How a 20-Person Manufacturer Uses AI, with Ethan Wadsworth

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

73 speaker turns, 73 changes.

• opening voiceover replaced with the authored script (match 100%) and attributed to Max
• closing CTA identified as CTA 2 - Subscribe (v4) (match 98%), replaced with the authored script and attributed to Max
• diarisation crosses the two speakers in the opening minute; the words are right, some attributions in the first minute are not

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
organizes -> organises	1
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
analyzed -> analysed	1
narrator opener re-attributed to Max, words left as transcribed	1
theater -> theatre	1
specialized -> specialised	1
split name repaired (Wadsworth)	1
aluminum -> aluminium	1
specializes -> specialises	1
skeptic -> sceptic	1
customize -> customise	1
personalization -> personalisation	1
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.

MaxYou're listening to Something About AI. This is one of the most concrete conversations in the whole run, because almost nothing in it is hypothetical.

Ethan Wadsworth's developer wired their own customer system into a model so that it reads the previous correspondence and drafts the reply, and a human still presses send.

He dictates blog posts into his phone while driving. And he thinks anyone still calling this a fad is about to be swept off the pier by a tidal wave. Here's the conversation.

Alastair McDermottSo imagine cutting your customer response time by 75% while still improving your service quality with a team of just 20

Ethan WadsworthPeople.

Alastair McDermottSo today's guest did exactly that by implementing AI in his manufacturing business, and he's convinced that this is just the beginning of a massive transformation in how we work.

And I'm delighted to say that today my guest is Ethan Wadsworth. Ethan, you're very welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So you are director of sales and marketing for Discrete Heat.

And so this is a thermoskirt, skirting heating board, which has been on TV. In the UK, it's been on Dragon's Den, which is, I think for the Americans, the equivalent of Shark Tank.

So that's a really interesting product.

Ethan WadsworthYeah, it is. This is it here, actually. This is what it, well, it's got a film on it, but this is, if I see it off, that is essentially what it is.

So it's a giant aluminium radiator disguised as a skirting board. That's what we make.

And, you know, basically for people who don't want traditional radiators, can't have underfloor heating.

And obviously with our transition towards net zero and the installation of heat pumps, our business has really seen,

you know, a massive increase in both interest, but also orders just in the last 12 to 12 months, two years.

Alastair McDermottThat's awesome.

Now, I wanted to talk about your business and this is the probably like the second or third time in about 250 podcast episodes that I talked to the guests about their backstory.

It's a really interesting business. This is a family business, right?

Ethan WadsworthYeah, it is. Yeah, it's a family business. It's actually my dad who invented the product and, you know, launched the business effectively, you know, initially.

And I joined the business at 18. I've pretty much done everything from packing boxes to installing to training, other new staff members, sales.

And now I'm obviously sales and marketing director and sales and marketing really does bleed into absolutely every part of the business,

you know, from product quality through to customer experience.

Obviously, your standard marketing practices like website and content creation and social media and also your sales processes, how customers are dealt with at the cold face.

Alastair McDermottAnd what I'm really interested in is that when we spoke, it seems to me like you have a I again to use that term bleeding through everything that you do. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Ethan WadsworthYeah, I mean, I first sort of stumbled across AI, like most people through ChatGPT, you know, there's an instruction to ChatGPT. And that would have been pre pre ChatGPT three, I think.

So that would have been like, late 2022, something like that, maybe two years ago now. So I remember, yeah, really early.

And I remember I remember kind of having my mind blown by all of the stupid things that it could do initially. So like anything, it was like, oh, this is interesting. How stupid is this?

Let's let's make up a story or let's write this article in the tone of Donald Trump or whatever it was. You know, that was all that was all that was all all fun.

But then, like most things, I started to think how actually hang on. This is this is useful. This actually filled in a lot of gaps for me. And so probably too early.

I think I tried to implement it into our business in various ways.

Every single time I went down the avenue of, you know, training or programming it to do something, then, you know, a startup business basically brought out a piece of software that did what

I was thinking of. So I'll forget it, you know, let's just scrap that. So I kind of just played around with it and slowly integrated it into various parts of our workflow.

And then let over the last 12 months to two years, the industry really kind of explode.

And now we've got now we've got fully fledged tools that are functional and usable and proper use cases now that have been have been proven.

Alastair McDermottOne of the places you talked about using a lot is your CRM, your customer relationship management tool. Can you tell me a little bit about how how that works and why it's useful for you?

Ethan WadsworthSo so our CRM system is is totally unique because it's made by us for us. I mean, for a business of our size, it's quite rare to have a full time software developer on the books.

But we do because, you know, a full time software developer, if you find the right one, which we have, they are also OK with doing those annoying IT things like asking people to turn the

computer on and off again and connecting a printer or sorting out the Wi-Fi or whatever.

And yeah, the guy we've got is really good and he's basically built our CRM system and it's bespoke to us.

So for me, a lot of the sales tasks and the customer service tasks are unique to a degree where you couldn't you wouldn't necessarily have a bot deal with it like an old style bot.

You would need some level of intelligence and some level of knowledge to deal with it. But really, a lot of the processes are quite repetitive and quite monotonous.

So we started to explore and we started to explore calling up open eyes API with our CRM and basically making simple requests for it to do things in advance.

So that rather than it being fully automated, it's effectively semi automated.

It does a lot of the heavy lifting for a human being to then come along and approve and submit and, you know, utilize.

Alastair McDermottRight. So doing things like maybe it might write three variations on a response to a message and then the human can copy paste the best one, something like that.

Ethan WadsworthAnd yeah, so, you know, that's that's one example. What we've done is we we've built the email communications with customers into the CRM.

So you go on to the customer CRM account and you can communicate through email and text message with that customer.

So I suppose one of the one of the things that happened initially was that because you have a record of the email conversation, you effectively use that as your reference point.

So when we get an email inbound from a customer, it will automatically read the previous correspondence, generate a response that it thinks is about right.

And then effectively, when we come to reply to that email, rather than starting from scratch, we've got either a framework or sometimes a fully a fully written email,

because you'd be amazed, you know, of all the various customer service requests you get, how many of them can be dealt with about five or six basic, you know, email templates.

And that's really where it developed from we actually, I actually built a number of set templates within our email service for salespeople and customer service people to use.

And then we went on from there, we went from templates to smart templates, basically.

Alastair McDermottThat's a great way of putting it smart templates. Yeah. And so one of the things that we discussed a little bit in previous chat is how some people think that AI is a fad.

And I think that we're both of the opinion that it's almost

Ethan WadsworthCertainly not a fad.

Alastair McDermottCan you tell me a little bit about your thinking about that

Ethan Wadsworth? Yeah, I mean, personally, I think that anybody who thinks that it's a fad, they're the kind of people who are about to be swept off the pier by a massive tidal wave.

You know, it's like this this is what's happening and it's happening in a faster rate than any point in history.

So, you know, you you you look at the birth of the traction engine and people say, well, it'll never really change true farming. It's never going to change proper farming.

You know, whatever whatever strange, you know, comfort that human beings give themselves by differentiating outputs and say, well, this has been done by a human.

So therefore, it's it's better in inverted commas and all the mobile phone. You know, people saying I'll never have a mobile phone.

I don't want to be contacted all the time or people who opposed Microsoft putting free software into schools because they think, well, why would you train a child on this software?

Well, there's 10 different software packages coming, not necessarily realising the monopoly that sort of awaits them.

So I think that this is it's a change that the likes of which we will never have seen in all of history because it will happen within months, not years.

The development and the improvements, even in the space in the space of 12 months have been totally insane.

And I'm and I and I'm one of the guys who follows the various YouTubers that put weekly updates out there and I'm struggling to keep up.

So somebody who's got the head in the sand, they're going to wake up one day and realise that the world changed around them.

Alastair McDermottYeah, I mean, it's it's it's it's really interesting. You said it's going to be omnipresent. That's the way you feel about it. It's going to be in everything everywhere.

Ethan WadsworthYeah. So at the moment, you're already you're already seeing it. You're already seeing it being touted by marketing teams.

OK, who who call things AI when it's not AI That's the that's the that's one issue, but that's probably a separate conversation for another day.

But now that AI has become like the buzzword, you've got Canva with AI You've got, you know, teams with AI It's not really AI Basically, it's a highly trained algorithm.

It's it's a piece of software that's been developed to do a certain task.

That's not necessarily true AI But what I think will happen is that it will become omnip resent because it will be woven into human behaviour. And so it becomes habitual.

It's not like, OK, it's 11 o' clock. I'm going to start using my AI now. It's just like your like social media. It's just woven into your automatic behaviour.

And I think that it will it will end up and complementing or supplementing pretty much everything that we do every every time we interact with with tech.

Alastair McDermottThere was another thing you mentioned, which was that AI allows you to compete with bigger competitors. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Ethan WadsworthYeah. So one of the challenges that we've had as a business is that we have we have a very unique product with no competitors.

OK, and in some ways that's a negative because what I could have done with really is a really crappy competitor with a really big marketing budget.

Yeah, because then what that does is it puts skirting board heating as a technology on the map. OK, and then and then we become the best at doing that instead.

We've been we've been like a very quiet voice in a very loud marketplace where there's there's 20 different radiator manufacturers.

There's 50 different under four heating manufacturers, boil ers, heat pumps, construction companies, you know, all vying for attention.

So for us, we've we've had to be very clever in leveraging and in leveraging technology that works outside of the normal rules of engagement.

OK, so the way that marketing teams are trained in the way that marketing degrees are taught.

Another reason why I think that going to university to do marketing probably a waste of 50 grand in four years is because they teach you the ordinary rules of engagement.

OK, which is let's do case studies and let's do blog posts and let's talk about newsletters and let's talk about web traffic.

And obviously, all of those things are important, but I would argue you could you could learn them from from YouTube and education cannot keep up with the rate at which technology is

changing. All right. And as a business, as a small business, we've had to leverage those those outside opportunities. So social media has been a huge one for us.

We just this week tipped over the scales of 100000 followers on Instagram and which is 10 times the number of the amount of reach that our biggest competitors have got.

And our biggest competitors have got marketing budgets in the millions and they have social media teams dedicated to doing it. Whereas we're we're we're absolutely smashing it.

Basically, we're just just cap cut and our installers doing videos on their their phone. And I see a I to tenuously link it back to that.

I see a I as another one of those levers that small businesses can pull whilst the big businesses aren't looking.

So the way I often describe it to people is that if you're if you imagine you're on a motorway with three lanes. OK, a I is like the fourth lane opening up. Right.

And all the people sat in traffic looking at that lane going, is it open? Is it safe? Can I use it? Are we allowed? Am I going to get in trouble? They're asking all these questions.

Meanwhile, the small businesses have all pulled into that lane and they're z ipping down the outside.

And that's the way I see it, that we're using it to do the job of ten people because we can't afford a marketing team of ten people. We can afford a marketing team of one.

Alastair McDermottThat's I love the analogy and I like how you articulate that. That's that's really demonstrating the value of it, I think

Talk to me more about like you mentioned just in passing there, you have your installers taking video when they're working and they're they're doing that knowing that that's then useful in

for you in marketing. Right.

Ethan WadsworthYeah. So what we what it took me a long time to do with the installers was actually get it into their heads that the rubbish looking content is OK. Right. Right.

Because they love they love the product so much. They love the business and they want to do well. When you say to them, like, can you get some videos of your install this this week for me?

They would come back to me with nothing and say the house was a bit messy or the lighting wasn't right or there was furniture everywhere.

And these kind of excuses for not creating video content. And I'm trying to I tried to explain to them that we're in the world now where authenticity is king.

OK, which is which is totally adverse to the AI generated content. But being authentic is like the new currency. Yeah.

So what I was saying, what I say to the installers is just video what you've got and give it to me. Give it just video what you've got and give it to me.

Doesn't matter if the house is a mess, doesn't matter if it's not perfect lighting, if it's not perfect weather, you know, just complete an installation.

Give me a time lapse on your phone, on an iPhone. It doesn't need to be special cameras and lighting and everything else. Just give me that.

And then we basically we basically do like quick edits of those installation videos. We post them and we get in the region of four or five million views a month. Yeah.

Alastair McDermottI mean, there's there's a lot to dig into there.

It strikes me that you've you've created a culture of like, I think that's a cultural thing where you can you can get people to contribute to areas that maybe are outside.

Like I'm sure the installers are not expert videographers, for example, and you're you've got them to go out and get this incredibly valuable content because that's what it is.

And you have taught them about the value of imperfect

Ethan WadsworthContent.

Alastair McDermottAnd that's something I mean, this is the fact that we're speaking right now, we're speaking on a live stream. And as I mentioned to you before, we went live.

One of the reasons why I do this live is as a forcing function, because otherwise I would be tempted to get overly perfectionist about editing.

Whereas when it's live, it's one and done and I can't go back and change it afterwards. That's one of the reasons why we're live now. Yeah.

Ethan WadsworthAnd it's actually the enemy of the good. Yeah.

Alastair McDermottAnd so what's interesting then is if we tie that back to the concept of AI and authenticity, because I think this is one of the issues is that people feel like a lot of AI generated content

is inauthentic. And I know that you that you create a lot of content using

Ethan WadsworthAI.

Alastair McDermottSo can you tell me a little bit about how you think about authenticity in content creation and marketing and then and

Ethan WadsworthThen with regard to AI?

Alastair McDermottYeah.

Ethan WadsworthSo so AI is a tool. OK, and I'm part of like an AI group on Facebook.

And I see questions that pop up on there going, does anybody have any good ways of making sure that finding out how I can make me money?

And it's like, no, OK, it's like it's like holding up a hammer and saying, how can this hammer make me money?

Well, it could build you a house or it could build a shed or it could knock down a wall. What you use the tool? It doesn't just do it for you. It's not a money money printing machine.

OK, so somebody who is highly educated with great ideas with AI will always be better than somebody who's not got a clue what they're talking about with AI.

OK, so if you use AI to leverage the knowledge that you've already got. So, for example, I have knowledge about sales and marketing. I have knowledge about low carbon heating systems.

I have knowledge about construction technology. I that's all in my head.

Right now, the challenge that I've had on a personal level is is often get articulating those those thoughts so freely like I'm doing now.

OK, so I'm just talking to you now effectively like a large language model. I'm just just words are just coming out of my face. Right.

And I'm not really thinking about what the next sentence is. That's natural to me. I can do that. I can hold the conversation with anybody.

The problem I have is then getting that down on paper and also having the discipline to sit there for an hour and write it down.

And once I've written it, go back and say, does it make sense? Is the strength sentence structure right? What about my grammar and all of those things?

So so what I've what I've done is I've I think I've I've been able to create authentic content that isn't doesn't have the same level of labour, which is quite strange.

It's a little bit like somebody baking a cake. It's somebody not even though the cake is worse than the cake you'd buy from Asda.

Yeah, it's nice that they made it because they put the effort in. You appreciate the effort, not necessarily the cake. Yeah. And sometimes that's the case with content.

It's like we appreciate the effort you've gone to more than the actual content that you've done. But I think that that's starting to turn on its head now.

I think people are going, I just want the value. OK, I don't want to watch. I don't want to read a book on, you know, how to grow a social media following.

I want to watch a 60 second Instagram reel on how to grow an Instagram following. So what I do is I use AI to dump my thoughts into into it, basically.

And then I ask it to effectively tidy up what I'm saying.

So I suppose if you want an actual practical example of doing that is I will have the ChatGPT's advanced voice product on my phone in the car.

Like I'm having a conversation and it comes up on on hands free in the car. Right. So when I when I leave, I click go.

It pops up on my hands free thing, literally like I'm on the phone to somebody and I'll say, good morning.

I don't even know why I'm having a conversation with it, but it starts to feel feel it starts to feel more natural. Right.

And then I'll say I'd love to write an article about how not teaching about heat pump installations in colleges is going to lead to a huge shortage of trades within the next five years.

And then it will ask me questions and I will talk to it and I will say I will waffle on like I'm doing now.

And then once it's got a lot of information, I'll say, can you condense my thoughts in my tone of voice into a into an easy to read blog post? And it does that.

So what that means is it means actually turn the content out. Now, previously, I've had the idea and gone, I'd love to write a blog about that and then never done it.

Alastair McDermottThis is one of the true powers of A.I., which is taking unstructured ideas and thoughts and turning them into structured ideas and thoughts.

And this is why I would recommend to everybody that, again, going back to a culture that you start to instill a culture where it's acceptable to record your business meetings.

And that's one of the places where we see a lot of value, where you can start to take these kind of unstructured conversations and start to turn them into structured meeting notes,

maybe even plans. We can even turn them into we can take a conversation and turn that into something like a Gantt chart directly from the transcript using something like Claude,

where you can suddenly you've got this Gantt chart with your timelines and your different dependencies and things like that.

And that all comes from a single conversation and it's just done automatically that the power of those tools in taking that unstructured input. I think that's one of the biggest powers.

And that's what you're talking about here is when you're saying these are just words coming out of your face. It's like, yeah.

And but there is like there's a lot of insights and key ideas in in that kind of unstructured stream of words that a an AI can then tidy up for you and turn into something that's really

valuable.

Ethan WadsworthYeah, exactly. You know, it always frustrated me. I did I did business studies a level. Right.

And there was there was somebody who sat on my sort of like cluster of tables when I was in sixth form college.

And if she's watching now, I mean, it's highly unlikely, but she was totally useless. She was she was totally useless, but she was great at writing. So she was great at passing exams.

And the business studies a level exam was was about writing. And and I was really good at business. I was the ideas person. I was like, what about this? What about that?

What about the other? And I always got great feedback in like the class and the teacher was always like loved having me in there. And I love being in there.

When it came to the exams, I was hopeless.

I was hopeless because I couldn't I couldn't give them what they wanted, which was the right sentence structure and the right phrasing and the right buzzwords and all those things.

Whereas now I can just I can just talk at this thing and get it to effectively condense and relay my thoughts in my tone of voice, you know, with my tone of voice.

Can you tell me a little bit about that? How do you

Alastair McDermottActually set it up so that it actually sounds like you and doesn't sound like kind of this robotic, you know, in a world of fast moving business and all that rubbish that it comes up with?

Do you mystify and delve and all this kind of stuff that does? How do you set it up so that it doesn't do that for you?

Ethan WadsworthWell, it depends.

So if you if you use if you are writing to it, so if you're not using advanced voice, the I think the easiest way of doing that is setting up like a custom GPT and putting in examples of

stuff that you have gone to the effort of writing. So every now and again, you know, I mean, like the other night was was an example.

Every now and again, I'll have like a wave of a wave of capability and I'll just start typing away and I can write a blog article.

And but it's rare and I have to be in the right frame of mind and everything else. So I do have examples of stuff that I have actually written and and my writing style is my talking style.

I just write how I talk, you know, with I even put in sometimes like and are even in my writing.

OK, so I have like documentation of my tone of voice and I just put that into the custom GPT and use that as a reference and basically say using my tone of voice.

If I'm if I'm talking to it and it's it's in a standalone conversation, I will I will basically ask it to to listen or pay attention to my tone of voice as I'm talking and use my my kind of

language. And what I find is that when I actually read the text that it's produced is that a lot of that text is actually verbat im what I've said.

It uses exactly what I've said and it might just rearrange the order or change the sentence structure or add some grammar to it or take away a part where I've gone off on a tangent.

So, yeah, it gets my tone of voice because I'm giving it my tone of voice as part of the part of the input.

Alastair McDermottYeah, this this is very clever using a custom GPT and I love what you said about the fact that it's it's repeating back verbatim what you've said is just tidying it up a bit.

And this for me is one of the key things where I feel like a I really is a tool because you're providing the expertise

And if if you don't provide the expertise to it, then it's going to go out into its kind of sea of average training data that it's been trained on originally.

And it doesn't have that expert knowledge that you provided it. I think that's where all of that really bland, mediocre

Ethan WadsworthStuff comes from.

Alastair McDermottBut what you're talking about is you're actually giving a

Ethan WadsworthLot to work with.

Alastair McDermottYou're giving it a lot of input. You're giving it some suggestions and instructions as well.

And I think that that, you know, that's what makes the output so much better for you than other people are where somebody comes along and they say,

you know, write me a blog post about commercial heating.

It's going to spit out a whole bunch of garbage that's not useful for anybody and won't ever get people like that certainly won't be getting millions of views, you know.

So it really depends on the input. It's garbage in garbage out like computers have been for for decades.

Ethan WadsworthYeah. And also with SEO, for example, SEO is now searching for personal experience.

So within blog posts and within articles, it's looking for language that's like, you know, for example, when we launched this product,

we found that this happened and they, you know, so on and so on. So it's looking for personalised experience.

So if you just ask it to write me a blog on Thermoskirt, there's going to be no specific references in there.

So if you think that AI is some sort of SEO hack, trust me, Google will be working very hard to get around that as well.

Alastair McDermottThey certainly are. I think they're a bit worried about

Ethan WadsworthThat.

Alastair McDermottYou said that AI slowly becomes part of your workflow. How have you found that being the case?

Ethan WadsworthPersonal, well, personal interest, OK, in productivity. And I think there's this kind of toxic productivity.

I found myself I found myself basically slipping into the wrong stream of productivity a few times where it's like, you know, I want to get up at five.

I don't want to go to the gym and I'm going to do a cold pl unge and I'm going to do this. Stop doing that. OK, so I have a personal interest in productivity.

My problem is that I always struggle to switch off. So then I started using like time blocking to say I'm going to do this in this time and this in that time and that in that time.

And if I finish it early, I will just stop. I'll go, well, you know what? I finished 20 minutes early. I'm going to have 20 minutes to just chill.

Whereas previously I'd be on to the next, on to the next. So I've noticed that AI helped me do a few things quicker. And so I got the bug. I think it's like a bit of a bug.

And then you're like, what else could I do? What else could I do?

But when introducing it to new people who don't currently use it, the easiest way I find to make it exciting is, and I've done that with people who work here,

is write down five to ten things that you're crap at, that you know you are crap at. And there might be, and I don't mean like unicycling.

You know, I mean, I can't take, for example, I can't take notes and talk at the same time. I cannot do it. I've tried doing it. And what happens is that I go, Oh, that was interesting.

And then I go to write it. And then I miss what they were saying next. And then you're blagging that you're blagging them that you heard what they said there. Okay.

So there's a, there's a phrase that my dad gave me, which is you can't ride two horses with one ass. Right now for me, AI can be your second ass. Yeah.

It can write the notes for you whilst you pay attention on what you're good at. It's like having a PA.

So for example, if you say to somebody like with customer service, that that's how it came about with customer service. You know, what do you hate? What do you hate about customer service?

Oh, I asked, I hate it when customers come ask me the most benign questions that are basic.

It's the same question every single time, you know, and we have a video on the website and we have it in the instructions.

And we have a note on the email that goes out with the order about it. Yet people don't do any of those things. And the email is asking, right. Okay. So we worked on an automated responses.

Well, they are miserable to read and depressing as a customer to receive. So say, for example, in an email chain, our customer, John has just got back from holiday. Yeah.

And he says in his email, hi, Lauren, just got back from holiday. Notice that we've not received any of this and we need it to complete our installation.

Rather than an email go back saying you need part number seven, six, five, two best regards customer service. He goes back and says, dear John, hope your holiday was okay.

Hope you had a nice time. Hope you're settling back in. Hope you brought the weather with you, whatever it says. Yeah. And the part that you're looking for is this. Don't worry.

It's a very common mistake to make and so on and so on. So you take that pain away from customer service and then people within the workplace feel it within the day to day.

They're like, oh, great. Oh, that thing that was really annoying me is now no longer annoying me. And then the penny drops. It's like, what else can we use it for?

What else can we use it for? What else can we use it for? And then now I find people coming to me saying, can we have a function that does this? Can we have a function that does that?

And so we're constantly leveling up because everybody in the organisation is on board as opposed to me standing there with a whip going, you know, you must have AI in your workflow.

It falls in naturally because it is useful.

Alastair McDermottI think one really crucial part there is you mentioned that people feel better about their jobs because they don't have to do this thing that's really annoying or horrible.

Yeah, I think people gloss over that a bit. Like for me, that's a really crucial part, right?

Ethan WadsworthYeah. Yeah, exactly. So with customer service, let's say, for example, customer service is an ideal one because customer service is a job that most people hate dealing with.

And if you're a business and you find a really good customer service manager, somebody who is unfazable, somebody who is permanently positive,

somebody who is permanently helpful, then pay them whatever they want because they're impossible to find. Right.

And if they are like that, they're not like that for very long because eventually they get they get hammered into submission. Right.

Whereas an AI bar or AI, you know, agent, if you want, and effectively has unlimited patients and it never has a bad day and it's cat never dies and it's never late for work and it's never

overworked. So if you have a really busy day on customer service, and to be fair, we only have one customer service person in the business now,

and even they also spend most of their day doing technical video calls with installers. Our customer service requirement in terms of human interaction has fallen to next to nothing.

And that means that that dreary job that nobody wants to have is not being done by anybody, really, the heavy lifting has been taken off them.

Alastair McDermottThis is crucial. I did a I did a project recently with a lab where they test blood samples.

And so we had some really intelligent, highly trained, educated and expensive lab scientists, and we were looking

Ethan WadsworthAt what they were doing.

Alastair McDermottAnd they were spending a huge amount of time just doing simple data entry, taking in sheets of paper and typing into the computer what the data that was on there.

And then when they were getting the results of the testing back, they had to spend a lot of time processing and analysing some really basic stuff.

And so what we were able to do was build some simple tools and it took the data entry job down by about 90%. So the best part and like they saved a lot of money by doing this.

They saved tens to hundreds of thousands per year. And actually, they're even able to scale up and process more samples now.

But the best part of it was actually seeing all of these really smart people who can focus on the important parts of their work instead of data entry and checking spreadsheets.

They can actually look at the analysis and look at the maps and say, oh, look, these samples are coming from this area of the country where we were able to map the town land onto

Ethan WadsworthA map.

Alastair McDermottAnd they could see, oh, yeah, look, we're getting a lot of positive positives from this area of the country. And now let's think about why that is.

That's such a much more valuable use of their time than typing in numbers off of a sheet of paper.

And that's the kind of work where I see AI being incredibly valuable, where we're letting humans do stuff that's more important or more difficult or just more fun. What do you think of that?

Ethan WadsworthWell, yeah, I mean, you know, 150 years ago, 80% of the population's involved in farming. It's like, and now what?

You've got three guys in a tractor, you know, harvesting millions of tons worth of food. So you've got you've got this leveling up where you're effectively unlocking.

I see it as unlocking human potential, not as robbing jobs. OK, a lot of people see it as job job robbing, but I don't think it is. I think the jobs will change.

I think we'll move to a higher level. And obviously, everybody says, well, technology is just getting faster and faster and faster.

Well, we don't really know how fast we can develop if we aren't spending our time working on all of these these things. You know, I've got a four year old who's who's just started school.

So you see like the I see her now doing the same stuff at school other than computers. Right. I wasn't doing computers in 1996.

But other than that, she's doing pretty much the same thing I did at school, which is like foundational stuff.

And I'm starting to wonder at what point in her school career is her education going to change from mine? Because in reality, I've never needed to know much about the ancient Egyptians.

Right. And I know that the challenge of learning about the ancient Egyptians was not so that I knew what Tutankhamun had for breakfast.

It was actually to get me in the mindset of doing research, sitting down for an hour and doing some hard work. That's what you're training. That's what you're training students to do.

You're not training them to learn about the Egyptians. You're training them to do the work, do the graph. Well, how does that change when you don't need to do that anymore?

You don't need to sit down and grind it out for two hours.

Alastair McDermottYeah. I mean, there's arguments that, you know, that the job of education is prepare us for the workforce. Is it to prepare us to be a citizen?

Is it as a place to, you know, keep kids locked up so that they don't go throwing stones through windows for, you know, there's a lot of different aspects of it.

And then there is, well, you know, there's the idea of creating a broad education where, you know, we should know about things like ancient history and we should know things like basic and

maybe even, maybe even some advanced maths,

Ethan WadsworthThings like that.

Alastair McDermottAnd also, if we don't teach everybody or kind of broad strokes of population, then how do we find the people who want to go on and become, you know, scientists and things like that.

So I think there's, there's like, there's so many, like, I think education is so fascinating when it comes to AI, because there's so many different aspects to it.

There's, there's so many kind of dependencies, there's so many different ways to approach it.

And I think it's one of the areas where they're really struggling to figure out how to deal with this because a lot of places see using AI as cheating.

And, you know, it's, it's like, there's people who are worried about getting kicked out of college because the way that they write sounds a little bit too AI for their, for their professor.

And so their professor has accused them of plagiarism when in reality, that that's just the way that they write. You know, I see examples of people talking about this all the time online.

And that's kind of scary as well, you know, that somebody gets accused, falsely accused of plagiarism and kicked out of college because, you know, they write quite formally.

So there's so many different aspects to that as well, you

Ethan WadsworthKnow? Well, exactly. If the AI is trained on human behaviour, it replicates human behaviour and we are human.

So, you know, yeah, the better it gets, the harder it is going to be to distinguish what is and what isn't AI.

So I think for me, just in terms of, in terms of how it's going to change things in future in the job market is that I think that for many people,

like you say, it will liber ate, it will liberate those people who are really only using 10% of their total bandwidth.

But, you know, those are the people who end up getting stuck and they might be getting paid enough money to be comfortable, but they never push themselves.

And before they know it, you know, they're 65, they're being given a Rolex and saying, thanks very much for 40 years of craft. And that's, you know, that's your career done.

And they go, oh, I wish I was a painter. Yeah. Go and do that then, you know, go and do that. If that's, you know, if that's, that's where you need to make money.

But what will be interesting is how, is how that impacts the economy and how we shift, how we shift as an economy.

Because really, right now our economy is based on scarcity of knowledge, you know, so like law firms, for example, I don't understand this particular part of law.

So I need to go and find a lawyer who specialises in this part of law. Well, what happens when you have this effectively database that you can call upon at a moment's notice?

I really, I really couldn't call it. I really couldn't call it at the moment as to how that's going to change things.

But all I'm doing is, I'm sure, I'm sure it's not going to be left holding the baby going, I'm going to be the one who says it's all a fad. You know, I'm going to ride the wave.

Alastair McDermottI think that's a good place to leave it. Thank you so much, Ethan. It's been great. I noticed, by the way, Jay just said on LinkedIn, we were talking about how you talk to ChatGPT.

He said, that's exactly how I talk to ChatGPT. I do an interview talk until I'm done and then get the AI to sort it out in a framework that I've built after. It's super easy.

And this is exactly how people should be using these tools is, you know, talk to them, let them make sense of what you're saying and turn that into something productive.

And basically using it to pull the expertise out of

Ethan WadsworthOurselves.

Alastair McDermottI think that's the right way to do it.

Ethan WadsworthYeah, I totally agree. I did idea generation and basically sanity checking, you know? Mm hmm.

Alastair McDermottYeah. Is there one piece of advice that you share with business leaders who are listening to this about how they might integrate AI?

Ethan WadsworthAny tips for them? yeah. Start off with the pain points. You know, start off with the pain points.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't start going into, I wouldn't, I definitely wouldn't search on YouTube how to use AI. Okay.

Because just like putting generic information into AI, you're going to get generic information back that's not relevant.

What you want to do as a business leader is look at the business, look over the business and find out where the pain points are and start off by trying to address them and finding out how

they can be, they can be addressed.

Because once you have done that first one, once you've tackled that first challenge and you've seen the penny will drop, not just for you, but for other people within the business.

And once people have that sort of lean mindset, how do we improve things? How do we make things better?

How can we use this as opposed to, you know, is this a threat then you'll find that the whole business starts to accelerate.

particularly for small businesses, if you're a small business like ours, that's, you know, we've got, we've got a turnover of about 3 million and 25 employees.

We are like the perfect size of business to really leverage it. So I would say just get on with it. Don't wait for, don't wait for, for the next bus. Get on this one.

Alastair McDermottAwesome. And I just want to mention to anybody listening to this, who is looking for some help getting started. I've got a new book, which is called an absolute beginners guide to using AI.

So you can find that at AI powered dot biz slash guide. And that's got lots of tips on getting started and doing stuff like creating the custom GPTs that we mentioned on

Ethan WadsworthHere.

Alastair McDermottAnd basically just how to use AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, to generate ideas. And, it's, it's for anybody who has no tech background.

it's very simple explanation of how to use AI, in plain English. So that's an absolute beginner's guide to using AI.

Ethan, thank you so much for coming on the show today and talking about AI. your business is discreet heat. Where can people find you online?

Ethan WadsworthDiscreetheat.com. Awesome.

Alastair McDermottAnd, go check that out. If you're looking for, heating solutions or you just want to see some cool marketing, go check out all their social channels.

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