AI Anxiety And The Real Question

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi David. Dear listeners, you know, like there is a strange tension in the air right now. Like we are being told AI will replace everything, automate everything, solve everything. And at the same time, we are seeing most businesses struggle to figure out where it actually fits. The noise is defiening, the hype is exhausting. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, there's a quite a question worth asking is what if the real power of AI is not in what it replaces, but in what it helps us become? What if the advantage is not the tool itself, but how we think alongside it, right? So I'm your host, Avik, and you're listening to Mind Meets Machine, a space where we slow down the conversation about technology and ask the questions that don't have easy answers. And today we have a very lovely guest who has spent more than a decade building businesses at the intersection of technology, marketing, and growth. And he's now the founder of a venture-backed AI company, building conversational AI and voice agents for franchisee brands and service businesses. Please welcome David Oversee. So welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Avik.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

A pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Amazing, amazing. Thank you so much, David, for being here. And uh, dear listeners, like I'd love to start with something which I feel it is it is very common these days. Like people are really curious about it. So, David, like there's a lot of talk right now about AI replacing their jobs, AI replacing creativity, replacing human judgment. So you have been in the trenches kind of building an AI company. So, what do you think people are getting most wrong about what AI is actually capable of doing in

Three Ways To Use AI

SPEAKER_00 1:52

business today?

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Of course, thank you. And that's a great question. I think that a lot of people are drawn into the hype of AI without really understanding what's going on behind the scenes. As someone who runs, uh have a software engineering background, and I've also been involved in startups, and I'm currently running a bench-of-back company. I think of the three ways to think about using AI in business. The first one is chatting with AI. And that is what we're all familiar with. You go to your cloud, your Gemini, your ChatGPT, and you're asking it questions, and it's just more of an advanced level Google, basically, and it's giving you the answers. And that's where most people stay. The next level, I think, is substantial, is having AI plugged into the tools that you already use. So you use QuickBooks, you use Stripe, you use Hotspot, you use all these CRMs and all the tools that you have. And I think that the real way people are starting to take advantage of AI is to have AI plug into those tools using different kinds of connectors or different uh MCPs, the whole ways of doing that. And what that does is you can start chatting and saying, okay, look at my Facebook ads, tell me what the report is like, look at my my CRM, correlate the results between my Facebook ad and my CRM. Oh, by the way, look at Stripe and look at what payments came in and correlate with the results. Now you're starting to do a lot of very interesting things that actually will take you a lot of time otherwise to do manually, and you're able to do that from the comfort of your search of your console. From, you know, I usually use Cloud for doing this, but there are other tools that can do that, and that is like a powerful unlock. And then the third aspect of how you can use AI is building new things with AI, which is by coding that everyone is kind of familiar with. And what I usually say is that a lot of business owners don't understand that these are the three phases, and they mostly stay in the chat phase, thinking they're getting the most of AI when they can go into the plug in AI into their tools, and then maybe they feel comfortable, then have AI start building new things for them. Once you understand this framework, it becomes very easy to look at your problems in your business and your bottlenecks and say, do I need to plug AI into my existing tools? Do I need just information from chat? Or do I need to build something completely new, by coded, and then use whatever it is that makes sense for your business needs? Got it.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

Got

Helping Founders Move Past Fear

SPEAKER_00 4:15

it. So, okay, and like when you meet an entrepreneur who's either terrified of AI or convinced it's going to be everything for them, then what is the first thing you try to help them understand?

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Yes. So we we go through that framework of how you're working with AI, and then we try to set them up on I try to help understand where they are right now. Are you just in the chatting phase? Have you tried plugging AI into your existing tools already? Usually you want to use like cowork, like float co-work for that. That really helps. And if they feel more adventurous, do you want to start doing like vibe coding? And actually, because I've done this so many times personally myself, I usually have a program that I actually walk them through that helps them with setting things up so that they can actually start doing that. And the the first thing we do is we set them up with you know what tool do you want to use? Do you want to use Claude? Do you want to use Chat PT codecs? I usually I prefer Claude. And then once we do that, the first thing we try to do is just set them up to have AI integrate into the tools they use already right now. So Stripe, QuickBooks, CRM, etc. And that gives them a massive unlock already without changing their behavior because they're used to just chatting with the AI. Well, if you just set it up and connect it to your existing tools, you're still doing the same thing except that the AI now has way more capabilities of what is accessing the own personal data. And then once they start seeing the unlock from that, then the next thing then is okay, let's try and create new things because in your business, you have new software you would like to build that does like this very specific thing for you. But obviously, you don't want to go pay a subscription to have it do that, or you want to you don't want to go pay someone to actually build it out for you from scratch, and that is where you know building things from scratch really helps. And to do that, I have like um ScrollMindPalaceX.com as a platform and build that basically takes all the things that I teach people how to connect to your database, connect to like your uh what we call GitHub where the code will be stored, how to connect to uh something called Netflix that would deploy things to the web and walk you through all of that. And how do you then build out the spec documents? So the spec is basically the whole project you want to build, giving AI the clear guidance of everything. How do you bring that to life? So I have a whole program where I actually walk them through that, they can do it themselves. But uh, when people start doing that, they find out it's actually not that complicated at all. Uh, and then the the real question becomes okay, what are my ideas? Like, how good are my ideas? Is this idea worth my time to actually build? Does it not worth my time? And that's where they spend most of their time because building is actually relatively straightforward. So that's kind of the process of how I think through uh helping people go from I don't know where I am to hey, you're now using AI in a Buddha for your business.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Got it. I mean, it's interesting, like how often fear and overconfidence come from the same place, a lack of clarity about what tool actually does. And that clarity only comes from kind of getting close to it, not from the hand so headlines. So yeah, and if you talk about our daily life,

Where AI Agents Drive ROI

SPEAKER_00 7:24

right? Like you work with franchisee brands and the service businesses. So I mean these aren't the tech startups, but they are the real-world operations with kind of real-world constraints. So, what are you actually seeing like AI agents produce measurable ROI today? Like, not the hype one, but on the ground.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Yes, absolutely. The way I think about this is you want to use AI to solve old, established, boring problems. You don't want to try and create new problems. They're already bottlenecks and constraints that businesses have. And usually it comes down to one of three areas: constraints in lead generation, uh, constraints in sales, or constraints in fulfillment. So, how do you generate new opportunities into the business and making sure and that's where you have things like speed to lead? And that's really what we focus on at my company, where when they have that lead coming from Facebook ads or Google Ads or whatever the leads come in, our AI agents are going after this, qualifying them and it's kind of get to the CRM and it's booking the appointments for the salesperson to then go out and do the sales. So that's our real focus. And then there are other areas will be like sales, which is like, well, you've now done the sales. How do you get the feedback from the calls to make sure you're improving that you're getting better from a sales perspective? How do you make sure that the CEO, for example, can have a high-level sense of what all the salespeople are saying without having to like listen to every single call? And that is where you know AI can really help. And then you start to see patterns and you correlate the pattern with the close-down ratio, and you can say, hmm, seems that the reps that are doing well, they're saying things like this, or they're doing things like this, the reps that are not doing, that are not selling, they're doing this kind of behavior, and you can try to like you know make the adjustments. So that's some of the ROI we're seeing around you know, sales and then fulfillment. That is where you want AI doing a lot of the heavy lifting, creating proposals, helping with establishing processes and systems for fulfillment so you can actually deliver on the service. But our focus at our company is in the lead generation and and and marketing side of things, where most companies measure clear ROI, which is I got 10 leads coming today, how many of those turned into sales appointments, and how many of them became customers? And we focus on that speed to lead.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Got it.

Speed To Lead And 10X Returns

SPEAKER_00 9:42

So, like, and when you see business that's using AI well and versus one that's just kind of throwing it at the wall, then what is the difference? Like, what are the ones who are getting results doing doing that? The others are not.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Yeah, so this answer is very different depending on the industry you are in. And I will just speak to home services because that is really what our bread and butter is. What we find is that the companies that are using AI right now, especially for speech to lead, they're seeing increase in return on their marketing investing in investment by as much as five to ten X. So two companies, and we've seen this, what they're spending five thousand dollars per month on ads. One company is not using AI to do the lead follow-up and and the and the sort of the speed to lead, and another one is using it. The one that is not using AI, they generate about, let's say, $50,000 in revenue from that same market they spend. Not terrible, not bad. But the one that is using AI, we see them generate over $100,000. Ridiculous ROI. Because every leader comes through the fund now, they're not relying on human beings to go after those leads to set up the estimates. AI just does it consistently, the same way every single time. And there's a quote alike, it says you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And what AI does is it gives you that system with intelligence needed to get to your goal. So that is like the biggest return on investment we're seeing for companies who are using AI, particularly for speed to lead. I'm sure there are many other areas you can use AI, but I like the speed to lead because it's very quantifiable. You can measure the impact. And some of our case studies that we've seen, we've literally seen like a 50% increase in revenue, sometimes even as much as 80%, by just having an AI fall over your leads consistently and aggressively. Such a small little thing, but it makes such a big impact. So, yes, we are seeing Clearrow.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

Got it, got it. So, I mean, obviously, I mean, there's something grounding about hearing it put away because it's not it's not the magic, it's not the shortcuts, it's just the clarity about the problems you are solving and whether the tool actually fits. So, yes, that is true. That is true, and so building a company is definitely hard. And building an AI company right now in the middle of all of this noise and all this change has to come with its kind of own set

Staying Grounded Building And Selling

SPEAKER_00 12:18

of challenges. So when things don't go the way you expected, or when you hit a wall, how do you stay grounded? Like how do you keep moving uh without burning out or losing the thread of why you started kind of?

SPEAKER_01 12:33

Yes, that's a very good question. So the way I think about it is that in today's day and age, the bottleneck is no longer building, let's say. So in the past, I used to be the bottleneck. How do I have this idea in my head? How do I actually build the software and kind of you know put it out in the world? Now, if you don't have the skills with AI that I talked about when I talked about those three steps, chatting with AI, plugging AI into your tools and building new tools with AI, if you don't have those skills, you're still gonna struggle with building things. But let's assume that you now know how to use AI to build things. Well, there's another bigger bottleneck, which is how do you get it in front of customers? How do you get sales going? At the end of the day, if your project doesn't have if you have built something and you don't have paying customers, it's just an expensive hobby, really. So uh the the the the two things to your question about how do you not burn out is number one, you have to build something that has an intersection of your passion and competence. So you can't just say, because I can use AI to build any tool, I'm just gonna build something in, like, I don't know, shipping space or aero defense that you have no understanding about the context or the nuance of those spaces. So you want to have something that actually mirrors your own personal experience. For example, for me, the reason why I went into services space is because when I was studying software engineering at the university in my undergrad, I actually ran a painting company for five years. We did multiple seven figures. So I really, really understand that space and all the knowns and intricacies of that space. So you want to make sure that you have some understanding and overlap in whatever you're building. The second one is you need to have a clear go-to-market strategy. How do you get in front of customers? And not everything has to be online or running ads. And by the way, I actually use AI to run my ads, which is like a huge massive unlock because AI is infinitely better at running ads than I have. It looks at all the data, all the clicks, all the scrolls, and it gives like, hey, you need to like short this copy or you can just change this thing because of how people are behaving. But more importantly, is you need to know, okay, do I need to go to trade shows? For example, for home services, we gotta have to go to trade shows all the time. Do I need to like do partnerships? Like you need to understand how do I get customers. And I think that if you build at the intersection of your competence and area of passion, as well as having a clear go-to-market strategy to get your customers in front of your product, uh, then it won't be as much of a struggle. I mean, every business is always gonna be hard, but at least you have the right things in place and then you can really start to really make some progress.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

Got it. Got

Learning Mindset Plus Where To Connect

SPEAKER_00 15:04

it, yeah. And so if you have to give one advice to the listeners today, what will you give?

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Yes, so the advice I will give is that AI is as good or as bad as your own personal self-improvement. So uh it's very easy for people to say, oh, AI is this amazing technology, it's not doing anything for me. Yes, just like any massive technology, the internet, social media, it's not just gonna do stuff for you just because it's a good technology, it's a tool like any other. And I think that you need to try to figure out, okay, how do I fit this into what I want to do and how do I make the most out of it? And part of it is number one, having an open mind to learn. For example, I spent, even though I have no technical background, I still had to spend many, many months experimenting. I don't know if you remember when there was this huge rising in uh in claw, clawbot, I think was what it's called. Yeah, uh open claw. There you go. Uh, and that was actually something like a big moment for me to be like, okay, I'm really gonna go deep to understand this thing. And I spent many months playing around with different tools, different sort of stack of combining tools together. And after a long time, I then started to build my own tools, and that's how I started playing around. I said, okay, I want a chief of staff system that understands me and access my second break. What that even look like? So I started to like experiment with different tools, and I failed many times. But once I got it, everything just clicked on the back. I'm like, ah, now I know how this all works. And then from there, everything else became open. So there are two key skills to know in today's world to be able to be, you know, to to to crush that. You need to know how to build and you need to know how to sell. If you can do both, you will never lack because business all comes down to those two things: building when it's software, building teams, building offers, etc., and then sell it, going out there, putting offers into the world and getting you know uh money in exchange for that. If you have those two things, you'll be unstoppable.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Exactly. So if the listeners want to connect with you, how they can connect.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

Sorry, can I repeat the last question?

SPEAKER_00 17:05

If listeners want to connect with you, how they can connect.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

Yes, so you can uh I'm very active on LinkedIn, so you can find me, David Owasi, on LinkedIn, and you can see all of my information. If you're curious about using AI to you want to learn how to build AI and like, you know, create create new things out of nothing. I have a website called MindPalace X, my ndlac.com. And it basically has the framework dev that you can use and learn about how I use AI to build, and it has like models and lessons and everything you need to learn. So those will be the two ways you can get ahead of me.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Great. So dear listeners, what I'll do is I'll put all the links, details, everything into the show notes for easy reference. And I'd say like the advantage is not in the AI, it's in the person who knows what to do with it. Right. So thank you, David, for being here, sharing your perspectives. It is really, really great talking to you. And for everyone who is listening, I just say the conversation matters because the tools are moving fast, but the questions, the human questions, those don't change. And the people who remember that are the ones who will build something that lasts long. So, with this hope, this is your host, Robbie, and this is Mind Meets Machine. We'll see in the next time. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

Thank you very much. Bye.