SPEAKERS

Sid Meadows, Host of The Trend Report

Marc Ronick

Nick Nalbach

TEASER

Marc Ronic: We love these tools—they helped save us a ton of time. But what you get out of these [artificial intelligence tools] should never be a finished product. We always look at it like a first draft. 

So, we can use ChatGPT to help us draft up a blog post or draft up an email sequence, but that's the first draft—then we go in there, add ourselves to it, change it, remove things that aren't relevant to us or our audience, and we make it our own. Versus just saying, “Okay, chatGBT took care of that job that I didn't want to do… now let's go on to the next thing.”

Coach Sid Meadows: So welcome to part two of leveraging AI and understanding AI for business. If you listened in on Part One of this series, you heard all these amazing gems from Nick Nalbach and Marc Ronic. 

The rest of this conversation is continuing, and even more wisdom shared from them! This time, we talk a little bit about some of the ethical, moral things to think about with AI and other ways to use the tools. So I hope you enjoy the rest of this episode!

 

INTRO

Sid: Hey, friends, and welcome to the Trend Report podcast, where we have real conversations with real people about all-things Contract Interiors! My name is Sid Meadows, and I'm your host. I'm a business strategist, a certified professional coach, and a longtime student of the office furniture industry, and I'm excited that you're joining us today. 

My hope is that you will gain some insights, inspiration, and motivation that will help you grow and your business growth. So let's dive into today's conversation. 

The Trend Report is proudly sponsored by the Insider, a weekly newsletter delivering a quick dose of insights to get your Monday off to a well-informed start. The Insider combines meaningful industry perspective with recommended reads and product solutions, offering valuable intelligence and inspiration to anyone working in commercial interiors. To learn more about the insider or to subscribe for free, please visit indeal.org/theInsider 

 

EPISODE 

Sid: The user experience—our friend Stacy Sherman talks a lot about customer experience. For those of you that might remember—Stacey was a guest on the show several months ago (maybe a year or so ago). I'll tag the episode down in the notes here. Stacy talks a lot about customer experience, and it is really important. I talk to my team about customer experience, and as podcasts are, we want to create a great customer experience. What's a customer's experience on the receiving end of an AI communication from your business?

 

Marc: I mean, I guess that depends on the business and what's going on. You got anything for me, Nick?

 

Nick Nalbach: I mean, I think right now, you would probably go over really well, with how popular everything is. Chatbots are kind of a weird wave, where everyone wanted to avoid the bots. Everyone wanted to talk to a “real person,” and now, everyone's implementing these very intelligent bots onto their website—that I haven't heard too many bad things about it happening. 

People using these things, and I think a big part of that is how accurate the information can be. Again, training that information or training like your ChatGPT, essentially, to handle that information is a big part of it. So rather than say, you want to learn about my business, so you're going to chat GPT and you ask it about my business… you might not know the right questions to ask to chat GBT to get the best answer. 

So instead, you come to my website, and you start typing in stuff in the chat. I've already trained it and kind of pre-programmed in some prompts. So when you ask that question, it's framing it in a way that pulls my information correctly and gives you the best answer. Yeah. So it's taking the intelligence of it and like refining it to a very specific data set, if you will.

 

Sid: So I think the thing here is ease of use, right? And ease of access—your customers want access to information on their time, not on our time. 

Let's say a customer wants to know what our lead times are. They want to be able to go to our website and type in, “what are your lead times” when it's convenient for them. And that may not be from 8a.m. to 5p.m., while our team is responding to emails—it could be at 10 o'clock at night after they put their family to bed or whatever. They need to go do some additional work, and they walk into their computer to go to our website and type in, “what are the lead times” so they can do their planning. We can use tools like this to respond to those types of questions.

 

Nick: Absolutely, absolutely. Heck, we can train it to even learn how to close the deal for us to if we want to—or at least upsell, if a client, customer, or potential customer has some specific questions about your offering . You train it to tell it not only the answer, but then also, what else can we do for you, here are some other other services we provide—you could have it doing that selling for you as well. Now, not necessarily suggesting that that's the way you should go. I'm suggesting, though, that you could be doing some upselling with it, without them even realizing it, because they're chatting with a chatbot.

 

Sid: Okay, so every business owner, and salesperson that's listening to this podcast ears just perked up, because you said you could use AI to increase your sales, which increases revenue, which then increases profit. 

So in the analogy, or the example that you gave was specifically to like a chatbot, on a website or on your website. What are other ways that you could actually use it to market or increase your revenue?

 

Marc: Well, I think we go back to the marketing aspect. Nick figured out a system for us—he created a whole funnel system for when we launched NextGen Podcaster. 

When we launched the NextGen Podcast, we had a bunch of people showing interest. We were collecting emails, and we created a sequence for a funnel that came up with every email and follow-up email within that funnel to bring people in and show them the different pieces of the podcast. It was better than anything I've put together to date so far—so that's just one way to use it.

 

Nick: Yeah, on top of that, and something that we've actually been playing with is building our own AI tools. That is something that… I'm gonna tell you right now, I have virtually zero coding experience, other than understanding what some of this stuff means. But when it comes to actually structuring and building something that actually works… I have no clue at all. 

I was using ChatGPT to help me with a lot of this. I've seen a lot of people like in marketing agencies create essentially a bot on the website that's like an email headline generator. You just type in your topic, or whatever it is… click the button, boom, you have a bunch of email headlines. 

People are taking it a step further to send them custom reports and things like that, where you know, you have to put in an email. So it kind of becomes like a lead-generating funnel. But these tools are becoming so easy to develop now. And if I can do it without knowing what I'm doing, just by telling ChatGBT to help me develop this tool, and it can give me the majority of what I wanted—these things can get put on your website and can help bring in new leads, bring in more sales. It's just a matter of how creative and how much you want to dive into the whole AI world.

 

Marc: And think about also, Sid—I know you do some email marketing. I don't know to what extent, and I know you do some. Imagine now, being able to custom-tailor emails to every individual client or potential client based on what we know about them. You can teach this artificial intelligence information about where this potential customer is in the process of buying your products and services. You can cater the message specifically to them using things like chat GBT and plugins like Zapier, and it can automatically customize to that person's needs those person's challenges and offer solutions that your company can provide them to solve those problems.

 

Sid: Okay, so you just said something that I think is pretty important to talk about for a hot minute… 

In the office furniture industry, I often talk about and the listeners that are frequent to the show have heard me say this—what is the problem that our products solve for our customers? It is the one question that stops most people, because in response for a task chair would be completely different than a response to a desk or an acoustic phone booth… I mean, they're all across the board on what problems they solve. 

But we really got to dive into understanding the problem that our products solve for our customers. What I just heard you say is that a tool like ChatGPT could very well help us understand our clients better, and help us understand their pain points, so that we can assess how our products solve their problems. 

For example, I might be a healthcare facility manager. We could get a profile of a health care facility manager, if we sold health care products, and understand who they are, what they want, what their wins are, what their pain points are, and then go as far to talk about how our product solves that problem for them. And we can get a lot of research done in 30 seconds, because it's fast. I'm overexaggerating there. It goes really, really fast right now. 

My head’s spinning a little bit, because I really didn't understand that you could do it this way. You mentioned something a few minutes ago, Marc. (And, Nick, I'm curious, since you're building the backend if you've tried this). But what I thought I heard you say, Marc, is that I could put a spreadsheet into AI, and it would analyze the data. I just have to tell it what I want.

 

Marc: Yeah. Now, you know, Nick mentioned it, and I think I did as well—ChatGBT recently introduced plugins. These plugins are allowing us to do things like that giving a lot of information all at once, where—if anybody who's listening has used chat GBT before, you can only give it so much information in one swoop. Otherwise, you have to break it all down and give it piece by piece. 

Now, there are these plugins that will allow you to upload PDFs and spreadsheets, and then you can ask it to analyze that data for you in any which way that you want it to. It will go through that information and spit out an answer for you.

 

Sid: Wow, have you done that ? Have you used it in that way, Nick?

 

Nick: So yes, I've done a little bit of that. Right now, I'm still waiting… there's one plugin that has yet to be fully released yet, that is going to really harness a lot of that power. 

From what I've seen of the alpha testers on this plugin—yeah, people are getting full-blown company financial analyses, with graphs and charts, breakdowns and opportunities, all of this different stuff from uploading a simple financial spreadsheet. It's mind blowing.

 

Sid: Wow. So I could just take a quick little month-to-date sales report about who bought, how much they bought (all that kind of stuff)—and I could give it criteria to analyze that data, and it will give me predictions for future growth… And it could do all of that?

 

Nick: Absolutely.

 

Marc: One thing I'm really wanting to try so badly, is to download Google analytics information, and plug that into GPT and see what it can come up with. I want to see where it can find consistencies and room for opportunity in places, recommendations to adjust your website.

 

Sid: Wow…

 

Marc: And I've I've tested it with PDF reports from the podcast industry, talking about the where, what, everything what happened in 2022… An then what I can do is say, “All right, now tell me what can I take advantage of, where are my areas of opportunity for 2023 with my podcast? What can I be doing based on that information?” 

And it is, like Nick said, it is mind blowing that it's able to go through the data and then identify opportunities for growth for your business. You won't believe it till you do it.

 

Sid: I'm like, I'm dumbfounded at this very moment… I had no idea that things like that were possible with it! So now it's making me want to go try it, and play around with it and pay the $20 a month for ChatGPT. 

But let's go to the tools…SoChatGPT and Jasper are just two of them. How many different forms of AI tools are out there for people to use? We talk a lot about ChatGPT because it's easy, and I feel like this has almost been a ChatGPT commercial—there's no affiliate fees here, guys. So anyways, what are the tools that are available to us?

 

Marc: Nick and I are working actually on our top 100 tools. And we're about ¾ of the way through… 

 

Sid: Stop, stop, stop... How many?

 

Marc: These are just our top 100 tools.

 

Nick: We're like sifting through dozens and dozens and dozens of different AI tools to try them out, play with them. We haven't even played with them all, but our list is up to like maybe 60?

 

Marc: I think we're approaching 75 now. 

 

Nick: We passed on a lot. 

 

Sid: So everybody’s jumped on this train! It truly started a snowball effect.

 

Nick: Yeah, one of my favorite recent tools that I've been using that is all AI-generated is a plugin for zoom. It's called Read AI, and basically what happens is when I start one of my meetings, this AI joins the meeting, and not only is it transcribing what's happening in the meeting—it's identifying the top questions asked during the meeting, the top calls-to action-that you and your other person or team have discussed. 

So you can go through, and it can even tell you the quality of the conversation. Was this an engaging conversation? How engaging was it? How engaged was I during that conversation? It will break the entire thing, getting down to just about anything that you want to know about that meeting.

 

Sid: Oh my gosh, does it take up a spot on the screen? I don't like that…

 

Marc: I like to be in the background. Me too.

 

Sid: You know, I don't want viewers to see it, because we have several people that watch on YouTube—that's where they don't listen on apps, they watch on YouTube. It would be a little weird to see AI bots up there.

 

Marc: Yeah, probably not the best for a podcast, but great for meetings with your team and prospective clients, too. I gotta tell you that I'm using Read AI a lot when I have those meetings with a potential client, because it helps me go back afterward and digest everything that we just talked about, and then create some action items that I can do to make sure I'm following up and closing that sale.

 

Sid: So the AI has a summary for you… This is what happened, and here are the takeaways,

here's the action steps, and then you probably could ask it a few other questions that would give you sales insights about what I should follow-up with on this customer or what we should focus on.

 

Marc: Yeah, and also, I know you've mentioned and we've been talking a lot about ChatGPT—and the reason for that is really calling back to something we talked about earlier, and that’s really the way that artificial intelligence is running right now. So even if it's not ChatGPT, it still goes back to what I was talking about—that pre-generative training model (that transformer, I should say)—everybody's using that same technology right now. So that's why we constantly go back to it, because it's all about coding without having to code, by just using regular language to get the computer system to do what you want it to do.

 

Sid: So, Nick, are you a Snapchat kind of guy?

 

Nick: I a little bit. Not enough…

 

Sid: Just wondering. My daughter was enamored with this, like, “Dad, have you seen this?!” So I'm wondering how long before all the other social media platforms have an AI built in? I would love to open up LinkedIn and say, “Write me a LinkedIn post around this picture or this image.” And it do it, and then I just hit post and it’s posted. I mean, that would just be wicked for that to happen. Instagram, too.

 

Nick: Yeah, and I guess I'll throw out a word of caution for a lot of these tools, too, because it's such a big thing, and everyone's jumping on the bandwagon. There are companies that are maybe not going about it as safely as Open AI is, and as Google is—because they're slowly releasing a lot of this stuff as they test it, as they play with it. Making sure responses aren't dangerous for potential people using it, and I had heard some pretty scary things about the Snapchat one specifically, as it was being released and giving some very less-than-ideal answer. 

 

Sid: That's like a warning to parents here. There is an artificial intelligence built into Snapchat, you should go check it out and ask him some questions and see what it does. 

It was really funny—I saw a LinkedIn post other day, and it said, it asks Chat GPT about a word that starts with “F” and ends in “U-C-K.” Right? It basically spit out this response that said, “I am a professional bla bla bla, this is inappropriate language.” But the person replied, so it was great. I liked how Chat GPT said, “Hey, I'm not going to use these kinds of words. I'm not going to do this.” 

That guy responded, “The word I was thinking of was fire truck.” ChatGPT responded with, “Oh, thank you very much. That's a really great point.” And it is, right? But it caught the question, it censored it in a way that said, “Hey, maybe you don't want to use… I'm not going to use this you should consider, you know, not using it too.”

 

Marc: Right and Sid, you know, this also is important to discuss the idea of, like you said—if you could go on to a LinkedIn and tell it to generate the posts for you and just hit submit… that would be something that Nick and I would strongly discourage, because it is not perfect. It does get answers wrong. It does sometimes plagiarize. 

If you're not careful, it is going to use someone's actual words or work, and you don't want to post it up there without that knowledge. You want to make sure if that's going to post, how are you going to handle that? Are you going to credit the actual person if it's plagiarized? Or are you going to rephrase it all together? There's all sorts of things ethically and morally to consider before just hitting post. So that’s important to cover.

 

Sid: Thank you for bringing that up, because that's actually one of the bullet points I wanted to talk about is this—and let's talk about it for a second. Thank you for transitioning us.

What are some of the legal, ethical, and moral things to consider when using an artificial intelligence tool in your business? Nick, you want to start?

 

Nick: So I mean, right now, it's kind of the Wild West, in a lot of regards. There aren't a whole lot of rules, laws set up right now that say one way or another, where a lot of the stuff right now we're kind of making assumptions and choosing the best moral and ethical way to go about doing it. 

Because I know there are lawsuits, especially once you get into music and the arts, not just text alone, like there are lawsuits happening all over the place with that stuff, saying that it's copyright infringement. It is a real possibility with the route we go down. 

With that said, everything that Marc and I preach about using—we love these AI tools, they helped save us a ton of time—but what you get out of these should never be like a finished product. We always look at it like a first draft. So we can use ChatGPT to help us draft up a blog post or draft up an email sequence, but that's the first draft. 

We then go in there, we add ourselves to it, we change it, we remove things that aren't relevant to us or to our audience, and we make it our own. Versus just saying, “Okay, ChatGPT took care of that job that I don't want to do. Now, let's go on to the next thing.”

 

Marc: I think the danger of doing something like what we're discussing here is that if we're not careful, if we're just using it as is, where the other challenge comes is—then we are regurgitating the same content over and over again. Whether it's ours or someone else's, we're basically going to start feeding AI the same information over and over again, because it's spitting it out and then it's learning from it. And then it's spitting that out and learning it—so we always encourage people to use your own words, use your own work to get started, feed it with your framework of a blog that you want to write. 

Maybe you don't know all the things yet that you want to include in that blog, but get it started and work with Chat GBT or something like it as a collaborative partner, right? And say, “here's what I've got so far. What's missing from this blog? What can I add to this blog? Can you check it for grammar and spelling?” 

Use it as a partner or as an assistant, rather than doing all the work for you? Because that's where you can fall into all these different traps of plagiarism, getting the wrong answers, etc.

 

Nick: I want to add one more thing to that… 

Just because you were talking about LinkedIn, and one of the things that I had done with it, it was kind of fun and kind of cool. I was developing a LinkedIn post, and I had it set, it was like we were promoting Next Gen Podcaster. So it [AI] gave us some information about that LinkedIn post, but it didn't feel like a LinkedIn post… like LinkedIn posts are usually very story driven. They talked about some kind of problem come to a resolution, like that a little bit more long-winded than say, Facebook or Twitter. 

So I went back into ChatGBT and asked it to add a personal story. And obviously, this wasn't my personal story, sure—but it did get added back again. And it wrote like it was me like, “Oh, I remember back when I was starting my podcast, yada, yada, yada.” 

And it touched on a problem that I had, or something that was very similar to what I had. I never had thought about that. I wouldn't have thought about that. But it did give me the idea to say, “Oh, I have experience something like this. Let me go change some of that stuff, and put my actual experience in here and frame it.” 

So I changed it to be about my problem and the things I went through, versus just what ChatGPT made up. So it's cool! It's really great to bring back some stuff that you might have tucked away in the back of your head that you're not even thinking about or wouldn’t think about unless someone else brings into play.

 

Sid: So the bottom line here with this is—you can't just take wording straight out of Chat GPT or anywhere and use it. You need to be morally and ethically responsible, and you need to review it, add your own words into it and your voice into it before you use it. Whether it's an email, a LinkedIn / Instagram post, a blog post, a communication to your company or to your customers—review it, add your words to it. Don't just take what it spits out because it could involve plagiarism, and maybe it could be wrong. So you want to fact check it, as well. It's some of those things. 

But I love the idea of, if you're a video person and you want to create videos in your business, and you can go in and say, “Hey, give me 10 video ideas around this topic” and it'll give you bullet points. The same thing with blog, it can be five blog ideas around this topic, and then you can take it from there and start the process.

 

Nick: Absolutely. It's funny, when I have these conversations with other business owners, and we're having this particular part of the discussion—some of them say, “Oh, that sounds like too much work. Why should I use AI? I'd rather just do it myself else, it'll save time.” 

I don't really believe that's the case. I'm sure you're familiar with the 80-20 rule. Chat GPT and other softwares like it really, in my opinion, can get about 80 or so percent of your work done for you. I'm willing to give up that 20%, and take that time to tweak it to make sure it's mine. That usually changes some minds, as well. 

If I went to a business owner and said, “I can free up 80% of your time,”— they might want to listen to hear how, and to only have to put in that 20% of work up front, it's not a big deal in the big picture.

 

Sid: Or to save you 20%, right? I can decrease the time to get to market or decrease how long it takes to do this. Back to Nick's point about productivity earlier—absolutely every business owner is going to want to listen to ways to increase revenue and increase profits, attract more customers, and then get more business from your existing customers. Those are things that every business owner or business leader wants to understand. 

 

Marc: We haven't even talked about dealing with vendors yet. Maybe you have an uncomfortable email you need to write to a vendor, and you do not know how to phrase it in a way that's professional without sounding insulting. Write the email, and put it into a software like Chat GPT. Ask it to say it in a more professional, more formal way, and it will do that for you! It'll keep your own content, it'll still keep your words and keep your overall tone—it'll just maybe bring it down a little bit to a more professional and direct answer, rather than the emotional answer that you probably wanted to share with that vendor.

 

Sid: The one that you wrote and then hit the delete key on… 

 

Marc: Or the one that wrote and you accidentally hit send, and you didn't mean to? 

 

Sid: Now, can you load the email into it? And say, please write a response to this email?

 

Marc: Yeah, absolutely. It's as simple as copy and paste. And I know there are also plugins that will help you do that as well.

 

Nick: Well, we haven't talked about it, but Google is already started implementing these tools in their apps. 

 

Sid: Let's talk about that, though. So Chat GPT started the snowball effect. Microsoft is doing something with Bing, Google is doing something... So tell us a little bit about these integrations that you're learning about Nick.

I heard that there's an AI plugin in Google with Sheets or Google Docs?

 

Nick: Yeah. So Google has their own version of Chat GPT called Google Bard, and it’s really dominant. They started implementing it, but I feel like they could have done better…

 

Sid: Sorry, Google Marketing Department and naming company… Nick does not like Bard.

 

Nick: With all due respect, when Google came out, back in the day, we were asking—what the heck is Google? It was also a terrible name back then, but now, we all know and love and use it daily.

 

Marc: So they've taken this idea of these generative AI tools and inserted them, implemented them in the tools themselves. 

So right now with Google Docs, essentially you're Google's version of Microsoft Word. As soon as you open up Google Docs, you'll be greeted with a message that says, “What do you want to write?” 

And then same thing on the Gmail side, you open up an email on Gmail that you're going to write and it says, “What do you want to write?” and you can type right in there, it'll spit out an email for you. Or you can highlight the email and tell it, “Rewrite this in a different tone. Change the way this is, make it shorter.

You can have a little bit of flexibility with that. Microsoft's gonna be doing the same thing with the actual Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook. This is the next big thing. 

Google was actually the first to start implementing this stuff, and I think this summer, we're going to start seeing more of these tools directly incorporated into this technology.

 

Sid: So with Google, do you have to add an extension or anything?

 

Marc: No. It'll now just pop up on the blank doc or on the blank email, it'll pop up a little message and says, “Do you want my help with this email? Do you want my help writing this doc?” Or whatever it is. It'll just do it right automatically.

 

Sid: It helps shortcut—probably a bad choice of words—it helps reduce the amount of time that was going to take me to do something by utilizing a tool. I could put a little bit of information in, and what normally would take me 45 minutes to do, I can get done in 20 minutes. That's a good thing to make me more efficient, more effective. 

So, Google already has it; Microsoft is coming with it; some social media apps [like Snapchat] already are coming with it. There are kinds you can get by yourself that you can just use however you want to, and then there's the localized version of it. I mean, this stuff will make your head spin, there’s so much of it.

 

Marc: Yeah, and let's be clear to Microsoft, when they saw the success of open AI and their product Chat GPT—Microsoft dumped in $10 billion into that company. So they knew right away to jump on it. I just felt like it's important to share that, because we're talking about them incorporating stuff—and it's really Chat GPT, specifically, that they're incorporating into their tools.

 

Sid: Very, very interesting. So I think my takeaway here is—be smart about using AI. Take it slow, one step at a time, figure out how it can help you and how it can help your business. And honestly, surround yourself with people that have knowledge about the products and the tools you are using, so you can understand the best way to help your business move forward.

 

Marc: Yeah, and I would add—have fun while you're in that exploratory phase, because that's how I learned it when I first got to it. I wasn't necessarily trying to figure out how it was going to help me grow my business, I was just playing with it… What can this thing to do? 

So I was doing things more like hobbies and humorous stuff, just to get comfortable to see it. Okay, I asked it to do this, it didn't seem like the best answer. How can I rephrase that question and ask it again, to get a better answer? 

Just play with AI—don't feel like you’ve got to dive in full force, just start experimenting first. Slowly but surely, you'll start thinking, “Oh, wait, I can do something like that with my business!” And that's where everything unlocks.

 

Sid: Cool, guys—we've been going on forever about this, and I feel like we're just scratching the surface about what's possible. Nick, any final words from you about AI and business? Any recommendations or tips? 

 

Nick: I think what Marc said, I completely wholeheartedly agree—without playing with the stuff, it's really hard to understand what it's capable of and what it can do for you. So just play with it! Figure out what you can figure out; don't give up. If you put something in there, it doesn't give you the answer, still play with it. 

Then the last thing I want to add, as another safety precaution getting into all this stuff… We've seen how many tools are coming out. There's a lot, and it can be very easy to find a tool and be like, “Oh, that sounds really awesome” without knowing anything about who developed it, who created it, who’s going and downloading it. 

And then now, you've just given access to who knows who's actually on the other side. I hear a lot of people get super excited about all these AI tools and diving in, “oh, I got this, I got this. And I got this.” Well, who even made it? I don't know who made that, that sounds sketchy to me. So, have fun with it, play with it—it's going to be beneficial for you, but also be smart about it. 

If you don't know what it is, at least do a little bit of research, ask around, see if other people have used it, and if you can't figure it out, maybe don't use that one. But obviously, we've been talking about Chat GPT a lot. So go ahead and use that one.

 

Sid: Yes, absolutely everybody. But the bottom line is—do your research, do your homework, investigate the company that's developing it (the app) before you just dive in headfirst to use it. 

Marc, any final words from you?

 

Marc: Man, I think I think I said it all… I think I will just emphasize one of the points that Nick mentioned, which is if it doesn't work the first time or the second time—don't give up, and don't assume this thing doesn't work or that you don't know how to use it. 

You've got to keep trying and keep crafting those prompts (as we call them) to fine tune them and get that answer you're looking for. And the more you do that, the better you're going to get the next time for the next thing that you're looking for it to help you with.

 

Sid: So I have found this conversation to be absolutely fascinating. When I reached out and said, “Hey, let's do this,” I really didn't know that I was gonna learn as much as I learned today. 

Admittedly, my head is spinning a little bit about what all is possible with this, and I'm sure the business leaders, business owners, and people listening are thinking the same thing. “How can I use this tool?” and “I'm excited about this!” 

I think we could talk for another whole hour about this, so I really appreciate both of you coming and sharing your expertise, because this is like real-time live recorded. You guys are into this, and you're learning about it on a regular basis—so it's all very fresh, and you're sharing those insights. 

I think those are the best insights, like practical ones you didn't go to school to learn about, and you come share your expertise in this. This is practical, real use. 

And Marc, I think you said this in the beginning—artificial intelligence is here to stay; it's not going anywhere. Absolutely lean into this and figure out how to leverage this and utilize this, for what's best for us as individuals, as well as what's best for our businesses, whether you work in a company or you own the business, what's best for it. 

So guys, thank you very much. Final question of the day… Nick, we'll start with you—if our community would like to get in touch with you, what is the best way for them to do that?

 

Nick: Probably Instagram. And my handle is @ninefivefree — it's all spelled out.

 

Sid: You don't have to, we'll drop it down in the show notes for everybody to be able to reach out to you there.

Marc, what about you?

 

Marc: I will say yeah, you can reach me on most platforms at Marc Ronic, or at ironic media. I would say, if you really want to see what I'm up to check out one of two websites ironicmedia.com — or what Nick and I have been working on, nextgenpodcaster.com. Although maybe some of your audience isn't podcasting, I still think they can find a lot of great information—like what we're talking about today, over there on that website.

 

Sid: Yeah, 100% agree with that, and we will drop all of that down in the show notes to click on and check it out. Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining me today, and to all of you out there listening—thanks so much, we'll see you again soon. 

Thanks for joining me today on this episode of the Trend Report Podcast. I'm glad that you're here, and I hope that you got some amazing value out of today's conversation. We look forward to seeing you next week and go out there and make today great!