. You know, there’s definitely a lot that you can that can be used with AI around specific data, right, like one of my friends here in Salt Lake City started pathology watch, and it’s AI for pathology to detect cancer earlier than a doctor can and it’s just amazing to be able to do with AI and, you know, detecting cancer at an earlier stage than even a doctor could be amazing. And so, I think there’s some really incredible use cases around specific sets of data. But yeah, I mean, the whole industry is moving so quickly. It’s pretty crazy. I mean, I don’t know if everyone here has played around with like, auto GPT. But it’s, it’s pretty incredible. Like basically, it’s it’s AI that can interact with itself online and see You can really have it you know perform any sort of research any support any any kind of search function that you might might want to have. It’s pretty, pretty amazing. So I’d highly recommend checking it out
29:53
yeah, it’s, it’s pretty cool. One of the things that has been discussed about auto GPT is its ability to in to have people insert prompts into it in a nefarious way and if you have it tied into any of your systems, that people who can figure out how to talk AI into doing some nefarious work, then it can go in and you know, it in do its own virus type, right damaged systems.
30:26
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s insane. Like, I think the measure of security you need to have now to fight against some of this AI fraud and whatnot that’s coming out. You know, you really have to be mindful and have, you know, high security regulations with your team. But yeah, it’s I mean, the industry is moving so quickly, and I feel like every week there’s something like, you know, auto GPT that’s coming out. That’s just like mind blowing. But, you know, that’s mostly what I wanted to talk about, in terms of how I’ve used AI to help my businesses and what we’re doing at caffeinated CX. You know, I’ll drop my email in the chat to Bud Abbott to answer any questions about AI, you know, just curious to have like, an open conversation because, you know, maybe there’s tools that I’m not aware of that people are using that, you know, been really beneficial, like, I haven’t played around with reply.io yet, and that St. Looks really cool.
31:25
Yeah, so take a look at that one, too.
31:28
I have a question. I mean, there are 1000s of tools that we could look at right? But I think important because you were showing us four or five tools that you that have helped your team the most. Okay, so how many people on your team and how do you keep it organized using all the different apps? Yeah, I mean, when there’s new ones and you’re using multiple places like To me that’s the big question, right? Now because it’s not all integrated. So yeah
32:02
Yeah, for sure. I mean, like, for example, instantly, or like Apollo to instantly we have to download the CSV kind of Excel file and then re upload it instantly. So it’s not you know, super one click of the button right. And then to set up the domains and emails on instantly, like, there’s definitely some like, kind of front end work that you have to do there. But, I mean, I think the beauty of AI is your team can do so much more than it could before. Right? And so like I caffeinated, we’re very lean team. You know, we’re five people and so we’re very lean, but you know, we’re doing a lot with the size of our team. At saucify. We were about 50 people, like our support team was, you know, 17 in the Philippines and you know, we’re contract based, but it’s like, I mean, I think in today’s climate, you can do so much more with a small team, which is made business so interesting, right, because like, before, byword as an example. I would go, you know, spend $10,000 a month on an SEO agency and have them you know, craft this strategy for me, whereas like byword is basically doing, like 80% of the work that an agency would do, and then you know, to kind of further improve the articles. I have someone you know, doing interlinking amongst the articles, you know, linking to external websites to and just making it you know, as legit as possible in terms of these articles, and also feeding it through like aI detection. services, like there’s hugging face where you can detect, like, what’s the likelihood of an article being written by AI? I mean, there’s a lot of tools that can enable you to really detect like, Okay, what’s the likelihood of this article being written by AI? And so, I think the way that I continue to look at AI is just like, you’re gonna be able to do so much more with your team using AI. And like, I think kind of your question is about like, Well, is there like a one size fits all tool? And I think like, honestly, it depends on your your team, right, like even like HubSpot launched this tool called Smart CRM, which I guess is now a chatbot that AI and you can literally like chat with your CRM, which is pretty cool. So if you want to update a lead if you want to like you know add a lead, like you can chat with your CRM, which is cool because before this, like you’d have to manually go into HubSpot, add their email, you know, update the deal or whatever it may be. And so HubSpot is doing a lot of cool things with AI I’m sure Salesforce and others will follow. But it’s like, it’s interesting, because now things are really like chat driven with AI. And like I think, you know, Nicole mentioned eventually it will be voice driven to have like, you know, it’d be talking like, you know, hey, add Nicole to my CRM and you know, put her as you know, this lead status or whatever may be it’s just a matter of time before.
35:04
work like that. Sounds like there’s gonna be a whole new sort of job title of like aI management within companies, right, like, what tools you’re using, keeping up with them and all of that right because yeah, we’re doing the same thing. It sounds like as your group is doing we are real lean, too. We use all these tools. We use the same we say the same thing to like the AI gets you about 80% of the way we read through it again, we add the links, we do all the things exactly the same, because it does make everything so much faster. We’re able to do, you know, five to seven blogs a week, just how much and like, posts and like things that normally would have taken you or cost you a lot of money in no time. So pretty amazing.
35:54
It is it is and I think this is literally just like the first inning, which is crazy to like, like, you know, most businesses just started using AI like, within the past, you know, six months or a year like I mean Nicole’s been in this space for way longer than I have. And you know, she’s I assume, Nicole, you’re just blown away by the progress the past, you know, six months. It’s like insane. Yeah,
Nicole Donnelly 36:18
it’s been the last six months has been crazy. And I can’t even imagine where it’s going to be in a year. I’m speaking to some EO chapters in the fall. I honestly I don’t know what I’m going to talk about because by September, things will start to change. And I can tell you about the history of it and it’s it’s accelerated. So, so fast, so fast. Um, we have a question from Alexandria. And he is asking if these tools have Spanish capabilities.
36:51
I’m so caffeinated. We do have Spanish capabilities. So caffeinated CX, we do support in Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish. And we can add more languages pretty quickly. The other ones I’m not sure about. I mean, I think instantly would I don’t know about the other ones per se. Like I would assume there’s got to be like kind of like a jasper or some sort of tool like that for Spanish as well. Right? That’s just kind of my gut feeling but I don’t know, you know, we don’t specifically target markets that speak Spanish but you know, business is so global right now we at caffeinated have customers literally in like six countries and it’s like, we support you know, those five languages. So that’s been pretty cool.
37:41
Yeah, customers. Spanish could be huge.
37:45
Yeah, thank you very much. I’ll contact you just to see what what do you can show us what you can do for us. So that will be fantastic. I’ll give you a call.
37:55
Yeah, yeah. Happy to help. I’m curious. Have you seen like writing tools in Spanish that are like Jasper or like, by word or anything like that or?
38:05
Not really, I’m really kind of new to this. What I do is just, we have a core banking system for Latin America. So everything’s in Spanish. So that’s, that’s the reason I’m asking if there’s Spanish capabilities to implement tools like this. To improve our customer service. It’s providing service to our customers, which are banks is kind of complex and takes a long time. So So I’ll give you pause and see if we can do something. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know that like, like Andrea said in the chat, like chat. T works with Spanish and water bridges. I just don’t know if like, these tools, you know, like lavender work with Spanish too, or whatnot.
38:54
But if you’re as done, you could learn from his database, right? With caffeinated. You could learn from his database to be able to serve the customers better.
39:03
Yeah, yeah, we could contact you. I guess you grow your
39:11
Yeah, I’ll put it in. Chat real quick. And, yeah. Feel free to reach out if anyone has any cool tools as well that they’re working with like, I’m just like, every day, looking at TechCrunch and seeing something new and it’s just like so exciting to see the whole space progress so fast. And I mean, I think to like I listened to the all in podcast, which is with, you know, some pretty well known like Silicon Valley based investors like chamalla and David Sachs and Jason Calacanis. And you know what they say with AI is that you know, the the kind of future of large tech companies doesn’t necessarily mean that you have like a large team, right? It just means that you are very efficient and effective and like to rebuild but say a HubSpot or rebuild. You know, one of these big tech companies is not going to take the amount of engineers and same amount, same amount of team members as it used to because your team members are just going to be able to be 10 more effective as before. And so I feel like really the future of, you know, companies and businesses in general is, you know, enabling your team to be a lot more efficient and have, you know, stronger output, which is, I think, pretty exciting times ahead.
40:31
Yeah, I agree. So we just had another question too, about if there’s the list of the AI tools that we’re using, and we do have a Google Doc and we’ll add these ones to it and share it out to to you. And Saxton just posted. There’s an API for that. And there is an API for I don’t know there’s more than 2000 different API’s on there. And we try to make it really simple. So like the ones that you showed, you use them every day, and we kind of do the same thing where we just have a few like a handful of them. Because there are so many and there’s new ones we find out about every day I was going to ask you and you just said TechCrunch and all in we I was going to ask you where you find the information about the ones that you’re looking at because if we look at these, like there’s an AI for that. There’s so many being
41:27
Yeah, one that I follow pretty closely on Twitter called Mr. All send the Twitter link in the chat. But he has a newsletter called prompts daily that I like. And it’s just, you know, really cool AI tools and he’s got a great audience. I mean, he’s got, you know, 360,000 followers on Twitter and his newsletters is great. So that’s the one that I keep a close eye on. But, I mean, yeah, there’s an AI for that as a great website, too. There’s so many different resources right now, which is good and bad, because sometimes you know, you get a little overwhelmed by all the resources, right?
42:11
Yeah, that’s why I like our little WhatsApp groups because people are sharing what they’re up to. Also, and is from a practical you know, this is what we’re using standpoint. Because there’s, we’re we’re also using one called victory like picture but Patri and we use that for video. And you can drop a blog post in it and it gives you a little snippets and makes a video. You can drop a video in it and do edits. It was it was so fast. We have a cinematographer on our team and what would normally take her for hours to edit took her 30 minutes the first time she tried. Wow. So do u p c t o r y, and we’ll put we’ll put that link in the dock that we’ll send to everybody too. But that one was super fun to play with. Yeah, yeah, picture. And Lynn will pose I’ll send you the doc the link with the doc with everything in it. We’ve been taking notes. And we keep a we keep a Google doc going and update it with different links to different things that we’re using. And if we stopped using something, we’ll take it off, because some things are getting better and some new things will replace I’d like to use as few tools as possible. And there’s going to be mass consolidation, which I mean that might not happen. For a year or so two years, but right now there’s just there’s so many to use, and of course chat GPT like I always have a tab with chat. GPT
43:51
right. Well, I think what’s interesting too about consolidation is like right now there’s a few companies that are pretty well capitalized like Jasper, you know, they raised $20 million and they’ve made like a few smaller acquisitions in the space. And so there definitely will be some consolidation around different you know, AI driven, but I think it’s just so early that you know, so many people are are chasing this this type of angle, which is awesome to see. Makes it a little hard pick the best product to use.
44:21
It does it does. We, we have a blog at AI smart marketing.com and we post our five favorite tools every week. Oh, that’s awesome. And we test them and use them. And so from different perspectives of a graphic designer videographer and like me, business owner, and we choose, we each choose our favorite tools that we’re using that is cool. That’s awesome. Yeah. Um, oh, yeah. I will post and we I don’t know about how you’re training. I guess the question was about your team. We do AI for marketing courses. So we have an agency but then people were just like, This is too much for me. And we want we want it to have AI in the team. So we will supplement a team a lot of the times where we started training again, and the last time we did this much training was when social media started like 13 years ago, we were doing training. Yeah, inside of companies. And so now we started doing it again for AI because I because we’ve been using it for so long. And
45:41
yeah, the one thing I would say, Yeah, the one thing I’d say about that too is like if you’re judging if a tool is like right for you or not like I think right now, especially with software and with AI like that kind of aha moment or time to value is what it’s called. And software companies shouldn’t be like near immediate with with AI in particular. Like if you can’t see value from you know, the AI that you’re being sold like right away, then you know, it’s probably not, you know, you might learn it and then all of a sudden something new is gonna come out, that’s even better. And then you’re going to be stuck with this, you know, quote unquote old tool. And so I would just, you know, be cautious like Nicole was saying of like, you know, when you go to use and onboard a new tool with your team, like the time to value should be very quick.
46:30
Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, one of the things that they have to get really good at that can take some time. Is just being good at prompting and understanding what a good input and output is. Because, like you, you showed the tool for doing the blog posts, and I appreciate it because it has the SEO tied into it. And if you don’t really know your keywords and don’t really know what people are searching to find you. You could create a bunch of posts, but then it’s kind of a waste. And so in our courses, we found out most people who are executing marketing at a company and content, don’t know their keywords and don’t know the correct ones. And so, you’ve got to make sure you have that a good source of truth for all the information that you’re using. And we had one come up earlier this week. That was what’s the best AI should use or how can I best use AI? And Nathan, like you were saying, it depends on what you’re good at. It’s gonna make you better at whatever you’re good at. So the guy who asked me who is a programmer, and I said yours is like he uses it for writing code and bug checking, right. And my husband’s an iOS developer, he uses that same thing for like making little bits of code and also checking for bugs, the checking for bugs. has been their biggest time saver, because you forget like a semicolon somewhere and it’s a big deal, you know? And so that’s their best use of it. And buddy has a different like, whatever your superpower is, this can this can add to it. Totally, totally. Yeah, I
48:10
completely agree. I mean, even like in customer service, like one little thing that we do is like tagging, like auto tagging different tickets, you know, based on you know, that that business of what kind of setup to bring attention to the ticket if it’s, you know, a higher level of support that’s needed or whatever it may be, but yeah, I think you really have to focus on like, how can AI superpower you and your your skill set?
48:35
Yeah. Because everybody can benefit from it. What’s your favorite personal use of AI like What have you done? That’s not business? Um,
48:48
it’s your question. Let’s see. I mean, maybe just kind of those headshot type of tools right, which is kind of still a little business related, but I don’t know I didn’t think the headshot tools are like that. Great. Yeah, you know, they were it wasn’t like I’m not going to change my like, you know, photo on LinkedIn or anything like based on AI generated headshot, but it was fun to play around with, you know, like, that was kind of cool. Like, there’s there’s so many of them, honestly, it’s pretty crazy. I mean, but there was that one. Ai too. I’m blanking on the name. That just went so viral where it was like generating like, like images of people in different outfits and like people were posting it across their their Instagrams and everything. And it was, yeah,
49:33
there’s my history. And there was an app that it’s like four letters. What was it?
49:39
Yeah, that was that’s the one that I’m blanking on the name. Yeah. Like went viral for quite some time. And I heard like that, you know, people that were paying for it like they were making so much money during the time that it was going viral. But
49:52
yeah, like $10 million in two months or something. Yeah,
49:54
yeah. Yes. But that goes to show I think a lot of these AI businesses they have like, quick, quick wins. And then, you know, either the trend moves on or new AI technologies released and I think you really just have to either work with a company that you know, is going to continue to update their model and improve their integrations or you know, just you willing to migrate and don’t get yourself locked into like a long you know, annual contract with with these AI companies. Yeah.
50:32
Playing one today called me lead me and it’s just like a really simple like, make your own avatar where you upload a photo and then you get 200 characters to feed it. You record your voice they give you like a paragraph to read so it is pretty bad.
50:55
It’s so bad it was I did want to they were so bad. Um,
51:03
let’s see. Oh, wait, that’s Katie Soldeu
51:06
headshot Pro two. So I have all these not quite new pictures. It’s funny looking at them. It’s like, Oh, I couldn’t be that person. I could wear that jacket or that shirt.
51:23
The funny part is like, if you didn’t know the person, it might be okay. Oh, um, you’re like No, that’s not quite right.
Nicole Donnelly 51:31
That’s right. I had my husband look at it and I had some of my team look at him like okay, if I put this on my LinkedIn, would you be surprised if I showed up if I put this picture
51:45
you know, how off is it? And there’s some with the hand that isn’t even a hand and you know, are the tiny hand
51:54
Yeah, and this was like a side profile picture. So it like made up the rest of my face, which is why that face shape is really strange. So anyway, here’s what happened. Oh, yeah. AI is changing business. Now is the time to adapt or get left behind. Our 10 week course covers AI tools and how to use them get faster and more productive as you learn to leverage AI for marketing. Still pretty cool, though, right? took me like two minutes. Like, I mean, that’s awesome. I mean, I’m sure like it’ll get better like the eyes everything else is pretty good. Just like you know, yeah. Because it was like this way picture. It was, you know. So, yeah, lots of fun things to get distracted by but you know, it’s also fun. So you need that creativity, or at least I need the creativity part to get me motivated in the other stuff sometimes. So.
52:54
Yeah, it’s something we’ve used it for too is itineraries for travel. And then meals, so we were in Seattle at an Airbnb, and there was a friend’s house and they had some food in the fridge like, oh, you can eat whatever you want. And there’s like, an eggplant and some peppers, just some random ingredients. So I put them all into chat GPT and asked for recipes. And it gave us some recipes.
53:21
Wow. That’s awesome. That is cool.
53:23
We’re also done the meal plans of like, hey, it’s this many calories a day, three meals a day, no snacks. Vegan gluten free, and and then it would give me the meals and do a meal plan for me. And then it can create a shopping list too. And I can do it for one person or two people and it’s kind of glitches out, sometimes around day three. Sometimes it gets today four but you know, it’s just I like to use it for my personal whatever random things I’m thinking about. Oh, Andrea posted and emulate me link so if anybody wants to play with that, and those are the sorts of things that I think you’re gonna get a lot better in our AI smart marketing blog. We do videos for every post. So we play with different video technology. And there’s video there’s a AI video app that’s built into Canva that you can use and it’ll be the talking head and it will take like you can put in a bunch of text. That’s kind of the intro to a blog post. So we use it for that. And there’s what’s the other one that Katie was using? Anyways, you can see some different video, the results of it in the blog, and we have aI generated blog and we’re changing the prompts and stuff and so we’re keeping this as like a historical record of like evolution of AI and tools and stuff. So we know it’s not perfect, and it’s fun to play with.
54:57
Hey, Jen is the other one. I could show you what that looks like. So here’s a sample of one of our blogs where we do a AI generated image, AI generated blog, everything AI generated,
55:12
except for links. Yes,
55:15
the links.
55:19
Voice Search is revolutionizing the way we interact with technology and artificial intelligence AI is at the heart of this transformation. As Voice Search becomes increasingly popular, marketers need to adapt their strategies to optimize their content for this new search format. In this article, it’s pretty good right roll AI plays in voice search optimization, explore natural language processing, and offer tips for marketers to capitalize on this trend.
55:47
And the Canva one is a little more simple. Yeah. Canva is cool, but it’s also really easy because so many people are using Canva already. So it’s like makes it easy for them to adopt that. So this is the Campbell one.
56:04
Email marketing remains a vital component of a successful digital marketing strategy. With the advent of artificial intelligence, AI email marketing has become more efficient, personalized and targeted than ever before. In today’s article, we’ll explore how AI can help you craft the perfect subject line segment your audience and identify the optimal time to send
56:27
so I mean, the AI is feeding you a blog. It’s feeding you images, it’s feeding your videos. It’s doing your social for you like all of these things. Use it to your advantage.
56:40
Yeah
56:44
Yeah, well, thank you so much for for setting this up and putting this yeah there and, you know, it was such a pleasure to discuss AI and how we’re using it at caffeinated and, you know, really just excited to keep a pulse on the whole industry and continue to improve customer service teams.
57:04
Yeah, I think it’s amazing what you’re doing with caffeinated. I think it’s so cool and it’s gonna absolutely change everything and customer service. I mean, when chat first came to customer service, we implemented it with Zendesk back in the day, and we went from six customer service agents down to one just by offering online chat. So I think this is another like this is going to like what did you say this 10 times the output of your customer service teams?
57:34
Yeah, so right now we see at least three times the number of tickets that are able to be answered in the same given period, we see founds times will be higher satisfaction. So I mean kind of components that we look at our response times, satisfaction scores and full resolution times.
57:52
Excellent. Yeah. And okay, so if you if you make someone three times more productive, I mean, that’s so worth it.
58:01
Yeah, that’s been it’s been pretty amazing. It’s been fun, too. I mean, I think like, I think for creators, it’s fun because it makes creating, you know, easier. I think some creators are a little maybe, maybe a little frustrated because it’s not really as kind of crafty as they used to be, in some sense, but I think for customer service where you know, a customer service rep job can be really, iron are really hard and tiring, and AI just makes their lives so much easier.
58:31
Yeah, it does. Thank you. Thanks, Nathan. We’ll keep in touch and we’ll send out the replay. of this. So you’ll get it to and we’ll send a nice link, or a link list will have a link to a Google Doc that has all of the things the tools that we’ve talked about today, including the link to caffeinated and I just want to say like Y Combinator for anybody who doesn’t know it is like the Olympic accelerators to get into. I mean, just kind of slipping that in there that was being very modest. It’s not an easy program to get into. It’s harder to get into than Harvard. Y Combinator is their acceptance rate is so low, so I like you must have things so good and you know, be a quietly brilliant human over there.
59:29
Thank you. I appreciate that and my YC to you know, happy to answer my last saucify went through YC in 2018. And it was it was game changing for our business and just push us to think bigger and really enabled us to have focus and move fast and build a great product. So definitely recommend it for people that have like tech oriented startups. It’s really just a great great accelerant.
59:56
Yeah, and I’m sure now you can do things like caffeinated a lot faster and like have that that same, you know, mentality and network and everything like that. Yeah. That’s, I’m like fan girl of that. I think it’s so cool that you did that. I know. It’s a it’s a hard thing to go through too.
1:00:20
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Well, thank you. And I appreciate everyone tuning in and always here to answer any questions. So thank you all again. And have a great rest of your evening. All right, have a good night. Thank you. You too. Bye. Thank you. Thanks.