Listen above or read the transcript below.

Dennis Collins: Hey, a warm welcome back to all of our viewers and listeners. This is Connect & Convert and it’s Dennis and Leah. Hey, we’re back, Leah. Leah Bumphrey.

Leah Bumphrey: Hey, Dennis. How are you doing?

Dennis Collins: I’m good. As always, producer Paul lurking in the background, making sure that we don’t mess up. So, he’s with us too. But hey, I got a question, Leah. It’s September and have you guys had snow up there in Canada? Is it snowing already? 6 inches?

Leah Bumphrey: No, nothing. We are having the perfect autumn weather, it’s pristine. Farmers are in the field.

Dennis Collins: Farmers are in the field.

Leah Bumphrey: There’s a big joke that, you know, in the ag community, nobody ever says it’s going to be a bumper crop, but wow, we are having the weather. Even our trees, not just the Christmas trees, all the trees are still green. So it is some weather.

Dennis Collins: No kidding.

Leah Bumphrey: Come on up.

Dennis Collins: Yeah, I may have to get up there because we’re still in full summer here in Florida. It’s crazy.

Leah Bumphrey: It’s always summer in Florida.

Dennis Collins: I want to know one thing before we get started.

Leah Bumphrey: Okay.

Dennis Collins: We got a great guest today. This is going to be one of our best ever. But I got to know. Ms. Leah, are you ready for hockey season?

Leah Bumphrey: Oh, are you kidding? I was born ready. You know that. This is Canada.

Dennis Collins: Are you still an Oilers fan?

Leah Bumphrey: You know what? Just through association, I was born there. I have to be. But you remember at our house, it’s the Leafs and the Sens, and between my husband and my boys, I have to walk that delicate line.

Dennis Collins: Well, just so you know, I’ve talked to some of the Panthers in the off season and they tell me it’s going to be a three peat. They will be the champions again next year. So that’s just so you know.

Leah Bumphrey: Well, we’re going to get our bets on the table, Thomas.

Dennis Collins: We are privileged today to have… We always try to bring our listeners the best, the experts, the people in the know, the people who are in the arena. And today we have a guy who’s in the arena. He is an expert in helping small businesses and large businesses use technology, leveraging technology to make them more effective, more profitable, and particularly the AI space. How about that? Say hello and welcome to Connect & Convert, Mr. Thomas Capone. Good morning, Thomas.

Tom Capone: Good morning, Dennis. Good morning, Leah. Happy to be here.

Leah Bumphrey: Nice to meet you.

Dennis Collins: We’re glad to have you. Just a little background.

Tom Capone: It’s a heck of an introduction.

Tom Capone: I hope I can live up to it.

Dennis Collins: Well, you will, because I know you will. I’ve seen you in action. Thomas is currently the Vice President of Business Development for Concepta Technologies. Tom’s been in that space for over 15 years. He’s not only a sales executive, he came from a sales background into technology, but he is now a technology strategist. He has helped not only small businesses, but Fortune 500 companies level up and use technology to make them more successful. Did I get that right, Tom?

Tom Capone: Pretty good. You’re hired.

Dennis Collins: Well, and Thomas the man, you got to know a little bit about the man, Thomas. This is a devoted family man, four magnificent kids, a beautiful wife, totally devoted to his family, and a big UCF, University of Central Florida fan. Go Knights!

Tom Capone: Charge on!

Dennis Collins: Charge on! And of course, we share something in common. That is a long suffering, long loyalty that we’ve been loyal to the Miami Dolphins.

Leah Bumphrey: I love the Miami Dolphins.

Dennis Collins: Yeah, I used to.

Leah Bumphrey: Come on.

Dennis Collins: Thomas is a native of South Florida, so he grew up there. I lived there for 30 years. And unfortunately, we now are still supporting a team that, it hasn’t been pretty since last Sunday, has it? The news is not good.

Tom Capone: But, yeah, Dennis, I appreciate that. It. It hasn’t been pretty since about 1999.

Leah Bumphrey: I still have my Marino t-shirt. I still have my Marino jersey.

Dennis Collins: That’s true.

Tom Capone: I can choose to focus on the positives. And one thing I’ll say is, I heard you guys talking about hockey right before I jumped on.

Dennis Collins: Yeah.

Leah Bumphrey: Yeah.

Tom Capone: And did you know that Florida is now the new, hockey is the new national pastime of Florida. We have four of the last six Stanley Cups here in the state of Florida.

Dennis Collins: Rub it in.

Leah Bumphrey: Anyway, we’re here to talk business. We’re going to boldly go. I’m all about it.

Dennis Collins: She wants to get off of this and get on to business. See, she doesn’t want to talk about hockey.

Leah Bumphrey: I’m more than happy to wax poetic about the Miami Dolphins. And we can talk Marino, I still have the jersey. But let’s just move this along.

Dennis Collins: All right.  So here it is, Thomas. I do a lot of study and reading in the small business space. And here’s what I’m hearing, and here’s what I’m reading. Big headlines. AI is coming for your job. AI is coming for your job. Beware, Thomas, is AI coming for my job?

Tom Capone: Woo. Doomsday. Huh? Doomsday.

Dennis Collins: Hey, what do you think? You’re in the space, buddy.

Tom Capone: Dennis, you know, I take that question, and I try to think of it from a different angle.

Dennis Collins: Okay.

Tom Capone: I think of a different angle, and my angle is, how can I avoid AI from taking my job?

Dennis Collins: Okay. How?

Tom Capone: Yeah. Right. If it was only so easy. Obviously, there’s mundane tasks that nobody wants to do, and mundane jobs that people probably don’t want to do that we won’t be doing for long. They’re not here for the future, and that’s happened over time as every technology has been introduced. Right?

Dennis Collins: Yeah.

Tom Capone: But I will say the real question is, how can you leverage AI to be better at your position? Because who will take your job are the people that are experts in how to apply AI to the role, and becoming far more productive by leveraging AI than you can be without it.

Dennis Collins: It’s an interesting spin, isn’t it, Leah? Leah, have you come to grips with AI? You and I have never really talked about it, and we need to talk about it more on this podcast because our listeners and viewers, they want to know about this. Have you come to grips with AI, Leah? Is it going to take your job?

Leah Bumphrey: No. But it’s going to take away the stuff I don’t like doing in my job. That’s how I’m translating what Thomas is doing. When I find something, and I’ve had some exciting opportunities just in the last couple of weeks where I went, oh, no, I have to do this. It’s going to take me this much time. And then I thought, hey, wait a minute, why don’t I just see? And we’re talking fundamentally pretty rudimentary things. Somebody who’s really good, for example, at admin, would be able to take this template and change it to that. That’s not my strength. It’s going to take me four hours to do it. So it’s like, oh, no.

And then it hit me, wait a minute. And talking with Boomer about this, I went, this is something that I could ask. So I asked the AI platform that I’ve been using, I’ve been going back and forth between a few. And yeah, I can do that. Two minutes later, I had everything done. It was brilliant. I was so excited. It just gave me a huge lift. And then I went on to do the parts of my job that I love, which are the creative parts, which are the real human parts of it.

Dennis Collins: So, Tom, there’s an interesting response. I’d love to hear your reaction to what Leah just said. Is this what you’re hearing out there when you consult with a client about AI?

Tom Capone: Leah, I think you’re spot on. It’s going to eliminate the task you don’t want to do. The next level to that, though, is how much more efficient it can make you on the things you love to do? I’m in sales. I know you guys are all in sales as well. And one of the things we love to do is not necessarily create, but talk about proposals, present proposals. Right? And think about the time we invest in creating proposals and putting things together for our clients, and how much more effective and efficient we can be by leveraging AI to help us with those tasks, and helping us to present those proposals with feedback and things like that.

Dennis Collins: I like this because Leah and I both work with a lot of salespeople. I have for years. It’s one of my things that I’ve done for decades. I love working with salespeople. I’ll tell you what. Right now, they are convinced. Thomas. They are convinced almost to a person that I’ve talked to that AI could never replace a salesperson. What do you think?

Tom Capone: Well, I will tell you, there are probably tools out there that are selling to you today that will say the opposite. However, I think that the salespeople, again, that come with the human touch, Dennis. Right? Human in the loop AI is what’s taking over right now. And I can’t predict what’s five or 10 years down the road. I think nobody can. But for today and what the near future brings, human in the loop AI salespeople that can leverage AI, and I’ll give you a great example. I use AI in my space now as a salesperson for researching my prospects.

Dennis Collins: Interesting.

Tom Capone: And I used to spend hours researching prospects and reading through annual reports and company structures. And now AI can do all that for me, and it can summarize a prospect by what it could find online in minutes, saving me hours and hours of time. But that AI still needs me to talk with the customer, understand the empathy, build trust, and those kind of things that AI can’t do by itself.

Dennis Collins: Okay, so question. I have come across, I haven’t actually used this myself, but I’ve heard that AI can simulate a salesperson. Okay? AI can sound like a salesperson and can interact real time with a customer. What do you think about that? Number one, is that true? And number two, is it real? Is it authentic? Does it sound authentic?

Tom Capone: So have you ever gotten a call or gotten on a call with an AI from a company that’s reached out to you?

Dennis Collins: You know, I probably have, but I probably didn’t know it.

Leah Bumphrey: I have.

Tom Capone: Boy, that’s scary. I have certainly seen companies and tools offering this service. I’ve listened in on a few of them myself. The big advantage is it becomes a volume play. Right? So the AI can make hundreds and hundreds or thousands and thousands of calls per second. And it brings me back six, eight months ago, when we were first starting to use AI to create content. And the content’s not quite as good, but the volume which we can create is pretty good. Right. So somewhere along the line, there’s help.

Dennis Collins: Help me understand. You made an interesting comment there. The content isn’t as good, but the speed is good. Let me understand that.

Tom Capone: Actually, Dennis, I think about this. The way I make my coffee, I love espresso coffee. I love it. And there’s nothing better than a freshly brewed espresso coffee.

Dennis Collins: Okay.

Tom Capone: You know what? I use an espresso machine in my kitchen.

Dennis Collins: Yeah.

Tom Capone: And it’s not as good as Nespresso, but I get my cup of coffee in like, 14 seconds, and it’s hot. And it’s what I would call good enough.

Dennis Collins: It’s good enough, interesting.

Tom Capone: Good enough. Right? It meets a demand. It meets the demand at a level that’s good enough based on the time trade off. And I would say for AI, we have a lot of the same. So there are tools that can help you get from zero to good enough very, very quickly. And then what happens? As professionals, it’s our job to take good enough and bring it to the next level.

Leah Bumphrey: I mean, I can think of times when I’ve been talking to, and I’m going in the past two, three months, talking to my bank, booking flights. So two very different types of apps that I’m using. And I can tell initially, okay, they’re trying to figure out, what do I need, what do I need, what do I need? And they’re taking me down the rabbit hole. And as long as they’re doing it fairly quickly, I don’t care that I’m talking to a robot. But then it comes to the point where I’m phrasing it wrong. They don’t get it. They get into this loop, and it’s like, okay, person, attendant, give me a person. And I want that right then, otherwise, they’re getting a bad review. But there’s a point where I’m okay with it. They want to know, why are you calling? Can we take the time to please do a survey after? No, I don’t want to do a survey. But all of this is regimented AI. I know it and I’m okay with it. But when it comes to the point that it can no longer answer my question, give me somebody.

Dennis Collins: Interesting. So, did we lose Tom? Are you there, buddy?

Leah Bumphrey: No worries. AI heard my rant and it went, oh, yeah, this is what… See, this is the kind of stuff that scares us. I’ve read Isaac Asimov, I’m a Heinlein fan. I’m a science fiction gal. This is what happens every time.

Dennis Collins: Really? So when you start talking bad about technology, it screws you.

Leah Bumphrey: It comes to find you, yes.

Dennis Collins: It finds you.

Leah Bumphrey: This is what happens. There’s been some great short stories about this. This is exactly what happens. Right, Thomas? You start dissing on AI and then everything goes to hell in a hand basket. Right?

Tom Capone: Yeah. They were listening to us, weren’t they?

Leah Bumphrey: Of course. Absolutely.

Tom Capone: No, I think you said something so interesting, Leah, because we all get to that point and there are limits today for AI. I will say, you know, I think it’s clear we’re in the early stages of AI still. It doesn’t feel that way, but it is. So, you know, the future, we don’t know where we go and how we get there. But I agree with you 100%, right? AI can do the job like we talked about to an extent, and then that’s where the human in the loop comes into play to really take it to the next level and leverage that information we get from AI so AI can help us. For the jobs that are customer facing, that are personal, that personal touch still makes a huge, huge difference.

Dennis Collins: So let me challenge you and get your response to some questions here. Let’s say you’re a 22-year-old, you have all the AI tools, all the knowledge. What is stopping that 22-year-old from launching your exact business with zero overhead and zero employees?

Tom Capone: Well, Dennis, thank you. I feel 22 sometimes.

Dennis Collins: You have a young spirit.

Tom Capone: Thank you, sir. This is a conversation that I have with businesses actually very, very often. And a lot of businesses that we speak about, they start looking for ways to use AI to fill gaps in their business. How can we use AI to improve this part of our business? And that’s a great way to look at things. But I’ll tell you this, especially for bigger, more mature companies, there are people that know now what you didn’t know when you started your business. And they’re not looking at your business saying, how can I improve this incrementally? They’re saying, now that I have AI, how can I, starting from scratch, knowing what I know now, do this way better, way different, more efficiently and more effectively? So the whole thought process of the business changes to how would I? We have to change that together. How would I… If I could start over my business from scratch, what would I do differently now that I didn’t know then?

Dennis Collins: Yeah, and that is a great, great question. In fact, it’s a question that I wanted to ask you, so I’ll go ahead and ask it right now. You just opened the door. What if you, Thomas, were starting a new business? Just as you said, you’re not tied to what’s been done in the past. You’re starting fresh and you know how to use AI. How specifically would you design that business today to incorporate the benefits of AI? What would you do?

Tom Capone: Wow, Dennis, such a loaded question. There’s so much that you can do. The world is at your fingertips.

Dennis Collins: Let me make it easy, let me make it easier. Let’s take it step by step. One of the things that I read the other day said, make AI your co founder, not a tool, but your co founder. What do you think of that concept, AI as your co founder of your new business?

Tom Capone: Yeah, it’s interesting. I often say that AI should be your first employee, and this is may be a very similar concept, right? Because we have to first see where AI can help us and then see how we can have employees to improve that process. The one thing that I’ll say is whichever AI tools you’re using to start your business, and there’s a plethora of them for different reasons, right? From sales, to operations, legal, to marketing, whatever AI tools you’re using, it’s very important to invest in the setup. The more information, the more about your processes, about your business, about your goals, the more about how you want to sound as a company that AI knows about you and about your business, the better responses you’re going to get.

Dennis Collins: So, how do you teach AI those things you just mentioned? It doesn’t know that. It doesn’t have any knowledge of that, unless you give that to the AI, right?

Tom Capone: Yeah, that’s 100% accurate. And I’ll say that teaching AI is different depending on the AI you’re using, but the goals are the same. And so you’re going to want to find a tool that accomplishes the tasks you want to focus on. If it’s sales, find a tool that works in your aspect of sales. Maybe it’s one that puts together great presentations and proposals. And there’s a great tool that I use that does that called Gamma. And one thing Gamma allows you to do is upload everything into the program before you even get started. So I can upload my logo, a lot of information about my company, my website. I could upload some design assets, the tone in which we want to communicate, and then everything I create from there on, it has that in its brain and it starts creating with that in mind.

Dennis Collins: Now, is that a proprietary AI that’s not just going on ChatGPT or Claude or something? Are you talking about something that is built just for you?

Tom Capone: This is actually a tool that anybody can access. It’s similar to a ChatGPT or similar to a Claude, but it’s a subscription tool and there are actually free versions of it. I would say if you’re still building PowerPoints or presentations from scratch, definitely a tool to check out. It can make your life so much easier from anything that you’re leveraging there.

Leah Bumphrey: The big thing is at the beginning, it’s a lot of work because you got to be doing this. And I’ve read some interesting stories that maybe you can comment on, Thomas, where all this information was downloaded. And then it became evident that because of what was coming out of AI, that the information that they were feeding, how their customer service reps were talking and interacting with clients was actually kind of rude. Had a bad flair to it.

If it was a woman, they were talking down to it. Maybe it was a minority, but it had the tone of the CSRs, the human CSRs that were feeding the information when it came to pitches and answering questions. So it was eye opening. They had to shut it down. And there’s been a few instances of that because suddenly AI is ramping up and standing in just like a human with that propensity would do.

Tom Capone: Yeah. Everything we do at our business, we do with human in the loop for those exact reasons. You have to have guidelines around it and that set up. But always putting a human in the loop can help with that. But yeah, certainly AI, look, AI is not perfect. It’s not perfect. It’s great. I think of AI as like my scatterbrained employee that is an amazing executor, but struggles if I give them a lot of tasks to complete. So if there’s somebody that’s managed closely, they can be your best asset and your best employee. But you have to make sure you have them under close management and a close eye to keep them on track, to keep them moving forward and keep them in the right direction.

Dennis Collins: Interesting. So explain to us what a company like yours, Concepta, when you get an AI assignment, what generally is it that you’re asked to do by your customer?

Tom Capone: Well, Dennis, what’s amazing is at Concepta, for years, we always helped people leverage technology to automate their processes and reach more people. And we did that with applications, integrations and mobile apps. And really, AI is just the next step. So nowadays people are asking us, how can we bring AI into a tool we already have? Or how can we create this tool and use AI to make it even better than we can imagine?

One of the things we’re getting asked a lot now, I use this example because it’s really cut down the way you can accomplish this task with AI. We have quite a few clients who have some kind of documents that they need scanned and reviewed. And an example I give is we have one of our clients who helps businesses with taxes. And they have, for one of the tasks they get from their clients, they’re sent a shoebox, a digital shoebox of receipts, and they are asked to categorize all these receipts of a year of expenses. And you can imagine the manpower that they’ve put into that for these businesses over the years. If you get a shoebox of receipts from a pretty big business, I’m sure that could take weeks to categorize.

Dennis Collins: Sure.

Leah Bumphrey: I love that it’s a digital shoebox. I’m telling all my girlfriends that are accountants because they cry about the bankers boxes of just random paperwork they get. A digital shoebox, now that’s fun.

Dennis Collins: It is.

Tom Capone: And so, with programming, this would be an almost impossible task or a very lengthy task. But with AI, AI can recognize a lot of things on these receipts with relatively minimal training and start categorizing them for you. And so you think about the manpower that saves, and it’s just incredible.

Dennis Collins: That’s interesting. First of all, you mentioned the word cost in one of your responses there a few minutes ago. How much are people spending to get AI savvy? Is it expensive? You mentioned that some of these programs are either free or relatively inexpensive. But I’ll bet you can run up some expense on this. Give us an idea, give our listeners an idea of what it costs them to ramp up with an AI.

Tom Capone: Well, Dennis, yeah, like anything else, cost is very relative to the business, right?

Dennis Collins: Yeah, of course.

Tom Capone: I came out of an AI conference last month where I talked to people who had already invested tens of millions of dollars just in R&D in AI and how they can create AI to improve their business. We’re talking about large enterprises that are finding ways to use AI with access of data lakes full of data, massive amounts of data information, ways to automate processes at a super high level.

However, I will say this. One of the beauties of the AI boom, and I’m amazed every day at the amount of subscription tools that I think for your audience, for the smaller growing business that are available at very low introductory costs, it’s incredible. It’s incredible. I mean, I pay for one of the big chat agents. I think it’s 19.99 a month. And I can’t believe the amount of time it saves me, again, when we invest and set it up properly, invest in that time, and in everything that I do from my personal life to business.

Dennis Collins: So it’s not cost prohibitive. It is possible to get involved fully in AI and not break the bank and have to go out and get a loan or something to pay for it.

Tom Capone: And I think you have to. I think it’s possible and I think you have to.

Dennis Collins: So let me keep on with this thing about you’re starting a new business. We already talked about AI as your co founder. AI as your first employee. I like that. How about customer intelligence? I know when I was in the radio business in South Florida, we had thousands of customers and we really didn’t have any good way of tracking everything that they did. It was rudimentary at best. We were just getting started in computer technology, so we had a little bit of information, but we never had enough to really get a good track on customers. What is it when you’re designing that new business that you would do regarding customer intelligence? How would you design that?

Tom Capone: Awesome question, Dennis. I’ll turn it around a little bit as I think that I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I think the research you can do with AI becomes very helpful on your prospects and on your customers. Of course, tracking customer intelligence depends a lot on the business, the type of business, what you’re doing with them. But where I think there is a huge opportunity is in the research of a business.

And so I have an AI agent that I created that anybody can do. I’m not a programmer, I’ve never been a programmer, but I have an agent that I created that helps me do research on my customers. My prospects first, but then my customers. And so even when we’re engaged and in ongoing contract with customers, I’m researching them all the time. And on a weekly basis, I’m talking with my AI and I’m finding out what’s new in that company, what can I find online that’s about them or about their industry, about their space. And then the AI can even review that and start making some recommendations of how I can leverage that to help grow our footprint within that company.

Tom Capone: And so now as a salesperson, of course, I need to use my relationship, my trust, my understanding of their business to then take this and make something of it. But it’s already given us a head start, saving a lot of time in our relationship with our existing customers.

Dennis Collins: So can AI make predictive models about the lifetime value of a customer? Can it predict stuff like that? Can it take data that you put in and draw conclusions from that about the lifetime value of a customer, the churn risk, upsell opportunities? Is it capable of doing that?

Tom Capone: Well, that’s also a loaded question. So what happens here, right, is AI is as good as the data that we have.

Dennis Collins: Okay.

Tom Capone: And with the right data, it could do amazing things. A lot of the bigger companies that we talk to, when they start implementing AI, the first step is organizing their data properly from all their systems.

Dennis Collins: Oh, okay.

Tom Capone: And getting all these systems to talk together, integrate together into a single data source so that AI can read that data, understand it. So it’s like anything else in life, and we’ve heard this probably a million times, garbage in, garbage out. The data we put in is the data we’re going to get out.

Dennis Collins: So collecting and organizing the data may be one of the biggest jobs to do to incorporate AI. Right?

Leah Bumphrey: I gotta ask too. The other thing is knowing what it is that you want AI to do, because you mentioned doing proposals. Well, to Dennis’s point, you gotta put in every proposal and every bit of information that reflects accurately how you want to present things. As a salesperson, as a business owner, this is really important. But first of all, you have to identify these are the kind of proposals I want to do. This is the kind of information.

Then there’s the idea of research. I know I’ve loved using AI to explain to me in a very simple way, how do I make this work for me? Because there’s different things, and I’m not talking about AI. I’m talking about other apps, other opportunities. How do I do this? And it will come back, okay, you do this, this, this, this. So I know what I’m wanting from it. But I’m always struck with, I know there’s a whole bunch of stuff I’m not asking it to do for me. How do I find out what I should ask? So I’ve asked AI, what can I ask? And depending on the platform, you get different things.

So it’s like this candy shop and it’s like, well, what do I want? I like dark chocolate with cashews. Dennis, I know you’re kind of a milk chocolate guy, aren’t you?

Dennis Collins: Milk chocolate.

Leah Bumphrey: I know you’re not going to join me in black licorice, but I know the stuff I like.

Dennis Collins: Negative. Is that a Canadian thing or something, black licorice?

Leah Bumphrey: No, it’s a premier flavor thing.

Dennis Collins: Oh, okay.

Leah Bumphrey: But knowing what it is, you…

Dennis Collins: I’ll note that. I’ll ask AI whether I should have that.

Leah Bumphrey: Well, for when I win the hockey pool this year.

Dennis Collins: Yeah. Okay. Good luck. I’m safe. Sorry, Leah. Love you.

Tom Capone: I love that, Leah.  And I do that, too. I ask not only what can you help me with, but how do you help me? How can you help me?

Dennis Collins: Or give me the questions that I haven’t asked you that I should ask.

Tom Capone: Yes.

Leah Bumphrey: Yes.

Dennis Collins: Yeah. These are all things that our business owners can do today. Right? What are the things that I need to know that I ain’t smart enough to ask you? Tell me what those are.

Tom Capone: 100%. Yep. AI could be the best coach. And how to use AI could be the best coach.

Dennis Collins: Yeah. Coach me on how to use you AI. Right?

Leah Bumphrey: Just a quick question. Tell me if I’m crazy. I can’t help myself. When I’m working with AI, I speak the way I would talk to Dennis or the way I talk to Paul or you. Like I say thank you. How I do business informs and I find that AI is kind of nice to me.

Dennis Collins: You thank your AI Bot?

Leah Bumphrey: Yeah. And this is another one. And I don’t want to take this too far, but when I was in Austin recently, I was calling for an Uber, and I just went for the least expensive one. I was in downtown Austin and what came was this vehicle. And it’s telling me, you know, that my vehicle’s unlocked. I was afraid that my vehicle in Saskatoon was unlocked. Someone broke into it at the airport. Then my son and I went around to get into the vehicle here. It’s one of the self drive, like driverless vehicles.

Dennis Collins: Oh, yes.

Leah Bumphrey: Which I have sworn I would never get into.

Dennis Collins: Waymo, the Waymo car.

Dennis Collins: I didn’t know that’s what it was. So I went in very polite and talking and Fletcher and I had a very, like I had to think about going into that vehicle. But that’s total AI.

Dennis Collins: Did the car talk to you?

Leah Bumphrey: It did and she was wonderful. And she even reminded me to bring our leftovers, which I promptly forgot because I was too busy recording the whole thing.

Dennis Collins: Wait a minute. How would it know you even had leftovers?

Leah Bumphrey: That’s the question.

Dennis Collins: Uh-oh. I think that’s more than AI, Leah. I’m getting a little nervous about that. It knows a little too much about you to know what you did the night before.

Leah Bumphrey: That’s all I’m revealing. I’m just saying that I went for it and I was very happy with it.

Dennis Collins: Tom, I’m gonna go check out and see if it can tell us what you did the night before. Thomas, back to this new business you’re building. I am a big fan of having competitive intelligence. Do you know what I mean by that? I want to know about my marketplace. What’s going on in my marketplace? What are my competitors doing? How are they pricing? How are they positioning? Okay, I know you’re going to probably tell me it’s about the data, but is AI useful to develop competitive intelligence with the proper data?

Tom Capone: Well, I’ve asked AI questions about my competitors all the time. I love it when, to piggyback a little off what Leah said, when AI replies to me and says, wow, what a great idea. Nothing’s better than getting a compliment from my AI. And he says, yeah, I could really help with that.

Dennis Collins: Do you believe those compliments, just out of curiosity?

Tom Capone: I take them to heart. I take them to heart. I do.

Leah Bumphrey: It warms the whole day, absolutely.

Tom Capone: Yeah. I have four young children, Dennis. I don’t get complimented often.

Dennis Collins: Really? How about your wife?

Tom Capone: Yeah.

Dennis Collins: She probably does. She probably compliments you a lot. No, we won’t go there.

Tom Capone: Yeah, but in a very similar way, the way you can research your clients and prospects, you can research your competitors using AI. And one thing that is super important if you’re starting a business and whatever type of research you’re trying to do is invest time. Of course, we talked about investing time in the setup, but maybe the next step, maybe even before that. But invest some time and take a class on a prompting framework.

Dennis Collins: Ah, okay.

Tom Capone: Google has very simple prompting frameworks. One of them they call PTCF. It’s Persona Task Context Format. And it shows you how to talk to an AI. Like Leah said, you got to talk to an AI like it’s a person. But if I was asking you to do a task for me, Dennis, as wise, intelligent and expertise that you have.

Leah Bumphrey: And good looking, he’s good looking too.

Tom Capone: Good looking as well. Without the right context, without the right ask, and we’re not understanding the why behind what I’m looking for, you probably would do, I hate to say this because I don’t know how you could do, an average job.

Dennis Collins: Yeah.

Tom Capone: But Dennis, I know that if you know the Persona, why you’re researching, who you’re acting as as a researcher, what is the task you’re trying to accomplish? Some background context and the format in which I want that information back, that’s that Google framework, Persona Task Context Format. I know you’re gonna provide me back a better result than not only you would have before, but probably that anybody else in the world can because that’s you. That’s Dennis. That’s Dennis Collins.

Dennis Collins: Wow, that’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? How do you say this again? PTCF.

Tom Capone: PTCF is one of the frameworks. Yeah. There’s course summary.

Dennis Collins: P-T-C-F.

Tom Capone: PTCF, Persona Task Context Format, and there are some Google, even summaries if you don’t want to take the whole course, that are like 30 minutes to an hour long. But you could take a far more in-depth course.

Dennis Collins: Okay.

Tom Capone: Which really helps to prepare the AIs.

Leah Bumphrey: What I find is there’s so many courses being offered right now, Thomas, and I sign up for them. Or it’s a masterclass. And within 15 minutes, sometimes they give me 20 minutes, they are hardcore selling me on their system. And maybe they’re the best in the world, but as a salesperson, that turns me off completely because I got sucked into some… And I don’t mind paying for knowledge and paying for the opportunity to learn, but there’s so many and they’re so vast and they’re all telling me the other ones are stupid. And some of them are even smart enough when I unsubscribe to figure out how to resubscribe themselves. I don’t like that either. So I love hearing from a professional like you. Okay, here’s something. This is valid. This is something that I can learn with. But how do you navigate this? I guess that’s why it’s your business.

Tom Capone: Yeah, no, I will say that I get that a lot. Nowadays, I feel like any amount of research that I’m doing online tends to come with an ulterior motive and a bias. Right? So it’s difficult sometimes. But who else can you trust than Google? I’m sure they have plenty of things to sell, but probably their tools for you and me are the smallest of their worries. But I actually do a lot of, I’ll find some experts who are summarizing these courses and depending on how deep you want to get, you can get a course summary in 30 minutes from a course that might have been three or four-day long course. You get the highlights or the cliff notes, so to say. And that’s another thing is, you can also then throw that into AI and start asking questions. Start asking your own questions about it.

Dennis Collins: Yes, I do that a lot. Yeah. Take a transcript from something that you like. Right? Take a transcript, put it into AI and say, give me the top 10 bullet points from this transcript. What are the findings, what are the conclusions? What’s the point of this whole conversation? And give it to me in bullet point summary. Have you ever tried that, Thomas?

Tom Capone: Yeah.

Dennis Collins: I love it. I actually did it yesterday. I said give me the top seven books ever published in a certain area. Okay? I want the top seven books. I want a 20-point bullet point summary of each book. I want the finding, what is the core finding of that book? And then I want you to take all of those seven books and give me what they teach in common.

Leah Bumphrey: Whoa. Okay, I don’t care what the topic was, but share that with me. That sounds fabulous.

Dennis Collins: No. That’ll cost money, Leah.

Tom Capone: Proprietary prompts.

Leah Bumphrey: Proprietary prompts. I love that.

Dennis Collins: We can’t leave this conversation. Oh, is that Producer Paul chiming in? Producer Paul, by the way, has just written a book about the secret… Yeah, but I just want to tell him you have written the book, and I am going to provide him with a copy as soon as it’s published. The Secret Formulas of Artificial Intelligence. So Boomer is not only our partner and our friend, but he is also in the AI space. I’d love your comments, Paul, on what we’ve talked about so far. We’re getting towards the end here. We got to wrap this up. But what are you thinking about what we’ve talked about?

Dennis Collins: Yep. We’re going to have, should we have him? We should have him back, huh? When Tom writes his book, we’re going to have him back to promote his book. Okay. I don’t think we can leave this conversation, though, without talking, you brought up the P word. Well, there’s two P words. Preparation, Paul Boomer and Thomas Capone. And the other P word is prompts.  Those who are just trying to get, you know, people that tell me, yeah, I use AI. I know all the prompts. I know how to do that. Yeah, well, when you dig into it, you find out they don’t. What is the role of the prompt in getting the proper output, Thomas?

Tom Capone: Dennis, the prompt is the heart and soul of the output of your AI. We mentioned earlier that AI struggles on long tail complex tasks. So I would say break things down into clear, smaller requests. This is where AI excels. Start small, test, expand on it if it works. AI is the most powerful when it’s practical and when your ask is specific.

Dennis Collins: Specific and practical. Okay, good.

Tom Capone: Specific and practical. And prompting is everything. Prompting, asking the right questions.

Dennis Collins: And as you said, there are a lot of resources out there to help you with your prompts. Right? I don’t think a day goes by in my feed that I don’t get 10 different ads, as Leah said, you know, they’re all ads. They’re trying to sell stuff, but there’s information. Hey, do you need the next 150 best prompts? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They’re out there. And I guess the key is getting the ones that you really need. And yes, sir. Of course.

Tom Capone: Yeah, great question. And I’ll say that you don’t always necessarily need a prompt engineer. Like anything in business, as you grow, needs become clear. But what is important as a business is protecting your information, protecting your IP, and protecting your company. Right? And so rolling out AI to your staff, it’s a culture, and it’s a culture that requires guidelines and guardrails, as you know. So it becomes letting the staff know what tools we can use, what we can use it for, what we shouldn’t be using it for, and how to use it.

And so just like there’s sales training, just like there’s all kinds of training in your business, your AI philosophy as a company, I think needs to, from my perspective, needs to be progressive thinking and forward thinking. But it also needs to come with guardrails and with, I wouldn’t know if I’d say caution, but with strategy.

Dennis Collins: That’s interesting. You and I have talked about certain companies that have not had the training and the cultural updates, and they throw it at somebody and say, do this. This is what we’re doing. And they have no idea how to do it. So I think a key warning is you cannot just say this is now part of what we do. Just do it without assimilating it into the culture. Would that be fair to say?

Tom Capone: I would agree 100%.

Dennis Collins: I have one last question. Let’s leave our audience with some words of wisdom. We always like to close our podcast with some action steps. With what can we do today, Monday morning actions. What can we do? Thomas, if you were advising our small business owners, our business leaders, our founders, our sales leaders, sales managers, if there was one or two things that they should do if they’re not already doing it, one or two things they should, they must do to get on board the AI train, what would those things be?

Tom Capone: Well, Dennis, I think that for the business owners or the business leaders that are not currently leveraging AI or don’t know how to, the first thing that I would do is what we talked about a lot today is invest some time. Invest some time in learning. Invest some time in learning prompts. And from there, invest time in the setup of the tools that can work for you.

Dennis Collins: Right.

Tom Capone: And Mr. Paul mentioned earlier that it takes time to do all this stuff, but this is one of the things you’ll do in life that will give you that time back tenfold. You’ll be so much more productive, so much more efficient in your business, in your personal life, and moving forward if you can leverage these tools for yourself. So invest time. It’s a guaranteed payoff. There’s not a lot of guarantees in life.

Dennis Collins: Wow. I like what you just said. Guaranteed payoff, folks. Did you hear that? Here’s the expert in AI who works in the space every day, spend time, figure it out. It’s a guaranteed payoff. I love it. There are no guarantees, but Thomas just made one. Okay. Tom, hey, I can’t thank you enough for being our guest today. Ladies and gentlemen. You’ve been listening to Thomas Capone. He’s Vice President of Business Development for Concepta Technologies. Okay. You can find him on all the social media. If you’re looking to get in touch with Tom, he is on Facebook on this one. On that one. He’s everywhere. He’s everywhere. Everywhere.

Leah Bumphrey: And if you can’t find him, ask AI. AI will track him.

Dennis Collins: AI will find him. AI knows exactly where he’s at. So, this has been a stimulating conversation. I knew it would be. Thank you for adding to the knowledge base of our listeners and viewers. We’re going to have you back, buddy. And thanks for a great show. That’s going to wrap it up for this episode. On behalf of Leah, I’m Dennis, and goodbye for now. Tune in again for the next episode of Connect & Convert.

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