Introduction and Background
Ryan: Welcome everyone to the Tech Business Roundtable podcast show. This is a podcast show dedicated to shining a light on the entrepreneurs, founders, and the compelling narratives behind the movements they’ve established. I’m your host, Ryan Davies, and I’m hosting today’s discussion on Unraveling the Secrets of AI-Driven Customer Experience and Success with Daniel Sloan. Daniel, thank you so much for being here.
Daniel: Ryan, I love talking about AI and frontier technology. So yes, I’m just excited to be here. I love talking about this stuff.
Ryan: I think this is going to be great for our listeners. Daniel is a wealth of information and you are going to get a ton out of this episode. I can tell already just from our pre-conversation and his bio, his background, everything he’s bringing to us. He is the co-founder and blockchain and AI practice manager at FutureTech with bringing over 28 years of profound experience into the IT industry, specializing in emerging technologies and innovation, and his leadership at FutureTech Software Development Company is instrumental in navigating the realms of blockchain, AI, robotic process, automation, digital transformation. Across the board, he is a distinguished member of the Forbes Technology Council, an exclusive community for senior-level technology executives and entrepreneurs, and his insights contribute to the broader discourse on technology trends and advancements. He has a very clear mission, and that’s to build and invest in Web3 software that will shape the future of the digital economy, reflecting his commitment to driving innovation and transforming in the ever-evolving tech landscape. I think we could go on and on with a lot of stuff here, but I’m going to turn it over to you and make you do all the hard work now, Daniel. Share a little bit more about your background, how you got involved in the tech industry, and really what inspired you to co-found FutureTech and what its mission is. Certainly.
Daniel: I’ll start in the beginning, whatever you ask. I joined the Marine Corps right out of high school. I did it for four years. Afterwards, I came home and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and got an opportunity to go down to Boston with a friend of mine. Long story short, I ended up in a real job that I had no experience in. It was a call center manager job, but basically, it was around the holidays. You remember the HP. Everybody buys a computer, and they get a call in. This is 1995, by the way. It was just a group of unruly seasonal workers that I used the skills I learned in the Marines to whip them into shape. We were the best call center in all of North America. The company that staffed that got a hold of me afterwards and said, I don’t know what you did, but we want you to be a recruiter. We want to teach you this stuff, but you don’t know everything about technology. I’m like, well, I program a little DOS because I’ve been playing with computers since I was a kid. That’s how I got into IT. A couple years later, I founded my first company. It was a software company, Infolink. It was in SAP, which SAP was in mass adoption. I didn’t realize at the time that my first startup was going to be my easiest startup because if you literally had any people or experience in SAP, it was gone. It was hot water in the Sahara Desert. I’ve been a serial entrepreneur. You asked me why I found a future tech. I really don’t like the whole, I’m going to come in. You’re going to tell me what you want to do. We’re going to just spend a few hours talking about what you want to do. We’re going to give you a random quote of how much it costs. Then as we’re going through it, then we’re going to figure out what you need to do and go, oh, we shouldn’t have done that. That was a waste of time. Something that could have been done in half the time and half the budget, it doesn’t happen. As you can see from our article here, Architects of Web 3, I took it to a very high level. Let’s pull together the best minds, the architects, and let’s really gather the requirements. Let’s take the time. Sometimes for big applications, it can take us six weeks to go through the process, gather the business requirements, do the software requirement specification, and then come back to them and say, no different than if you’ve ever built a house. You sit down, you draw up the plans. You could take that to any competent builder on the planet and they can build you a house. That’s what we do. Part of the secret that we have is by spending all that time and getting to know them and really understanding what they want. At the end of that process, they really don’t want anyone else to build it because they’re like, you know it the best, we trust you. In a way, it does twofold for us. It allows us to understand what they want, but also build that relationship to a point to where we end up being not just a vendor, but a partner.
Ryan: I think that’s a great background. It’s really going to help our founder audience, our tech audience understand and really bring a lot of authority to what you’re bringing forward here. We wanted to talk about that evolution. Again, you’re so deep into AI. We talked before, we kicked off here about people just coming up to you and going, oh, I want to know more, right? Because you can Google so much, but when you get it from somebody with your experience and your background, it means so much more to be able to provide that granularity, this is what it’s about. We’re talking about, again, the AI-driven customer experience success. That means success from both the customer side, but also from the organizational side, as you had pointed out when we were talking before. I’d love to get your background on what that customer experience success means in terms of how AI can impact that.
Daniel: Yeah. When we think about some of the things that we built in AI over the past 10 years, think about robotic process automation. Let’s take a process that humans have to type stuff in a form all the time, go into a website and grab, and you’re building the automation around that to where it’s done for you automatically. We worked with a major pharmaceutical company and did a project. Essentially, the results of that project blew them away. Every time that we went and grabbed the data and brought it in, it was 100% accurate, where previously they had 50% to 60% accuracy of their data. The people that had to make decisions on the data that they got, they could make it 80% faster because they could now trust the data. It was almost this domino effect of we did all the work, we presented it to the executives, but they couldn’t make a decision because they had to go back and recheck everything. Companies and organizations have been getting a lot of power at AI for a while, but really OpenAI, ChatGPT, the fact that all these massive repositories of OpenAI have come out, has given companies the computing power to do things that they couldn’t do before. Because it takes a lot of compute power to run an artificial intelligence that can actually have a conversation with you, Ryan. With a partner of ours, Sony AI, they built an AI that’s conversational and we’re partnering with them to integrate it with different platforms. One of our clients is a real estate client and they have a call center down in Mexico. Those guys are cranking on the phone all the time, following up on leads, trying to set appointments for the agents. We’re bringing in this conversational AI that’s connected to the call center platform that’ll be able to auto-dial me. We’ve programmed it with all the scripts it needs to know. It’s dialing the calls. It’s having conversations with them. In our early tests with some of the founders’ friends who the AI has spoken with, they didn’t even know it was an AI. That is the next level. Every day, I get people that send me stuff and it’s that, hi, Ryan. I want to book an appointment with you. You know what I mean? It’s having a conversation, but you clearly know it’s AI. That to me is, I don’t want to use the word holy grail, but it certainly is the end goal to get an AI that can do the job better than a human because it has all the knowledge. It’s been trained with all of it. It has a knowledge repository and it can have a conversation. You aren’t sitting there mashing the button that says, talk to agent, talk to agent, talk to agent. That to me is the next level of AI.
Ryan: I think with that comes obviously a lot of challenges and things along those lines. As you mentioned, you’re trying to implement this into your sales processes, into your follow-up processes, into things like that. How are you helping and what do you see from these challenges that businesses commonly face in the implementation or even, like you said, the identification stage? Is there a lot of resistance or skepticism that people have towards this? Well, again, my sales team is human and people buy from humans because they’re emotional. Do you hear that a lot? Is there, like you said, the technologies evolving to where it’s being successful?
Daniel: One of the AIs that we’re using as our core AI is actually a clone of a real person, Victoria Gentz. She’s a top model. She’s got about a million and a half people on Instagram. She speaks on stage with Tony Robbins. She’s a prominent person and she wanted this AI built because she had her fans that wanted to interact with her. She’s like, well, I can’t talk to everybody. We built it. It was about three months of deep learning and putting all of her stories and doing everything there. Once we built that for her and got that for her, we really liked her voice. She’s got this British voice. Not only is she very pretty. We’re like, we’re going to license her name, image, and likeness. We’re going to buy her NIL, which we did. This is our base AI. Once we had her NIL and we could do what we wanted with it, we started playing around. I don’t know if I shared the recording of the conversation that Chris, who’s the CEO of XIAOMI had, but he just wanted to play an ad hoc role, role play with her and just have her play a real estate agent that was calling him as a for sale by owner and convincing him to have conversation. It’s about a three minute thing. Do we have enough time? Do you want to listen to that?
Ryan: That’s pretty amazing. Yeah. If you’ve got that queued up, I would love to have that. Let’s do that.
Daniel: All right. Let’s go ahead. I could share my screen so you could see if you have that ability.
Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Let’s do this.
Daniel: Let’s share a screen. Here we go. Sorry. Cancel. All right. Here we go. You should see it in a second. All right. See my screen? We got it. All right. Cranking it up so you guys can hear it.
[Video Playing]: Good afternoon. May I speak with Christopher? Hi, this is Christopher. Hi, Christopher. This is Victoria. I’m representing you from WMH Home Services. I noticed your property is listed for sale by the owner. It looks like a gorgeous home. Have you had a lot of interest so far? Hi, Victoria. Yeah, I appreciate that. We’ve had some inquiries, but nothing really upgraded yet. I listed the home for sale by the owner because I didn’t want to have any relative fees. I’m not really looking to list with a realtor at this time, but I appreciate the call. I completely understand, Christopher. Everyone wants to maximize their profit when selling their home. However, if I could show you a way in which you could potentially net more money, even after paying agencies, would you be open to a quick discussion? Well, possibly. I’m willing to listen if you can convince me that I’ll be able to net a higher sale price. Great. On average, homes listed with WMH Home sell for about 10% to 15% more than for sale by owner or feasible listings. This is because we have access to a larger pool of buyers that we combine with our specialized marketing tactic that we believe is the reason why more of our buyers make higher offers on our listings. And let’s not forget the time and effort you save by letting someone handle showings, negotiations, and paperwork. When you factor all that in, it’s likely that even after paying the agency, you will walk away with more money in your pocket. Okay, interesting. But how could I be sure that you would maximize my selling price? That’s a fair question, Christopher. Here’s what I propose. Let’s meet up and I’m straight for touch. I’ll provide a detailed comparative market analysis for your property and I’ll outline exactly how we can help increase the visibility of your home and attract serious buyers. If by the end of our meeting you still feel Feasible is the way to go, I respect that. But if you see the value in our services, we can discuss a partnership listing. Does that sound fair? Okay, no, that sounds fair. Sounds reasonable. Fantastic.
I appreciate your openness, Christopher. I’m free next week with Tuesday or Thursday.
Daniel: So the next, you know, 30 seconds is just her scheduling that call. And so the reason I like it is, and this was about four months ago, right? So the reason I like to share that is just because it was an ad hoc impromptu, um, no programming. Like we didn’t teach her anything about real estate. So how we have this real estate client of ours as we shared this. And he’s a friend of mine too. So when I told him what went down, he’s like, if I didn’t know you, I wouldn’t be calling you a liar. And I was like, why? He goes, because some of those objections handling she uses are things that I’ve had in my script for 20 years. And he says that AI bleep is doing it better than some of the people I pay on my team to do it. How can I, you know, so this is how, this is how the conversation came. So when you can get an AI that is able to have that level of conversation and you’re not, you know what I mean? Cause I, that you, unless I tell you that’s an AI, you might not right off the bat. No, it’s, it’s pretty darn good. We’re getting better. So the goal is to get it to a point where it’s so smooth and conversational and you know, just a little bit of lag here and there that we’re going to have to basically disclose at the end of the calls. And by the way, just wanted you to know, I’m an AI, I’m in a program by future tech and Sony. So I just wanted you to know that because you’re going to talk to a live person after I, you know what I mean? And then they’re going to go away, Holy cow. I just had a whole 10 minute conversation. I didn’t even know it was AI. Now that’s going to whoever we’re setting that appointment for, because even though you set an appointment, there is, I want to say a high, but you know, 30, 40% of the time people don’t show up for the appointment. Yeah. We’re thinking if they’re so intrigued about the AI thing, even if they’re not interested, right. They don’t want to list their home with you or whatever. They want to code with that meeting because they want to ask them what the hell is going on with that?
Ryan: Yeah, no, that’s, that is, that was incredible. I absolutely agree. Like I, I kept wondering like, okay, are you really, this is, this is entirely AI through this thing. Cause again, there were objections there, even right down to the very end, how, you know, you’re taught the AB perspective Tuesday or Thursday work better for you this or that, you know, not the, so when would you like to, and leave too many things open.
And like, it’s just all of the best, you can put all of your best practices into one, you know, into one persona and now you’ve, you’ve got the ideal again. And that’s the hardest part. Booking that appointment, that cold calling, the success rates are so low and everything else. And that’s where I think a lot of ROI is lost. And you know, a lot of investment goes in now you’ve kind of bypassed it. And as you mentioned, you know, in our conversation before, and is the fact of you’re, you’re basically taking humans and upscaling them into what’s better for them and giving them more empowerment, because like, let’s be honest, that’s the part of the job that salespeople hate is doing the cold calling and booking the appointment, doing all that. Their, their, their dream is I have an assistant, they put things in my calendar. I show up for work in the morning. I go through and go, these are all, you know, high value leads that have come through that I can talk to. I’ve gotten all that stuff I hate doing out of the way. And we’re empowering people to do what they, what they love. Right. So it’s just that that’s remarkable. And I’d love to, again, get your take on that, of the idea of putting people in a better position to succeed in doing what they love as an AI advantage, as opposed to, oh, AI is taking my job. It’s no AIs, AIs empower you to do more of what you want to do and more high value work. Right.
Daniel: Nobody, nobody really wants those call center jobs. No, nobody really wants to sit in a freaking cube with 10,000 other people around them. Take an answer to the same thing. Control alt delete, reset your system. You know what I mean? Like it’s over and over and over and over again. Like we, you know, in previous businesses, we’ve had staffing divisions in arms and I’ve staffed some very large call centers by 600. And, you know, like I’ve had people come to me and say, if I do this job, another five minutes, I’m going to literally shoot myself. I quit. It’s not a job people really need or want, but like you said, this AI had this conversation. Now, if I’m the agent, because obviously Victoria’s not showing up to that meeting, right. And that was ad hoc. So we would train it to say, by the way, I’m an AI. I can’t come meet you, but Daniel’s going to come meet you. Right. So I would get the transcript of that. If I want to listen to the recording, I can listen to the recording because it’s short enough. But if let’s say it’s a 15 minute conversation, I’m going to get the transcript. So really the AI has an AI helper, whether it’s fireflies, whether whatever. So now it’s amazing. I come in, I can either listen to that call or I get the transcript. And then we’re also building tools based upon that conversation to suggest to the sales, like, so like in the insurance business, if this is somebody that’s recently lost a loved one, right. Well, there’s a whole script and the whole thing you go down, right. They’re newlyweds. They’re different. You know what I mean? So you can kind of help that salesperson say, Hey, in the call, these were the key hot buttons. And these are the things you need to focus on. And they even want us to build it to where the AI sits on the call. And then it’s instant messaging them during that and say, they just mentioned this, go in for this close, go do this, go do that. So again, just helping you like how transformative it would be as a football player? You could have the coach in your ear the whole time while you’re playing, you’re about to get hit, go left. Like you literally have got this coach sitting here helping you the whole way along. And COVID has really brought a lot of in-person stuff like insurance to video conferencing. So it’s really empowering, but yeah, I do want to make that point. I don’t feel like where we are with AI, it’s going to take people’s jobs. It might take some of those crappy jobs, but please go get a better one. But it’s certainly going to empower all the people that just hate this part of their job, but love this, right? Like they love the action. Like I love the clothes. I love talking to people. The whole, like you said, the whole cold calling thing. I hate that. Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan: It’s just like somebody who’s done sales and stuff like that, right? That’s the high. You want to chase the high of that close of that next of that, this is a high value appointment. This is exciting. I’m having a day, not a, all right, I’ve got an eight hour grinding block to go through to hopefully fill my calendar and do things right. And if I’m empowered, you’re going to also, you’re going to get better salespeople. You’re going to have stickiness. You’re going to have higher retention rates. Like, I mean, the trickle down from it is far beyond just efficiency, but there’s so much more in hard costs, soft costs, everything that kind of brings that together from that side. Um, I want to bring it up because, you know, I think this is a, the AI question, I guess we’ve already talked about a little bit about the, like you said, job replacement, not necessarily it’s, it’s upskilling it’s changing, but like the security and the ethics behind it. Right. And you mentioned, you know, AI processing, huge amounts of data. Some of that can even be sensitive data, you know, from her it’s personalized data, it’s personalized conversations, things along that. So how do you prioritize data security, ethical considerations in this kind of automation sales automation space specifically, and, you know, ensure the responsible and ethical use, uh, of, of the sales process?
Blockchain and AI
Daniel: Well, as you can see from my title, I’ve got a blockchain in it. And for people that don’t know what blockchain is, it’s an immutable ledger. And so they’re like, okay, that’s a big word, immutable. Let me think about that. Do I need to Webster that? So essentially what we’re saying is if you think of an Excel spreadsheet, where I’m going in there and I’m, I’m adding information and all of us are adding information, right? I could go in there and delete that information. And I can make it to where you wouldn’t know that I deleted it, right? With blockchain technology, if I put information in there, it’s almost like chiseling it on a piece of rock. Now I can scratch that piece of information off and write something new next to it, but you always know it’s always there. So you, you always know who went in there, who accessed it. So putting all the information and using, you know, distributed ledger technology, which is another way of just got, you know, blockchain distributed ledger technology, very, very similar. That allows us to say from every point of when your data came in, who accessed it, what was done with it. There’s an immutable record of everything. So even especially highly regulated industries like insurance, we were actually talking about building a regulatory node, which is essentially we dump every bit of information that’s required by the regulator to be reviewed into its own separate server that they have access to. Cause typically they have to come in and they have to audit, you know what I mean? Like it’s a physical audit. So we’re saying here, you can have the electronic version of all of our data at any time you want to look at it. And we’ve done this with natural gas trading and other, or, you know, highly regulated things. And it’s shown when you give them data that they can trust, like, I know you can’t fudge these numbers. It’s written in the blockchain. It has reduced the amount of physical audits by 60%. They still got to go in and do it, but they don’t come in as often because they’re like, why am I going to go in and take a whole team? It costs them money to come do that. So it’s just stuff like that, where they just want to make sure you’re not doing something wrong. Because that’s their job as the government. And you provide them the ability to do that job more efficiently through this. And it’s a win-win for everybody. Right.
Ryan: Yeah. That’s, I mean, it’s just, that’s so, I love that idea again, like that everything is going to be identifiable. IP is protected like, and, and our likeness again, you know, if I’ve been through this, I could host this podcast. Someone could take this podcast. They can be translated into other languages. They can do whatever they want with it. You know, I don’t have anything if I can’t claim any IP to it from that sense. Right. So no matter what it is, we’re talking about security and ethics and how it’s done and being able to connect those two things together is phenomenal. You know, I want to talk a little bit again about, you know, the adaptation to changes in the business environment, scalability with this. And really have you seen, you know, again, how that has come into place? Cause I know there’s got to be a lot of hurdles and integrations and okay. I don’t know where to start. Everybody’s at different parts of the, you know, of their journey. Some people are laggards and, you know, they might listen to this in four years and go, well, I better get on that. Right. And then somebody else might be like, we’ve already done that. What’s next? But those challenges exist in terms of adaptation and scalability and how you can help with that.
The Impact of AI on Business Adaptation
Daniel: Yeah, there’s kind of a famous cautionary tale blockbuster video, right? And the CEO gets on a, and some kind of interview and basically talking about how he’s not worried about Netflix and how people love to go to his store and walk around and buy candy and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, a blockbuster goes from a fortune 500 company to bankruptcy because they didn’t adapt in time because of technology. There was a technology revolution, evolution, whatever you want to call it happening right around then, which enabled Netflix and all these things to happen. And they were very resistant to that change. And there’s lots of other companies. I mean, Mammon companies like MCI and Worldcom that didn’t adapt like, okay, you can’t just be selling, you know, long distance anymore. That’s kind of going away. There’s a, there’s, so it’s interesting with AI because it’s even more important now because I’ll give you an example. I’m sitting down with the group that does this kind of ERC, you know, like you get your grants from the government kind of thing, and you’ve got to apply for it. And it’s a lot of paperwork and it’s a lot of BS. And there’s some big companies that have massive people that they’re paying to do it. Well, we’re going to use AI to automate that process and do all that stuff. And so their 10% team, they think is going to be able to do the work of about 50 people. So like we can charge less, like we could go in and basically say, we will take less. They’re winning about 15% more business now because they’ve literally said, oh, by the way, your stuff isn’t going to get rejected because of errors because we have AI double checking everything. So not only are we charging less, so they’re being very transparent about saying, Ryan, here’s why I can do this cheaper. Here’s why I can do it better. And oh, by the way, I’m a small business. And if you could take care of me, I would appreciate that. And they’re like, oh yeah. So they’re competing with big companies that are throwing bodies at it, trying to do some tech. And it kind of blew me away. I was like, this could be really the way of the future of how smaller companies are able to get really good body shots at some of the bigger companies. Cause if these guys are moving slow and these guys come in and bring in AI tools and all of a sudden they don’t need a thousand people in a call center, they need a hundred people. They don’t need as many people doing this data entry. If AI is empowering and making all of their people like the justice league, the meta humans. I used to be human, but now with AI, I’m a meta human. I can breathe in their water. I’m Aquaman. How powerful is that going to be? Cause I know as an entrepreneur, I’ve been doing what I’m doing a long time, very efficient, but I still sometimes got to stop and do stuff and to be able to get into and use my GPT and go and like, you know, I’m working on a prop tech project right now where I’m one of the co-founders in and we’re doing a business plan and my partner in that, Brian’s like, how the hell are you getting this stuff done so fast? And I’m like, you can’t have AI in your title and not be using AI tools, man. It’s like a chef that doesn’t use his own food, buddy. Cause you know, he’s deep into real estate. He’s been doing that 20 years, 30 years. He knows that, but he doesn’t know tech. So he’s been really enjoying our partnership because we’re kind of showing, Hey, we’re going to do it this way to do it that way. But he’s like, man, if I had this, I could, cause he gets so many, so many deals that come to him. Right. He goes, I get literally hundreds of deals. How do I analyze them all? So I’m like, well, we could run them through it. So now he’s starting to think he’s like, Holy cow. I could do 10, 20 more deals a year if I could vet them. Cause I’ve got people that say, if you find these deals with this internal rate of return and with this ROI and all that, I’ll, I’ll put money into them, but it takes him and his team so long to get to that. So you see how just this efficiency that’s going to happen. And it’s exciting to me because I’m, I’m, you know, not super pro big box, big companies. I’ve worked with them. You know, I like working with them, but I’m kind of an underdog. I’m rooting for the smaller guys. So I like to see the smaller and the mid cap companies come in and be able to, you know, compete head to head.
Ryan: Yeah. I think, I think it’s, it’s just so, like you said, it’s so revolutionary. You’re going to, it’s becoming a story about adaptability and things like that. And like you said, it’s, it’s, if you were to interview someone and say, you know, if I could hire somebody for you to take something off of your plate so that you’d be more productive, close more deals or whatever, they’d be like, yeah, sure. What does that salary cost? Who is this person? Right. It’s not, it’s an instantaneous result that you can get from it too. And you can do it all. Right. So it just becomes that, you know, that understanding that it’s out there, you can do it. Right. And it’s really changing how, uh, you know, sales processes and everything is done the best prepared founded companies for this. Do they have a commonality between them? Is there something where you go, you look at someone and go, okay, you know, you’re, you’re setting yourself up for success because anything from that standpoint?
Daniel: Well, I think when you can focus in, you know, probably all seen the movie, Jerry Maguire, you know, give your customer more attention. Like, what do you need? How can I help you? Right. That only happens when you have the time, the humans have the time to actually have conversations and actually spend time with them. So if I’ve got all these software tools that are making what I’m doing for you, Ryan. So you’ve hired me to do this job for you. We’re kicking ass and we’re taking names and we’re getting it done. And my guy isn’t running around doing all these things like, and he’s spending more, like, how can we help you? What are your other problem areas? And then you’re like, you know, you just became my partner. Like you’re not just a vendor to me anymore. I’m like, you’re constantly asking me what you need. I think that to me is something where, and quite frankly, the sanity of humans being able to like take time and go watch their kids’ baseball game, right? Like you’re working so many hours in a day. If AI can come in and take off four hours out of your day that you’re doing stupid stuff that you hated anyways.
And now maybe you don’t work those extra four hours. You take them and you relax and you enjoy life. You know, burnout is such a massive thing because we’re especially talking about sales automation. Salespeople today don’t want to take a vacation. I know this because we interviewed a bunch of them in the insurance business, because they’re like, when I come back, it takes me so long to get my pipeline full. Right. So I didn’t make any money while I was on vacation. It took me three weeks to get my things back up to where I can start making money. It’s like five weeks of not making money, four weeks.
So for them to take a vacation, they have to forgo a month’s worth of income. But if we’re like, if AI could be keeping all your people, you know, all the new people that are coming, you know what I mean? Like, and you come back, you got a full slate of stuff to do. And they’re like, I would kiss you. I’m like, okay, no kissing. But you know what I mean? Like that is blowing their mind. I’m like, really? I’m like, and you could be like 10, 15 minutes a day just going in and going, yep, I approve all these automated emails that are going on. Boom, yep, let’s do it. Like you could be spending a little time on vacation without actually working. Like just telling the tools what they need to do, confirming everything. And they’re like, I could do that. I could do that on the beach while drinking Corona. I’m like, you could absolutely be doing that. Like I could be on vacation, really be on vacation if I know that, if I built it all out. And that’s the thing, that’s why we’ve got to spend so much time understanding you and your business. Because if we don’t understand you and your business, we can’t architect and build it to do the things that you do. Because not everybody does the same process. Like you’re like, I do this. I set up a webinar first and I did that. And then I do this. So if we can automate the majority of that, that’s again, I think where you get the acceleration of more business, the sanity of the people that are doing it. And quite frankly, you aren’t going to go through as many new hires too. The people that work there are going to enjoy working there and they’re going to stay longer.
Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I’m thinking about it myself now already. I mean, I’m going on vacation for like six weeks. I know you get to go sooner than that. And I already think about myself, like, the work doesn’t go away. It’s just, it’s waiting for you when you get back. I spend my time on vacation anxiety about half the time, especially towards the end going, okay, so now my vacation is coming to an end. I got to start thinking about work again. And I don’t even know what’s there. And where I’m going, there’s no, I’m not, there’s no cell phone out in the middle of the ocean where I am. So I’m like, what am I going to do? What am I coming back to, right? And if it’s like, hey, there’s something that can take care of a lot of this for you, you can actually enjoy the purpose of why you’re trying to get away from work. Do all of this in that sense. Last thing I want to talk about, cause I know, again, this is something, you do a lot of digital transformation and a huge piece of that is on the change management piece, right? So again, really helping people understand what it’s going to take, both from a user experience for sales teams to, you know, an executive side of things, everywhere in between, you know, what do you recommend when it comes to preparation for that training, onboarding processes, et cetera? Cause you really want to have as seamless an adoption as possible. And again, don’t fear mongers, but this is how we’re making life better for organizations.
Overcoming Resistance and Embracing Change
Daniel: I’ve seen it done both ways. I’ve seen carrots and I’ve seen sticks. Okay. I think the best story that I can relate from analogy was, you know, if anybody doesn’t understand SAP as an enterprise resource package, it’s essentially a nuclear bomb to any existing applications. So any accounting systems you had, any HR systems, everything that you had previously is gone and is replaced by SAP. And back in 99, when Shell did theirs, there were some very old legacy systems that the people that were using them didn’t want to get rid of and this and that. And they kept trying to incentivize them and this and that. And finally the CEO just came out and said, we’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this. They’re bringing in change management consultants. The consultants will come back saying the same thing. I can tell them what they need to do. They’re just not going to do it.They ended up firing a lot of people because the CEO said, either you get on board and you use this or you’re done. I don’t care how long you’ve been here. A few people got fired and everyone’s like, well, I guess he’s serious. We got to do it. And that’s unfortunate, but I’d say the vast majority of the people through the incentives, like if you take this training and you do this, like you get some pay time off or they do the grading of your bonuses. Like if you’re proficient in SAP, then you’re getting a hundred percent of your bonus, not 80%. So you can factor those things in. I think AI is a lot different because it’s so fun. And you can actually, I mean, people that actually take the time, because you know, chat GPT is not the easiest thing to use, right? People get like, oh, I asked the wrong question. The model broke. I mean, it’s kind of like the early days of the internet, right? Yeah. But once we get more than adoption, once it starts, you get it and you understand it and you use it and you’re like, holy cow, like this is so fun. So I feel like the reason this is going so fast is because people aren’t really resisting it. They’re like, why would I use an ax to chop down a tree? You just handed me a chainsaw, Daniel. Like, holy cow, I can get three times the amount of trees cut down in a day. I mean, that is pretty transformative. That’s kind of where AI is coming in. They’ve already had studies, 40 to 50% individual efficiency. Like it can make you 50% more efficient as a new job. Just my model.
Ryan: That’s amazing. Yeah. Three times as many trees and I won’t be sore tomorrow. So that’s also a positive, right?
Daniel: So it’s- You are on a chainsaw. I mean, it’s fun. I mean, you’re having fun doing your job. It’s not like, I gotta just keep hacking away and I gotta, you know what I mean? Like some things are just fun to do.
Ryan: Yeah, exactly. I love that. That’s an unbelievable analogy. I think, you know, that could be a good place for us to start to wrap up here. So a couple of little things at the end, I always like to say, you know, for business leaders to kind of, what key takeaway would you say, you know, looking to leverage AI automation, sales automation, customer experience automation, key takeaway for the audience to remember from our conversation here?
The Future of AI Integration in Business
Daniel: If you’re trying to find, you know, it’s like anything that’s brand new in demand, not a lot, you know, like it’s gonna cost you money, right? And you’re gonna be like, holy cow. But when you look at the value that it’s gonna bring, and a lot of the bigger companies, they’re like, I don’t care what it costs. I know this is gonna, I mean, it’s having such a massive impact. And again, I keep coming back to SAP because that’s the only thing I can think of in my 28 year career that companies saw and didn’t care what the price tag was. They’re like, we have to do this to be competitive. Shell said, Exxon’s doing it. I can’t let Exxon get a competitive advantage. And they were just doing it because they knew that the value was there, even though it was costing them a lot of money.And over this period of time, it has proven all of those companies wise because they’ve gotten their money back tenfold because of the efficiency. So AI, don’t wait for it to get to the point where, you know, it’s like, everybody’s doing it. It’s super affordable. I mean, if you wanna be on the cutting edge, now’s the time to get in, spend the time researching it first, find a company like ours that will help you understand the journey, help you understand where’s the low hanging fruit, right? Don’t try to do everything at once, you know, take a very, we’ll do this, we’ll get the value out of it and then go from there. I think that’s the best approach. Like pick one thing you wanna do, do it, see the value out of it, get hooked on Phonics and then keep going.
Ryan: I absolutely love it. That is, you know, in the tech world and software development for all of our listeners, man, you gotta understand the whole, like, you know, you don’t develop it all overnight. It’s iterations, it’s a sprint series of, you know, processes. What an amazing takeaway. Get on it now. And you mentioned, you know, find the right person to partner with. So Daniel Sloan of FutureTech, how do we get in contact with you to find the right person to get partnered with here?
Daniel: Oh, you can, you know, we’ve got to contact us on our website. LinkedIn is a great place to connect with me. Just, I don’t, you don’t need to put an email address to know me to connect with me. So you can connect with me on LinkedIn and then I can, you know, our general email is info at wearefuturetech.com.
Ryan: There it is. So for our listeners, again, I think an unbelievable wealth of information here, some amazing points, no matter where you are in that journey, whether you’re looking to upscale what you’ve already got or you’re, okay, it’s time to put a toe in the water and start to figure out why I’m not, you know, why I’m not keeping up with the Joneses sort of a thing. You know, I don’t want to become a blockbuster. Let’s figure this out. Even from the founder stage, I’m brand new, but I could go obsolete so quickly if I’m not part of it. So wearefuturetech.com is the website. Daniel Sloan, CEO, co-founder there. Thank you so much for your time today, for joining us and for sharing some amazing insights and wisdom for our listeners. Greatly appreciate it. I personally incredibly appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
Daniel: Thanks for having me.
Ryan: Thank you. So with that, we can wrap up our podcast today with Daniel Sloan on unraveling the secrets of AI-driven customer experience success. And also I want to thank our listeners as always. We can’t do what we do without you. So until we meet again with another amazing TBR episode, I’m your host, Ryan Davies. Thanks everybody and take care.