AI Without Getting Overwhelmed

[00:00:00] Calan Breckon: Today’s episode is sponsored by Make.com, the Automation and development platform that helps you harness the full power of AI. I’ve been using make because it’s hands down the easiest way to automate the boring, repetitive tasks in my business without needing to know how to code or over complicate things. Make uses a super simple drag and drop visual builder which lets me connect all the different apps that I use to create workflows and saves me so much time. Honestly, it feels like having a virtual assistant running in the background 24-7.

Whether it’s sending out client forms, updating spreadsheets, or syncing your calendar, make helps you get it all done automatically so that you can focus on the stuff that really matters. And the best part? You can get started for free while you figure out how to set up the best automations that work for you and your business. To check it out, head on over to calanbreckon.com/make or click the link in the show notes. Now, let’s get into 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 the co founder of Techies of Tomorrow, Ramin Shadmehr. Techies of Tomorrow is an AI tech platform working to make assisted AI secure and helpful for everyone.

They specialize in helping businesses manage rapidly evolving tech, particularly focusing on AI integration, cloud applications and digital transformation. They’re also the creators of Roughly AI, a secure and adaptable AI solution that allows organizations of all size to innovate and grow without needing an in house AI team. Ramin is a seasoned technology developer, educator and researcher with over 15 years of experience in education, media and tech. He holds a PhD in Educational Technologies from the Simon Fraser University where he researches the effectiveness of virtual reality in job interviewing training for autistic adults. I’m excited to talk with Ramin about how small businesses can use AI without getting overwhelmed. So let’s jump in.

[00:02:11] Calan Breckon: Hey. Hey Ramin. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. How are you doing today?

[00:02:16] Ramin Shadmehr: Good, thank you very much.

[00:02:17] Calan Breckon: Nice.

I’m very excited to jump into this conversation around AI.

So with that let’s just get to the first questions. For small businesses without in house tech teams, this can be really difficult because a lot of solopreneurs listen to this podcast.

What are the first realistic steps that they can take to, you know, start using AI without feeling overwhelmed or over committed? Especially right now.

[00:02:45] Speaker B: There’s so many choices and options out there.

[00:02:48] Calan Breckon: Folks are thinking, well, where do I start?

[00:02:51] Ramin Shadmehr: Well, my, my suggestion, not just with AI, with basically anything that is new, doesn’t have to be technology per se.

Look at it as getting into a room that you have no clue what’s behind the other, what’s behind the door. Like someone asks you, hey, hey, go knock on that door and go in. How many of us are comfortable actually doing that, not knowing what’s behind it? So we actually ask questions to learn, to get some idea what is behind it. What am I supposed to see? Who am I meeting? If you have that mentality and have that approach, AI or any technology for that matter becomes less scary and you actually identify doors to explore, open and start learning from.

Education is the key because education brings up the knowledge you need to make the right decision.

Again, that could be in any aspect of your life. But again, in case of AI, look at it this way. When people say, oh my God, AI is going to destroy our jobs, do you actually know that is a fact or someone told you or you are just as scared because you don’t know it?

Interesting enough, one of my, one of our employees at Techies of Tomorrow, the very first time we jumped into the whole assessive AI development and this is even before Chat GPT became public, we started our mission, we started this project and she basically said, am I actually shooting myself in the foot? I’m like what do you mean? She said, well, I’m creating something that potentially is going to take my job away. I was like, no, but I would like to know why you think that way.

So when we talked, I’m not going to bore you with it. It was clear that she did not know the environment that is going to happen, but by knowing who is behind it. And I said, listen, you are actually behind creating this engine. We are working this together. We know what we are making.

So don’t you think it’s not gonna actually be an adversary to our jobs, it’s gonna actually help us improve.

That’s why we actually even focus on the assistive component of it. Not to generate just out of thin air to actually help us improve.

And FYI, we have launched roughly AI for over a year now.

All of our employees, the one that actually helped us building it, they are still employed. Two of them actually moved to different industries with a better pay and they are actually benefiting from working on that project or even knowing how to use AI. Knowing how to use AI will definitely help you one understand it better, make it less Scary. Awareness is the key. When you are aware about the environment you are stepping into, when you are prepared, it’s not scary, it’s actually going to be useful. Yes, there are bad factors, but by learning you identify those. Another colleague of mine said something very interesting. He said, we are not going to lose jobs to AI. We’re going to lose jobs to people who know how to work with AI. And that’s a very key, important thing. So I think back to your main question.

If people, especially a small businesses that don’t have their own internal groove to deal with it, my suggestion is start learning, explore, make a private account, do it safe, make a private Account, go explore ChatGPT. Even if it means you pay for some of the services, do it. It’s, it’s a few hundred here and then throughout the year, but it’s a test that you won’t regret doing.

Do the test, learn, see what it’s providing and then make the decision of adopting, not adopting, and if you’re adopting, which one is better working for you. It’s like social media, you just need.

[00:07:04] Calan Breckon: To go in and play with it. And that’s, that’s the approach that I took to it. I, I haven’t used it like crazy so far, but I’ve used it to assist me in like helping to write some emails over here or helping to draft this, hey, can you look at this and maybe make some suggestions and edits? And I gave myself the opportunity to just play with it and to learn and to grow and approach it from that. And the same with, you know, building out models of like, you know, oh, you can schedule it to do all this stuff for you and that was very daunting. But then, you know, playing with things like N8N and just kind of creating something just for fun, to see how it might work together and start to learn something so that I have the knowledge to then evolve it into possibly my business. And that’s what, you know, entrepreneurs should do now, is learn, have fun with it. And then once you have that knowledge, you’ll be able to evolve it. And the same with your colleague. I don’t think AI is going to take over and take all these jobs and people are going to be jobless. That’s not how the world works. The world works by evolution and evolving and there’s always going to be something for humans to evolve into. It’ll look different, but, but that’s the point of humanity. It’s supposed to look different, we’re supposed to evolve.

[00:08:16] Ramin Shadmehr: And may I add Something. It’s interesting you mentioned that and I love it that you highlighted it.

Look at what we are. What is happening with Canada Post?

[00:08:25] Calan Breckon: Hmm.

[00:08:27] Ramin Shadmehr: Amazon was just selling books back in late 90s when they started, they were using Canada Post to ship product.

But as you said, they evolved, the industry evolved. They even created certain technology to support their customers better. Other companies started popping up, the shipping companies and shipping and receiving. But unfortunately, the evolution that a service like Canada Post should have taken on 20 years ago, it was so, I don’t know, maybe they spend way too much time studying what to do next. Then they realize, okay, it’s too late.

They could have done a lot of things.

Canada Post did not lose jobs to Amazon.

Canada Post did not lose jobs to Internet. Canada Post lost jobs to Canada Post because the same thing with taxi industry.

And look at it this way. One of the things that Canada Post could have done 20 years ago was, hey, Amazon, or hey, ebay, let’s literally partner up exclusively.

I want to be part of this evolution. Let’s do this together.

And it just sucks that I see postal workers are hurting because of someone or somewhere that probably they don’t even work there anymore. They made a decision 20 years ago to just maintain the status quo.

[00:10:03] Calan Breckon: Yep. And that’s what will always kick you.

[00:10:05] Speaker B: If you maintain the status quo, you’re.

[00:10:08] Calan Breckon: Going to get old and dusty and going to fall behind. You need to make sure you’re keeping on top of things in a nice flowing way. There’s many things we could talk about Canada Post, many ideas I have that they could have evolved into. But let’s keep things on the AI. How. How can small business owners distinguish between like the AI hype and then practical tools that are actually going to help.

[00:10:29] Speaker B: Them solve their everyday problems?

[00:10:31] Calan Breckon: Because I think that that’s also where people get a little bit stuck, is like, what’s hype? And what’s like just like realistic and practical.

[00:10:39] Ramin Shadmehr: Why did you ask me that question? Because I have so many answers and not answers. Because so what is the hype? What is not a hype?

The hype is the one that you probably.

You catch it. You can catch the hype when something is so much advertised, when like even a really minuscule progress is blown out of the park, like, oh my God, look what, what we have achieved.

And I don’t know if you remember, like this was actually last week or maybe even two weeks ago, a huge AI company turned out to be another AI company.

I don’t know if you know which.

[00:11:30] Calan Breckon: One I’m Talking about it doesn’t surprise me at all. I don’t think I’ve. I might have heard about it, but I don’t think I can like recall it right at this minute.

[00:11:38] Ramin Shadmehr: Yeah. So I don’t know if it’s okay. I look it up because I just want to make sure I know the name.

[00:11:48] Calan Breckon: We’Ll give you. Yeah, we can move on. Let’s not name.

[00:11:52] Ramin Shadmehr: But anyways. But anyway, you could actually realize, oh yeah, builder, AI.

So it was so hyped up. Oh my God, we can do X, Y and Z. And I’m like, when. And this is way before they started.

They, they got, they got caught.

I actually heard about their advertising. I’m like, okay, that’s actually cool that this is possible.

So you get my idea because I’m not a programmer and your AI engine develops it and I can then launch my application.

Okay, that’s very cool because a lot of people may like to know that. And by the way, that actually scared a lot of programmers, like, oh my God, my jobs is taken away.

But then I was like, but this is just way too good to be true. Way too good to be true. And it as it turned out, fast forward now, they got caught that, oh, it’s actually not AI.

They literally get your idea, send that to a ton of developers.

[00:12:59] Calan Breckon: Yes, I did hear about India. Yes, I did hear about this.

[00:13:02] Ramin Shadmehr: And they say, hey, quickly do a MVP version of this.

And they do it because they need money. And when you pump 500 or actually, why should I go that far? 10 developers on one tiny idea, they can easily develop it as an MVP. And you, you get your minimum viable product already. And now they got caught.

They raised billion dollars and they got caught. So that’s a hype. Oh, it’s too good to be true. And I, and I go, and I don’t know if you remember, but back in the day when Facebook actually started, the number of social media channels went through the roof.

Like, oh, I just created the social media. I created the social media. I created the social media. But only a handful of them, literally estate.

And they were the ones that properly managed, properly targeted. You got LinkedIn for professional social media. You got WhatsApp for personal private messaging. You got Instagram for video and picture sharing. And of course later on you got TikTok. But they are literally five or six that can actually work. Google failed in the social media world. Oh, I remember they started with Orcott. This is back in my day, like, that’s how old I am. Early 90s they started with Orcott, they started too early, that failed.

And then with Google plus or Google. Yeah, Google plus. They, they failed again.

[00:14:36] Calan Breckon: Yep.

[00:14:36] Ramin Shadmehr: So it’s, it’s a hype. You know, it’s a hype because it’s just too much. When it’s too much. Like you have to let it go.

Look at it this way and again, feel free to stop me maybe sometimes I kind of like talk a lot about coming up with examples.

When you go to a restaurant that gives you a 65 item menu, you get confused. Okay, what am I supposed to eat here?

[00:15:03] Calan Breckon: I hate that. I hate restaurants that have so many choices because it’s, it’s the indecision freeze. You just. I’m inundated with so many options that I freeze and I can’t make a choice. Menus that are much more limiting and limited are so much better because then I don’t have to actively choose so many options.

[00:15:23] Ramin Shadmehr: Exactly.

[00:15:24] Calan Breckon: Oh, I hear that.

[00:15:25] Speaker B: I hear that for sure.

[00:15:26] Ramin Shadmehr: So right now that’s the 65 item restaurant that we are in right now. You go on Instagram, you, you get advertising from something, something AI, something, something, this. Do you want an AI girlfriend? And I’m like, no, this is just too much. Like one of the things I do on Instagram is just marking ads as irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant. And yet they are still coming. Why? Because God forbid I forgot to go incognito and I just went on ChatGPT to do something. Or I even went on my own engine. I went on my own engine, roughly AI. And of course it got cookied and now Instagram. And everyone knows what I’m looking for.

[00:16:09] Calan Breckon: Right. So can I ask you what are some of the like common misconceptions people are making or small businesses are making about AI? That’s like preventing them from exploring. Is this over inundation? Preventing people from getting into it?

[00:16:24] Ramin Shadmehr: Yeah, they don’t trust it.

They are afraid of it because they don’t trust it.

They are afraid of it because they don’t know much about it.

Not everyone is tech savvy and not everyone should be tech savvy to be honest. But we need to at least have a basic understanding of the tool we are dealing with.

Everyone is a driver in our city, but not everyone is a race car driver.

But we know the basics of driving. Although it would be great that everyone follows those basics, otherwise we wouldn’t have this many car accidents. But at least they need to understand the basics of AI. What is a prompt, what is an output, what is Deep search some of the new terminologies that coming out or what is deep fake? Like some people, they don’t know what deep fake is still like. Come on, at least let’s, let’s educate each other, let’s go for coffee, let’s talk about what we know, what we don’t know, and share the gnomes.

[00:17:33] Calan Breckon: Definitely what they need to do. Yeah.

So with all of these AI tools on the market, like you said, there’s a bunch of them at a restaurant. Everybody’s trying to figure out how does a small business choose the best solution that’s going to be secure, it’s going to be scalable, it’s going to be safe, and it doesn’t require like constant maintenance or deep, you know, expertise. How do they find the one needle in the haystack that’s happening right now?

[00:18:01] Ramin Shadmehr: Well, they can definitely, I mean, I wouldn’t say do a simple Google search, but that’s a kind of a cliche answer. But you can indeed do a little bit of a Google search or go to the channels that provide you with a learning content that you can trust if you are on LinkedIn. I mean, to be honest with you, I don’t see why business owners are not on LinkedIn. I have clients who are not on LinkedIn and it really is annoying like hell. But anyways, LinkedIn learning is a good resource because they do actually vet the content that is being put for teaching and education and you can actually explore what is available and you can read the reviews of others. Okay, this was crap. I didn’t learn anything from it or oh no, this was great. I learned a lot about it. Go to the right resources to learn. Yes, YouTube is also a good way of learning, but again, go to the ones that you trust.

Actually not a bad idea to do a little bit of digging into companies.

How did they get started?

Because like right now, a company like Microsoft, a company like Google, they have so much money that they can put behind doing their own AI. Like Google created Gemini. And to be honest with you, this is not by no way it’s an endorsement, but my experience with generative AI was better with Gemini rather than ChatGPT.

And if you want me to know what, you want me to share, why?

Because, well, Google has been my trusted search engine.

A lot of the material I found on Google have been validated.

And for me, if an AI engine has access to that search engine, why not using it?

So a lot of times if I want to do a deep search on, on a content that I don’t have in my possession, I go to Gemini. But if I already have the content, I use my own assistive AI because that was the purpose. We created it to literally focus on only what we create. What I have instead of crawling on Internet. Coming up with hallucination.

[00:20:29] Calan Breckon: Yeah, definitely. It’s doing a little bit of upfront work, just checking things out, looking at Google. Google’s job is to provide you the best, you know, customer service and to find that result for you. So it’s going to provide you with the best options, what you’re looking for in that moment. At least on that first page you can click around and do some discovery. How can small businesses prepare for the long term digital relevance, especially as AI continues to evolve at such a fast pace?

[00:21:00] Ramin Shadmehr: Sorry, can you go over it again?

[00:21:02] Calan Breckon: Yeah. How can small businesses prepare for the long term digital. For their long term digital relevance, especially as AI kind of continues to evolve. What do they need to do to make sure that they can stay relevant? Like how we talk about Canada Post, they’re becoming irrelevant. What can a small business do to make sure that doesn’t happen to them?

[00:21:20] Ramin Shadmehr: Yeah, interesting. Be ready to change it.

Moment notice, unfortunately, and this is, this, is this problem also.

This problem also affected our postsecondary education system because our postsecondary education system did not adapt properly in a timely way.

And because of it, they, they got hurt.

They got hurt.

So be ready, be prepared and be willing to understand the changes that are coming.

Like same thing with driving, same thing with cars. People I know people who are not getting an EV because they are so used to driving stick or automatic and they are so used to the vibration and a lot of things, they are afraid to change.

But EV is coming, my friend, like way more 100 years ago from now, probably everything’s going to be EV or solar.

[00:22:30] Calan Breckon: Yeah. Oh, 100.

[00:22:33] Ramin Shadmehr: Be ready to change. Be ready to adapt. You need to. We need to pivot. We need to pivot.

When you go to grocery store, like, my wife gives me a list and I go to grocery store, I’m like, okay, they don’t have milk, but hey, would soy milk do immediate pivoting? So the answer is either yes or no. If it’s yes, okay, you just pivoted. You don’t come back home empty handed.

Be ready to pivot. Understand, learn. Learning is literally part of any job right now. You don’t learn, you fall behind.

You are very, very likely screwed.

[00:23:13] Calan Breckon: Yeah, that’s, I think, I think that that’s the theme of today’s episode has been being open to learn and to play. And you don’t have to implement these things immediately, but go to ChatGPT and talk to it and see what’s going on, ask it some questions, learn how.

[00:23:28] Speaker B: The flow goes a little bit.

[00:23:30] Calan Breckon: I know for me, I didn’t want to have AI on my phone. You know, how Apple implemented AI on your phone and all these things. I didn’t want it crawling through my phone and doing all that stuff like up front. But I wanted to explore the possibilities of what it could do. And so I have the new 16 that has the button instead for the sound that you can hold it, be an active button. And there’s this new app called Arc Search and I paired it with Arc Search. So it’s almost as if I have AI because I can hold the button down and talk to it like Siri, but Siri is awful. And then it’ll open up Arc Search and Arc Search will be kind of like an AI representation and it’ll go through crawl the Internet, provide all the links and all the things.

And that’s how I’m learning to play with it and activate it and use it more in preparations that, you know, in the future I might use things for business and that kind of a thing. So just play and have fun. And on TikTok, I watch a ton of TikTok videos on AI stuff just so I can learn passively so that one day I can implement it once I feel a little bit more comfortable.

[00:24:37] Ramin Shadmehr: Yeah, no, yeah, that, that’s only logical to be honest.

[00:24:41] Calan Breckon: Right. So where can folks go to find out more and connect with you and techies of tomorrow?

[00:24:47] Ramin Shadmehr: Well, as I mentioned, like I’m. I’m not a very active private social media type. So like I’m not very active on Facebook or Instagram, but I am extremely active on LinkedIn. Like as I said, people should have a trusted source. LinkedIn is one of my trusted source because it’s full of professionals who are validated same.

So I’m always on LinkedIn extremely active there and our, our business also have a page there. We actually need to be more active there as well. But again, I’m not a marketing type as you also mentioned. Like I’m more on the development side and designing digital products.

So if anyone by the way wants to help us market our company, I’m game.

Reach out to me on LinkedIn.

And also Techiesoftomorrow.com is our website and hopefully if you are generous enough to share the link, it would be great. And of course from there you have access to kind of like a preview and demo of a lot of the products we did within techies of tomorrow or even collaboration with other companies. We do actually collaborate with other tech developers. One of them is roughly Design, one of our biggest collaborators. These guys are by the way, also quite big in the market and they are the ones behind the development of our a Canadian made 3D print and printer called Tinkerine.

So yeah, nice. So, yeah, awesome.

[00:26:29] Calan Breckon: Perfect. I will make sure to have the LinkedIn and your website links in the show notes for anybody listening if they want to connect. Ramin, I want to thank you so much for chatting to us about AI and how it’s just time for us to evolve and start learning and start growing.

[00:26:43] Ramin Shadmehr: Thank you very much. And yeah, it was a great conversation and if it helps, I’m happy to share you that you just got yourself another listener.

[00:26:50] Calan Breckon: Well, thank you so much.

[00:26:52] Ramin Shadmehr: Thank you very much, Take care Calan.

[00:26:54] 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.