How this transcript was made
Transcribed by machine from the published audio, then corrected by hand.
It is not a verbatim record: the changes below were made, and are counted.
This episode
55 speaker turns, 106 changes.
- closing CTA identified as CTA 3 - Resources (match 100%), replaced with the authored script and attributed to Max
What was changed in these transcripts, and what was not
Generated: 2026-09-20 from 2026-09-20-named/, itself transcribed from the audio that is live on the feed. Every change below is mechanical and counted. No sentence was reworded, no claim altered, nothing removed for being awkward.
The editorial decision
Owner's choice, 2026-09-20: light clean. "Um", "uh" and stammered word repeats ("and, and") are removed, because nobody intends to say them. "You know", "I mean", "kind of" and "sort of" are KEPT - they run to roughly 2,300 instances across the catalogue and stripping them would make the page read as somebody else.
Counts across the whole set
| Change | Count |
| stammered repeat removed | 667 |
| um / uh removed | 654 |
| space before punctuation | 241 |
| split contraction | 132 |
| guest turn named (Joe Casabona) | 101 |
| organization -> organisation | 71 |
| diarisation fragment returned to the host | 62 |
| ai -> AI | 57 |
| empty turn dropped (was filler only) | 36 |
| synthetic outro restored from script | 21 |
| organizations -> organisations | 18 |
| hyphen followed by space | 14 |
| realize -> realise | 14 |
| A.I. -> AI | 10 |
| recognized -> recognised | 9 |
| gray -> grey | 9 |
| summarize -> summarise | 9 |
| color -> colour | 9 |
| behavior -> behaviour | 8 |
| synthetic intro restored from script | 8 |
| analyze -> analyse | 7 |
| behavioral -> behavioural | 7 |
| recognize -> recognise | 6 |
| percent -> % | 5 |
| personalized -> personalised | 5 |
| skeptical -> sceptical | 5 |
| analyzing -> analysing | 5 |
| center -> centre | 5 |
| optimization -> optimisation | 4 |
| realized -> realised | 4 |
| favorite -> favourite | 4 |
| realizing -> realising | 4 |
| canceled -> cancelled | 4 |
| recognizing -> recognising | 4 |
| announcer turn relabelled from Guest | 4 |
| summarizing -> summarising | 4 |
| labor -> labour | 4 |
| behaviors -> behaviours | 4 |
| colors -> colours | 4 |
| organizational -> organisational | 4 |
| customized -> customised | 3 |
| analog -> analogue | 3 |
| optimize -> optimise | 3 |
| honor -> honour | 2 |
| optimizing -> optimising | 2 |
| summarizes -> summarises | 2 |
| personalize -> personalise | 1 |
| prioritize -> prioritise | 1 |
| prioritized -> prioritised | 1 |
| organize -> organise | 1 |
| rumor -> rumour | 1 |
| organized -> organised | 1 |
| capitalize -> capitalise | 1 |
| centered -> centred | 1 |
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| emphasize -> emphasise | 1 |
| split name repaired (Schaefer) | 1 |
| humor -> humour | 1 |
| traveling -> travelling | 1 |
| defense -> defence | 1 |
| maximize -> maximise | 1 |
| Organizations -> Organisations | 1 |
| apologize -> apologise | 1 |
| digitized -> digitised | 1 |
| monetize -> monetise | 1 |
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| narrator opener re-attributed to Max, words left as transcribed | 1 |
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| specialized -> specialised | 1 |
| split name repaired (Wadsworth) | 1 |
| aluminum -> aluminium | 1 |
| specializes -> specialises | 1 |
| skeptic -> sceptic | 1 |
| customize -> customise | 1 |
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| optimized -> optimised | 1 |
| visualize -> visualise | 1 |
| spoken domain -> humanspark.ai | 0 |
What was deliberately left alone
- "Program". A computer program keeps that spelling in UK English; only a broadcast or a scheme is a "programme", and only a reader can tell which was meant.
- "License" and "practice". Both have a noun/verb spelling split in UK English that a rule cannot decide.
- Capitalised words mid-sentence that would otherwise have been respelled: 4 of them, most often part of a name. Left as spoken.
- Retired show and brand names. Spoken by the host and guests. A transcript that removes what was said is not a transcript.
- "Co-pilot". Sometimes Microsoft's product, sometimes the metaphor. A rule would corrupt the honest ones.
The synthetic segments
The opening voiceover on the archive episodes and the closing call to action are read by Max, the show's AI narrator, from a script written in advance. Transcribing them means guessing at words already on file, and the guesses were wrong in places - one opener came back as "an AI that boned him up" where the script says "phoned him up". Those passages carry the authored text instead, and are attributed to Max rather than to the guest: the diariser groups Max with the non-host speaker, which would otherwise put a real person's name on words they never said.
Alastair McDermottAre you drowning in all this hype around AI, but you're still waiting to see real tangible results and real value?
In today's episode, we're going to cut through the noise and we're going to talk about how businesses, just like yours,
are using AI in the real world to save time, increase profitability and leave competitors in the dust. I have a super guest for you today that's coming next.
Heidi ArayaHermit.
Alastair McDermottAnd my guest today is a process improvement consultant who focuses on AI automations.
She has over 25 years of experience driving multi-million dollar improvements and she is the founder of BrightLogic. Heidi Araya, you're very welcome to the show.
Heidi ArayaThank you so much. I'm so glad to be here today.
Alastair McDermottSo the thing that I think is most important to anybody considering spending time or money on implementing AI is where is the value?
And I'm seeing people talking about them not finding value in AI, which personally, I think is crazy, like I see value everywhere.
But I'm just wondering, do you have any insight as to why people are finding it difficult to find value in AI?
Heidi ArayaWell, simply put, I think they start thinking about AI as the tool they must use instead of starting with the use case. And what's, what are they struggling with today?
Why would they even adopt AI? Is it even an appropriate solution there? So I think there's lack of understanding about how they should be adopting AI and what it really means.
It's such a broad topic that means so many things that just, you know, AI to everybody today is just ChatGPT.
And so it's, it's natural that not only they don't know what to put in the little box, but it might seem limiting to them because maybe it can't take care of the business,
the biggest business challenges that they have today, which might not even be related to anything that ChatGPT can help with.
Alastair McDermottYeah. So maybe part of it is kind of people putting the cart before the horse.
They're looking at the, they're looking at the tool and seeing how can I make this work with my business, but they're not looking at their business and saying,
what problems do I have that I might be able to solve with AI, right?
Heidi ArayaYes. And in my 25 years of process improvement experience, it's not this is not a new use case, right?
It's like the latest fad comes on, whether it's a Six Sigma or agile or lean or AI now it's like, whatever it is, everyone is jumping on it.
And they're, they're missing the point because it's like all about adopting AI instead of thinking about how their business can leverage that.
Alastair McDermottSo where is the place to start then? Can you just talk me through how you think about this when you're looking at a business and you're, maybe you're
Heidi ArayaTalking to a business owner.
Alastair McDermottLike, where do you start with this?
Heidi ArayaSo first of all, I asked them what, you know, what makes you grown? You wake up in the morning, you're ready to start your day. What makes you grown?
It's a particular process or particular pain or challenge that you're suffering. And they always have an answer to that. Like the biggest challenge in my business is this particular thing.
It's a process. It's something that is, that they're struggling with. And it could be lack of leads. It could be a particular part of the process that they have.
That's very manual, but they always know what that is. And then with that, you can start to look at how AI could help in that process. I can give you one example.
So a handyman came up to me after I went to a chamber of commerce event and said, you know, I think I need some process improvement and I could, I could really use your help.
And so we walked through his workflow of how he gets customer intake, which are all inbound leads, and then how he sends his folks on the job and then finishes the job and then goes through
that whole workflow. It was many steps across many different platforms because they are there.
The inbound leads are coming on many different platforms, texts, emails, Facebook and next door and all those things.
And he has to figure out how he can respond to them in a way that's human and timely.
And so we discovered while running through his process, I actually pointed out which parts of the process that could be automated.
And it turned out that 75% of his process could be automated. At the end, he decided that he didn't want all of it automated. He really wanted to keep a very personal touch as well.
So we opted to start with some voice agent for him. So it's a, it's in basically an AI receptionist that takes calls when he's not available.
And we're going to be building on that solution by adding one automation that puts all of those inbound messages into one place so he can see easily what stage of the process they're in.
So it's things like that you really have to talk to someone to figure out what is the struggle that they have today and where AI can fit in.
And even if AI could fit in somewhere, you can opt to say, I don't want AI here because I really want to reach back out to the owner in person and ask them how the job went.
And of course, AI can do that, but, you know, we don't want to do that in that case, right?
Alastair McDermottYeah, so really fascinating. And so the question then that I'd have is, you know, just about this specific example is this not overkill to use AI for something like a business of that size?
I'm just wondering about like the appropriateness of AI solutions and maybe there's something off the shelf that you could have used instead.
I'm interested in that because I think that's a question
Heidi ArayaPeople struggle with.
Alastair McDermottLike maybe there's something out there already.
Heidi ArayaYeah, so great question. So he has six people working for him. So he is, you know, a smallish business, but still, it's not just him.
And I, we actually, that was one of the things that I told him. Couldn't you just have people fill out a form? Couldn't you actually, there's out, there's something called Housecall Pro.
You can use Housecall Pro. So I actually told him about these things and said, I just want to make sure that you're, you think you're going down the right direction.
And for his business personally, he said, Heidi, I want it to be a very personal touch.
If I have them fill out a form, they're just going to say like, oh, I received this thing and you're telling me to fill out a form. How boring is that? And they're not going to do it.
They're not going to upload the photos. And the other choice with the Housecall Pro was it really didn't have a personal touch either.
And it was about deploying staff to job sites instead of really integrating and having a personal touch.
And so you might think it's ironic, but he felt the AI would bring that personal touch. He gets an inbound call. The AI responds and asks them about the job.
Say, I've got 20 cracked tiles on my back porch I need to fix. And then the AI will say, tell me more about the tiles, you know, what location or how many tiles, whatever.
So it asks for more details about the job. And then it asks them to send photos to his text or email.
And then by the time he gets the voice transcript and looks at his email, he's already got the photos there and he can just give them an estimate back.
Whereas before he was just waiting till the end of the day at 9pm when the leads could have gone somewhere else because they haven't heard from him.
So he's able to respond more quickly, but he thought it was the more personal touch instead of going with the other solutions that I presented him with. That's genius. I love that.
Alastair McDermottAnd I do know from sales in that kind of scenario that the speed of response time makes a huge difference in closing
Heidi ArayaSales.
Alastair McDermottSo actually getting back to somebody very quickly like that
Heidi ArayaIs very effective.
Alastair McDermottSo that's genius. And it's interesting, you know, because I think people think of AI as bringing us into a world where things are less personal,
but yet we're able to do things with AI where we're almost able to clone ourselves.
And I know that kind of freaks people out as well, this idea of, well, you're replacing me or I'm talking to a robot of you and I don't want to do that.
But there are scenarios where if you're transparent and say, hey, look, this isn't the real me, but this is an avatar of me that's able to help you with a lot of this stuff and will speed up
our interaction.
Heidi ArayaHow do you think about this? Yes, absolutely. So I already have clients who are using that. They have already done their AI avatar or duplicated themselves or they have this knowledge base.
So I have one client who is a train the trainer and he, when I got on a call with him, he said, Heidi, look at this. I spend from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. I get text messages.
I get phone calls because my new trainers have to go and run these activities and workshops in their own organisations.
And they're struggling to remember what it was that we covered or how to do this. They have a question. And so they text me, they call me.
And he said, Heidi, what if I could share my knowledge with this? You know, I told him, I think I have a solution for you.
We can build a chatbot and people can sit in there and they can chat with a chatbot, get the response as though they were talking to you.
Of course, he has this big knowledge base he's been building up for the past 20 years.
And then I told him about another client I had who was building this voice agent for her knowledge base. And he said, Heidi, I think I want that.
I want a, like, they can, like, call 911 emergency. So they step out of the workshop, like, oh, my gosh, this is coming up.
And they call 911 and they're like, hi, how do I run this workshop? And the AI gives them the answer. And now he won't have to spend from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.
every day answering questions that to him are repetitive, maybe. But to each client, it's a different question, right? It's the first time they've done it.
And this is a perfect use case to scale your business. So now he'll be able to focus on more time with his family, hopefully. Take a day off here and there.
Not be glued to his phone for so long.
Alastair McDermottYeah, and this is one of the places where I like to tell people to start is, what is the stuff that you tell people over and over again?
And a great place to find this, particularly, is your email sent items, your outbox, and stuff that you've sent, answers that you've sent in emails to people,
be it your colleagues or clients or people like that. And there's usually, like, if you have been in business, like I've been in business 18 years, I have 18 years worth
Heidi ArayaOf email in my outbox.
Alastair McDermottAnd a lot of that is rubbish, but a lot of it is actually good and useful and could be really useful in building out some of this kind of experience,
this kind of chatbot or something where it's able to answer questions. I think that's genius.
So I think this is one of the places where AI is really helpful because what it's able to do is it's able to help us scale because we get to a point where there's only so much time that we
have and it enables us to deal with multiple inquiries.
Like for me, the one that's a big deal is I used to spend hours, possibly days, writing proposals when people would contact me about projects.
And I'd easily spend half a day to a full day writing a proposal document, like no problem, because they would all be very custom projects.
Whereas now I'm typically able to write that in maybe two hours or maybe an hour and a half, maybe even an hour, depending on the scope of the project.
And that's because I do things like record my sales calls with the permission of the client and process those with AI. Is that something that you do yourself?
Is that something that you've helped people to do?
Heidi ArayaI do, actually. So I have a lot of coaches and consultants, solopreneurs as clients.
And so one of the things I tell them is if you're a coach and you, of course, with your client permission, you have AI sit on your calls,
you can have it analyse your coaching style in your call. And maybe it will uncover something that you haven't yet tried with this particular client. Maybe they're struggling.
You could have it analyse and give you feedback on sales calls. So I just had this use case yesterday because I had a client I had met with a few times.
And we were trying to get to the next level where he's going to purchase my AI sales representative.
And I was I uploaded the content and I started asking it structured questions around what are the objections that he might have? What are the concerns that he might have?
And I went through like three or four, I would say, iterations of conversation with it.
And then by the end, it told me his main concern was that he has invested a lot in previous situations and scenarios for AI because he's an early adopter. And they never panned out.
And this might be one big concern. I do remember that he said that. But by the end of our call, I asked him, are there any other concerns that you have that that still remain?
I know we've spoken now, you know, a few times. And he said, yes, you know, I have three. And he listed one of that with the top one.
I've invested so much and they make big promises and it never comes true. Like the tech is not there yet.
So I see this fancy demo and I said, well, let me explain this AI, you know, sales development rep that I'm that I'm doing.
And I explained it and I said, you know, well, the bottom line is this is not new tech. It's been around for a year. And so we've done this hundreds of times already.
And I explained it in a way. And he said, well, actually, you've also not oversold me on it. Like every time I say, hey, why don't we just get rid of all the people? You say, oh, no.
Their job will change. But and here's what you need to consider. And so he said, you've actually been on the very cautious side to just tell me what I need to do and what to expect.
But that went well because I had AI help me through that process. So I told him, like, I'm new to sales. But anyway, AI can help me and understand.
And, you know, what are the concerns that you might have? So I do think that contributed to an excellent sales call.
Alastair McDermottI think that this is a bigger issue that maybe we need to accept or come to terms with, which is that there is a huge value in recording our meetings and recording our calls.
Because we can we can do so much with that when we process those with AI.
But at the same time, people don't really like the idea that, OK, every work call I'm going to do from now on is going to be recorded.
This is something I kind of think about and struggle with and talk to people about.
Heidi ArayaHow do you feel about this? Yeah, it's for sure a tradeoff, right? I know for me, in my use case, I speak with many different people and many clients.
I couldn't possibly remember the conversations I've had week over week when I let me just do this because this was me before. Right.
You're talking and I'm looking down and I'm like, hold on, I'm taking a note now. Oh, just hang on. Let me just write this down.
And I saw a recording of myself and I was looking down at least 60% of the time on that call. And I felt embarrassed for myself because I wasn't able to pay attention.
And the call probably went slower because I was trying to take manual notes still. So when I saw that recording, it was like an aha moment for you.
Like, no, I also, even though I love my book and I still have it here, I just need to adopt this so I can truly focus in the meetings.
I do think and it's a legitimate concern that people have about privacy.
And there was one tool whose name I won't mention that when you read the terms and conditions, it said you could they could train their AI on your calls.
And I was like, no, so I'm not using that tool.
But, you know, read the terms and conditions, make sure that the privacy policy is spelled out so that you know how your information will be used,
both by the person recording it and the company who's recording that. Yeah, that's a good point.
Alastair McDermottAnd I think that the the whole privacy issue is complex. I've tried to simplify this by by creating a privacy matrix
I blogged about this recently. I think that we can put AI into either one of two categories or one of three categories, which is private or non-private.
Now, a friend of mine is a bit more cynical and he said, well, there's absolutely private and then there is private where they say it's private. Yeah.
And that that may those may be two different things, depending on whether you trust the company or not, who's providing the AI. So, like, this is this is where it gets difficult.
I think sometimes you have to make judgment calls about, well, do I trust the company?
Like, for example, Facebook don't really have a great reputation when it comes to caring about end users and the consequences of their business actions.
So do I trust that the AI that Facebook runs that says that is private, for example? And, you know, even if it's in their terms of conditions, well, what does that mean?
You know, so I think there's judgment calls still, but we can try and make these things we can try and make these things a little bit easier by saying,
well, there's private AI, there's non-private AI. And then there's sensitive information and there's non-s ensitive information.
So sensitive information, you've got to be extra careful with it, like some of these medical records or company confidential information.
Heidi ArayaAnd then there's stuff that isn't so important.
Alastair McDermottYeah, I agree. So I think when we think about those things and are aware of those things that it can make it a little bit easier. But I think you're right.
I think that the idea of having everything recorded, it's it's a concern for some people.
But it's how we get the most value, in my opinion, it's how we get the most value out of AI is because we're feeding data to the machine,
we're giving it stuff to work with, we're giving it and what we're doing is we're giving it unst ructured data, which is all our conversations.
And then it's able to give us back to us in this structured format, which makes it really useful. And that's I think that's something that we have to come to terms with a bit as well.
Heidi ArayaI think so. I think so as well. I also think there might be the rise of edge, like AI on the edge devices, or, you know, I'll have AI running on my laptop, so it's not going up to the cloud.
So there'll be less of a chance of it getting out if I don't want you're being misused. So it's still not quite there yet. But that is also happening.
And so I think more and more people may opt for just a local AI on their machines.
Alastair McDermottYeah. And that's, that's one of the ones I was talking about when I say there's this private and then there's
Heidi ArayaTruly private.
Alastair McDermottBut when you're running it locally like that, it's truly private because it's running locally.
The only thing I've noticed is people are going to get a bit of a shock if they're running AI on their phone, for example, how quickly your battery will burn through.
When you start running stuff, it's amazing. We don't really experience just how much power this is using because we're typing it into ChatGPT and it comes back in half a second.
Google has just bought like five nuclear power stations to power this stuff. Like this is a lot. This is a big deal. And every time I put something into AI, it's also in the
Heidi ArayaBack of my mind.
Alastair McDermottThe amount of energy that this is using, me checking this recipe, you know, I wonder sometimes, and I do think about that.
I think it's just something that we have to, again, come to terms with and figure out.
But I want to come back to what we originally talked about, which is examples of practical use cases in business.
I'd love you to take us through a couple more examples that you've seen or that you've helped people implement.
Because I think when people hear about specific use cases, that's when their eyes light up and they say, oh, yeah, that's how it could be useful for me.
Heidi ArayaYeah. One of the most popular use cases is really for sales and marketing. I have a client that I'm working with, a creative agency, and they do research for their clients.
They spend 35 hours on customer research. So a new customer comes to them and they have to do market research. 35 hours. They're not leveraging AI at all.
That is something that AI could go out and perform the research, come back, and actually send you a draft report.
Of course, you have to look at it, edit it, but it might take from 35 hours down to four hours, for example.
So that's one common use case that people, it's a great one, but people aren't really leveraging as much as they could do. All the amount of research that AI can just do these days.
Even a simple perplexity search will do a lot for those simple research use cases without having to use complex queries or agents.
The other one is sales is going to be changing dramatically. If you're in the sales business, sales people spend a lot of time prospecting manually, making cold calls, nurturing customers.
Well, they don't often have time to do that, but the statistic is something like sales people spend only 28% of their time actually selling.
The rest of it is doing all the other things around it. I know from sales in my own business, I go to an event or this morning I met with somebody.
I've got to add them to my CRM and I've got to keep them updated and then, oh, wait, they didn't reply.
So like every three days, I'm like, hey, are you know, you mentioned this, you're still interested. Send some personal, oh, send them something valuable in exchange because they did that.
So all that stuff is manual and those are things that AI can automate at scale in a very personalised way.
So I do think that not only it's the top use case that people have approached me about in the past six months, but also that it is huge, the return on investment. So AI can make calls.
They can revitalize in a dead leads database. They're already, you've got their contact information. All you need to do is reach out. So AI can do that. They can text. They can make calls.
They can, assuming you got some permission from them, of course, you have to opt into some terms and conditions. They can message across various social networking and other platforms.
And it can do a lot of things like qualify leads for you. By that time, they're going to be booking appointments. And then the people, you're not getting rid of people.
They'll just be waiting to receive and close those calls. So that's one huge use case that's, yeah, I just think it's going to change the sales landscape dramatically.
So when I spoke with the client yesterday that I had the call and he said, you know, what, yeah, why do I, what do I need people for? Tell me how their jobs will change.
Because I already told them, you're not getting rid of people necessarily.
And I said, well, they'll have to look and manage the workflow, alter the workflow, check that the response is the one that you want.
You still have to train it the same way you would want to train a human.
But the scale at which the AI can operate is so much higher, like 1,800 calls per minute from the AI and like similar scale of outbound messaging and texting and however you want to do the
messaging, that a person could never really compete with that.
Alastair McDermottYeah, I think that the question of what people do and, you know, how we think about jobs, I think that there's two fundamental approaches that you can take to this.
And if we, if we say, let's take, I'm going to make the numbers very simple here, but if we say that you could have a business with five people and they currently have five people and you
say, okay, well, everybody can be five times
Heidi ArayaMore productive.
Alastair McDermottSo what we can do is we can fire four people and then one person can do the job of five and that's one approach and you save the costing of four people.
But the other approach is to say, well, if we make five people five times more productive, now we have five people doing the productivity of 25 people.
And so you don't save the, you don't save the cost of four people, but you've got all this extra productivity and what does that allow you to do? It allows you to do lots more.
so I think it's like, part of this is just going to be, what is the philosophy of leadership when in business, you know, how do they want to approach this?
Heidi ArayaYeah. And I do think that the majority of businesses who are that size, they won't be able, they need those humans because you've got like the finance person,
you've got the, you know, whatever the person is, they have a very specific skillset that you couldn't get rid of it because one person can't think about sales and finance and all the other
things that they're supposed to be doing.
So you, I think that's a lower risk in my mind and that's, well, that's why I prefer to work with smaller businesses because I know that they're less likely to lay people off rather than a
huge corporations that I didn't want to work with for partly for that reason.
Alastair McDermottYeah. I have, an upcoming guest on the show, who I'm looking forward to having a chat with because, she built some, AI automations that,
caused her to be laid off, along with 300 of her colleagues, including her boss and her boss's boss. So, and, so yes, so she was telling this story in our pre-chat.
I'm really fascinated to have a chat with her about that, but yeah, like this can happen. I think we need to be very honest and open about these things as well.
You know, that this definitely will impact on jobs and the way that people work, but you know, you can take a different approach to it.
You can put people doing things that like AI is really good at grunt work at doing repetitive, horrible tasks.
So let's get it to do all the grunt work and horrible tasks and let the humans do that. They're really the stuff that's fun to do. I think that's, that's personally my philosophy for it.
let me ask you, are there any common mistakes that you're seeing people making when they're trying to implement AI?
Heidi ArayaWell, I think the first one is, well, first one is freezing, right? That that's, I'm not going to do anything because I don't even know how to start.
So they just freeze and they don't use it at all. But the second one is, well, I'm just Googling really quickly. And I came up with this AI for sales use case.
And so I'm just going to buy that tool and they don't really do due diligence on it. And because anyone now can put up a nice sounding website.
a lot of people I know have been sc ammed when they bought something that it didn't actually do what as good as it said it would do, or even worse, right?
They purchased something and they said it could do this, like close calls with clients. And then they come to implement it. They spent thousands of dollars and it can't actually do that.
He's like, no, first you need this and you need this and you need this. So it's, I think that's a danger.
And I think the main thing is just to know the person that you're dealing with and think about the use cases that they have and just make sure that you're not getting into that yourself into
that situation. And I always recommend people, if they aren't sure to do a proof of concept first.
So they're not spending a lot of money with somebody that they don't know, or maybe the person, you know, if they haven't come recommended and trusted,
then do a simple proof of concept first.
Alastair McDermottYeah, that's good advice. the other thing that I wanted to talk to you about briefly is the importance of understanding capabilities.
And this is a moving target because AI capabilities are increasing all the time.
how do you think about that when it comes to like non -technical business leadership, they're looking at this, trying to figure out,
like they're trying to figure out, okay, this whole ChatGPT thing, I've got ChatGPT 3.5, which I used a year ago. It was terrible. AI isn't all that great.
And then, and then people are saying, no, it's really good. You got to try it out. the whole capability thing, I think is a big mess. How do you think about this?
Heidi ArayaYeah. So here's the thing. If you don't start or you just try it once and you don't see the change to you're just going to be thinking about chat, you know, ChatGPT 3. 5.
And you're like, I tried it a year ago and it sucked and I don't want to use it again.
I mean, when I tried it a year and a half ago, I, or whatever, however long it was then, or almost two years ago. Now I thought, okay, it's not great, but you know what?
It does save me a little bit of time and I can see the potential and I know it's going to get better because that's just how tech is. You know, how it's going, it's going to evolve.
So I had faith very early on that it was going to improve, but I know people who are stuck on that moment in time.
They tried it in April of, you know, almost two years ago and then they aren't trying.
So the use cases with AI are changing and upgrading so frequently that if you're not keeping on the forefront for your little use case in your industry,
you're going to miss the boat because other people are actually doing that. So one of the funny stories I have is about a year ago now I was using Hey Jen to create my own AI avatar.
I worked really hard. I tried like five, six, seven, 10 times to create the, just the right video. And you know, my AI avatar was not good, had funny, you know, voice.
It was, it was, I looked weird and you know, my lips weird, but, and people laughed.
And I said, you know, you might laugh now, but a year from now, you won't be able to tell if it's really AI. So it's almost there now. I actually went to Synthesia.
I created in just a couple of minutes with just a couple of, yeah, a couple, a few sentences. I created an AI avatar myself and I played it at an event.
I had prerecorded it for that event and I just hit play and they're like, so, okay. Yeah. Okay. Great.
It's a recording of you saying I'm, I'm really pleased to be here speaking in front of you today. And I said, well, that was AI created it in, you know, about 10 minutes this morning.
And they were like, no way. I didn't realise that was AI.
So, I mean, it's not perfect yet, but it's just you, if I hadn't tried it really for a year, but I knew it, I had seen other people try and try.
So I knew it was good, but that's the way you have to do it.
You have to keep trying because very soon it's going to hit that where for your particular use case, it's going to hit the moment where you're like, yes, this works.
And you don't want to miss the boat.
Alastair McDermottYeah. This is something that people talk about and I see it, you know, I see a little bit of that overhyped, you know, if you don't,
if you don't, start using AI, you know, your business is going to be in trouble because everybody else is going to use it.
I think that's overplayed a bit, but at the same time, I think there's an element of truth in that message as well. what's,
Heidi ArayaWhat's your take on this? It may not be today.
It may not be tomorrow or even next year, but three years from now, they will wish that they had taken more action and kept on the forefront of it. I do believe that for sure.
Alastair McDermottYeah. Yeah. Well, I think that that's a good place to, to leave it. Heidi, you actually help people to build those AI sales assistants that you talked about.
Can you just briefly tell me about that?
Heidi ArayaYeah, of course. So, I have an AI sales rep that will do a lot of those things and help the human salespeople spend more of their time actually selling,
take on the tasks of making, outbound calls, receiving inbound calls, sending DMS, messages, texts, and nurturing your clients until they're ready for the next step. So yeah.
If someone is interested in that, then just reach out.
Alastair McDermottAwesome. And where can people find you?
Heidi ArayaYou can find me at brightlogicgroup.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, or you can always message me at my phone. It's a 407-403-3361.
Alastair McDermottAwesome. Well, thank you so much. and I just want to mention that I have now released my new beginner's guide, which is called an absolute beginner's guide to using AI.
And you can get that at AI powered.biz slash guide. So, if you are a beginner and you're a bit overwhelmed or intimidated by AI, you can go check that out. It's for absolute beginners.
You don't need to be a tech expert. Heidi, Araya, thank you so much for being on.
MaxThanks for listening to Something About AI. Everything discussed here, and a good deal more, is backed up by free resources over at humanspark.ai. No cost, no catch.
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About the host
I'm Alastair McDermott, founder of HumanSpark AI. I work with businesses on practical uses of artificial intelligence, including AI strategy, training, automation and building AI systems for real business processes.
You can find more of my work, articles and resources at HumanSpark.ai.
Something About AI is about practical insights from using AI in the real world.
Fewer late nights. Not fewer humans.