Using AI to amplify your strengths, with digital agency owner Pete Sena.

Are you ready to amplify your business with AI? This episode has you covered! We're sitting down with creative entrepreneur, founder of Digital Surgeons, and podcast host, Pete Sena, to discuss how AI and automation aren't here to replace us, but rather enhance our performance. Pete shares valuable insights on how to harness AI and learn from your business's top performers. We delve into the sphere of content creation, learning how AI can be fine-tuned to think and write like your business's best minds. 

But we don't stop there. We also explore the vast potential of AI and automation in revolutionizing customer experiences. We'll share hands-on tips on how to leverage these technologies to automate mundane tasks and, more importantly, create personalized customer experiences. We're also discussing the balance between AI and human touch, with Pete providing an excellent example from Chewy. So, buckle up and get ready to rethink AI's role in your entrepreneurial journey. In an era where 'AI' is often thrown around as a buzzword, this conversation sheds light on the principles that will drive your lasting success. This episode is a must-listen for entrepreneurs, doers, and dreamers who are ready to unlock the full potential of AI in their business.

Chapters

• 0:00 Amplifying Entrepreneurship With AI
• 8:47 Automating and Personalizing Customer Experience
• 15:49 Human Customization & AI in Customer Experiences

Transcript

Jim James: 0:00

Hello and welcome to this episode of the unnoticed entrepreneur. Today we are going to New Hampshire, connecticut. We're meeting with Pete Senna. Pete, welcome to the show.

Pete Senna: 0:09

Good to be here, jim, and I'm in New Haven Connecticut today. Sorry, new haven, new haven. Wish I was in New Hampshire. New Hampshire is beautiful this time here.

Jim James: 0:17

Mate, I wish I was to other wheelchair, I gotta say, is a picture as well down here in the west of England. Now you and I gonna talk about how can help an entrepreneur to write themselves out of their own business. You are a creative entrepreneur. You got digital agency. You also have an amazing podcast called future obsessed. So, pete, I know you're helping clients to build brands and using technology to do that, but, as an entrepreneur, how do you think I can help to write somebody out of the script their own movie?

Pete Senna: 0:56

as an entrepreneur, yeah, no, I love that and it's certainly a topic right now, especially with writing people out of the movies is a big topic in America right now. So I think I've been on this quest recently because I've just for the audience to know, like they're probably asking the big question why should I listen to you? Well, I've spent the past 20 years designing and building brands, technologies, that sort of thing. So I came up as a software engineer first and foremost and then kind of got deep into design and then there found a love for marketing and blah, blah, blah. So why should listen to me? All days I only shared advice on things I've done on myself, on the biggest guinea pig and on that topic, jim, that you're saying, I started thinking a lot recently with all these LLM, right? So if you're not familiar large language models, I'm guessing if you're, if you're listening to the unknown sponsor or you know what chat GPT is and the things like it, but At the highest level, just for the audience, to make sure that I'm speaking to everyone here in a way that connects with them. These technologies chat, gpt, large language models they're bigger than the internet itself in terms of like, scale and power and possibility. So I'm really excited, you know, when I think about just what's gonna be possible with these technologies. So when these started getting really popular in the past a year and a half, two years, obviously chat to these very new Things in sort of a tech move million miles a minute, right. So why is that important? Well, it's important because I think what we're seeing now is, when I was digging into this, I asked myself what are all the things I do as an entrepreneur, what are all the things my clients who are Founders, ceos, entrepreneurs what are all the ways we can automate their business?

Pete Senna: 2:33

I started from the wrong place. Actually started from the place of let's automate everything using these Tools, and the more I automated, the more I realized that that wasn't the right solution. What I needed to really focus on is not automation, but acceleration and amplification. So really, what I realized when talking to my customers, talking to their customers Really it wasn't about removing or replacing people with tools and technologies. You know a lot of my, my clients, my bigger clients, were like we can reduce headcount and save costs. You know everyone's trying to do more with less, but it really came down to when I went five wise deeper, as we say so, ask why. And ask why, then ask why.

Pete Senna: 3:11

When I got deep into it, what I realized is they just wanted to get more output out of their best performers. And what it came down to is, if you think about it, just audience listening into the show, right, think about any team you've been on and, let's be honest, you're probably one of the top performers if you're listening to the show, or maybe you're about a bottom performer in the middle right, and typically it's the top performers that pull the most weight, right. So the challenge is what ends up happening with a lot of companies is they they take their best individual individual contributor and they promote them to be a manager, and then they realize that not all managers want to be managers, but also forget about that. This is not a conversation about leadership development, right, happy to have that another time, but what they end up doing is they lose their best individual contributor.

Pete Senna: 3:54

So what I started to ask is a different question. I said well, what would it look like if I could take the best people and make them faster, better, stronger, and how could I change my mindset from automation to amplification? And that's where some magic started to happen. So, just to go a little bit deeper on that, jim, and definitely jump in here if I'm going off track.

Jim James: 4:15

No, this is. This is great to do. That amplification rather than replacement is also super reassuring for everybody that's worried about AI Right. You're going to get enhanced performance, not replacement performance. So carry on, pete. I love it.

Pete Senna: 4:29

Yeah, and what I always say to people is an AI is not coming for your job, but someone using an AI is, so you got to level up where you're going to get leveled in this space. There's no question about it, right? So Anyone that comes to me and tells me that chat, gpt or tools like this, these large language models or LLM's Can't help them work faster and better, just doesn't know how to use the tools. Period end of story. So if you're not already playing with these tools, I highly suggest you do so, and my favorite thing to do is to look at what are the highest leverage activities that High performance and organizations typically do. So one of the things I hear a lot from my clients is that their best, best and brightest people are creating great content. So one of the things that we can do is we can really study the knowledge, the voice, the tone, the communication styles that those people do, and then we can train or fine-tune In some cases these different AI tools and technologies to think and write like them, and then, ultimately, then we can provide a similar set of inputs, but we can scale the set of outputs, which ultimately speeds up the contribution to outcomes. So now, as an example, was recently working with a client in the financial services space, and what we're doing right now is we're taking their two best writers and we're scaling them to basically produce like a team of five or six would produce. So you can think about like the scale of that. It's actually pretty immense. And what we're doing is in the financial services space there's a lot of rules as to what you can and can't say, so what actually makes some of these copy creators really good is that they know the business, they know the legal constraints, so they understand there's a framework on how they think. So the beauty of these tools is that the more you can put your the way of working into a Described, visualized way of working, the more you can train these systems to produce content that way. So now one's ends up happening is, instead of having a bunch of content writers, we have a bunch of really great content editors. So what we're able to do is we're able to put some inputs in these machines, scale the amount of outputs and then, instead of a person spending eight hours writing an article, which they were doing in this case for this financial services client they're spending two hours editing an article and Getting it to the finish line, and then, because of the power of automation, what they're then automating is, you know, sending it off to get graphics created, doing a bunch of these different things. So now what we looked?

Pete Senna: 6:54

When I look at the problem through the lens of Acceleration, amplification, I'm getting to a better outcome where their staff is happier, they're doing more meaningful creative work and they're collaborating on more meaningful things, versus the other side of it. When I first came at it through the problem of let's automate everything, what I ended up doing is approaching it from the wrong problem. So what I say to the owner is entrepreneur and and anyone who's trying to build their businesses, the first thing you have to ask yourself is am I solving the right problem? And I think, as an entrepreneur myself, like one of the things I recognize is, almost every time I've been Massively unsuccessful, it's because I was not spending enough time with the problem space. I was spending too much time with the solution space. So that's just what I would say to that specific thing when it comes to AI, jim.

Jim James: 7:39

The there's a huge amount in there. Can you give us an idea of the tools that you're using just from a practical point of view, because for many people, the idea of harnessing that's a one subject matter expert inside a company most, most companies, got one person, or in fact the entrepreneur often is the subject matter expert, that the engineer, the technician, the service provider but they don't have the capacity to write, for example, to create the videos. Can you give us an idea of some of the tools that people can use where really that person is giving their knowledge to the AI rather than To an external writer or videographer, or even hiring people and training them as we used to, to try and get to the same level as the?

Pete Senna: 8:23

expert? Absolutely. I'm purposely not going to go and name a bunch of tools like ChatGPT and Jasper and Wrightsonic and all these different tools. I don't tell you why I'm not going to name those tools If people want to send me a tweet or an X, whatever we're calling it these days. Thanks, elon. I'm happy to respond to anybody with a list of my tools. I've compiled over 100 of them and a free thing that I'll give to anybody, thank you.

Pete Senna: 8:47

What I do want to start with is what is the point of knowledge? Is the knowledge in your head? Can you speak it out loud? Is the knowledge in a white paper or a document? Where is the knowledge in your organization? What I always say is you have to get the knowledge documented. If you're a busy CEO or entrepreneur, you can literally turn on voice notes on your phone and just start recording voice notes. We can transcribe those voice notes. We can catalog those voice notes If you're a long-form article.

Pete Senna: 9:14

One of my clients is a large franchise and they have over 10,000 pieces of franchise content for their franchise network. What we're doing in that case is we're doing what's called a vector database, where we're actually ingesting all their content and we're essentially building mini chat GPT for their business. Why that's special is it's only trained on their knowledge. What we're doing. There is something called fine tuning where we're still using OpenAI, which is the maker of chat GPT, or in some cases we're also using Anthropic, which is the maker of a tool called Claude. We're using these really well-established large language models, but then we're fine tuning the models only based on the retrieval data that's in our vector database. If you haven't heard the term vector database, I would say check out a technology called Pinecone, because they're getting a ton of investment. They write a lot of great content.

Pete Senna: 10:07

Again, the tools change, the techniques change, but the most important thing is, if you're looking to scale yourself, you have to get the things out of your head and out of your computer into a place that can be accessed, whether that's pictures, videos, words, whatever that is. Then from there you can start to build a data corpus, which is just a fancy term for your information. Then you can figure out how to access that information, repurpose that information and scale that information. That could be anything. That could be the way you work. That could be your process. It doesn't matter if you're a dentist or a chiropractor or the CEO of a SaaS technology company. All of these businesses have knowledge and information that they can repackage and repurpose. That's the place to start.

Pete Senna: 10:54

Once you figure out what your golden goose is in terms of information, then you can look at all the other things you're spending your time on. Most of the things you're spending time on could be automated, like the other day I got a call from somebody. They were too small to work with me and my team. What I basically said is go on to Zapiercom. You could automate just about anything you want in a couple clicks of a button, right.

Pete Senna: 11:17

So when I get this email that says hey, jim's, can Jim, can we work together? Automatically add that to my slack channel. So somebody my team can do that. That's something you you can do yourself if you spend a couple minutes on YouTube or you go on a tool like zappier or make. These are sort of what I call low-code automation tools. So there's levels to the things that you want to automate. But again, what I want to start with is start with the big principles of what am I automating, why am I automating it, and start with the outcome first and then work your way backwards, versus Don't start from the input first and work your way forward.

Jim James: 11:51

Hey, that's wonderful, and this idea of capturing Essential knowledge and then training the system to be able to amplify that without your direct involvement Is really a great way to start to write yourself out of the story but then to be the producer rate rather than the main actor, if we can carry on the the analogy there with the movie set and let's, but let's, let's add one more, even flavor.

Pete Senna: 12:18

I love a good metaphor, right, which is, if you think about the people who get remembered most in history, it's the people who have the most leverage, right. So it's the conductor of the orchestra, not the best violinist. It's the owner of the sports team, not the best person that's on the field, right. So what we have to, I think, think about is, for the first ten million dollars, zero to ten million. In a business, you know, typically you're a player coach, right. Once you get past ten million bucks, generally and again these are general numbers, right, different for every industry Then you go from being a player coach to more of a coach and then from from coach, then you sort of go to being sort of that, that owner mentality. And I think that what a lot of people that I work with faces that they're spending too much time in their business and not enough time on their business.

Pete Senna: 13:04

And what I like about these types of systems is it forces us to communicate. You know the questions we ask these systems. You know the chat GPT's is. You and I could sit in front of a computer and, jim, you know how to use this stuff, I know how to use this stuff, but people listen to it, to the show right now. Garbage in equals garbage out.

Pete Senna: 13:21

Whether you're asking a human to do something or asking a computer to do something, the quality of our inputs dictates the quality of our outputs, and the quality of our outputs and our measurements dictates the quality of our outcomes. So I think that a lot of times, people are chasing this AI bullet, which is moving too fast. I think they have to just stop, pause and look at where they at in the journey and when do they want to go next, and it's that definition and documentation that I think creates the force multiplier for growth. And again, that's me just giving Context based on doing this for the past few years. The space is moving quickly and from the time you hit post in this on this interview, 100 new things will have cropped up in this AI space. So I just want to make sure that I focus on those principles.

Pete Senna: 14:07

Yeah not the sort of buzzy things, because they come and go like the wind.

Jim James: 14:12

Yeah, no, it's, it's really fatty too and I know, pete, we've only got 20 minutes of your time. I know you're busy and you have to scoot off sometimes soon, but it's possible, isn't it, to kind of automate your way out of business by, if you're like, depersonalizing the company so much that you lose your clients? Yes, right, so we've all experienced this with the bank bots and the mobile phone provider bots, where you, you know, in the end almost want to throw the phone. Tell us your view on sort of brand Experience and AI, because it does seem as though a lot of companies are in danger of sort of abdicating that final touch point To AI tools. What's your view, pete, on how an entrepreneur can amplify their personality and engage the customers and their team and still use the tools so not to be tired of the business?

Pete Senna: 15:08

Yeah.

Pete Senna: 15:09

So what I would say is, you know, personify, personalize and customize in that order, right.

Pete Senna: 15:15

So, first and foremost, we can use these tools to help our brand personify what is the voice and tone of the content that ultimately will reach somebody. Then we can personalize it directly to the needs and wants of that customer, no different than when you go on Amazon. You know, right now on Amazon I'm seeing a lot of baby stuff because I have a two year old right. But if I was seeing that stuff before I had a kid, I'd be very frustrated, right. So you know, again, you can personify what you want the brand to look like first. Second, personalize to the behaviors and actions. That's where marketing technology becomes really powerful for you in any aspect of your business, or CRM becomes really powerful in your business. The third thing is customize. What I mean by that specifically is there's a lot of steps in your customer experience and again I'm gonna speak broadly because we're talking to so many different business owners there's a lot of steps in your customer experience that people don't wanna deal with the human for right, like I just wanna know when is my delivery driver gonna show up with my product? Or I just wanna know when I'm gonna get something right, but there's opportunities for surprise and delight. That's where the human factors are really, really important, right? So when I walk into a high-end restaurant, yeah, I want the text telling me when my table's ready. But when my table's ready, I wanna be able to deal with a human who's gonna say hey, pete, really, really excited to have you tonight. Seize that you're celebrating a birthday with your significant other. We're gonna walk you to this specific table. The personalization component gets you to the can do en masse, but the human customization component, I think, is the most magic. So I think what's really important I think about the legendary startup startup kind of entrepreneur, paul Graham, right, really famous essay do things that don't scale. I actually have a shirt that says that. So what I would argue that people should do is all the things that can scale for a person scale those with technology, scale those with AI, but understand that there's certain parts in the journey. The only way you know the answers to that is by talking to your real customers, right? Actually, having human conversations to understand where do people need that human touch most and where do people not need that human touch. And I think that what's gonna happen now is the opportunity to scale. Those magical human moments is what's gonna make brands excel the most. A good example is take Chewy right. Chewy is a e-commerce brand where you buy pet food right.

Pete Senna: 17:34

One of the things that happened recently which is still getting press is a friend of mine lost a pet and their automated systems do a great job, and they were reordering pet food and dog food showed up their house like it normally would, but what Chewy didn't know and their system didn't know is that the pet had died. So now they got this big bag of pet food and my client was super emotional about that and she writes back to Chewy and a human sees that right. So a tech sees that the whatever they were using routed it to a human and a human apologized, said please don't worry about sending this back, just donate it if you feel comfortable, et cetera. And then a day later a flower arrangement showed up at their house and the flower arrangement had a handwritten note to the person and said so sorry about the loss of. They knew the pet's name because it was in their CRM. So sorry about the loss of. We apologize for this mistake and we're here if you need anything kind of thing. And that brand experience went from a terrible automated brand experience to they fixed it with a personal human experience. And now, as a result of it, when she goes on to get another dog and she's told me this right when she goes and gets her next dog, no mistake about it, she's only gonna order from Chewy because she's gonna remember that experience.

Pete Senna: 18:52

So what I always say to people is technology you should aim to automate whatever you can, but don't forget about those human moments that people are looking for, because no tool or technology can ever replace that human touch. So I hope that tracks for the audience. A real example just happened recently and it's a great example of a company that's masterfully using these tools and technologies but understands when humans should step in. And I wanna just add one more thing to that point here, jim, which is I think it's super important to understand that that customer service person would not have had the time to be able to go and do that custom flower arrangement if they didn't have all those AI technologies that were automating all the other things, because they just wouldn't have enough coverage. So I think what these AI tools do is they give us back time to think, time to process, time to create and time to connect, and that's why I'm super excited about how we can remain forward. Obsessed with these technologies is it's about creating space for the humanity, not replacing and removing the human.

Jim James: 19:54

No AI chatbot could have said what you said so beautifully and in such an articulate and insightful way. Pete Senna, if you want to find out more about you and the kind of work that you do, how can they come to you?

Pete Senna: 20:07

Yeah, so I'm pretty active on most of the social channels. If you like to read long words, I'm Pete Senna on Medium, where I read a lot of content. If you want to just kind of connect with me directly offline, it's just PeteSennacom and then you know. If you want to see the work that me and my team are doing at scale, you can check out digitalsurgeonscom, which is the brand transformation agency that I started 20 years ago. But again, any questions that people have, I'm happy to publish all of my wins and losses, and there's always more losses than wins when you come to innovation. You can't fail without failure, right, Sorry? You can't win without failure. So I hope that's been helpful for you in the audience and it's been great being on the show.

Jim James: 20:47

Pete, it has, and look. Thank you so much for joining me and my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs and, of course, I'll put Pete's details in the show notes. And it's Senna, just with the one N, in case you were wondering. Thank you for listening to this episode. Really interesting how you can use AI to write yourself out of the business, but that should free you up then to spend time with your lead actors in your business, who are really your clients. So thank you for joining Pete and I, and I hope you've enjoyed it. Please leave a review if you possibly can and, most importantly, share this with a fellow entrepreneur that you think would find it a view. So until we meet again, just encourage you to keep on communicating. Thanks for listening.