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- Coming up next on the Jeff Crilley Show, you're gonna meet a global thought leader in the world of AI. It's the great Matt Rosen. He's on my show for the third time. His journey just ahead. Many are predicting that the worst is yet to come, which is unfortunate, said one person here. Until now, they've enjoyed the reputation of being the nation's icebox. Watched a burglar in his home this morning by webcam. As a journalist of over twenty five years, stories are what make my world turn. Reporting live from The Dallas Newsroom tonight, Jeff Crilley, Fox four news. But in 2008, I took the jump from my familiar life and started a PR firm from my home. We're talking about anyone with a camcorder like the one I'm using becomes a television network. We started slowly growing the company, and we now have over a 100 clients. And we've branched into the world of live digital broadcasting. I now own eight different TV studios and have a huge team. And the stories that I now get to share are sometimes the most important of my life. Life has a funny way of coming around full circle. This is The Jeff Crilley Show. Well, AI is the wild wild west. It changes every single day and in order to go through this wild west, you need a tour guide if you will. And that's my next guest, Matt Rosen is in the studio again. He is the founder and CEO of Aleda. Thanks for coming on the show. Yeah. Thanks for coming on again, Jeff. Yeah. Well, we first met during the height of COVID and we did some work with you during COVID and got you some news attention. But your business has changed tremendously in the last six years. Absolutely. I mean, we have our roots as a custom development firm. We're big in the digital consulting, which was huge. Now that narrative and what we do is totally pivot over to AI and data and helping companies really adopt AI from an enterprise level, integrating all their systems and documents and really helping them unlock the knowledge they have internally. They have to structure their data. And we still do a lot of our custom development, but it's all AI driven. So we're developing solutions for people faster than ever before. Yeah. Well, it feels like the AI gold rush because now there's an AI expert on every street corner. You've had a chance to meet some of these people. Tell us what makes Aleta different. Sure. You know, they're every consulting firm, every software firm now has AI. In fact, businesses that don't even do AI say they do AI. It's kinda like the ecommerce days when I started in this business. Everything had e in front of it, little e and, you know, or a .com behind it, and it was worth billions of dollars. So the way we've had to differentiate ourselves is really by it's in the proof. So we decided that we back in 2022 when ChatGPT launched, that we were gonna have to stay ahead of everybody else. And so we thought, hey, if we're gonna be great at AI, we gotta do it for ourselves first. Yes. And so, you know, we looked across, like, what are the biggest, like, inefficiencies and pain points? And we ended up building an some AI tooling out to really help with our employee review process. You know, our mantra is family first, clients are king. We take great care of our people. So as part of that, taking great care of our people is reviewing them, you know, annually, and we have a very complex Excel workbook that shows what we expect of you at each level. We gather 360 degree feedback, and then we create a word narrative, and that was taken anywhere from eight to ten hours. And 350 employees now globally. Yeah. That's a lot of time and effort went into writing reviews that oftentimes weren't that great. And so by using AI to help the reviewer or the mentee work with AI, we were able to take that time down to, thirty minutes. So we estimated savings of, like, half 1,000,000 a year Wow. Across our organization, which is huge, and it gives people you know, and the reviews are way better, and people like them more. Yes. And so we started enabling other parts of our business with that AI platform, and then what we did is we started showing clients what we've done. So instead of just saying, we do AI, we're like, let me show you what we've done. Let me show you the business results it had, so that we had a lot more credibility in going to our clients and say, we can help you too. You know, the hard part is just identifying what is the biggest problem you're trying to solve, and as people are coming up to speed, helping them understand what problems are best suited to be solved with AI versus other other means. Let's pull up Matt's website. And as we scroll down the website, why don't you talk about your ideal client? Is it a company size? Is it small, midsize, large? Yeah. You know, we have clients that are startups. We have some of the Fortune 500, but I'd say our ideal clients usually range in about 250,000,000 to about 5,000,000,000 in revenue. So they've got, you know, a good leadership team in place. They view technology as as strategic enabler of their firm. They're looking to transform with AI, and we can usually go in and have a pretty, you know, outsized impact for a firm our size, helping them figure out really where to start, because I think most there's a lot of noise out there, and there's it's changing so fast. I mean, every day, you know, different model providers are releasing something new, and we're staying ahead as a firm and really trying to help our clients really surf these waves of change that are coming faster than anything we've ever seen as a human race. Tell us one of your favorite success stories so far. Yeah. So I've I've got to do two recent startups. One is a tool called Relay, which is a software for the multifamily real estate space. You're building out an old garden style eighties style apartment and you you're building it out and getting money from a draw from a bank or let's just say there's a flood and you need insurance claim money, we helped a a multifamily operator develop a tool called Relay, which helps them get money faster for both insurance claims and development. And another story is Sportsmo. You had Chetan on the show. He developed an idea to have multi I'm sorry, in game micro donations for NIL to help schools that don't have big check writers get money from their alumni. Both of those application development initiatives would have cost in the millions of dollars, and we will do it well under what it would have normally cost using AI to help speed the development. So it allowed both of these entrepreneurs to get their dreams to market faster and out in the marketplace so they could start getting clients on them and we would not have been able to do that before the advent of that technology. I was asking you before the show how you use it in your daily life and you mentioned a family meal plan? Yeah, so in my personal life, I'm a big fan of a tool called Lovable, and Lovable allows you to quickly build applications. It actually uses the anthropic models behind the scenes, but I have two daughters that are teenagers and a working wife who's a doctor, and so every week, we would get together on Sundays as we plan the week, like, what do we wanna eat? And they got tired of eating the same thing, and they complained there weren't any meals. And so we're lucky enough to have a nanny that's been with us for fifteen years who helps shop and helps me cook. And so we I basically uploaded all the recipes, uploaded a bunch more, put some health scoring behind it, and the kids and my wife get to vote what they want, and then it creates a shopping list that deducts what we have in the pantry. People have said I should take it to market as an app, and I'm not a b to c guy. I'm a business to business type of guy, but, yeah, we it it's great. So I have this family meal planner out there every every week. People are what are we eating? I'm like, go check the app. It's in there. What's in it? Just click the recipe. You have a very popular podcast on our network. We're gonna show your YouTube page as we scroll down. You were telling me that you're celebrating 60 shows? Yeah. Right after this. It'll be 60 episodes. That's incredible. What kind of guests do you like to feature on your show? I like people who have been through tough times and emerged stronger on the other side, which is a lot of business owners, executives. We've had some special forces. We'd like to have, you know, more people from the the health care and maybe first responder space. Had a few school teachers, some influencers, some coaches. So just anyone who's got a good story, it's called The Great Mindset, so it's all about people who have persevered in challenging times and emerged stronger. I know I'm blessed to know a lot of really great people and want everyone to know their stories. And, was blessed enough to be asked to be on your show. Yeah. You think you were against 13 or I was. And, I gotta tell you, I was a little uncomfortable because I'm used to being You're not used on to the other side of the chair. Let's talk about myths because Yeah. You know, when I get up in the morning to to look for news stories, I see so many negative headlines about just it's gonna take jobs or employees don't know how to use AI. What are what are some myths about AI? So I will say that the people that are driving AI, that's the Sam Altmans, the Dario Ahmadays that, you know, run Anthropic, they've done a terrible job on the narrative. They've talked negatively so much about it without a solution of, like, what's the good AI is gonna bring? Mean, think about some of the good things that are gonna happen. Mean, AI is gonna revolutionize health care. It should eradicate a lot of diseases. Self driving cars should keep the roadway safer. There's a lot of great things it's gonna do, but it is going you always see the disruption first in any technological revolution. And I think that the worry that it's gonna displace all work and everyone's gonna be out of a job, but you know what? Humans crave being around one another. You know, Starbucks actually tried to automate everything, and they're actually hiring more baristas and bringing people because they want people to sit in the store. People want that human interaction. So it's gonna vary industry by industry, and there are gonna be jobs lost as a result of AI doing the work. But there's gonna be a lot more opportunity created. I would just say it's not yet as clear where those opportunities are gonna be, but what I would say to the audience that's listening out there, if you're not out there playing with Chad GBT or Anthropix Cloud or Google Gemini, you need to sign up today. It's free. You actually get better models if you pay a few bucks a month. I've got all three. I play with them constantly. I try and figure out what their capabilities are. They launch something new, like, every week. It's it's an amazing time to be in technology. And the great thing about these models, people are like, well, I don't know where to start. It's like, just go to the model and ask what it can do for you. You can use AI to teach you AI. Yes. And and so, but in the news, you do hear a lot of negative things. You also AI does require a lot of power and water, and so you see a lot of negativity around data centers. But, know, this is a race, and, you know, China's investing heavily in AI, and what you know, we're frenemies. It is very important that we keep up. And so banning data centers and banning AI and making it restrictive is not a good thing. This technology is here to stay. You cannot put your head in the sand. If you're a business owner listening to this, like, if you're not starting to empower your employees with it, you're you're gonna fall behind because the haves and have nots in AI, the gap is growing wider and wider, and this is not this is not a fad. Yeah. Well, we were talking before the show in the early nineteen hundreds, the car came along and I'm sure the horse and buggy people were nervous, but some said, no. They we'll always need a horse and buggy. Yeah. And then that doesn't exist anymore. No. You know, Henry Ford's great quote was if I ask them what they want, they said faster horses. So things so things are coming quicker than ever before. So, you know, one of the things that we've been advising our clients on is we built this you asked where do I use AI? We have our own AI accelerator. We built we call it a later bot. David Romeo, our VP of innovation named it. He's not a marketing guy. But every day I log in and I'm like, hey. Tell us about our sales pipeline. Tell me what's going on with projects in the company. You know, tell me about my day and it scans our CRM, it scans our time expense and billing system, it scans my Outlook. It helps me get prepared for the day, what would have taken me twenty, thirty minutes to search through systems in my inbox, and it generates to me, in fact, I could have it send it to me every morning if I wanted to. Yes. It eliminates the need for me to log in to all these different things and then I can focus on the important things which is serving our clients or people and ultimately my family. How are colleges and universities doing? I mean, are they preparing our young people for an AI workforce? You know, I don't have a kid in college right now, but based on the conversations I've had with my friend's children that are in college, I'm advising a number of them on what to do. I don't think they are. You know, I think they're still teaching, especially in the commutative sciences, like c plus plus and Python, which is a coding language you need for AI. But, like, using the engines, I think schools are struggling with how much do we let kids use them. This is not I mean, my daughter's in sixth grade at DSD that all the engines are blocked. Like, she can't get to ChatGPT or Gemini or, you know, they won't allow it. And it's like, these kids are growing up in a generation where they're gonna need to know how these tools work. And luckily, my daughter has another computer so she can access it from her home computer, but not all kids have that. And again, you get back to this haves and have nots. Luckily, you can access all these things on a phone, and most people have access to a smartphone. But I think colleges and universities need to take a hard look at the world they're getting kids ready for. And in the meantime, what I've encouraged, you know, my friends who have kids in college is, like, get yourself up to speed, build your own projects, start playing around, do not wait for the college to do it for you. And, again, you can use AI to teach you how to use AI. So he's like, hey. I'm a student studying data engineering. How can you help me do better and get up to speed faster? And it's it's you know, I think the fine line they're worried about is are they gonna use it to cheat? Well, it's like, they're gonna have access to it their whole lives, so it's best to kinda build a curriculum around the tools. Yeah. And some are talking about doing, you know, oral narratives or different things. But I would say to anyone who's in college out there today, like, you're not playing with AI and getting yourself up to speed on it, you're going to be a little bit behind. I'm expecting anyone that comes out to apply with Elated to have experience coding using AI. Well, if we went back fifty plus years ago and the personal calculator came along, people would be saying, oh, we won't No one will be able to do math. No. This is not the case. It's laughable now. Matt, we have about two minutes left. So why don't you look into the camera on the left and talk to the the company owner who might need to bring you in? Yeah. So if you're out there and you've been playing with Copilot or ChatGPT Enterprise or Anthropic and you're less than thrilled with the results, you know, the tools, they don't have the true enterprise context for the most part. And ultimately, you know, you're uploading your data, your documents, you should secure things into a world that, you know, is still being defined as we go. And so at Aleta, what we do is really help companies enable with a platform of their own, hooks to the latest and greatest models. It provides all the same capabilities, but the data stays safe, secure in your environment. Because one of the things I found is sometimes I go into cloud and it's down or chat GBT is down. And but, know, there's Gemini. But if you you've title entirely hooked your business to one of those tools and one goes down, you're putting yourself at a little bit of risk. So I like taking destiny into into your own hands, and so we're enabling companies to do that. It's very much reminds me of the browser wars of when I got started in this business, and ultimately, Chrome won. You know, there's a few edge users out there, and it's probably gonna be the same way with AI. But right now, people are using three, four different tools. No one knows which one's gonna win. So empower yourself, either build your own tooling, hire someone like us, buy a software out there that allows you to hook to multiple models, multiple providers because nobody knows who's gonna win this race. And it's gonna be a really interesting one to watch. I'm I'm excited to be in technology today. And, you know, if you're not embracing this wave of change, it's it's it's time to get on board. Matt, thank you for sharing your heart and your wisdom with us. We're going to end with his website, which again is alleda.com, the great Matt Rosen. Thanks for coming back. Thanks for having me on, Jeff. Always great to be here. That's it for now. We'll see you next time. Thanks.