Ethical AI for Small Businesses

[00:00:00] Calan Breckon: Today’s episode is sponsored by Kit, formally known as ConvertKit, the email marketing platform for creators. I’ve been using Kit for years because I found that it is the most efficient and easy to use out of all the email service providers. Kit simplifies your email marketing by combining powerful automations with an easy to use interface. I love the Visual Automations builder because I am a very visual person and it really helps me to organize all of my automations in a very simple, simple and easy way. And let’s face it, automations is a must have in order to succeed in any business Today. Kit also integrates with all of your favorite e commerce platforms, lead generation services, and much more. The best part about Kit is that it runs on a sliding scale for payment so that you can get started for free while you learn all about Kit systems and how to grow your email list. So to get started today for free, head on over to calandbreckon.com/kit or just click the link in the show notes. Now let’s get on to today’s episode.

Welcome to The Business Gay podcast where we talk about all things business, marketing and entrepreneurship. I’m your host, Calan Breckon, and on today’s episode I have founder of Halyard Consulting, Jonathan Goodman. Halyard Consulting is an LGBTQ+ AI consultancy that helps small, small businesses automate their workflows using chatbots, voice assistants and custom tools. With over 30 years of experience in digital strategy and advanced AI, Jonathan specializes in making automation simple, ethical and accessible for entrepreneurs who want to grow without burning out. I’m excited to chat about AI and automation today with Jonathan, so let’s jump in.

Hey Jonathan, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. How are you doing today?

[00:01:51] Jonathan Goodman: I’m doing great. Thank you so much for having me on this.

[00:01:53] Calan Breckon: Yeah, I’m really excited. AI is kind of exploding all over the world. It’s the to do topic. I’ve not really chatted about it with anybody, so I’m really excited to dive into, into this topic with you. So with that, let’s just get right into it.

What are some simple ways entrepreneurs can use AI to automate parts of their business? Because I know that as a small business person and a lot of people out there, there’s a lot of fears of, like, there’s so many tools, you don’t want to pick the wrong one, but you also know that it can help you. And so what, how, how can you help us navigate that a little bit?

[00:02:30] Jonathan Goodman: Yeah, a lot of people assume AI is this complicated Expensive thing, but you can actually start really small and still see a big impact. For example, one of the easiest wins is setting up a chatbot on your website to answer frequently asked questions or, or capture leads 24, 7. I mean, that alone can replace hours of repetitive work. Another great starting point is automating appointment scheduling, connecting an AI assistant to your calendar. It helps so much with booking instead of going back and forth with emails.

And for folks doing a lot of outreach or marketing, Halyard Consulting specifically builds voice bots that can answer calls, qualify leads, or even send follow up emails after a conversation.

So we don’t look at it as replacing people. It’s about freeing up your time to focus on what actually grows your business.

[00:03:28] Calan Breckon: Yeah, making things a little bit more efficient. So you’re not doing so much of that groundwork that you’re just getting straight to the point. I want to jump in a little bit more with that chat bot. How could somebody implement that on like they’re not, they don’t have a crazy website.

They just need something simple to kind of get the juices flowing. Somebody might be thinking, well, this chatbot has no idea really who I am or what I’m about or how to answer these questions. And a lot of these small businesses hold them so preciously that they’re afraid to hand that over. So how might that actually look at the beginning?

[00:04:02] Jonathan Goodman: Yeah. You know, so many of the chatbots that are out there on the market right now are what we call rules based on, which means that when you’re coming in to have a conversation with the chatbot, it’s expecting certain questions to be asked and it’s able to answer those questions. That’s a really old way of doing things that doesn’t incorporate AI. Ours incorporates AI. So we have, you can almost kind of think of it as like, you know, I don’t know, two balls in the air. Right. And one of them is the large language model. And usually that would be like perfect perplexity or would be chat GPT or something like that. And then in the other, you know, globe or ball, whatever you want to call it, is this knowledge brain, right. And we fill that knowledge brain with everything about the company. We scrape the website so we understand the content that’s on the website. We ask for any, any documentation, maybe your business plan, maybe your marketing plan, strategies, you know, what your, you know, any kind of press releases, anything about that company. So that on a very simple, low cost, low effort chatbot, that, that does not capture lead gen or do calendar integration so just on a very, very purely, I’m a chat bot and I know about this business, you can get a lot of answers, a lot of questions answered because the chatbot understands that business.

[00:05:36] Calan Breckon: Okay, so how would you implement like an email capture into that chatbot if somebody were to on their website? Because I know usually you have like, oh, join my newsletter here or this there. How could that be implemented in that chatbot?

[00:05:50] Jonathan Goodman: Yeah, so what? So then we kind of go up a level in the ability of the AI chat bot, which is lead gen. Right. Legion and calendar integration.

So that means that at some point in the conversation with the chatbot, and you can see this on our website, Halyard Consulting, you can go in and ask it a question. It’s going to be able to answer that. If you ask it a second question, we’ve triggered it to then ask you if you’d like to schedule an appointment. If you’d like to schedule an appointment, the first thing that it asks you is what is your name, what is your email, what is your phone number and what company do you work with? Well, now we’ve captured all that data, plus we’re capturing all of the conversation in the chat bot, going back to the clients, they can see it and then it integrates into that client calendar. So let’s say that somebody wanted to have a meeting with me tomorrow at 2 o’ clock. The calendar, the API connection to the calendar would check to see what my availability would be for that moment for that 2 o’ clock meeting and come back and either I’m available for it or it would suggest several other days or times.

[00:07:01] Calan Breckon: Okay, so it seems like it’s fairly simple and straightforward and easy for somebody to do this then to build it.

[00:07:08] Jonathan Goodman: Or to deploy it.

[00:07:09] Calan Breckon: To deploy it onto their website. Yeah, because I’m thinking about a lot of small business owners, not aren’t necessarily tech forward people or tech savvy folks. They, you know, a lot of them are creatives or this, that and the other and this can, you know, make them very nervous to implement this onto their systems. And so it sounds like it is quite fairly straightforward currently to do that.

[00:07:31] Jonathan Goodman: Yeah, There are two things that the client has to be involved with. In addition to providing us the knowledge for the knowledge base, they have to connect their calendar to our systems, which is not difficult and just kind of goes through a form, asks you a couple of email questions, what is your email, blah, blah, blah. Who are you? What are you using? Google Meet? Are you using Google Calendar? Are you using Calendar? Whatever it is and then it connects to that. Once that’s done and we have the knowledge base, within a 48 hour period, that client is then going to get a little snippet of code that they’re going to have to put on to their HTML. Now I realize, and we realize that this is definitely a blocker for some companies. And so for those companies we do a free service. We will come in, we will connect into your back end and we will put that code into the header of that homepage and then it replicates across all pages.

[00:08:31] Calan Breckon: Okay, so for me, somebody who is techie I like, I’ve built my own WordPress. It would be easy enough to know where to put that for myself.

Or is I maybe one day there’s going to be a plugin developed or there already is a plugin developed.

[00:08:44] Jonathan Goodman: Well, I mean there are other chat bot plugins, but those tend to be rules based that are already working within WordPress. It’s a question of whether you want an AI knowledge base or whether you, you’re okay with the rules based on. Okay, but, but it’s simple enough. Maybe we’ll build a WordPress deployment tool at some point, but you know, we’ve had WIX deployment, we’ve had homegrown website deployment, it runs the gamut and it’s a very easy install.

[00:09:13] Calan Breckon: All right, well, that sounds great for being super easy.

How, how do you make sure that the AI tools you build are ethical and inclusive, especially for communities that are often left out in tech? And I asked this because obviously I’m an LGBTQ platform and we’ve seen things happen on other chat programs or chatgpt and this, that and the other, where they’re hallucinating or they’re saying things that should not be said. How are you navigating that in this field for yourself right now?

[00:09:44] Jonathan Goodman: It’s definitely a big part of my focus at Halyard.

I also am part of the LGBT community and I know what it feels like to be overlooked when tech is built for the default user. And I have been in the tech industry since before the dot coms and so I understand the feeling of being left out of the conversation when sites are being developed. So we design our tools with the intention and thinking about who’s going to use them, who’s going to be affected by them, and how we can reduce bias and increase access.

That means everything that making sure our bots are using inclusive language to build tools that don’t assume everyone has the same access to time, tech or capital.

And we’re transparent with our clients about how the AI works. We don’t do black boxes. We let everybody see what we’re doing from the client side, and we really prioritize consent, privacy, and accessibility from the ground up. And, you know, it’s. It’s. You know, I’m very passionate about ethical. I have multiple certifications in ethical AI. It’s a. It’s at the forefront of everything that we’re doing. If we’re building a LLM, which does come up, the request does come up from larger companies that want. They understand that if they built a large language model about their company and all data ran through that company, through that. That LLM system, you have an incredibly smart, diverse, focused LLM that is then able to connect to all different departments, the law department, the marketing department, and everybody is able to tool into that. And building that LLM ethically is extremely important.

[00:11:41] Calan Breckon: Yeah, I.

There’s so many things we could go on about this specific topic, about ethically. I think scene AI, because I think a lot of things right now, specifically, I think I don’t want to get political on today’s podcast, but as the time of this recording, they’re trying to push through kind of like a pause on things in the US and kind of just letting everything go for the next 10 years before they really implement a lot of stuff. I mean, not shocker, but those things do make me nervous, especially because we know that it’s quite typically straight white guys who are building a lot of these programming. So it’s really important to make sure that we’re getting, you know, LGBTQ and people of color. Color and different experiences in there. Because even if you have this massive company, who’s to say it’s still not swayed in these straight white man sector? So that data still would be skewed to that, you know, point of view. And so making sure that you’re taking the time to really add those things in is really important. So I’m glad to hear that you are taking those steps to do that.

[00:12:42] Jonathan Goodman: Yeah. And also understand that in the forefront of the technology, LGBTQ are at. At. They’re at the top of the level. Right.

Sam Altman is the head of Chat GPT. He’s. He’s a gay man.

The head of Apple is gay.

You know, all of these, you know, just having that one person in the room that has that level of sensitivity. I know that when I’m working in Chat GPT, it understands, you know, the. The nuances of my life. Right. It understands all aspects of my life. Because I’m in chatbots 100% of the time, all the time, all day long. And I have different files for business, family, personal. And so, you know, I have a little bit of trust, a little bit of faith in Sam Altman to, you know, not be that standard white straight man who’s, you know, you know, to say, you know, this is not permitted content or anything like that.

[00:13:49] Calan Breckon: Yeah, well, our fingers are crossed. We’ll see in the next, what, five to ten years? We’ll see.

You work specifically a lot with LGBTQ businesses and, like, minority owned businesses. So what are some of the unique challenges these entrepreneurs have been facing when it comes to the adoption of AI?

[00:14:07] Jonathan Goodman: That’s a great question.

So it’s, you know, in my personal experience, it has shaped everything that I do in business.

And, you know, I am. I am at the forefront of inclusion. Right. I have an incredibly diverse staff.

You know, I think, I think we walk into conferences and some people think that we are the parade party, the bride parade, you know, coming to town. But, you know, how we build and, and creating, the ability and the creativity and the diversity is critically important.

Maybe I didn’t answer your question.

[00:14:53] Calan Breckon: Yeah, we’re diving in more of the challenges from the entrepreneur side of things. So when you’re going to work with these folks, what are their challenges that they’re facing in order to adopt the AI that you’re implementing?

[00:15:05] Jonathan Goodman: You know, I think it’s the same as everybody’s trying to adopt. I don’t think that there is an outlier for LGBTQ businesses except for resources. Right. And, you know, we were heading down a path that was going to be very good for the LGBT community, and we now see the opposite of that. And, you know, where I had obtained an LGBTQ certification for. For Halyard, and I was moving towards an 8A certification for government contracts, I am now very hesitant to work with the government and to utilize that certification in open conversation outside of New Jersey. Now, New Jersey is specifically phenomenal for LGBTQ businesses. We have a certification here. We have a whole system. There’s a it, there are grants, there are. It’s really phenomenal here. But I understand that outside of that, not only do you have the incredible pressure of running a business against, let’s say you’re running a retail business against big box stores in a small community, and you have a pride flag out there. I understand now, you know, since the election and since the, you know, since this president has come on board, the.

The paranoia that comes with that to put out a Flag to put on my website that I, that I am part of NGLCC and NJPP and New Jersey New, the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce, LGBTQ Chamber of Commerce. Because it’s, it’s acceptable now to not do business with an LGBTQ person if you don’t want to. It’s acceptable now to, you know, put your politics in front of business.

And, you know, I guess I’m fortunate that I’m able to say no, thank you. When we get a client who we very firmly explained that we have a very diverse employee relationship and our employees are extremely diverse and that we are a diverse company and you know, there are some clients or potential clients who may have backed away from our company and gone with another company that was straight owned and white owned and you know, non diverse.

That is, you know, that’s, that’s capitalism. That is your choice. I believe at the end of the day that, you know, there is, there is plenty of opportunity out there, especially for my business. But I understand, you know, even for retail, to market to the people that you want to market to and build it and they will come is really what I believe.

[00:17:55] Calan Breckon: I definitely believe that we are in a space right now that is more.

It’s loud and it’s, and it’s very forward facing. But I think the reason it’s so loud is because of the, the knowledge and know how of the fact that we, the majority, most people are just like, be good people, do good things, let people live their own lives. And it’s the small minority. But the small minority is so loud that it seems like it’s encompassing a lot more than it really is.

[00:18:27] Jonathan Goodman: That’s right. And unfortunately, the Republican party has sided with, you know, the anti. The. No. They’ve always been the party of no right. But you know, now they’re particularly in cahoots with Nazis and you know, people that, you know, my grandfather would have been surprised that they would have even let speak on a dais, but here we are, right? But, you know, realize that you always have to fight for your rights.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a white CIS man, you still have to fight for your rights. Right? And so I was part of Queer Nation. I was, you know, in the Matthew Shepard riot.

I did my part for the community.

I think that a lot of the younger generation thinks that it’s just, hey, everything’s fine and we’re just going to go ahead with everything. And now they see this pushback. Well, guess what? Get out there in march. Get out there and Throw a bottle at a police officer. I’m not suggesting you do that, but you understand that. You know, I don’t think that the younger generation understands the difficulties that we went through just 20 years ago. Right. I mean, I have, I’m in a domestic partnership because that was allowed and I got a domestic partnership. Right. I chose not to get married, but that was my decision.

But the day that we could get a domestic partnership, we went right down to town hall and we got that domestic partnership. Well, guess what? If that right is going to be taken away from me now, if that’s the path that we’re on, I’m expecting a lot of younger people to get out in March. I’m not going.

[00:20:14] Calan Breckon: It’s the human history and human mentality goes in cycles. And we’re in one of those cycles right now. And I want to pull us back to the air.

Let’s go back over to the AI. So folks who are feeling like overwhelmed right now just by initiating AI and like they want to dip their toe in, but they’re not ready for like the website, chatbot and all that kind of stuff, where’s a good place for them to start?

[00:20:37] Jonathan Goodman: It’s a great question. I don’t want to be doom and gloom, but AGI is going to be here by 2030 and so what that means is a lot of the kind of low level work is going to go away now. Where does that stop? It’s very difficult to know. Right?

You know, you may have a bookkeeper that you don’t need anymore. I don’t really have a need for content writers anymore because ChatGPT does such a great job at understanding how I write what I write about and then writing it themselves. Writing it itself. Right.

But I think that it is, I think everyone needs to use ChatGPT if they have a business. It doesn’t matter what business they have.

They need to spend the $20 a month so that they can have folders, so that they can have projects and understand how to build that project and how to then start utilizing ChatGPT to answer questions about your business.

You know, we’re only as smart as we individuals are, but CHAT GBT understands everything.

So, you know, whether it’s legal advice, and I’m certainly not saying to take legal advice from CHAT GPT, but you can certainly do your research, you can certainly find out whether something is permissible in the law or, you know, simple questions like that. Right.

When it comes to marketing, it can build a marketing calendar, it can help you design and develop a strategy.

So it’s critically important that everybody at least have an understanding as what the capabilities of ChatGPT or any of these large language models are, or you’re just sticking your head in the sand and that’s not going to work. It doesn’t matter if you own a gas station or if you own the Hilton hotels, everyone is going to be affected by AGI and it’s going to be so incredibly profound that it’s very difficult for me to kind of not instill fear in this conversation. Because, you know, if you’re an accountant, I can do accounting now on chat GPT, I can do my law, I could do my marketing. I can actually. And internally we have these individual agents that are doing multiple things for multiple departments that are speeding up the process to the point where I don’t need 100 people in my company. Right. The prediction is that by the end of 2026, someone will build a multibillion dollar company by one person.

One person will build a multibillion dollar company. I mean, is that my company? I don’t know. It might be right. Because we are building and deploying SaaS applications in addition to working with clients. So we have a subscription stream revenue on things that we are building out as well as working individually with clients.

So I don’t think that I’ve helped this conversation in making anybody feel better about general AI, but it’s definitely something that you need to be very aware of. It is the. It is, it is greater than the wheel. It is greater than when we learned how to do fire.

This is so profound.

It, it’s, it can be a lot.

[00:24:11] Calan Breckon: It can be, it definitely could be a lot. And one thing that came up when you were talking was this thought of like, content because I, my background’s SEO and so that contact writing, you know, for blog posts and this, that and the other. And part of me, not to dive too crazy into this, but part of me is like, okay, but if you have an AI developing this article, and then humans get to the point where they’re like, well, I know this is an AI article. I don’t want to read that.

[00:24:34] Jonathan Goodman: What?

[00:24:35] Calan Breckon: Like, I’m just so curious as to all the things, the nuances that are going to happen because it’s going to be like, the Internet’s just talking to the Internet on the Internet. And people are like, I’m not engaged or interested anymore because it’s just the Internet talking to itself. Then is like the existential humanity of it of like, well, then what do Humans do like, what is humanity doing for humanity? And what are we doing as people? Does that free us to then go out and be people again in the way that we used to back in the day where we had the time and the finances and all these other things to enjoy just being human?

Or do humans still have to go up into the right, like capitalism always says, and so we’re still going to have to work 40 hours, but doing what, you know, like it’s. These existential questions are exciting, but also terrifying.

[00:25:23] Jonathan Goodman: Yeah. I mean, I believe in universal basic income. I think that it’s the only way that we’re going to survive this.

I think that we need to understand that a child who is in high school right now maybe shouldn’t go to college. They don’t necessarily need to.

I think that YouTube is an incredible educational tool.

I have been able to learn incredible amounts faster. I have a Master’s of science and an MBA, and I feel that YouTube has educated me far beyond that in the last three years.

So do you want to take on $100,000 worth of debt to then get in a line to go sit in a chair for the next 40 years to work in an office and type away at things that you know are either redundantly done through AI and you’re just the checker, or do you want to be more creative and more and think about the world more and how the world can heal from what got us to this point? But, you know, I, you know, 50% of all jobs are going to disappear in the next five years. I know it’s terrifying to say, but it’s the truth.

[00:26:33] Calan Breckon: Yeah. Oh, gosh. Okay, so how about.

Because I don’t want to end on that. Like, I want to end on good stuff. So where do you think in terms of the future of ethical AI? Where do you think it’s heading? And let’s look at the positive spins on that and focus on what could change and what your beliefs might be around that.

[00:26:55] Jonathan Goodman: Sure.

So I believe at some point that Chat GPT will be able to take all of the information from all of the files and all of the chats that I’ve had, and I will then be able to connect it, maybe. I upload every single video and every single photo and introduce ChatGPT to every single family member connected to Ancestry.com and tell it stories about my. My high school life and my elementary school and my early life. And it builds an understanding of who I am.

And then it gets put into a robot and then I have a Robot assistant that understands me, is constantly in conversation with me, understands my business. And I know I’m jumping. I know you’re blinking and you’re like, oh, my God, where are we going with this? But, I mean, I think that that’s the next step. I already talk to GPT, Chat GPT every single day about so many different things about my mental health. It is so phenomenal with mental health. It is so great with my business and it understands my family dynamics.

And if I could then kind of put something on my shoulder that hangs out with me the rest of the day, just like a little animated robot that knows me and knows my business, I mean, that’s where we’re going. And then if I have an individual like that who understands everything, then they’re able to run the business.

Why? Why, why do I need to. Sure, I need to go and shake hands and meet people and make speeches and tell people who we are, but in terms of the business, in terms of, you know, the invoicing and the accounting and all these different things, it’s going to be handled by the ChatGPT, the LLMs.

[00:28:45] Calan Breckon: Yeah. Okay. Well, it’s going to be. It’s definitely going to be an Interesting next five to 10 years. I’m telling you that for sure. Where can folks contact you and find out more?

[00:28:57] Jonathan Goodman: Yeah, so please visit Halyard Consulting. There is no dot com after that. It’s just halyard.consulting.

you can read all of our articles. But more importantly than that, right on that homepage is the chatbot. You can go ahead and have a conversation with that chatbot, talk to it about how you’re consulting, talk to about something else that you know, let’s see if it’s going to answer asking a question about dinosaurs. Right. And then right on that homepage also is the phone number to talk to the voice bot. And those two experiences are really the first way that we like to work with clients. When were introducing autonomous workflows, which can be everything from as simple as we have a client, she’s a bookkeeper, she uses Jetpack and she uses QuickBooks. And every month she has to reconcile these two applications. And it takes her four hours. And she hates. Those are the worst four hours of her life. And so we are autonomously implementing relationships between Jetpack and QuickBooks so that this all gets done automatically. Right. That kind of first step in the process.

We generally like to start you off, if not with the autonomous workflow directly, if you have something big that you need built like that or, you know, anything like that but generally the chat bot or the voice bot is the way to interact with us. First you can go ahead and call and schedule a meeting. You can, you know, yeah that that’s probably the best way. Ask it questions and we will get that whole report back to us.

[00:30:35] Calan Breckon: Awesome. Well thank you so much for joining me today Jonathan and telling all the things you have about AI and where you think it’s going and how people can get in contact with you. I’ll make sure to have all those links and everything in the show notes for if you were listening.

Thanks so much Jonathan.

[00:30:50] Jonathan Goodman: Thank you. Thank you so much.

[00:30:52] Calan Breckon: Thanks for tuning in today. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button and if you really enjoyed today’s episode I would love a star rating from you. The Business Gay podcast is written, produced and edited by me, Calan Breckon. That’s it for today. Peace, love, rainbows.