Mastering AI in Business Development: Strategies for Sustainable Success

Mastering AI in Business Development: Strategies for Sustainable Success

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to episode 155 of the business development podcast. And for the first time ever, today's episode is all about AI and business development in an AI world. Stick with us. You are not going to want to miss this episode.

Intro: The Great Mark Cuban once said business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal.

And we couldn't agree more. This is the business development podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and broadcasting to the world. You'll get. Expert business development advice, tips, and experiences. And you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs, and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business.

Brought to you by Capital Business Development. CapitalBD.ca Let's do it. Welcome to the Business Development Podcast. And now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello, welcome to episode 155 of the business development podcast. My gosh, 155 episodes. Freaking amazing. It still blows my mind that we're as far along as we are.

It's it feels like yesterday guys. It feels like yesterday that we were recording, you know, episode number one, episode number two, that this was just a pie in the sky idea, and now we're a hundred and fifty five episodes in. It's really, really cool to be here. And on today's show, I wanted to spend some time chatting about AI, because in a hundred and fifty five episodes, I have yet to do A topic on AI which you know what?

Some of you might be like, well, what the hell Kelly? What were you waiting for? I was waiting for a lot more experience guys like the reality is, and we're going to get into this today. When I started this show, I had not even experienced chat GPT yet. I had not even really played deeply with AI and really the path that this show has led me on really introduced me to so many different AI programs and ways to use it.

And so now at 155 episodes it a little over a year and a half into the business development podcast. I am now ready to give a preliminary discussion on ai. And guys, it is not all encompassing. The reality is AI is changing all the time. AI is changing every single day, and so there is gonna be a caveat to today's show.

The caveat is the things that I've learned today on how to utilize AI in the ways that we've used it and the effectiveness of it is really only valid until today, until literally July of 2024, because. Tomorrow is a new day and like, we're going to get into it today. We are basically at the iPhone one of what AI will be.

And we all know that, you know, 15 years after the iPhone came out, the smartphone world is a completely different world. And the AI world 10 to 15 years from now. Is going to be a completely different world as well a world we cannot see right now even the best futurists cannot see what 15 years from today looks like and so remember that guys like we're at an early stages of AI the things we talk about today about AI and how we're utilizing them in BD and how we're utilizing them in podcasts.

It's probably not even relevant, even five to six years from now. Really? Like that's how fast this whole thing is going to change guys. So just remember that we're going to have some fun with it. We're going to chat about the use cases, how we use it today. And and obviously the humanity aspect of it, which is very critical, but remember like AI is changing daily.

And so remember to be open to it, be open to the change and see what it does for you next, because it is critical. It isn't going anywhere. And we're all learning how to use it together. So before we get into today's topic, and I'm very excited to do it, I wanted to leave off with just a little bit of a caveat, because I want you guys to embrace whatever is coming for our futures.

We always have to keep learning. We always have to find our own competitive edges and how we're going to utilize different things. And it would be wrong today to say that we know it all, because we don't. We're just playing in a new playground. Alright guys, and I wanted to start today's episode 2 by just giving a little show update.

Really cool thing, we have now crossed 200, 000 downloads guys. We're actually sitting at 206, 424 downloads of the show. We are one week away from our 18 month anniversary. And unreal. Unreal, guys. It's it still blows my mind that we've come this far in such a short period of time, and, you know, for a small business show that started out in Edmonton, we've done pretty alright.

And we couldn't have done pretty alright without our amazing listenership, without all my rockstars out there, without my rockstar experts and my rockstar listeners, and you guys are amazing. And really, guys, this show could not have come this far without you. It still continues to go because of you.

And I am incredibly, incredibly grateful for each and every one of you. And as we launch in today's show too, we started to get some community questions, which is awesome, but I want more. I want more. I'm greedy. I want my community questions, guys. Shoot me community questions. I want your business questions, your podcasting questions, and obviously your business development questions.

Send them to me, podcast at capital bd. ca. Or if you are so inclined, shoot me a message on LinkedIn with your question, and I will make sure that we deal with it for you on an upcoming episode. And keep in mind guys, unless you give me permission, everybody is anonymous. And if you give me permission, I'm more than willing to read your names, but.

I want to I want to encourage everybody to send questions, even if they're a little afraid of of, of having their names out on the world, so, if that's you, understand, we start anonymous, and if you let us know, we will use your name, but, if you don't say anything, it will be First name only or anonymous based.

Okay. And then once again, guys, if you have not had a chance to do so, we have an Instagram account, we have LinkedIn accounts, we are on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and everywhere you find your favorite shows, it would be amazing if you guys could give us a like, or a follow on all of our pages, we appreciate it immensely.

And it is a great way to continue to grow this show as we move into the next phase and whatever the heck that may bring. According to explodingtopics. com, 40 percent of companies globally are using AI in their business as of August 2024. Notably, 42 percent have reported exploring AI use in their companies, and another 40 percent are exploring the use of AI technologies within their companies.

Nice. That means that 82% of companies are either currently using or are exploring ai, 82% of companies globally. Guys, that is gigantic for a technology that frankly was barely commercially available when I launched this podcast a year and a half ago, to go from that to 82% of companies worldwide.

Starting to figure out how to utilize it. If that isn't like a gigantic window opening for you guys to show you guys the world is changing, that AI is here to stay and it is going to be a game changer. I don't know what is. So I'm not really sure what the other 18 percent of companies are doing and why they aren't yet exploring AI, but I do imagine they won't take too long to play catch up.

And there's no question guys, AI is here to stay and its use cases are, are endless. They are absolutely endless. But one of the things I wanted to chat about today. Is that AI is never going to be a replacement for you, my amazing business development specialist, my amazing business owners, CEOs, anybody who, whose job it is to grow a business guys.

AI is not a replacement for your humanity. What it is, is an extension, a tool to help you expand, to help you do more than you ever could have with your humanity. And so, one of the really cool things, one of the important things I think we're going to talk about today is, that AI is going to buy you time.

To do more of the things that only you as a human can do, which honestly guys is going to be amazing. I think there's a lot of people who are afraid for their jobs, but I think if you are in business development, if you're in sales, if you're in anything where human to human relationship is important, well, what's the keyword to that?

It's human to human guys. There is going to be a big world ahead for us and more time probably than ever For us to really learn to execute our human to human active marketing skills. And I'm very, very excited to chat with you about that today. AI is evolving so quickly that when I started this show in February of 2023, I had not even tried chat GPT yet, guys.

I know it was out. I'd heard about it. I hadn't even tried it yet when this show launched, guys, and over the last year and a half, I have utilized AI extensively in the making of this show, in the execution of my day to day business. And with copy, socials, and obviously day to day life tasks. Guys, just in everyday life, we use, we use AI, we use chatbots to help us with, with equations or other things we might need.

Or heck, who hasn't had an Alexa, right? At this point, guys, we use AI, most of us, on a daily basis, in one way or another. And it is crazy. And what I can say, is that AI can and will change everything. I am confident at this point, guys, AI is going to change the entire business landscape, the entire human landscape, everything we do from our personal lives to our business lives to almost everything is going to be impacted by AI in a substantial, substantial way.

And it is important because of this That we keep an open mind, that we stay curious, and we keep trying to figure out how can we continue to implement AI to make our lives easier, to make us more effective, and to frankly buy us back more time, which is ultimately the use case for AI. AI is going to be a time saver, guys.

It's going to put time back in your pocket. It's already put time back in my pocket with regards to producing this show, with regards to growing this show. There have been so many things that I've used AI for, and we're going to get into that today because I think I can only speak to my use cases of AI.

I'm not going to speak to things I have not done. I'm not going to speak to hearsay. I am going to speak to you guys today in the ways that I have utilized AI in both the making of this podcast and obviously in my day to day life because I think we can only ever speak from our own experiences and it would not be fair to me to speculate on things that I do not understand.

AI is something that I'm not even going to pretend for a minute. To say that I am an expert in not even close. The reality is I think the only people who might be experts in AI are the people who are making the AI on a day to day basis. The rest of us are all playing this game on how to figure out how to use it.

What are the use cases for it? And we're all in this human Guinea pig play pen together. That's the reality. The reality is we're learning every single day. And so. Don't don't stop being curious. Don't stop asking. Could AI do that for me? Is there a way for me to streamline this process? Is there a way for me to eliminate this process even better?

Am I doing redundant tasks? Is there something that we maybe don't need to be doing on a day to day basis or that we could outsource to AI or that we could figure out how to simplify using AI, that is the reality guys. That is the reality of AI in 2024 and beyond. At this stage, at this stage of AI, remember, I am not speaking to what AI will be.

I cannot speculate on what AI will be. I'm pretty darn confident it's going to be unbelievable. It's going to be hard to believe, probably very similar to magic at some point. But as of today, it's a very useful, useful tool. And so that is what it is in 2024. What is it in 2034? Who knows, right? But you couldn't have seen when you watched the original iPhone reveal video, that like hour long thing where Steve Jobs came out and chatted about the future of phones.

You couldn't have seen what that was going to become. I remember looking at me like, wow, that's so cool. And being really excited for iPhone one. But guys, iPhone one is a piece of junk compared to what we are dealing with today compared to our amazing next level super computers. We carry in our pockets everywhere we go.

We couldn't have seen it just like right now. You cannot see 15 years from now what AI will be, but I can almost guarantee you it will be that or better. And so that's just it guys. We have to keep our minds open and we have to be thinking about, okay. We aren't going to necessarily know what the change is going to be, but I'll tell you what, just like you had to learn how to use different apps, just as you had to learn, Oh, that's amazing.

That's, that's a new thing that our iPhone or our smartphones can do. You're going to have to learn these new skills that are AI. And learning how to use AI is going to be a skill set all on its own. And it's going to be a learned skill set that we are all learning together. There's no way around this.

Nobody's getting the fast track. We're all getting these things available and released to us at the same time for the most part, guys. And so the secret is if you want to compete in 2025, in 2026, 2036, The secret is going to be how smart can you get with outsourcing AI, with using this tool to become a superhuman yourself, because that is what it's ultimately going to do.

It is going to allow you using AI to do the work of five or 10 different people. Exponential value over time, guys. It really is like the business development of people. AI is going to make you exponentially more valuable over time or exponentially. Less valuable over time if you do not take the time to learn how to use it.

Okay. And I know, I know I'm speaking to, I'm speaking to some people who are like, Kelly, AI scares the bejesus out of me. I don't want to learn how to use this thing. Can't, I just hire somebody to do it. Maybe, maybe you can, but I'm telling you, it's not that hard. It's not that hard to learn these things for the most part.

We're at like square one. You are not behind. If you haven't taken the time yet to learn how to effectively use AI, don't feel bad. Don't feel bad. You are not alone. There's a lot of people who are kind of on the fence with what to do with this thing. But let me tell you, it is not something to be afraid of.

It is something that is going to buy you time. It's not only going to buy you time. It's going to make you more powerful, more valuable than ever before. And it's going to give you time to do the things that AI cannot do. To get great, once again, at being you. To get great, once again, at being the authentic you.

The connected you. The human you. This is what business development and marketing and sales is all about. It's about building human to human connection. The way to stand out as we move forward is to use and leverage our humanness more than we ever have before. And trust me, it is going to pay off in your favor.

Companies who do not implement AI solutions, guys, Companies who do not implement AI solutions will be left behind. Guys, it's not even a question. It's not even a question. If you do not figure out how to leverage AI to make yourself more competitive, Your competitors will, and it's only going to mean the end for you.

There is no way forward as a company in 2024, 2025 and beyond without figuring out how to leverage AI. And guys, big companies, almost all of them are figuring out how to leverage this thing more than ever. They see this coming. They know it, that the difference between them staying on top and being completely blown out of the water is their ability to effectively use AI as we move into the future.

Every single large company on earth is investing immensely, immensely in AI. It is the future, and it can be the differentiator guys at this point, AI, like I said, is so new that everybody is. On a level playing field, but that level playing field is going to shift immensely, immensely. If you do not get on board right now, the reality is, is that those big companies are investing millions and millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars into AI, into giving themselves a competitive edge into making sure that that moat is bigger and bigger and bigger between them and the small companies that could compete against them.

Right. But that moat right now, It is a little stream. It is not a moat yet. It is going to be a moat, but if you guys get on board right now, you figure out what AI tools are going to make you more effective, more competitive, more cost effective. This is your leveling the playing field. This is your ability today to give yourself a competitive edge to solidify your place in the future of work.

And so today is the day if you are not implementing AI, if you're not figuring out how can we. Be more effective, more efficient. Today is your day. Today's the day to start figuring it out, okay? One of the things that I really wanted to talk about today, like I said, I'm telling you guys what I see and what I think is going to come.

I cannot see the future. I can only see the trend, but the reality is, guys, if you just look at the pace of evolution, from, from essentially you using AI for the first time to, to today, right? It is bonkers. It is bonkers. I can't even tell you the last time I saw a technology growing at this pace, expanding and changing on a daily basis.

And so one of the things I wanted to talk about is my evolution of use with AI because I think that if I speak to you guys about when I came into it, some of the use cases that I started using it for and some of the findings I figured out along the way, I can either save you time on your journey if you have not started or potentially just show you what an evolution could look like for your businesses, right?

In podcasting guys, all I can say is this, I really started to use AI initially in podcasting. Now podcasting is one of those things where it is incredibly time consuming. Like let's get real, if you're doing your transcriptions, if you're creating posts, if you're editing and exporting audio. If you are doing all of these things, the amount of time guys that I would spend doing this would be equivalent to probably two full time jobs if I did not have AI to support me.

And obviously, AI has changed along the way of the show. When I first launched this show, One of the important things that I needed to do was obviously release my show, but I also needed to add a transcript. And so my AI journey actually started with a program called Descript. Descript is actually an amazing program that we still use on this show, primarily still just for transcriptions.

We do sometimes use it for audio editing, because it has some pretty cool audio editing features, like Shortening word gaps or taking out breaths and butts and ums, which is amazing. There are so many different programs now that I use a multitude together, but the first one I had experience with was Descript.

And Descript was really cool because it could do AI transcription, something that before you had to pay somebody like probably looking between like 20 and 30 per episode, which doesn't sound like a lot, but if you're pumping out, you know, nine to 10 episodes a month, it adds up very quickly. And for like a low cost Descript would go through and very accurately, even at the beginning of the show, it has improved a lot.

But even at the beginning of the show, it probably had a 90 percent accuracy rate when I launched the business development podcast, I would say at this point, it has probably close to a 99 percent accuracy rate. What AI still struggles with, with regards to audio transcription, is names, places, places. people, things like that, it struggles with names, but you know, who can blame it?

We struggle with names, right? So usually I have to go through and I got to fix a couple different spots, but it's very, very accurate and continues to get more accurate all the time. The next experience that I had in the podcast when I launched it was using a program called Riverside. Some of you who do podcasting or do interviews, you may still use Riverside.

We still use Riverside. Riverside is amazing. But it has a host of AI features that include normalizing audio, that include removing background noise, that include improving audio considerably, that include creating clips, and like AI will search through and find the best clips for you. There are amazing tools like this available that are getting better and better and better every single day that save an absolute ton of time.

When I started this show, you had to manually grab clips. You had to actually search through into script and pull out the exact wording you wanted. And I did that for an incredibly long time, guys. But now AI is streamlining these things, making it easier than ever to get the best clips from our audio. We use chatbots to summarize our, our show notes.

Whenever we have a show come out, we summarize the show notes. We pull out the top things, the top 10 things that we learned from each episode, the key takeaways. Key takeaways are done with AI really easily better, frankly, better than I think people could because it can search the whole document and really get accurate on what those are.

It is absolutely amazing guys. And these are just some of the ways that I've used it in my time with the podcast, let's head into business development uses with Capital. We started playing with chat GPT pretty early on once we realized what it was and what it could do. And we, we learn every, every day.

I feel like I learned new prompts or new, better ways to prompt chat GPT to help me. One of the things you guys are seeing a lot of though are direct chat GPT pitches. And guys, I hate this. And I've been talking about this from the very, very beginning. Your amazing chat GPT with all the amazing things it does speaking like a human is not something it does a great job at it will use words you would never use.

It'll use a tone you would never use. And so even though you can actually ask it to correct via tone, I find it still, it still struggles with that a little bit. It still can't quite give you the exact tone. And so what I always recommend with chat GPT guys, Amazing tool. Amazing tool. I hope it never goes away and continues to get better forever, because it really is next level.

But you cannot take it word for word, guys. What I always recommend to do is type out something like you would normally type out. If you're going to run it through Chat, GPT, Ask it to grammatically correct your wording and then reread it. If it grammatically corrects your wording and you like the reread, good.

If you still think it could be better, ask it how it would improve it. Watch what it does and then just add in a piece or two from the correction, okay, to your original. But you always want to make sure that your interactions are coming across as you, as a human building connections and speaking in the way that you do.

If you can do this and create authenticity, you are going to be much, much more successful. Also, what ChatGPT is really great at is if you're doing a value proposition and you're looking for the statistical layout of it, it can do an amazing job. If you punch in the math and the statistical layout as to why your product is the best possible value and say, hey, could I improve this?

Heck yeah, it can. It can improve it better than you could even imagine. It'll pull things out you could have never seen. And so using it as a research tool on how you can create the best proposition ever, but not necessarily taking it word for word, just taking the best pieces of it. That is the best way for you guys to use ChatGPT and how we've been using it at Capital.

Basically, since we figured out it existed, but these things are changing all the time. Its ability to do better is changing all the time. And who knows, maybe one day it will be indistinguishable, but it is not there yet. And so you must remember that you have to put yourself back into it guys. Okay. Email reviews, right?

If you're going to send an email and you just want to double check, run the email through does an absolutely amazing, amazing job at reviewing your emails. Copy ideas, guys, you know, like I said, asking it to just check over your copy and see if there were ways to improve it, but remember, do not take it word for word.

It is fixing it in the way that it understands, and it probably sounds like a robot. You do not want to come across as a boring robot. You want to come across as a human every single time, okay? If you need formula help, if you guys are creating formulas, math, stuff like that, you're asking it problem solving, It can do an amazing job problem solving.

Proposal review is something that we've used it for, where we just basically submit a proposal to it and say, How do you feel about this? Can you give me feedback on this proposal? It gives amazing feedback on how it could be improved or what is great. Document analysis, guys, comparing two documents side by side does an absolutely amazing job at something like this, okay?

Remember, this is only a reflection on how we have used it as of July of 2024. We are still so early and these things are going to get so amazing and the use cases are only going to go up and up and up. Understand that things are evolving very quickly and that use cases will come and go. Quickly. Okay.

Things that it was great at might not be great at. I've actually seen that. We used a program for a while called any summary when we were originally doing our show notes and summary notes and they changed the code behind the scene. It suddenly changed and something changed behind the scenes and it was no longer doing a great job and we had to switch switch program.

So there there are things evolving behind the scenes so quickly. AI programs coming and going all the time. The important thing for you is that you are trying them, you are giving them a fair shake, and you're seeing what they can do, and you're replacing them the moment something better comes along.

Because the landscape is evolving so quickly that if you are not constantly looking to remove or upgrade, Your program, you are once again going to be left in the dust, even if you are using AI. Okay. It is changing so very quickly. As amazing as AI is, we must remember that it is a tool. Not a person, okay?

It cannot and will not replace a human touch. This is the problem. We live in this world now where you're seeing a lot of companies trying to market to you that AI is going to be your new lead generator. It's going to get you all of these opportunities. It's going to do all the work for you. Guys, a lot of it is bullshit.

And a lot of it is bullshit for a very simple reason, okay? And that is because, no matter how amazing AI is, we crave human to human interaction. And we will interpret any type of digital interaction, even if it's great, as not as good. As human to human interaction. Okay. You should of course, use AI to automate as many non-human critical tasks as you can so that you can double down on your active marketing process on the things that AI cannot do.

It takes human to human relationships in business to business, to build trust, to build relationship, and AI cannot and will not do this for you. No matter what, even if AI was incredibly successful at your lead generation, you still need a human to build a relationship. You still need a human to build authenticity and trust and a connection.

Okay? These are things that are inherently human and that no matter how good AI gets, it's going to be very, very hard for them to replace you. And so in a world of AI and robots, be human. Being human is your. Your differentiator always, no matter how good this system gets. It is never going to be able to be you.

In a time of AI and robots, differentiate yourself by doubling down on the things that make you human. And one of those amazing things, guys, and every business development salesperson knows this, is our ability to generate amazing relationships with people that lead to repeat business over time. I found a really neat statistic as I was doing the research for this show, and according to research in Customer Experience Magazine, only 16 percent of consumers trust websites that allow completely AI written content, and only 22 percent would trust AI generated product photos on a website.

So what does this mean, guys? It means we don't trust robots. We don't like it. Not only do we not like it, we can spot it a mile away. And so if 80 percent of us would rather have a human to human interaction, 80 percent of us at least would rather have a human to human relationship. So what does this mean for you?

My amazing business development specialist, my amazing president, CEOs, founders, people out there marketing their own products. Guys, it is still in your court. Being human is still the secret. Relying on people to build real human to human relationships in 2024, 2025, and beyond, it's not going anywhere. So remember, use these tools as incredibly powerful extensions of yourself.

But remember, it's still you. You are still 80 percent of this equation. You are still the rock star. That is going to close this deal. You are still the rockstar that is going to build this relationship. That's going to create relationships that lead to repeat business, exponential value for you and your organization over time.

So remember that it's still about you, no matter how great these AI programs get, no matter how powerful AI gets. It's about saving time so that you can be you, so that you can be human and double down on the things that are truly effective for you. So remember guys, in 2024 and beyond, we stand out by being human in our messaging.

We stand out by inserting ourselves. Back into our marketing, inserting ourselves back into our copy, inserting ourselves back into relationships and working to build just that real human to human relationships, active marketing and human interaction are not replaceable by AI guys. The stats say it, it's not replaceable by AI.

So dust off your keyboard. Pick up your phone and do what no A. I. can replace. Build a human to human relationship. Shoutouts this week, guys! Susan Poseika Colin Harms, Rodney Lover, Dawn Osland, Tatsiana Zametalina, Ken Gee, Gary N., and Michelle Coulson, Katie Flowers, Ben Gioia, Shane Unruh, Daryl Curry, Bryan Hayes, Hugo Santa Maria, and Aaron James Russell.

Until next time, this has been the Business Development Podcast, and we will catch you. On the flip side,

Outro: This has been the business development podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020.

His passion and his specialization. Is in customer relationship generation and business development. The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.