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AI Isn’t Just Big Biz — It’s Already Changing Small Business with Cathy Redford and Stephen Rhodes · Budget Your Business

• 0:00
  Cathy Redford: Just from a cost perspective, it's affordable.
• 0:03
  Cathy Redford: It's affordable for SMB, mid-market enterprise Like.
• 0:06
  Cathy Redford: These are world-class technologies that anyone can implement.
• 0:10
  Cathy Redford: You just need to have the right understanding of how to do that correctly, right.
• 0:14
  Cathy Redford: That's the key, the big key.
• 0:17
  Stephen Rhodes: Absolutely.
• 0:18
  Scott Geller: Hello and welcome to Budget your Business, the podcast for small business owners who want to learn how to financially plan for every aspect of their business.
• 0:27
  Scott Geller: I'm your host, scott Gellar.
• 0:29
  Scott Geller: Today I'm joined by Kathy Redford and Stephen Rhodes of Synergy Technical.
• 0:35
  Scott Geller: This is the Budget your Business Required podcast on AI, but today I think it's going to be a little more than your traditional AI, because we're really going to be talking about how you use AI in your business, specifically your small business.
• 0:49
  Scott Geller: So I have the experts today.
• 0:51
  Scott Geller: Kathy and Steven, thank you for joining.
• 0:56
  Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, thanks for having us.
• 0:58
  Scott Geller: For the folks who don't know you or meeting you for the first time, could you each share a little bit about who you are or what you do?
• 1:07
  Cathy Redford: So I'm Kathy Redford.
• 1:09
  Cathy Redford: I'm Vice President of Business Development for Synergy Technical and a little bit briefly about Synergy.
• 1:15
  Cathy Redford: Synergy was established in 2011, and we were a scrappy startup in Richmond, Virginia.
• 1:21
  Cathy Redford: Our CEO was a global CIO and so, just as you all are business folks that have started companies, you see a need and you create something and that's how we had landed.
• 1:32
  Cathy Redford: So she started Synergy in 2011 with the belief the future was in the cloud, and I think she bet right.
• 1:39
  Cathy Redford: We've grown the company and now we've got clients in 50 states and we've done project work in 70 countries, and we'll talk a little bit more about AI, but you know we're heavily invested in Microsoft solutions.
• 1:55
  Cathy Redford: We also work with other suppliers.
• 1:57
  Cathy Redford: We do a lot of like.
• 2:00
  Cathy Redford: We do consulting services, strategic work work and managed services and licensing advisory.
• 2:07
  Cathy Redford: So that's a little bit about us, Steven.
• 2:11
  Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, I'm Steven Rhodes.
• 2:12
  Stephen Rhodes: With Synergy Technical, I'm our director of business applications.
• 2:15
  Stephen Rhodes: I've been with the company about 10 years middle of this month and my background really is in application development type of workloads.
• 2:23
  Stephen Rhodes: I actually worked in the bowling industry in my prior life with our founder of our company, but I've worked with our companies, with our clients, on a lot of implementations of productivity and security tools, but most recently on helping to build out our AI practice.
• 2:37
  Stephen Rhodes: So really excited to talk with you today, scott, about the opportunities that we're seeing in this field.
• 2:44
  Scott Geller: Great Now, stephen.
• 2:45
  Scott Geller: Work in the bowling industry doesn't mean a professional bowler does it?
• 2:50
  Stephen Rhodes: Not professionally, no, helping to support more of the recreational side.
• 2:55
  Stephen Rhodes: So yeah, it was more being in the manufacturing and the retail running of retail stores.
• 3:02
  Scott Geller: All right.
• 3:02
  Scott Geller: Well, I had a feeling that was the case.
• 3:04
  Scott Geller: Just thought we might have an interesting side story of your professional as well.
• 3:08
  Stephen Rhodes: Definitely not a very good bowler.
• 3:10
  Scott Geller: Fair enough.
• 3:11
  Scott Geller: Well, let's get into the topic here and maybe you can share.
• 3:17
  Scott Geller: What sorts of companies do you see actually using AI today?
• 3:23
  Cathy Redford: All of them.
• 3:23
  Cathy Redford: I mean small, smb, mid-market enterprise.
• 3:27
  Cathy Redford: Wouldn't you agree, steven?
• 3:29
  Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, it runs the gamut, Scott.
• 3:31
  Stephen Rhodes: We're seeing them across industries, right.
• 3:32
  Stephen Rhodes: We see a lot of both in retail, financial, legal consulting of all sizes.
• 3:38
  Stephen Rhodes: So we're talking about more small business here, but definitely across the board.
• 3:43
  Stephen Rhodes: Ai is a hot topic.
• 3:46
  Stephen Rhodes: We're seeing clients in different stages of their implementation, so some of them are in more of a planning strategy phase, trying to figure out what this is.
• 3:54
  Stephen Rhodes: A lot of them are in the piloting phase with the targeted group of users or groups, and some of them have been mandated for a rapid rollout to their whole org.
• 4:01
  Stephen Rhodes: So we're seeing a big mix across industries of people in different stages.
• 4:06
  Cathy Redford: I would add, too, that just from a cost perspective, it's affordable.
• 4:10
  Cathy Redford: It's affordable for SMB, mid-market enterprise Like.
• 4:14
  Cathy Redford: These are world-class technologies that anyone can implement.
• 4:17
  Cathy Redford: You just need to have the right understanding of how to do that correctly.
• 4:21
  Cathy Redford: Right.
• 4:22
  Cathy Redford: That's the key, the big key.
• 4:23
  Cathy Redford: That is a key in anything right.
• 4:25
  Scott Geller: It is kind of understanding how to do that correctly, right, that's the key, the big key and that is a key in anything right.
• 4:28
  Scott Geller: It is kind of understanding how to get started.
• 4:29
  Scott Geller: Do you see, are you seeing a difference, different degree maybe of acceptance between kind of the big players and the small businesses?
• 4:39
  Stephen Rhodes: I would say we're seeing some strong acceptance across the board.
• 4:44
  Stephen Rhodes: I don't, you know, we see some hesitation from larger organizations that have a lot of regulatory concerns.
• 4:51
  Stephen Rhodes: But also, you know, small businesses can be much more agile and can pick these things up.
• 4:55
  Stephen Rhodes: I think people having seen these in their personal life right just with the, you know, using ChatGPT and the tools we have in our consumer lives, people have become more comfortable with them.
• 5:07
  Stephen Rhodes: So finding the applicable use cases for your business is something that people you know, small business leaders, are eager and willing to jump in on.
• 5:16
  Scott Geller: Okay, so you touched on kind of planning and getting started right kind of planning and getting started right.
• 5:25
  Scott Geller: I'd really like to understand, or maybe you can describe, how you see companies approaching their AI strategy in that planning or implementation stage.
• 5:34
  Cathy Redford: I mean, I would say it varies about organization, and one of the first things we do is when we're meeting with a client or prospect is we want to understand where they are Like, we need to meet them wherever they are in their journey.
• 5:46
  Cathy Redford: And I've gone in to meet with a CEO and he's like, well, I want AI.
• 5:50
  Cathy Redford: I'm like, well, what does that mean to you?
• 5:52
  Cathy Redford: Right, because the board's telling them he needs AI.
• 5:55
  Cathy Redford: And so you know, tell me what that means and tell me, like, what are some pain points that resonate with you where you believe AI might be a fit?
• 6:08
  Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, and the importance there in those discussions, scott, is to make sure that you're including stakeholders across the business, right?
• 6:16
  Stephen Rhodes: So if you've got members in IT or in legal and HR, you want to make sure you're getting their input so that you can really look at the use cases that are most applicable to your business and you know the data and knowledge that you have or processes that you have that are unique to yourself.
• 6:34
  Stephen Rhodes: So you really want to understand, you know, what are the unique business cases that you can apply AI to and not just try to apply it across the board.
• 6:44
  Stephen Rhodes: You really want to try to find those quick wins, and getting input from across the organization is something that we recommend.
• 6:52
  Scott Geller: So it sounds like you're saying kind of start small a little bit before.
• 6:57
  Scott Geller: Hey, this is AI across the whole business and everybody is using it.
• 7:01
  Cathy Redford: Exactly Start small and be wise, and we start with security, security, security security yes.
• 7:11
  Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, yeah, we definitely.
• 7:12
  Stephen Rhodes: You know you want to identify those small pilot projects where you can find a quick win right.
• 7:17
  Stephen Rhodes: But, as Kathy was saying, even before you do that, the most important thing is to understand.
• 7:22
  Stephen Rhodes: You know your data security, governance and regulatory requirements right.
• 7:27
  Stephen Rhodes: So make sure that you're not using tools where your data is getting out there into one of these platforms and you don't know how it's being used.
• 7:33
  Stephen Rhodes: The last thing you want is for your proprietary business data to be used to train a large language model, when that's not at all what you want.
• 7:43
  Stephen Rhodes: So, really understanding how these tools work, understanding the security around your data and any mitigations that need to be put in place for those.
• 7:54
  Scott Geller: Yeah, I'm glad you touched on that because if I occasionally talk to a business owner and they say, oh yeah, Scott, I'm financial forecasting in chat, GPT and to me I grew up in my professional career as a bank examiner and risk and audit and have a very ingrained in my approach.
• 8:17
  Scott Geller: But I don't really like the approach of just throwing your financial statements.
• 8:22
  Scott Geller: If you're not going to throw your financial statements and leave them on a desk outside the business, is it?
• 8:27
  Scott Geller: really safe to put those into something like ChatGPT or any of these tools.
• 8:32
  Scott Geller: What is your opinion on that?
• 8:35
  Cathy Redford: Exactly right.
• 8:36
  Cathy Redford: In fact, there's a huge learning.
• 8:40
  Cathy Redford: So one of the things we typically and Stephen actually leads these but we really start with, like the steering committee, like who's your AI committee in the organization, and then with that, we also try and come up with acceptable use policies for your company.
• 8:56
  Cathy Redford: Right?
• 8:57
  Cathy Redford: Sign a synergy everyone here signed one and we're fired if we misuse AI.
• 9:00
  Cathy Redford: Right, it's very it's not complicated.
• 9:01
  Cathy Redford: And we're fired if we misuse AI.
• 9:02
  Cathy Redford: Right, it's very, it's not complicated.
• 9:04
  Cathy Redford: And then from there, though, what we try to do, there's a lot of learning.
• 9:09
  Cathy Redford: So there's a lot of education to the people making the decisions about the solutions, and I think that's where Steven and his team will go in and say, hey, this is how ChatGPT processes your data, this is how Microsoft.
• 9:23
  Cathy Redford: Right, steven?
• 9:24
  Cathy Redford: I mean you can elaborate a little bit more about the types of AI.
• 9:28
  Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, exactly, it's understanding how the tools work, like we're saying, and understanding what's happening with your data.
• 9:34
  Stephen Rhodes: So one of the common implementations that we do in a Microsoft partner is Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the beauty of that tool is that we know Microsoft is running those large language models in a controlled environment, right?
• 9:51
  Stephen Rhodes: So if you've already brought that data to the cloud, you have a lot of security and privacy and regulatory controls you can put against that data set and you know that that's running in its own private environment so it's not being used to train the model, it's not being used, it's not gonna leak out or anything, and so it's really saying, okay, well, so I've got all this data up here now I'm comfortable that I'm using it or I'm comfortable to use it, but how do I make sure that even my users, like Kathy said, acceptable use policies are necessary because people need to understand that you know these things can expose data that you may have access to that you're not even aware of, right?
• 10:35
  Stephen Rhodes: Like we've seen examples where you know a law firm basically had all their data in SharePoint.
• 10:41
  Stephen Rhodes: They knew that they probably had some issues with oversharing and we discovered that, yeah, indeed, they had shared a lot of you know more of the critical business information with a lot of, basically, the entire organization, and so we knew there was a mitigation that needed to be put in place first, and so saying, ok, well, let's secure that data and give you the tools to do it, but then, as part of that acceptable use policy, it's to say, okay, user, you know you're not, you're not to be prompting for these kinds of things and you also are responsible for the use of AI.
• 11:17
  Stephen Rhodes: Right, you need to understand that.
• 11:19
  Stephen Rhodes: You know it can make mistakes, so you need to validate that output and not just take it and use it.
• 11:25
  Stephen Rhodes: You know verbatim, you need to be responsible for your own use of those tools, and so that's one of the key things that we try to educate our clients on.
• 11:35
  Scott Geller: And I know the whole point of AI or not the whole point, but one of the points that I'm aware of at least, is that it uses your data and kind of gets smarter for you.
• 11:43
  Scott Geller: And when you mentioned it, doesn't, you know Microsoft, for the code pilot, doesn't use your data, you know, to algorithms or within its engine, but it's still using the data for what you want it to.
• 11:57
  Scott Geller: Is that accurate?
• 11:59
  Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, and that's a lot of part of it too, is learning how to use those tools, because it can.
• 12:04
  Stephen Rhodes: You have to kind of understand that the more you use it, it's because your prompts are being.
• 12:09
  Stephen Rhodes: You know you're getting better at the way that you're asking for things and it can sort of learn your style.
• 12:15
  Stephen Rhodes: But ultimately you have to, you have to guide it Right.
• 12:19
  Stephen Rhodes: It's still something where you have to ask for the output and the information that you want in the format that you want, and you have to give it a number of guardrails and instructions to be able to do that properly and effectively and get the responses.
• 12:34
  Stephen Rhodes: So it's what we call prompt engineering, right, learning the right way to prompt it, and it doesn't all have to be in one single fell swoop, right.
• 12:42
  Stephen Rhodes: You can also kind of have sessions where the beauty of these tools is they remember that conversation right and so that they can reference things you've said prior.
• 12:51
  Stephen Rhodes: So in that way it's kind of learning your style and the way that you work, but the ability to keep reprompting it, refine its response, change what you need back from it and get the effective results.
• 13:05
  Stephen Rhodes: So really it's still the beauty of these large language models is that they're able to reason on problems that we give them, even if it's not seen that problem.
• 13:17
  Stephen Rhodes: They've been trained on all this human language, natural language, content, right and so that's why these tools have become so powerful, because you can throw in a question and it can reason on it in a way that you didn't have to train it specifically to do that.
• 13:30
  Stephen Rhodes: So it's really kind of just learning your behavior and your style and what you need from it.
• 13:38
  Stephen Rhodes: But it does require your use of the tool and your proper prompting with it.
• 13:44
  Scott Geller: We touched on security for a while and how that's part of the preparation.
• 13:48
  Scott Geller: What other also you know?
• 13:50
  Scott Geller: You want people that are showing effective use.
• 14:09
  Stephen Rhodes: One of the things that you can see with these tools is that if you just take it and you roll it out to everybody and you don't provide the proper training and context and multiple ways for people to learn right, then you're not going to get the lift of productivity.
• 14:24
  Stephen Rhodes: Some people will figure this stuff out.
• 14:26
  Stephen Rhodes: You want to find those people we call champions in your pilots and then kind of have that be a feedback loop to the organization so that you can use that to refine your training and kind of empower other people to learn the best way to use them.
• 14:39
  Stephen Rhodes: A lot of these are use cases.
• 14:42
  Stephen Rhodes: Or you know we're all knowledge workers, right, so we all use.
• 14:45
  Stephen Rhodes: You know we all use.
• 14:46
  Stephen Rhodes: We have emails, we have files, we have meetings and notes and things like that.
• 14:51
  Stephen Rhodes: So we have that same kind of data but it's all unique to us and these same kind of problems we all kind of face, right.
• 14:58
  Stephen Rhodes: So the best use cases that we've seen are where people are able to even just find information, because a lot of times we do our best to structure things and put them where they should go but we forget where they are.
• 15:10
  Stephen Rhodes: You can use it to just find even the smallest bit of information or you can use it to draft out an entire document of a proposal or something.
• 15:18
  Stephen Rhodes: So it's really kind of training people on how to use it, finding those good examples that are more specific to your business and letting other people in the organization kind of learn that.
• 15:30
  Stephen Rhodes: So you do have to have a plan for training.
• 15:34
  Scott Geller: And how long does this and I'm sure this is a tough answer or tough question to answer how long should I kind of give to really get something back, or for this process of preparing for it and then expecting some type of return?
• 15:50
  Cathy Redford: I think it depends, and I think we have a lot of clients come to us and they say we know we want to implement AI within the organization, so we want an AI organizational strategy.
• 15:59
  Cathy Redford: Which great, let's do that.
• 16:01
  Cathy Redford: That's a bigger lift, right?
• 16:03
  Cathy Redford: You're bringing in key shareholders or stakeholders from different parts of the company.
• 16:08
  Cathy Redford: You're looking for business use cases in different areas of the company.
• 16:12
  Cathy Redford: However, many folks come to say, hey, I've got a significant investment in Microsoft technology already.
• 16:30
  Cathy Redford: I'm hearing about Microsoft Copilot.
• 16:31
  Cathy Redford: What is that right and how might that like, be a a quick win for my team to show immediate productivity?
• 16:34
  Cathy Redford: In fact, microsoft has done studies and there's one of the numbers 77 of the people who were given microsoft copilot would not give it back.
• 16:39
  Cathy Redford: Because because they were, and that's an old number, right, because it's more heavily adopted now.
• 16:45
  Cathy Redford: But you figure it's ingrained in all the Excel, word, powerpoint, teams, outlook.
• 16:51
  Cathy Redford: There's so many use cases.
• 16:53
  Cathy Redford: Stephen and I were talking the other day about all the different ways Like this is a tool we didn't even have a year ago and how it changes our start of our day, how we prepare for meetings, how we deliver content.
• 17:04
  Cathy Redford: It's it's just amazing.
• 17:07
  Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, exactly, I mean people are.
• 17:09
  Stephen Rhodes: You know it's going to vary per organization, but people are talking about, well, we're getting 90 minutes to three hours per week back per person.
• 17:16
  Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, right, Just an increased productivity.
• 17:18
  Stephen Rhodes: We're seeing big lifts in, you know.
• 17:21
  Stephen Rhodes: And then you tie these tools into some of your line of business apps.
• 17:24
  Stephen Rhodes: So, you know, we're talking about generative AI that's being used more on a personal productivity level, but there's also the ability to build out AI agents that then can be automated against, you know, either some of these same data stores but to your line of business apps, right, and then can be trained to kind of take on certain tasks and automate those.
• 17:46
  Stephen Rhodes: But so in that case, you can see an increase maybe in your outbound sales calls by 40%.
• 17:52
  Stephen Rhodes: Or the development of marketing content is a key one, but one of the biggest lifts is even just in meetings.
• 18:00
  Stephen Rhodes: So we spend a lot of time in meetings, a lot of time preparing for them, and you know, as someone that's run a lot of projects, I know I've spent, you know, countless hours, you know, either drafting agendas or, especially, creating meeting notes and follow up actions.
• 18:14
  Stephen Rhodes: And these, these tools now can so quickly summarize your meeting.
• 18:20
  Stephen Rhodes: Give you those next steps.
• 18:22
  Stephen Rhodes: Now you have to validate it, because a lot of times the next steps coming out of these tools they're kind of aspirational.
• 18:27
  Stephen Rhodes: When we're having conversations, we talk about things that we're really meaning to do down the road right.
• 18:33
  Cathy Redford: They can hallucinate sometimes, right?
• 18:35
  Scott Geller: We're not going to get from $20 million to $200 million by the next week right.
• 18:40
  Stephen Rhodes: Exactly Like just listening to our conversation.
• 18:43
  Stephen Rhodes: It might think that you know I'm planning to be a professional bowler, so you've got to pay attention and you can use it.
• 18:51
  Stephen Rhodes: But my point here is that those tools that can give such a in that use case we're seeing significant time savings, like four times People think saving as much as four times of the time spent just being in meetings or following up on meetings.
• 19:06
  Stephen Rhodes: So it's something that is applicable to a lot of people.
• 19:11
  Scott Geller: And that's the business case.
• 19:12
  Scott Geller: I get right Like that's the business case for going down this path.
• 19:16
  Scott Geller: And if you're going down a path, thinking about going down this path, how many small businesses do you find have the internal resources that can just handle this kind of lift for the implementation, for the planning, for the execution of it?
• 19:36
  Scott Geller: Do you see those in?
• 19:38
  Scott Geller: Too many businesses actually have that.
• 19:42
  Cathy Redford: I would say, from a security perspective, what you do want to do is you want to make sure that you do have a trusted partner or someone that can look at your data, your identity, how things are set up.
• 19:55
  Cathy Redford: You want to make sure every user who has access to this environment has that they don't have too much or too little access.
• 20:03
  Cathy Redford: Right, they can only see.
• 20:05
  Cathy Redford: And I know as a company, when we implemented, you know, we took our time and we really looked at all of our data.
• 20:11
  Cathy Redford: We had one of our engineers, in fact.
• 20:14
  Cathy Redford: So again, someone could get a trusted partner to take a look at how they are sharing documents, how identity is set up in the organization, look for any risk, mitigate those up front and then start with a small pilot with, just immediate, a very small group, so if something does surface, it's not being exposed to anyone who really shouldn't see it, right, and that way the leadership can get comfortable with a little bit further rollout.
• 20:42
  Cathy Redford: And then you have those terms of use and acceptable.
• 20:45
  Cathy Redford: You know your agreement with your users that if they see something they shouldn't, they report it right away, right, stephen?
• 20:52
  Cathy Redford: What would you add?
• 20:53
  Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, no, I would agree with that, especially on the security side.
• 20:56
  Stephen Rhodes: Like you know, clients that are leveraging the tool set we've helped them implement they may not always have that expertise and understanding.
• 21:04
  Stephen Rhodes: You know how they can apply data loss protection or sensitivity labels to their data to be able to affect that kind of protection or even understand that they need to be looking at it.
• 21:15
  Stephen Rhodes: So it is.
• 21:15
  Stephen Rhodes: There are some of those gaps that we do see that we then try to fill with education so that then they can either implement themselves We've seen a mix of it.
• 21:24
  Stephen Rhodes: Some of them do have the expertise in-house.
• 21:26
  Stephen Rhodes: Once they understand it, they've got the IT staff to be able to kind of you know, okay, well, we know, we know how to.
• 21:33
  Stephen Rhodes: Now that you've shown us, we know, we know how to apply these settings and then roll these out and communicate it to users.
• 21:38
  Stephen Rhodes: But some of them need a little bit more help with that and even sometimes in training people how to use stuff.
• 21:44
  Stephen Rhodes: There's, you know, when you put in some of these controls, it can be there's a fear of it being disruptive to the workflow, right, like putting a label on a document or an email.
• 21:54
  Stephen Rhodes: People get very they can get very concerned that it's going to gum up our ability to work quickly.
• 22:01
  Stephen Rhodes: But you know, we can train people on.
• 22:02
  Stephen Rhodes: Actually, you can do that in a very either an automated way or you can do it in a way that you train people and it becomes second nature.
• 22:09
  Stephen Rhodes: So, yeah, some of those, we do see some gaps and a lot of that is around some of that security and the ability, really the security, and I think there is a lot of knowledge transfer in our processes.
• 22:21
  Cathy Redford: I suspect other vendors have knowledge transfer as well, but education is a key component to make sure that we leave an environment that someone understands how to manage and what they need to do um but also and then just the use right, like, and people picking these tools up and say, wow, I'm not getting anything out of it, you know I'm not, I'm not seeing any.
• 22:40
  Stephen Rhodes: This isn't that great.
• 22:41
  Stephen Rhodes: And then having to show them.
• 22:42
  Stephen Rhodes: Okay, no, no, let's walk through some use cases, let's, you know, train you on that stuff.
• 22:47
  Stephen Rhodes: And that's really where you know that pilot meant training and engaging with business users sometimes is necessary.
• 22:52
  Stephen Rhodes: Some of them get it and they bring that immediately.
• 22:54
  Stephen Rhodes: So we've done pilots with clients where there's going to be key users that you know they try some things and they share that group, and that's that's exactly it.
• 23:03
  Stephen Rhodes: And then other even more experienced head of users, it and then other even more experienced heady users.
• 23:10
  Stephen Rhodes: We had a user, you know, very experienced Excel user that tried to prompt it for some very complicated responses, didn't get what he wanted, and then we showed him no, let's simplify what you're asking for and you can actually, you know, get the response you're looking for.
• 23:22
  Stephen Rhodes: So sometimes it's just learning the tool, learning the process.
• 23:26
  Cathy Redford: Yeah, it's a little bit of trial and error and trying different, like with Word Excel, all of those.
• 23:30
  Cathy Redford: I mean some of it is just game changing, scott, like I went in to do a PowerPoint and I was like, okay, well, I've got my document, I'm going to ask for a PowerPoint presentation and I'm going to ask for images and I mean it saved me three hours.
• 23:46
  Cathy Redford: It gave me a starting point.
• 23:47
  Cathy Redford: Now it's a trustee intern so I don't always fully.
• 23:51
  Cathy Redford: I'm going to vet it and make sure that it, because it may not have all the facts, it may not have the industry or the content knowledge that I do, like it doesn't.
• 24:00
  Cathy Redford: It can't replace a person, like the reasoning at this point and so.
• 24:03
  Cathy Redford: But just the time saved is phenomenal for me and prep for a meeting, it really is a game changer.
• 24:11
  Scott Geller: And that's a central kind of thank you for sharing that example.
• 24:15
  Scott Geller: Do you have any other, maybe like one or two other kind of best use cases or where you've seen implemented the most, where it's been most effective?
• 24:24
  Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, yeah, we've seen a lot of where you know.
• 24:30
  Stephen Rhodes: So a lot of organizations have their standards around, let's say, like how they're building some sort of an internal document or like, know it's just their legal department and they you know the gentleman from that department was like you know, I have this standard way that I always summarize these contracts and it takes us a long time to do it we're able to take these tools and basically say what are the prompts that you need, to kind of template out the prompts and then be able to build actually AI agents that will point to that data store and then script out some suggested initial prompts and then they can basically then deploy that agent to multiple people and right when they open up that agent, it's got suggested prompts and they can just basically, you know, select one of those, throw a document in there and then it'll compare that to whatever contract, that is, to what their standards are, and then generate the summary, so kind of templating out, generate a summary of this document based on our standards and it's using those standards, and be able to basically spit back the work that they would do a lot of manual work to compile and look at.
• 25:56
  Stephen Rhodes: That's one of the best and it's a great use case because it's one that a lot of organizations have.
• 26:01
  Stephen Rhodes: They always have their standard.
• 26:03
  Stephen Rhodes: We do it internally for a lot of our own contracts in Statement of Works, where we have a lot of similar engagements.
• 26:10
  Stephen Rhodes: Everyone is a little bit different, but a lot of them follow the same kind of structure and we're able to use some of the prior ones to basically create that framework and then get the inputs of the details, so we can take the meeting notes from a discovery for the client and then generate a Statement of Work.
• 26:28
  Stephen Rhodes: Again, you have to take that output and then refine it and so forth, embed it, but it can save us a lot of time as well.
• 26:36
  Stephen Rhodes: So those kinds of things where you're taking standard business, a standard process, you have around knowledge that you've developed and being able to leverage it very quickly in a templated way.
• 26:49
  Cathy Redford: The agents are really cool because we've got some obviously created in our environment.
• 26:54
  Cathy Redford: And so you know, say I get a particular RFP, I can actually have an agent I can go in and it will help me at least get a starting point to a response to that RFP, based on other information just in our tenant and other responses that we've made before, because we find the same types of questions come up over and over right, and so, you know, you feed it some of your information and, again, this is all within our tenant, it never leaves it.
• 27:22
  Cathy Redford: It's, you know, our NDAs, everything are fully protected to that.
• 27:27
  Cathy Redford: And then we actually did something really fun Scott, our CEO, decided to do a contest and to create innovation, you know, and drive, just getting everyone in the company thinking, and it was around creating an agent and there was an award and you could work in teams of three.
• 27:43
  Cathy Redford: And I was super excited to see that our marketing team came up with a problem and, you know, actually did a lot of research and they actually went to engineering and said, hey, we're trying to do this, can you give me some tips?
• 27:57
  Cathy Redford: Right, and then they actually did a really nice case study and they won the award.
• 28:02
  Cathy Redford: But again, they got excited about being innovative when they learned more about the solutions that we implement for our clients and it just showed the creativity of these solutions within an organization.
• 28:14
  Cathy Redford: I just love that.
• 28:17
  Scott Geller: Yeah, I really like that idea.
• 28:18
  Scott Geller: That's pretty neat.
• 28:19
  Scott Geller: It gets everybody involved.
• 28:21
  Cathy Redford: Yeah, Everyone's trying to solve those problems and figure out a faster and more effective way to do it correctly.
• 28:30
  Scott Geller: Absolutely, and I can relate I'm not high volume with clients.
• 28:34
  Scott Geller: At the same time, I can relate to putting discovery or prospect meetings and just having that feed run into a proposal or contract.
• 28:43
  Scott Geller: That'd be great.
• 28:46
  Cathy Redford: Yeah, it would See, check it out.
• 28:48
  Scott Geller: That's right.
• 28:49
  Cathy Redford: It really is a game changer from a productivity and we're seeing different things, you know.
• 28:54
  Cathy Redford: You see it in customer service.
• 28:55
  Cathy Redford: You know there are agents now helping people.
• 28:58
  Cathy Redford: We've got clients across all different verticals and we're seeing different use cases.
• 29:02
  Cathy Redford: But, as Stephen alluded to before, one thing we all have is basically a desk that we manage, where we communicate and we have some sort of output right and we have to bring in input and we have to process that.
• 29:16
  Cathy Redford: I've also found it particularly helpful with contracts and trying to understand, compare contracts and terms and conditions.
• 29:23
  Cathy Redford: You know, to understand some of the clauses between maybe our agreement and someone else's that was presented.
• 29:27
  Cathy Redford: You know hold on what are the differences and someone else's that was presented.
• 29:31
  Cathy Redford: You know hold on what are the differences and that's what that means.
• 29:34
  Cathy Redford: Ok, so again I have to question, I have to have some base knowledge.
• 29:38
  Cathy Redford: But boy, just the time of doing that comparison.
• 29:41
  Cathy Redford: It's night and day.
• 29:43
  Scott Geller: Yeah, Well, digging into more use cases.
• 29:46
  Scott Geller: I could probably keep going for a while, but I know, use cases.
• 29:51
  Scott Geller: I could probably keep going for a while, but I know we're running out of time and I like to wrap up all of our shows with one to three media takeaways that our listeners could put in action as we get off this podcast.
• 30:02
  Scott Geller: What can you share with us today?
• 30:06
  Stephen Rhodes: One or two.
• 30:06
  Stephen Rhodes: Well, I think, start with a pilot, you know, start with a strategy, with a large organization right, and involve the key stakeholders and then find those pilot projects and be able to, you know, rapidly implement them in that kind of you know the fail fast model.
• 30:25
  Stephen Rhodes: Right, You're not going to fail with these tools because they're very, they're so effective, but find that first group of users, find those first pilot use cases, get it going and then do some rapid learning about what you need to do to further roll these out and train and communicate and find those immediate use cases that can give you some value.
• 30:44
  Stephen Rhodes: That's really what I would say.
• 30:47
  Cathy Redford: Yeah, and I would say, if you don't understand the technologies you are using, find someone who does understand technologies and have them explain to you how the different solutions chat, gpt, microsoft, all these different solutions how are they taking your data?
• 31:04
  Cathy Redford: What are they doing with it?
• 31:06
  Cathy Redford: Right, what security is around it?
• 31:10
  Cathy Redford: Understanding that's critical to the decisions you'll make about the different solutions and what you do and don't want to use within your organization, and some of them you know.
• 31:21
  Cathy Redford: There may be a free level that doesn't have any guardrails, but maybe there is a paid level that there are some guardrails.
• 31:27
  Cathy Redford: But again, really lean into understanding the tools before you go too deep and making sure you have the right guardrails up.
• 31:37
  Stephen Rhodes: Yeah, I would underscore that, especially understanding your data security and governance.
• 31:43
  Stephen Rhodes: You know, and the implications for that.
• 31:45
  Stephen Rhodes: I would definitely put that even in front of the pilot.
• 31:48
  Stephen Rhodes: That's my first yeah, yeah.
• 31:49
  Cathy Redford: You can't steal hers.
• 31:49
  Cathy Redford: I know that, even in front of the pilot, that's my first yeah, yeah, you can't steal hers.
• 31:51
  Stephen Rhodes: That's a component of the pilot.
• 31:53
  Cathy Redford: Yeah.
• 31:55
  Stephen Rhodes: Sometimes we get too excited to get rolling yeah.
• 31:58
  Scott Geller: Well, great.
• 31:59
  Scott Geller: Well, the other ask I always, always have of my, of my listeners or my guests, rather, is a good podcast or book recommendation, and I'm excited we get two today.
• 32:09
  Scott Geller: So what do each of you have, stephen?
• 32:12
  Scott Geller: Do you have something?
• 32:15
  Stephen Rhodes: From a podcast, nothing that I listen to regularly, but I do.
• 32:18
  Stephen Rhodes: I read a lot of books between business and history.
• 32:22
  Stephen Rhodes: The most recent one that I read was the latest Eric Larson book, demon of Unrest, about the dawn of the Civil War in Fort Sumter.
• 32:28
  Stephen Rhodes: Just a fascinating novel.
• 32:30
  Stephen Rhodes: I enjoy these kinds of these reads because you know they're very.
• 32:34
  Stephen Rhodes: They tell a human story but they get us to reflect on, you know, past experiences that can inform the current.
• 32:41
  Cathy Redford: So that's just my personal recent yeah, I tend to listen to a lot of things because I'm in my car a lot and I'll do you know online books or right now I'm doing these master's classes and I'll flip them to audio and I'm really enjoying hearing from different leaders and the keys to their leadership and their leaders of all different backgrounds, different belief systems, backgrounds, different belief systems.
• 33:11
  Cathy Redford: But it's fascinating to me to hear critical decisions and things that were going on in the room right behind the scenes and there's so many learnings there.
• 33:18
  Cathy Redford: And then it also flips to cooking and exercise and you know have a lot of varied interests, so it keeps my attention right, so I do enjoy listening.
• 33:28
  Scott Geller: Well, good, well, this has been great.
• 33:30
  Scott Geller: Where can people find out more about either of you or Synergy online?
• 33:36
  Cathy Redford: wwwsynergy-technicalcom.
• 33:40
  Cathy Redford: Yeah.
• 33:42
  Scott Geller: Okay, well, thank you.
• 33:44
  Scott Geller: That's it for today.
• 33:45
  Scott Geller: I appreciate you both joining me.
• 33:47
  Scott Geller: Well, thanks for having us.
• 33:48
  Stephen Rhodes: It's been a pleasure.
• 33:48
  Stephen Rhodes: Thanks for having us, Scott, Absolutely All for having us.
• 33:50
  Stephen Rhodes: It's been a pleasure.
• 33:50
  Stephen Rhodes: Thanks for having us.
• 33:51
  Scott Geller: Scott, absolutely All right, folks.
• 33:53
  Scott Geller: That's it for today.
• 33:54
  Scott Geller: If you like the show or found something useful, do me a favor and shoot a text or an email to another business owner or friend and recommend them check out the podcast.
• 34:05
  Scott Geller: I'm Scott Keller and I hope you join me next time for Budget your Business.