Episode 90 - Lucas Petty

Erik Martinez:Welcome to the Digital Velocity Podcast. I'm Erik Martinez and I'm thrilled to have Lucas Petty, the founder and CEO of Ai daddy on the show today to talk about integrating AI into your business. To accelerate growth and innovation, Lucas has spent the past three years helping businesses integrate AI into their marketing processes.

Lucas, welcome to the show.

Lucas Petty: Thank you for having me, Erik.

Erik Martinez: I am super excited to have you. I'd probably say that to all my guests, but I am actually very excited to talk about this topic because I see lots of companies that could utilize the types of services in the processes that you [00:01:00] are investigating. But before we jump in.

Do you mind telling us a little bit about yourself and how you got to this point?

Lucas Petty: Yeah. Absolutely. The short and dirty is AI killed my last business. Made it completely obsolete. It was just a little startup and I had invested maybe around 45, 50 grand into launching this subscription based business and then a friend gave me beta access to Chat GPT before it came out back in 22.

So in 21 I got access and I realized, holy guacamole my business is irrelevant. Because what I was selling, I had a massive library of all the SOPs, best practices, templates, guides, checklists, basically for launching startups and it was a subscription to this massive library. But when you have something like Chat GPT, being able to just ask it, "Hey, [00:02:00] make me a checklist", and it's completely tailored to what you want, what you need.

My genErik templates were thrown out the window even though they were gathered from industry experts, Chat, and a lot of tools like it now take those industry best practices into account when completely tailoring their responses and the things that they build.

And so I stayed up all night. I just couldn't sleep and I was freaking out. And then the next morning, I don't even know if I actually fell asleep that night or not, but I went to my team and I told them we're shutting down the business because I couldn't remain in an industry that I realized was gonna be obsolete in three to five years.

I could have stayed and made a little bit of money, but I realized fundamentally, the way we do our work is gonna change. And it was really difficult because that wasn't play money for me. That was everything I had saved up at the time. And [00:03:00] I told the team, sorry. We're gonna have to pivot. I threw away my ego and said, I need to learn this as fast as possible. How the hell do I do that? It's not just by reading it is by doing. It's by talking about it. It's by teaching it. And so I consumed every book, every podcast, every newsletter.

And I made tiktoks about it. You know why I made tiktoks? Because I didn't use social media and I didn't want my friends seeing me doing something embarrassing, and I thought, none of my friends use TikTok and yeah, within a month I had friends from Mexico, Brazil, from all over the us.

Basically, all my friends were like, "Hey, I saw your TikTok". But also within that month I ended up with 30,000 followers, and then within two or three months, I hit a hundred thousand followers. And it just kept snowballing from there. And, honestly, after that [00:04:00] first month when I hit 30,000, every other AI startup started reaching out for brand deals. And all of a sudden I got paid to learn.

I got paid to test out AI tools and before I knew it, I had investors knocking at my door not to invest in me, but to ask me, "Hey, what do you think about the AI note taking tool landscape? What do you think about the AI tools in this market and this place?"

And I got paid to do market research and along the way I was thinking to myself, What business am I going to build? Where am I gonna fall in the AI space? The reason I didn't decide to go for another tech startup and create my own custom AI or whatever it might be, is because throughout those months I saw hundreds and thousands of AI startups get launched.

But I [00:05:00] saw just as many disappear because the moment a Fortune 500 company acquired a small startup or released the new feature themselves. All the other startups were irrelevant because why the hell would I go to, so and so's tiny little AI website that I don't fully trust when all of a sudden Adobe now has AI editing features.

There's no competing and so I say all that because I went through this crazy journey and I saw how rapid the space was, and I recognized, what I love has always been education. What I love has always been more of the strategy, more of the high level thinking. And I very naturally ended up falling into AI strategy for companies.

I got obsessed with " Why the hell are people falling behind?" This is fundamentally changing the way we do everything and people are sleeping on it and they know that it's going to take jobs. People [00:06:00] know that it's gonna transform businesses, but they're not doing anything about it.

And I obsessed over it. I started AI change management, doing research and finding the best ways to adopt it. And eventually AI Daddy was created out of that passion, outta that curiosity and we went from exclusively building AI strategies for companies, identifying all their use cases and AI opportunities and tools that they can and should use to doing the implementation of those strategies. Built out a team. And now we're here. And now you think I know a little something and I got a little something to share and that's why we're having this great talk.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, that's quite the story. You know, interesting how you started a business trying to help business startups and then you end up killing that to start another business. Absolutely fascinating. Lucas [00:07:00] you've been doing this now for a few years, which in AI years is a lifetime at this point and there's not a lot of people doing what you do.

It's still a fairly small community, but it's interesting as I talk to other businesses and I look at what my clients are doing and I look at conferences I go to. I still feel like businesses are dabbling with AI. And what I mean by that is you and I've had this conversation before where companies are throwing money at AI, but they're putting it in the tech and not into the people.

And we were talking pre-show. Because there's somebody on the team Lucas is phenomenal with the AI tools. Erik, you're kind of mediocre, and we're gonna use Jane over here. Poor Jane, she doesn't know anything about AI. Right. And each team that I encounter is kind of structured like that.

There's not very many Lucas's. There's a few [00:08:00] more Eriks then there's a lot of Janes on the team. Even today as pervasive as AI is in our business conversations, we're just seeing that they're still dabbling and not systemically using the tool. So from your experience why is this still the case?

With this conversation being so pervasive, why aren't companies using AI more systemically?

Lucas Petty: Why the hell would I use a tool that I believe is going to replace me at my job? That's gonna take over my job. That's gonna take over the world as the freaking Terminator. And it's not actually true, it's what the media has shown us. Right? A sci-fi movie wouldn't have a plot if the technology was just useful.

It has to be scary. It has to be an evil robot. And because we had that general tone around AI technology prior to Chat GPT, the AI becoming [00:09:00] available to consumers rather than it's been around for decades, but it was only accessible to University Labs, Fortune 500 companies. Now it's available to everyone.

And there's this undertone in any conversation about AI. Not if it's going to replace me, but when. And if you don't address that a company won't succeed at their AI adoption no matter how much money they throw at AI technology.

Erik Martinez: So fundamentally, you're talking about fear, right? Fear of something. It's really interesting 'cause last week , Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon has actually come out and said, Hey, we see our workforce shrinking over the next few years. And you're seeing a handful of large enterprise CEOs come out and talk a little more openly about that there is gonna be some AI job loss.

I was listening to the Artificial Intelligence Show podcast [00:10:00] and last week they said there was a report that came out. A think tank had put themselves together and said, well, what kind of jobs will AI create? And it was fascinating because in any technological revolution, you have job winners and job losers.

You know when the computer came out, the person who is doing manual calculations no longer had to they evolved their skills to learn how to do word processing or work on spreadsheets or whatever that particular skillset needed. And I think we're going through that same period of change right now.

Where yeah, there are gonna be some job losses but there's also gonna be job gains in new industries created and new ways of doing things. And I'm actually really excited about it, but I can understand it is kind of terrifying. When you talk to your clients about this particular issue. What advice are you giving them?

I assume they're coming to you, Hey, we would like to integrate these tools into our business. So [00:11:00] they seem to be more open to it than some. What are you saying to folks who might be a little bit on the edge Hey, we'd like to, but we're not sure because our staff is concerned about X, Y, or Z.

Lucas Petty: I don't work with companies that want to use AI to get rid of people. That's what I tell them. And I say that because no one else is taking that stand. And I think it is protecting your team. Protecting your people is the most important thing you can do. Everything is relationships.

Every business. Everything I know. Everything. I have it's thanks to other people, right? A business doesn't if you don't have people building the thing, and if you don't have people buying the thing. I straight up refuse to work with people who jump on a sales call and they start the conversation saying, I got three VAs I want to get rid of them, can AI replace them?

And it's not like I tell them it's possible but me and my team aren't the right people to do it. 'cause that's [00:12:00] not what we care about. And I think it's short term thinking because lemme put it to you this way. If you had a business that's generating a million dollars and all of a sudden you decide to automate it completely and then you fire everyone, but the owner stays, what do you think is gonna happen?

Erik Martinez: I know what would happen in my case. I would implode. I would personally just burst into flame and be done. All joking aside, I think that my business would suffer long term because our business is a people business.

We work with those people in those companies and they want to know that it's not just Erik behind the scenes. That there's a group of people who are dedicated to their success. So I think you are right that the relationships are important, and if you don't have any relationships, while there are business models that could work in that scenario, I think over time your business does not succeed.

Lucas Petty: That's right, and it's not just that it doesn't succeed. Look at any process [00:13:00] you've ever built. Over time, everything in life breaks down. It just stops working. And by choosing to automate a process and then getting rid of the people is what you've chosen is to stagnate.

What you've chosen is to stop growing. Because in reality, the best thing that you can do when you integrate AI, when you start using AI automation, AI agents, all the fancy things you can do with AI is free up your people from the things that take them away from their zone of genius, their expertise, what they love doing .

No one knows or understands the business better than the people that work it day in and day out. And so if you free up their time, they can now spend that time designing and thinking and building a 5 million, a 10 million business, rather than getting stuck in the rat race of maintaining the 10 mil or the one mil.

So I just tell people to think of AI as a [00:14:00] tool. To just get rid of people and save some cash is the shortsighted because you can maintain the status quo, or in reality you make it worse. Or you could 10 x it, you could a hundred x it. The output of AI and humans working together is insane.

Erik Martinez: Yeah I totally agree. Kind of pivoting off of that a little bit, when you're working with your clients, you know, there's a lot of misconceptions about AI and what it means to implement it in a business, and one of the ones I'm seeing, I was telling you pre-show that we're running. A series of surveys in some companies right now just to see what their teams are doing and how they're using AI and what their hopes and concerns are. And one of the concerns that constantly comes up is the one that you just talked about.

We're afraid of what it might do to my job. The second one that keep coming up is ethical considerations and those are usually centered around creators and how they're being impacted [00:15:00] by the the current set of AI tools. When you're talking to your clients, what are the most common misconceptions and how do they get a company to go in the wrong direction or how do you help them overcome those objections and get them into the right direction?

Lucas Petty: I don't think it's so much that they have misconceptions as that they just don't have any. They lack knowledge of what AI is capable of doing because they lack the experience. They haven't played around, they haven't tested, they haven't explored enough to really understand what AI can offer.

And I wanna touch back on the first thing you said which was your number one kind of concern that you're hearing, which is people afraid of their jobs. You remind me that Mackenzie did a study and they estimate that a third of all workplace tasks are gonna be automated by 2030.

And I think that statistic misses a deeper truth. It's not just tasks [00:16:00] disappearing, it's roles being hollowed out from within and tasks being rebundled together into new roles. I don't think that it is jobs are disappearing as much as jobs are transforming.

Take your job, break it into its components, reading and summarizing documents. AI does that better. Writing proposals, AI can draft them in seconds. Making slides, AI can do that. Spotting patterns and spreadsheets or analyzing numbers and data. AI is amazing at analysis. But thinking clearly about what matters, that's still you knowing what to ask, what to prompt an AI What's important is still you convincing others, navigating politics, sensing context, being able to read the undertones or having the background experience. It's all still you.

And I think the issue that a lot of us struggle with is we've associated our identity, our [00:17:00] expertise, not just to our careers, but to the tasks that we've mastered, to very specific tasks. How do you make a nice spreadsheet? How do you send the perfect email. How do you, whatever. And now those little things that we get geeked out on and learned how to do really well are now being automated. And those were the things that made us feel like an expert. And that's why we feel threatened. That's why there's kind of this internal crisis that everyone's going through.

But I don't think jobs are disappearing. They're being hollowed out. And then the question becomes, what are you filling that space with? Right back to the, if you automate a million dollar business process, what are you doing with the time you've freed up for your team to build the next level, to get to the next place?

It's the same thing with our businesses. We're gonna get to a point where most of our jobs. And I know I'm getting a little sci-fi right now, but I [00:18:00] know people who work this way on a daily basis. So it's not just future talk, it's also present. I know people who go to work and they have army of AI agents that they've trained and specialized in and the things that they need to do for their role.

Like marketing people who have an AI agent that basically is trained on the company's brand guide, that's trained on how they write website copy, how they write LinkedIn content, all these things. And he doesn't write content anymore. And this is his choice. This is how he wanted his role to be transformed.

What he does is he prompts these hyper trained AI agents and he generates the things that he wants. And then using his expertise, his taste, his knowledge. He edits, refines, he then shares those outputs. But I mean, the guy is doing like a hundred x what I see in other companies.

[00:19:00] I remember, I don't know, this was maybe like three months ago. A creative director telling me, " I spent 20 years mastering my craft, learning all the skills, the software, all the layers". And then he watched a 21-year-old intern with Midjourney out produce his entire team in a single afternoon. He generated like all the merch designs, all these images, brand ideas, just by playing around with an AI. The difference there was that 21-year-old didn't have 20 years of ego.

Uh, attack And habits. Exactly. It's not just the ego, but it's 20 years of habit that he has to break. That 21-year-old got to create brand new habits from scratch 'cause he didn't have any work experience. But I would argue that creative director with the 20 years of experience, if he were to dive into AI without his ego kind of getting in the way, because they know what's good and what's bad and what's great and they know how to go about [00:20:00] creating it. They can prompt an AI 10 times better than an intern, than someone who doesn't have that experience.

So I don't say that story to tell you. Oh, be afraid of all the young people. I'm just saying if you got experience and you're not leveraging AI, you're doing yourself a disservice because you can use AI to create stuff far better than anyone else.

I remember having a writer friend. She's written over five books. She's an incredible author and she came to me after like months of me having introduced her to Chat GPT and other tools, she came to me and said, I tried Chat GPT and it is amazing. It's helping me with my math, with doing accounting and doing like math problems. And I go wait, what? What about writing?

And she told me, oh no I asked it. And it was really bad. I know better. I'm a professional writer this is what I do for a living. Why would I rely on Chat GPT? And I got into an argument with her almost trying to convince [00:21:00] her and telling her, it's because you have this experience that you're gonna be able to do the most amazing things when it comes to writing.

You just have to get past how to prompt. You haven't learned the basics. Just be curious, be creative, what you already know and love. She came back to me a week later and told me she was about to finish the book. She'd been stuck on for six months.

Erik Martinez: You know I have a story like that too. I was talking to a gentleman that was doing some basic prompt and Chat GPT training with him and his team. . And we were pre-planning the the training session. And he said he was writing a book and I go, Hey, have you ever used the voice app for Chat GPT on your phone?

He's like, no. I'm like, it's amazing. You can talk to it and it will ask intelligent questions. And next time I talk to him, he had done it. And he is I got three more chapters done It helped him do something that he wanted to do and start working on completing it a little bit quicker.

It's interesting going back to what you were [00:22:00] saying about, the intern out producing the team and the creative director. Kind of being locked into their habits or their ego or whatever those issues are. And I think you're absolutely right, like the experts are still experts and you used a word and I'm hearing come up in more and more conversations, taste. And I view taste as the equivalent of a viewpoint.

That creative director has a viewpoint on what is good. Part of it's experience, but part of it is also a positioning of how you want to approach the world. And the cool part with the AI tools as they exist today, you can take your own personal worldview and whether you're writing, you're doing analytics projects or things like that, you can impose your methodology or experience or worldview into your prompts to elicit amazing results.

But you used another word which was [00:23:00] training. And I think that has two different meanings today in this conversation. Training AI, but also training the individual. And you know, as we were talking pre-show, I think one of the concerning aspects of where we sit today, enterprises seem to be investing money in AI, but they're not necessarily investing it in their people to get better at using AI.

What are you seeing out there?

Lucas Petty: I'll tell you what the biggest companies in the world see, which you just reminded me. Boston Consulting Group. They're like a top four consulting company. They identified in a study of over 2000 companies across every industry, every size, 70% of AI challenges. Adopting AI or the challenges there came down to just people and processes.

And then rank number two was only 20% that was related to like tech. So it's kind of that 80 - 20 rule. And if you think about it, it makes sense. [00:24:00] People are the ones fighting it and the processes are, like 70% of challenges are people and process. But I always think of one of my favorite people Edward Deming. And he has a quote where he basically says, roughly 80, 85% of issues in our company are related to process, not people.

And I say that because we're basically applying the 80 - 20 rule to that. People in process to then go further into, oh no, the issues are about the process. Because a bad manager will badger a person to go, Hey, why aren't you doing this? Do better? So on and so on. Rather than recognizing, No, if I just give you the a checklist. If I just give you the process, if I just tell you this is exactly how to do things, if I communicate very clearly, like you won't have the same problems.

And I think what doesn't exist is clear processes, methods of adopting AI. And so [00:25:00] if you'll let me geek out on how we approach it. How we've seen team tends to have the best results, which is you just get your people in a room and you listen to them. You let them talk about their fears, their concerns. But more than anything, you get them not blaming each other.

The Japanese have this belief that people don't make mistakes. If there's a mistake in the business, it's the process' fault. And it's really healthy. Because it lets us stand by side and look at our processes, how we do things, and go. No, we're not failing because we're not capable, because we're not good enough. Because the process is set up for failure from the very beginning. Not necessarily, but there's things that are broken in our process that aren't serving us and are holding us back from how we should be communicating to the client. How we should be building things. How should we be handing things off between teams.

And when you get a team talking about those processes and then identifying their [00:26:00] pain points, those bottlenecks saying, oh, can AI help with this? Can AI automate this? I don't want to deal with this problem that I've been dealing with for months on end. I'm okay with delegating this to AI. All of a sudden we have a problem to solve and AI is now a solution.

This is like the big mistake I see. 80% or more companies want AI because they know they're falling behind. Because they know it has some massive capability and they tell their team, Hey, go explore. Go try a bunch of tools. And now we're all just messing around with tools for the sake of playing around, of exploring. But we're not solving problems. And that's why just going down tool rabbit holes doesn't result in clear ROI. Doesn't result in revenue lifts.

The industry average right now for marketing teams marketing agencies when they adopt AI successfully is a 50% increase in revenue [00:27:00] growth without hiring more staff.

Erik Martinez: That's massive.

Lucas Petty: It is insane. They're keeping the same team. They're adopting AI and they're solving problems. And I'll tell you off the top of my head, 'cause we've done a lot of research on this, that 50% comes from AI use cases around personalization in media, process automation, content generation, and then measuring data and gathering insights.

And so if I can kind of be a little more specific that is the biggest pillars and not just marketing. I see it across the board. Using AI for media budgeting, running outcome based media allocation real time having AI analyze how much you should be putting on your ads and where money should be going. I mean, that saves you and makes you a lot of money.

And then the second most powerful one. Well, actually this is the first one is AI process automation. Automating entire [00:28:00] workflows. Chat GPT can automated a task of writing a blog post if you ask it to write you something or you've automated doing research because it'll generate some research. AI automation or AI agents.

There's a lot of interchangeable terms for it, but AI automated workflows instead of just AI tasks is you'd have Chat GPT, not just write you that blog post. You'd have it also take that post and turn it into a TikTok, into a LinkedIn post into all these things, and at the same time. Run it by another AI that analyzes whether it's written as viral content or not, or whatever metrics you might use to say whether it passes your standards and it would go as far as automatically scheduling to post on all those platforms.

The way we use tools to like just automate tasks, is if you're still there and you haven't started having AI [00:29:00] automate workflows that's really what most of the companies that like, they're seeing 50% increase in revenue or a hundred, it literally comes from they're okay with handing work off to AI.

And if I could turn it to the listeners what they can do for themselves, I would tell them after this podcast, deconstruct your job into tasks. List every task. Estimate how many hours you spend identify what's generating genuine value versus just busy work. Then classify those tasks into three buckets.

Can AI do it entirely? Which you should delegate immediately to AI and stop doing it yourself. Can AI help significantly? Basically, you're augmented you're doing it together. You prompt the AI you have a back and forth, is kind of how most tasks are now done by teams that use AI and then. This is critical.

The third one is what tasks can only humans do? And these are the [00:30:00] ones that you should be doubling down on, and those are the ones that are usually about relationships and people.

Erik Martinez: That's great advice. Because I think that's the hard part, right? Many of us have processes and many of us don't have those processes written down in any way, shape, or form, which means that we haven't broken them down even if we have my version of that process and your version of that process, if it's not written down, are probably two different things.

Two different recipes for doing the same thing. And I can tell you from my own team's experience, when we have those different recipes and people doing the same jobs and performing the same roles, we get inconsistent results. When you get inconsistent results, clients get unhappy because they're getting inconsistent results and so on and so forth.

So I think what you're saying is really very smart. We should all take some time and break down our processes and classify them into those logical [00:31:00] buckets.

Lucas Petty: Most people start with tools, AI tools, and then they try to build a strategy of how they're gonna use AI. But you can't really build a strategy if you don't know what's possible of what AI can do. And so they're fighting against the current, they're fighting against this natural flow.

That's why I keep saying this is the process we follow. We start with people first. We have them look at their processes, and then you can build a strategy around AI. Because you should be looking at AI as a tool to solve those problems that your people identified and that they need help with.

If you go out and once you have those tools, now you can start going to the next level where it's like all the big players are at, which is using AI automation to delegate even more and more. So people process then strategy, then tools and automation not the other way around of starting with tools and then having to force AI down people's throats. It is just [00:32:00] change management.

Erik Martinez: It really is fundamentally

Lucas Petty: Just change management

Erik Martinez: Yeah

Lucas Petty: That's my pro tip for the day. If you wanna learn how to adopt AI , ask Chat GPT about change management.

Erik Martinez: Chat GPT about. You can Google it too, 'cause Google will give you a good response on that. I think that's excellent.

Let's change topics for a moment because I think one of the things that's coming up with the integration of AI and AI tools. Ethical considerations, all that.

Again we're interviewing companies and we're asking them questions like, What type of governance do you have inside your company? What type of policies are surrounding? And I can tell you right now what we're finding and confirmed by other people's research as well, is that not very many companies today are very far along in figuring out what their policies are.

So what's your advice as we start to incorporate these tools into our processes? What's your [00:33:00] advice to companies in terms of types of policies, what types of governance do they need to make sure that they're staying within some bound, whatever that is.

Lucas Petty: If your AI policy is longer than one or two pages, you're screwed. And I only say that because we used to do a lot of AI policy building. We have a lot of templates around them that we'll share with employees. But honestly. What we found out in the field is even if a company buys, you know, Microsoft copilot for the whole organization and everyone's just supposed to use it and they restrict it on their laptops, like the work computers and all this stuff.

It doesn't change the fact that everyone's gateway drug into the AI world was Chat GPT. And everyone that's in the AI space or exploring with it has all sorts of tools that they've experimented with that they now like and they're gonna use regardless of what your policy [00:34:00] says.

And this is we used to be very adamant around creating AI policies. We don't even bring up creating AI policies unless they mention that they want it. And all I can tell you is the best thing you could do for your company's security privacy around AI is literally just do an all hands meeting and pull up Chat GPT, pull up the AI tools that you're using or that you're allowing for the company and in live.

Tell everyone, you all have to do this. Follow along. Go to Chat GPT, press your little face and click settings and then click data controls, and then click another button that says, don't train AI on my data, aka, keep my information private and don't share it. And that's three to five clicks on any AI tool, on any platform to make sure that what you're using AI for stays private.

But no one does that. And by default, [00:35:00] every AI tool has train AI on my data. Go for it. You're free to do this is why in the early days. Back in 2022- 2023, Samsung had millions of dollars of their IP made public because their team was all using Chat GPT and some other competitor was asking Chat GPT about Samsung and how they do things and they uncovered, "Holy shit." I just got their playbook.

I just got everything that they're doing. My only advice is as a team, decide what needs to be protected at all costs. And then you train your team regularly saying, we do not put in our client's names into any AI that we use. Always just make it John Doe or whatever, and you manually edit it afterwards.

You're already saving hours on the work. Don't be lazy with literally typing in a name, for example. Little things like that you have to decide [00:36:00] for yourself. But just decide what are you gonna protect at all costs. And then just please show, don't tell. Show your team how to turn on the security for themselves and their own tools.

Not just for the one that you've shared for the company. They're all gonna use other tools regardless. So it's better if you just make sure that they're being safe.

Erik Martinez: I think that's excellent advice.

Lucas Petty: 'Cause we've tried everything and the security piece, like that's the only thing that matters at the end of the day.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. I totally agree. Running out of time here, but I would like to ask you one more question. As you look to the future. What could a small or a mid-size enterprise, what should they do in the next six to 12 months to start generating more growth in innovation by integrating AI into their processes? What's the first thing that they should do? I mean, you gave some very clear tips, but are there any additional things that they should do right now

Lucas Petty: Reach out to [00:37:00] Lucas at AI Daddy. I'm just kidding.

Erik Martinez: And here's the commercial folks.

No, I mean, honestly, that's part of the process, right? Is reach out to an expert and get some help.

Lucas Petty: It is. But I want to give clear value right now. I would put AI use cases into two buckets. You have horizontal use cases and you have vertical use cases. I would start off, if you haven't, with the horizontal use cases and AI tools. And the examples here is get yourself an AI chat bot like Chat GPT, Gemini Philanthropic cloud, whatever it might be.

So that's a general purpose horizontal use case, AI tools that everyone across the organization can use regardless of their job, right? We all need an AI for research, for note taking and b asically general purpose chat bot for what we're doing. And so that note taker you can follow [00:38:00] up after a meeting, so our communication as a whole team levels up.

The way you follow up, the way you do things. It is incredible that you could have a AI sit in a meeting and not after the meeting, during the meeting, you can ask it questions about what people are talking about and it can generate ideas or it can summarize what's going on. And after the meeting you can say, Hey, write me an email follow up, and boom, here's all the next steps.

The AI researcher is because everyone needs to research. And right now tools like perplexity, geminis I mean, hell even Chat GPT just released new deep research models. They can do the research. That's like PhD level research. It is crazy how incredible that research is. So if you don't have a tool that's a general purpose chat bot, a researcher and a AI note taker, I think you're doing yourself and your company a disservice.

Those three things [00:39:00] will level you up massively. And once you have those basic horizontal use cases, go into the vertical use cases. And these are AI opportunities, tools for specific functions or departments.

These are the ones that are actually lead to generating revenue, like really clear ROI. This is AI opportunities for marketing, sales, customer service, operations. You get the idea. You can have AI doing supply risk assessments, sales analysis, like doing research on all your leads before you get into a call.

I get into calls and I have an AI that has already done all the research that I need on the company, and I've qualified before you even get on the call. And I trust the quality of the research that my AI does, but I'm still going to qualify regardless because it's part of building the relationship. And it's part of you saying what matters to you and what you need. Because I [00:40:00] can't convince you of doing anything you don't want, right?

But there's so many use cases you can have RFP generators demand forecasting, support, assistance. Each department, each function, and your operations, and those are the ones that are gonna have the biggest impact.

So if you haven't integrated those horizontal AI tools, use cases that affect the whole organization that anyone can use, like a Swiss Army knife. Start there. If you've already gotten those basics down and you're ready for identifying those vertical use cases that are much harder.

And this is kind of where I said before, people struggle to build around AI for their companies because they don't know what AI is capable of. That's the part that I can help with. That's the part that any expert hopefully that you'd reach out to that Erik, that you've been diving down and learning and doing as well.

Erik's a great place to start with. So determine which one of those two buckets you're at and then start from there.

Erik Martinez: [00:41:00] I think that's awesome advice. We are just about out of time. Lucas, thank you so much for all this amazing information. 'cause I think you've given some very practical, tangible things that people can do today to start changing how they view AI, how they can start thinking about integrating it into their businesses.

And it's not a overnight thing. It takes time and planning. And consistency to get these things put into place. Lucas if somebody wants to reach out to you what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Lucas Petty: They can email me directly atLucas@aidaddy.com. They can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Lucas Petty. They can just go to ai daddy.com and reach out through there. Happy to answer any questions. Happy to geek out on this 'cause this is what I love. This is what I care about and I can share AI policy templates that we build. I can share use cases and other things.

I will make [00:42:00] the promise on this podcast that I won't sell you anything. If we jump on a call and if we just talk, because I know how important it is to just understand what's possible before making any decision, before moving forward with something so new and unfamiliar.

And to me, my biggest ask to your listeners is don't postpone. AI is moving at a pace. Me and Erik were talking about this before we started recording this podcast. I tell everyone every three months, you should be looking at every tool that you're using as if you just got it for the first time and explore everything because AI is moving so fast.

It's rapidly changing. The capabilities are getting better and better. AI used to be horrible at generating hands, and now we can't tell when we see an AI video, whether it's real or not. And that was over the span of three years. So don't postpone. Act now. Talk to your team. See what's important to you.

Ask them what their problems [00:43:00] are. Look at your processes. Reach out to an expert if you get stuck. But just start with conversations and it's a big deal, but don't make it a big deal. It's baby steps. It's one thing at a time, one relationship at a time, one tool at a time.

Erik Martinez: That's awesome. Well, thanks again for coming on the show and sharing. Some great insights and your experience and it was a lot of fun to talk about this particular topic. ' Cause I think it's hugely important for the audience and the world to kind of get behind. These tools are here. This is here. It's not going away. How do we start embracing it in a proactive way? So thank you for all that advice.

Well, that's it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Thank you for taking time to listen and have a great day.

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