Episode 108 - Wes Lemos

Erik Martinez: A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about a problem I was having. I was just copy and pasting transcripts into Notebook LM from client calls. Takes just a few minutes in the moment, but then I don't do it right after the call because I'm on the next call and then the next and what should take only a couple minutes takes more than an hour because I let days of transcripts pile up. That friend said something to me that stopped me. He said, what if he just built something that solved those problems for you every time. That's what today's conversation is about.

Erik Martinez: My guest is Wes Lemos, CEO, and founder of Roll Digital, [00:01:00] TIV AI and Vibe Scribe. Wes has been building tools with AI and what he's built and how he thinks about building is gonna change how you think about what you're doing with these tools. Wes, welcome to the show.

Wes Lemos: Hey, I appreciate it. It's fun to be here. Thank you, Erik.

Erik Martinez: I'm excited about this conversation. One of the things I've learned about you in our handful of conversations is that you are, idea a second guy, and I love that. And I think the audience will have some fun learning a little bit about what you do and some of the things that you're building and, your perspective on AI.

Erik Martinez: But before we jump into all of that, Wes, can you just give us a brief synopsis of who you are and what you do?

Wes Lemos: I appreciate that. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here. Hopefully it'll be fun for the people that are listening. There's a lot of things I'm inspired by what's going on with the changes in technology just in the last, years, six months, two months, every week I feel like there's like new things that we can be doing that we couldn't be doing even two weeks prior.

Wes Lemos: My background has always been tinkering with technology. Like this goes far [00:02:00] back. I feel like the entrepreneurial gene starts young, and you can see it in people from a young age. I have four kids and I see one of them has this entrepreneurial gene to 'em more than the other three.

Wes Lemos: In third grade, the kid's already making like three, $4,000 just selling things to his friends here and there, bringing backpacks with kind of what's needed. Kind of figuring out ways to make his backpack into a cooler because his friends wanted things that were kind of cold. It's pretty clever. But myself, same thing.

Wes Lemos: You know, little kid did the things in, high school, had like a little video production company that wasn't all that successful. Then in college I started a company, without any money. I didn't even own a computer back at the time, but I love technology and I was hopeful one day to be able to buy a computer.

Wes Lemos: I'd go to the library, built my first website that was, about stock investments of all things.

Wes Lemos: So, I started a website called Stock of the Month, and then I started another company called Stock of the Week and then Stock Exposure and then a bunch of co websites in the space. And about six months into it all, a couple companies approached me, say, Hey, you're getting lots of traffic.

Wes Lemos: Would you be able to promote our company somewhere on your [00:03:00] website too? They paid me in stock. I think they paid me 200,000 shares and their stock was like pennies. But, within a few weeks of working with them, their stock went to $16.

Erik Martinez: Wow.

Wes Lemos: Yeah, it's like I wasn't quite ready for that, but it's still, it was kind of a fun way to kind of jump into the big, leagues.

Wes Lemos: And that kind of started me in this kind of genesis of, of just always being a self, bootstrapped entrepreneur. I've only done that pretty much my whole life. And it's been a journey. I wish I could say it's all, like every company's bigger and better than the last one. Absolutely not.

Wes Lemos: Many of them have, gone flat, have gone down. But, you get this resilience that you're not too worried about you know, starting the next chapter is not that scary. And that's also something I'd love to like inspire listeners here too.

Wes Lemos: If you have an idea, just kind of going with it. You can't go wrong. 'Cause even if it doesn't go anywhere, what you learn from it is invaluable. And the friends you build along the way and all these other assets you get, even if you don't financially end up ahead. You have these lessons that are, priceless at the end.

Wes Lemos: So, that was the [00:04:00] beginning and then here I am today. I own a web design development company. A marketing SaaS platform. Those are my big two. And then I have lots of side projects that I'm still trying to turn into big things as well.

Erik Martinez: Well, based on our conversations, you have a lot of side projects.

Wes Lemos: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: And they're all fascinating and very interesting. Maybe we'll get into some of that. So, you know, when we talked a couple weeks ago, you said something that really kind of stuck with me. You said, one person with AI could do more work than a whole team can. We hear this stuff in the news, but I think for the vast majority of people, it's still kind of a far away concept. Like it's still really, really new. And if you look at the statistics on adoption and AI adoption. Hey, lots of people are aware of AI, but they don't really understand the capability.

Erik Martinez: So, would you provide, an example, what could a small business owner do to kind of start taking advantage of this technology and [00:05:00] do that extra work with a small team.

Wes Lemos: It's definitely a case by case basis, right? Even though I'm on this show trying to talk to people about what to do. I'm still learning just as much as everybody else. And we're on this kind of journey together to figure out like, this is new technology that hasn't been available to any of us.

Wes Lemos: And now we get to figure out what to do with it. A lot of the buzzwords, I'm not a buzzwords guy. 'Cause as a bootstrapped entrepreneur, it doesn't matter your title. Either, you're making things that are productive or you're not. If you're called the Chief Experience Officer, the Chief Operations Officer, the VP of Sales, it's all the above and you just gotta get it done, you know?

Wes Lemos: So, buzzwords don't really like matter to me, but there are some words that have been buzzy for a while that are making more sense to me today. Like the agentic version of what AI can do. That one now, just in the last two, three months, I feel like that's been an unlock. I've been building stuff with AI for a while.

Wes Lemos: But once you understand that it actually really is smart, and different people have different opinions on this stuff. But, the way that I've been building even in the last two months has [00:06:00] shifted for me to where I keep it enveloped in the canvas of inside of the Claude Code or the Codex kind of modality where it has all the tools to make the decisions, to make the choices of its own.

Wes Lemos: And instead of giving it like specific instructions that are narrow. You give it a wide parameter for what it can do. Like, even for the show, I asked it, you know, gimme a briefing about what you think I need to know for the show. What you can prepare me for, for the show. And I do this all through my messaging app, right?

Wes Lemos: And the messaging app kind of gave me like this big rundown of all the points, lots of points about you in there too. And then it said, here's some things that I should highlight. And then it even gave me an audio file that I could listen to prior to getting onto this with you.

Wes Lemos: I did it all, from a generic prompt. It's not like there's a template for how to do this. And so every time I get on a call, the AI can kind of, okay, Wes, I know you , I kind of understand what you're good at. You're talking to this type of person. Let me do this for you. Maybe next time it'll flush out when it makes a decision, I'll go, like, I made a little website for you that kind of [00:07:00] explains what you should be doing for this call.

Wes Lemos: And for the next one here, I actually called two of your friends to tell them that you're gonna be on the call so they can be ready, you know, for this information too. So it has the ability to kind of act agenetically, like an agent, like a person. They can do more. And just 2, 3, 4 months ago, I don't really feel like that was, maybe it was possible, but people weren't using it like that.

Wes Lemos: I don't think it was capable of doing a good job. Even if you would've tried, it wouldn't have been nearly as good. And today, it's moving that space. All right. if I don't answer a question Correct.

Erik Martinez: No, there is no right answer to this. 'Cause I think, what you're talking about, like we were talking pre-show. You know, the idea that this technology is geometrically getting better.

Wes Lemos: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: It's not a straight line. It is geometrically getting better. And I can tell you just in the last year, what I could do on March 18th, 2025 versus what I can do on March 18th, 2026, wildly different.

Wes Lemos: Wildly different.

Erik Martinez: And I still feel like, you [00:08:00] said it right, like we're all on this journey learning this stuff. It's changing every single day. The capabilities are changing every day. And, the whole agentic thing is a buzzy word, but, it is starting to do things. And I listen to a fair number of shows to try to keep myself up to speed on what's going on with the big LLMs and what's going on, on the fringes and things like that.

Erik Martinez: And I think there's a lot of differing opinions on what agentic means. For me, it could be a simple agent that just does something well for you,

Wes Lemos: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: Makes your life a little bit easier.

Erik Martinez: And what you're starting to talk about is some of the autonomous agents that can do things for you even almost before you ask.

Wes Lemos: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: And that's cool. And scary to a certain extent. I mean, we're seeing this kind of play out in the news right now, right? With the war and Iran. There's a whole discussion about this and we're not gonna dive down that particular rabbit hole. But I think for me, in the last 12 months, the capabilities of these tools. 'Cause I remember sitting at my desk in February [00:09:00] of 2025 when chat GPT first released the code interpreter.

Wes Lemos: Oh wow, yeah.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. That was only a year ago. And I'm like, how do I use the code interpreter to, work with my Excel files and within a couple months, you're working with your Excel files. And now chat GPT just released their, Excel plugin last week.

Erik Martinez: Claude has had their Excel plugin for a few weeks and it is crazy good. I put those things in there and things that used to take me 30 minutes, now take me two . And that's honestly just setting up the prompt to say, this is what I want done. That's it. It's really freaking cool. I think the challenge right now is for a lot of people.

Erik Martinez: One, there's not a whole lot of education around what AI is actually capable of and how it can help. I think there's a lot of focus on the negative side of AI and there are some negative sides of AI. I think there's legitimate concerns about environment and power consumption and how that impacts our society and, people [00:10:00] using it as a therapist and whether that's a good thing or not.

Erik Martinez: I'm not gonna go there from an opinion standpoint, but those are all real concerns.

Erik Martinez: And yet I think some of it is just simple lack of understanding of these things have vast capabilities. And, it's almost overwhelming. If you're a business owner and you're like, okay, if I were just to start today, and I ask almost every guest this. If I were to start today, what one thing should I think about using AI in the next 30 days? What's one thing that would be super valuable to me as a business owner?

Wes Lemos: Yeah, these conversations are important and I think we all should be having them a little bit more because it really is whether we want to or not, it's reshaping the landscape of how business is done. Whether you're either side of the equation, you're for it or against it.

Wes Lemos: The truth is, it's not going back. It's not gonna be the same as it was. It's gonna be impacting all aspects of so many different industries. What you're saying all makes sense. I'm glad we're here, we're talking about that. I wanna lead people with as many nuggets as I can to make their lives, better [00:11:00] and, and be able to maybe take a step in the right direction, moving towards things.

Wes Lemos: The buzzword all these big LMS are working towards is a AGI, right? The Artificial General Intelligence. We're trying to build not just a computer that's good at chess, not just a computer that's good at like understanding, atoms and structures of like small things.

Wes Lemos: But this is like almost anything you throw at it, it's good at. I personally am a big fan of Anthropics, Claude, their Opus 4.6 right now. That's my favorite go-to. I have multiple max subscription plans in there. What I would challenge people to do though is, you know, it'll eventually click where you kinda say like, wow, this can do more than I expected it to.

Wes Lemos: And you have to put it to the test. Let's say, small things like I, needed to, for my accountant, download a whole bunch of like all my bank documents. Now that's a common thing that I do at the beginning of the year. I go through last year and I take 'em all and I zip 'em up and I send 'em to my accountant.

Wes Lemos: But, I still did the same thing. Accountant has 'em all. But before I did that, since I had this nice little folder with all this stuff already there, I go like, you know what? I'm gonna go to Claude Cowork, which it's easy thing to download. it's [00:12:00] nicer than the CLI for people that are a little scared.

Wes Lemos: It's kinda like a stepping stool to kind of get into the deeper things you can do with AI. Just drop that folder in there and go like, what can you tell me about what's going on with my finances here? And it found subscriptions that I don't need. It found prices that I, beginning the year that I was paying like $800 a month and it creeped up to $1,200 a month in certain kind of areas that I'm paying for things.

Wes Lemos: Ask really good questions, and then it kind of created a whole little chart of expenses.

Wes Lemos: And I did way more than I expected it to just in one drop. And you're like, whoa, okay, I didn't expect to get all this knowledge out of it. And that might spark for me asking questions that I didn't even think before I threw that in there. And that's kind of the fun thing.

Wes Lemos: If it only does what you know, then that's only so good. But if it can start unlocking you to do things you didn't even know that you didn't know. That's the brilliance of what it can pull off. And it can. There's a second grade teacher that she asked me a while ago. She knew that I was really big into like AI stuff, right?

Wes Lemos: And she kind of said, Hey, I'm trying to build this little project, and I have this vision one day to make a [00:13:00] website, and I'm not too sure what to do with it. And I go tell me a little bit about it. And she gave me a little blurb and then I just gave it to Claude. And I have seven servers right now that are all running, you know, with Claude on it.

Wes Lemos: And it had built a really good kind of beginnings of a website. Picked a domain for her, picked branding for it and called it a name. And she was like, I love this, Wes, this is amazing. So I took my agentic AI system, which is Claude. I turned it into just one little channel where she can communicate with it via Telegram.

Wes Lemos: And she's been, gosh, the last week I think that there's over 800 back and forth conversations she's having to continuously update her website with like more and more stuff. You know, there's like interactive elements. There's, I don't know how many pages at this point, I've kind of stepped away from paying attention to it.

Wes Lemos: But she's actually called PTO from school two or three days because she's just addicted to seeing how fast, and how quick this thing has continued to build this huge project that she had. But, that's just one thing you can do with it. You can have it building a website, easy. Managing finances, easy.

Wes Lemos: Okay, I wanted to track my fitness goals, you know, [00:14:00] boom, you can throw it towards that. I wanted to track activities that I do with my kids. You can start doing that too. I wanted to, recommend a little bit more things in my social life, fun activities that I haven't done that I could check out.

Wes Lemos: Make suggestion every day. You know,I'd like to do something new every day from like 5:00 PM till 10:00 PM. You can build apps. I built iPhone apps, IOS apps, Linux apps, set up brand new servers. Once you kind of unlock this idea that it doesn't have limits. It's so smart in almost any area that you throw at it. It starts allowing you to think of things in new ways.

Wes Lemos: One example, like the Jets pizza thing. I probably shouldn't use there, but now it's out there already.

Erik Martinez: Now we're out there.

Wes Lemos: Yeah, now we're out there. It's okay. So, this is a middle project that I still haven't really landed the full proposal yet. But, I had heard that this pizza company, it's a pretty significantly sized pizza company, was always struggling to have somebody at each one of their locations answering phones, taking orders. You know, being there, during their availability. And so, I knew a thing or two about using, voice AI agents to be able to answer phones, take calls, inbound outbound [00:15:00] calls. And I kind of thought like, okay, maybe, they're having a meeting with their organization tomorrow.

Wes Lemos: Let's see if I can build an MVP for a better prototype for taking calls for them.

Wes Lemos: And so right now it's a system where

Wes Lemos: One, you can just use regular phone lines to talk, and then you can use audio from your computer to talk you know, more like a Zoom call. We're actually not using telephone technology.

Wes Lemos: We're using internet technology. So, we have both those modalities where people can do this. And each person has their own access to their individual agent that's helping them make their order. So you could be talking about gluten-free options. I could be talking about, the calzones that are on the menu and somebody else could be talking about, what desserts and drinks are there.

Wes Lemos: And we're all combining our order into one order that's being ordered. And it'll say like, oh, Erik looks like you just added, two more items to the order. Your total now is da, da, da. I've never even seen something like that before.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, that's incredible. However, I'm gonna reel this back in because I think that's 10 levels beyond what most people think but I think the important part of that whole conversation for me was, you can do a [00:16:00] lot. Your imagination is the only limit to what you can do with AI tools.

Erik Martinez: I mean, I think that's what you just told us. But, you know,I'm really new to this Wes, and I don't know where to start. I think you gave a great example. Pull all your bank statements and run an analysis for the last year as you're prepping your taxes. That's a great simple use case for a business, right?

Erik Martinez: Because we all have those subscriptions. I mean, you mentioned it, right? We've got subscriptions that we don't use or we're not quite sure if the team's using. We've got, money going over here and money coming in from over here and are we making sense of that? And being able to answer those questions and make sure we have some clarity is a really good example.

Erik Martinez: If we were picking a workflow for a small business owner to start with and just say, okay, maybe let's take it out of the realm of accounting and let's put it in the realm of marketing.

Erik Martinez: What would that workflow be and what do people need to think about in terms of Hey, this is [00:17:00] what I need for an input. This is what I need to make sure I feel comfortable. 'cause I think part of this is, right now, part of this educational gap that I was talking about is just feeling comfortable using the technology.

Wes Lemos: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: Hey, I heard in the news that it can go off the rails and do all these things, but I haven't experienced that.

Erik Martinez: So, if we were to pick a marketing workflow and maybe building a website's a good example of one. It could be something else. What do we include? What types of things should we be thinking about in terms of making ourselves comfortable that it's working the way we want?

Wes Lemos: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: And then, what is something meaty enough that somebody could, if they wanted to dedicate a few hours to this, what could they accomplish in the next couple of weeks?

Erik Martinez: I know that was like five questions all packed in the one.

Wes Lemos: But I see where you're going with it.

Wes Lemos: The heart of what you're asking for is really good though. I see that even the care and how you're asking in a way that really can help. 'Cause there's a big part of the audience that's kind of still stuck on, like, they understand that [00:18:00] it's out there. They're seeing the news, but they're not knowing what actions to take in that space.

Wes Lemos: My favorite two right now are chat GPT has a thing called Codex, and Claude has a thing called Cowork. Both of them, before they launch these products, they have this thing called, it's in the terminal.

Wes Lemos: It's Codex CLI or Claude CLI. And that's Command Line Interface is what it stands for. That's what I love. Like I have 20 screens right now open on my computer that are doing 20 different projects and I can jump in and tell each one what to do and it does something next.

Wes Lemos: Right now for a while, that's how I anticipate my interaction with AI to be. I don't go to chat gpt.com, I don't go to these place anymore. I just am using these terminal interfaces. Codex and Cowork, they both kind of do the same thing, but they make it a little bit nicer for people that aren't used to seeing the, the terminal screen with a flashing, prompt and you can't use your mouse in there.

Wes Lemos: A lot of commands don't work in terminal, but I'm lucky that I started using computers back in the MS dos days and then the early Linux days. So I'm used to using a normal screen, so it didn't scare me at all when I saw that, that's how I had to [00:19:00] interact with it.

Wes Lemos: You mentioned, Vibe Scribe is one of my products. It's vibescribe.me. But, whisper flow is, you know, a much more established product that's in the same space. That's what I built my product to kind of meter and clone theirs. When I talk to AI, I talk to it just like I'm talking to you.

Wes Lemos: I just talk to it like probably like the smartest, coolest person that kind of has a general understanding of things. And I'll hit record on my computer, on my little vibe scribe button It'll record me saying something for a while like, Hey, you know, I have all these clients and I'm doing these five things for them and I'd love to see if I can upsell something else to them, but I don't know.

Wes Lemos: And this is my business and this is what I do. And just talk to it for a while. And you drop it in there and then you see what it says to you, and it's gonna start being your brainstorm partner on these things. And it goes well, this is a great idea. I've identified five things, you know. But the more information you throw into it, the more that it's gonna be able to actually give you better answers.

Wes Lemos: So I would throw in documents and long form talk to it. It's not prompt engineering anymore. It's brain dumping is [00:20:00] what I really feel like is the way to

Wes Lemos: go nowadays Don't worry about say, have this perfectly prompted engineer with the right adjectives and something in there.

Wes Lemos: But, I've always been a verbal processor. I mean, even when there's nobody else in my house, you know, if I'm thinking about something, I'm talking out loud about it. I feel like that's also kind of a win in today's technology because that's how I interact with my AI systems. I just sit and I talk to it, Hey, you know, I need something quick for my next meeting.

Wes Lemos: I don't know what to do. I wanna give 'em something. You know my business well enough, what do you think I can do? So I click on the button so it records it, it turns it into like a nice text format for me, and then I drop that text into my, systems. And then it just usually spits out something pretty good. I also would tell people, what I've seen struggles often when people try to start using AI is that maybe you have like one legitimately big problem that's weighing on you today. Like a buddy of mine, you know, he had a client that he had to do a little branding documents for them.

Wes Lemos: And it was a big client and he was struggling kind of to know how to give a good presentation, good pitch, very valuable client to [00:21:00] him. And he hadn't used AI hardly at all up until this point. And he goes, I need to solve for this problem right now. And, it's like building a skyscraper when you haven't even really learned how to use the tools too much.

Wes Lemos: You throw that in there, it's gonna spit out something that's not quite perfect. It's gonna create disappointment. And what you want to create with yourself with AI is this kind of like a dopamine adrenaline growth thing. That's how you learn. Out of my, probably my first a hundred things I built with AI, probably half of them were little silly games.

Wes Lemos: It's so silly to say that, but I would say that's a valuable lesson for all of the people out here too. Build something simple. Do you like Tetris? Do you like chess? Do you like checkers? Do you like Pacman? Ask it to build a Checkers game for you that you can play on your local machine. I know there's no point, there's no financial reward for that, but you'll see it build and then you kinda like, oh, you know what, it's bread and blue, but I like the colors green and purple.

Wes Lemos: And I like 'em to have some shadowing, make it a little bit more 3D elements. Maybe have it have an AI that I'm playing against instead of just another human. And you get in this kind of idea oh wow, I, the more I ask for it, the more it gives me.

Wes Lemos: Then you move on to, you ask for something else.

Wes Lemos: But it [00:22:00] just shows the capacity of the AI and what it's doing in the process is it's allowing me to learn what it's capable of doing. You know, if they can do this, oh my goodness, actually, you know, I can have it do this other thing that I've always wanted it to do.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. So, I think what I got out of that was find something that you're passionate about and do some experiments on that. Ask it questions. Give it some information . I have a friend, she's into genealogy as a hobbyist. She's really into it. And she's like, I don't like AI. I don't trust AI, da da da da. And we started doing this, little weekly kind of semi informal, training session together. And I'm just like, okay, let's talk about the genealogy stuff. What do you need to know? How do you verify your sources? And she started thinking about it and I'm like, okay, now let's like start spitting that into, information that we can process.

Erik Martinez: And then she started doing it and she's like, yeah, I'm starting to surface some things that I didn't know about genealogy or finding [00:23:00] this type of record in this country. It was really, really interesting. And she's definitely on the skeptical side, but she's slowly coming along going, yeah, this stuff is capable.

Erik Martinez: I had another, conversation with a friend a week or so ago, and, I did a training for the speaking group that I'm part of. And I showed them, Hey, here's some ways you can use AI to help build your speeches. Not to write your speeches, but to help you build the speech, right?

Erik Martinez: The outlines, the stories, all the stuff. And I had something like, 15 prompts and I gave them just to show them some ways to use this.

Erik Martinez: He said, you know what, Erik? I started using that and I tell you what, in the last two weeks I have used Claude and chat GPT more than I have the entire time previous to this.

Erik Martinez: And it's because you showed me some of the capabilities and now I'm experiencing them. And I think that's, what you are trying to say [00:24:00] is, Hey, just spend a little time, do some experiments, try some stuff.

Wes Lemos: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: And it doesn't always have to be a work oriented thing. It could be a personal thing that you're just passionate about.

Erik Martinez: I think that's fantastic advice. I think one of the things that I'm seeing not only is there like some fear or apprehension about what we are personally doing. And I've been working at this now for a year and a half and I've seen my capabilities grow. I listen to what you're doing, I'm like, man, I have a long ways to catch up to what Wes is doing.

Erik Martinez: But then, you also have a team of people and you run multiple companies. And what I've seen in looking at teams is they want to do good work. They want to help their organizations. They want to help themselves do better work. But there's this fear and that fear ranges from a variety of places, right?

Erik Martinez: We talked a little bit about there's some ethical concerns and, environmental concerns and I think those are real. And I don't think [00:25:00] anybody should discount those things 'cause they are real. The number one thing that I hear across, regardless of who the people are, whether they're An AI enthusiast or they're the beginner, or they're a little bit of skeptical, is time.

Erik Martinez: We still have to do our job and then we throw AI into the mix. For a little while it feels like it's an extra job. When you started implementing some of this stuff and starting to push your team to adopt AI within their organization, how did you guys go about doing that? What types of things did you tell them? Did you just show them things? What types of things helped start moving the needle?

Wes Lemos: It's a push and pull. Some people, naturally, are really intrigued and catch on faster than others. And some people are just slower adopters to it. I'm still dealing with that, today in my organization. I'm definitely more on the side of an enthusiast and definitely like a big fan of using this as much as I can.

Wes Lemos: There's a lot of [00:26:00] questions in what you just said there. But, usually companies have communication channels, whether that's Slack or whether that's, another tool, like again, I use Telegram. We have all these rooms in Telegram. We have all these clients.

Wes Lemos: What I did is I took all the knowledge with all my clients and I dumped it into kinda like a server and I said, Hey, study everything you can here. Pull out as many insights as you can. Understand my business. I gave it so much documentation.

Wes Lemos: And it just kept on eating all this information. The more I'd give it, the more it could kind of eat on it. And I was kind of just amazed at how well it was just like processing this information. So I went back, and I had over the course of the last five years, I had maybe almost a thousand meetings that I had recorded. And I kind of said, you know, they're in this one format, I'm just gonna see if it can handle it.

Wes Lemos: And it was an all night processing going through, pulling insights, and it put together this giant document about really how my business operates, right? And now all of my employees have access to that. When they have a question, they're using an interactive agent to talk about the business.

Wes Lemos: You know, what was the last meeting that we had with this one client? [00:27:00] What was, their goals and objectives? You know, if we were gonna do something new for this client, what do you recommend us doing for this client? Or are we doing a good job for this other client? again, I'd probably speak in like two steps beyond where people are at.

Erik Martinez: I think that's really, really important because I think that's kind of a fundamental these days. It doesn't feel like a fundamental yet. I used to coach Fast Pitch. A lot of people who listen to the show know that. And one of the things I used to say with my kids, especially when they were beginners, when I was taking the kid outta rec ball and teaching them how to be competitive players. It was just like, Hey man, you need to just throw the ball.

Erik Martinez: Go home and throw the ball with your dad or your mom or a brother or sister. Throw like the things we practice here at practice go do at home for a little while. Right. And I think, today one of those fundamentals that you just addressed is. Building that knowledge base, that fundamental thing about the company.

Erik Martinez: I've been writing some articles on this very topic, but get all that [00:28:00] organized, make it available to your team. And that's one way that they can start adopting it without, there's no fear, right? I just need to go ask a question about the client and where they're at. Or you know, Sally's sick, she's the account manager on client X, Y, Z, and we didn't want to cancel the client meeting.

Erik Martinez: So I'm stepping in. So I go and I ask the knowledge base, like where were we on all the different stuff that we're responsible for? And I handle the meeting. Because I have the confidence that I have the information available . That's a very, very low risk way that helps everybody in the organization.

Erik Martinez: I have this belief that the market, the SaaS companies, they're pushing AI and AI tools, whether they're ready or not. When I start adding up my subscriptions, I'm sitting here going, in December, we cut 50% of our budget of tools because I realized a lot of those tools were, duplicate.

Erik Martinez: We're duplicating things that we can now do with the common [00:29:00] LLMs. So here's the question. Is it better to, buy a tool, build the tool, or fix the process, right? Because I think, that's where there's a lot of friction right now in the It's like, Oh, I need a buy tool to this. Been a very very specific but I'm not even sure that in a lot of cases we understand what the problem is. What's your perspective

Wes Lemos: Yeah, that's a deep seated question there too. I think, for me, I've always been a builder at heart, right? And that's been my nature. And so, the only things that I legitimately pay for are the big LLMs Because all these other tools are secondarily built on top of those tools.

Wes Lemos: With a few exceptions, there's a couple other tools that I pay for that are hard, to do specifically with LLMs. But, if I can build it and I can just use the same tool to do it, then I don't need that other piece out there. So, I'm canceling my HubSpot subscription, had that for years and years.

Wes Lemos: And this is kind of an interesting kind of trend. I think the market's going down this path. All the use cases that I was getting out of it, I feel like I can in a short amount of [00:30:00] time, do something that's much more custom, better and modular and continue to grow my business as I need to.

Wes Lemos: And, this goes, even tools like lovable and things like that, that are good. You can go straight to the LLM and it can almost do just as good of a job. Which is kind of scary to see that the market is kind of going to almost anything you need. You know, I need to make some music for something.

Wes Lemos: Oh, just, pay for Claude. I need to have a better customer service experience in my company. I'll just pay for Claude. It's an interesting kind of aspect because that's the idea of general intelligence, right? It can generally do most things and that's what they're trying to build.

Wes Lemos: That's the heart behind the goal of all these big companies is to be the one that, you know, it doesn't matter what your needs are, our tool can solve it for you. And it's getting better at doing that. That's their heart. They're putting millions and trillions of dollars into this space.

Wes Lemos: Going back a little bit earlier in the conversation that I think it's kind of interesting that I've seen and might spark something for some people here in this. I kind of compare it to just giving somebody a canvas and some really nice acrylic paints and

Wes Lemos: some good paint brushes, things like that. And saying, [00:31:00] Hey, you can make something really beautiful with this. You know, you have all the tools. You have the best tools available. You give it to the 10 people and you come back and one person's gonna make a race car, another person's gonna do a field and a sunset picture.

Wes Lemos: We all kind of do different things with it. And that's one thing I've been seeing. I'm a very much buttons function. Press a button, do 10 things. You know, my example for the pizza company. I like seeing ways that things are connected, communicating. My brain goes there. It's always been that.

Wes Lemos: Now I have AI, it's propelling me to build things that's fit into that space. Right? My son, for example, he's 18, he's in high school still. I finally got him the cross hump of using, you know, Claude code and setting him up on a good computer and stuff like that and said, Hey, you can build things with it.

Wes Lemos: He is loving, building visually stunning websites. And they're doing things that I didn't know that could be done. Elements are popping outta different places on the page, rotating around 3D graphics that are just kind of shining. The fonts show up in certain ways.

Wes Lemos: It looks gorgeous, the stuff that he's [00:32:00] building. He's done this in just two months of playing with the code. He's building websites that I know agencies that probably spent like five, ten years would struggle to be able to build. It's a very different use case of the same canvas of AI.

Wes Lemos: I don't think like that. I'm not building things like that. My mind doesn't go down there. He even built a bot, and it's a funny name, but he calls it Steel You. But, it's going on the web every day and at nighttime, and it's finding the most beautiful websites it can possibly find.

Wes Lemos: Understanding the aspects of their CSS or JavaScript and how they're designed and the intricacies of how they're doing the font changes and the layouts and the intros and the outros and it's building repository for him. And then he wakes up in the morning and he has a hundred new skills available to his Claude code that he can build a website with.

Wes Lemos: Oh, you know what, if I want a reveal for a photo, I can use this effect that I pulled the other day from here. And he's just excited as you can possibly be about this. So he wakes up every day and he's just excited to jump on his computer and find the new skills and use them and build something new with them.

Wes Lemos: I think that excitement is what we're trying to [00:33:00] cultivate in people. Some people might get excited to do the same things I'm doing, but others won't. You find that little excitement and then that's the spark that you start to understand, okay, this really can be useful for something that matters to me.

Wes Lemos: Once you start seeing it and growing with it in that space. It starts unlocking more and more areas where you know that this same tool can be done, in different areas. I'm still scratching the surface, right. And I'd probably built, at this point, I don't know, it's multiple hundred projects, several million lines of code. It's multiple servers, but I still feel like I'm in the learning phase of what I can do with it.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, It is a lot of fun. I mean, I've started building some things, and I'm not anywhere near what you're doing, but I find it very satisfactory. I get a great deal of satisfaction. I built that, that was my thinking behind it. And I came to life. You know, maybe it's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

Erik Martinez: And, you know, I think the other thing that you said here that was interesting is concept that I've been thinking is this idea I'm gonna call it throwaway software, but it's not necessarily throwaway [00:34:00] software. It's building little pieces of applications to do something very specific. You know, I've been looking at CRMs and I was looking at, HubSpot and a couple others, and I'm sitting there and my CRM needs are really really fairly simple. I just needed to do a couple things. Can I just build an app for that instead of paying HubSpot, whatever, they're charging or what one of these other CRMs. But I don't think that's necessarily appropriate for everybody, right? Building something also has some, some downsides to it and you gotta test it and debug it, and you own any of the problems that come along that. Whereas if you have a technology partner, they're kind of responsible and there's pros and cons to both sides. I think there's really, really good examples. Like I'm starting to run into some more examples of, Hey, you know what, maybe I don't need to reinvent that particular wheel because my time is better focused over here doing this, instead of trying to build that. [00:35:00] You're a natural tinkerer. So your mind's like, I'm gonna build it. And I think I've learned about you, like you're gonna try to monetize it. You know, I wanna be super respectful of your time. We could keep talking forever. So I think right now I'm just gonna close and just ask you that final question.

Erik Martinez: If there's like one thing that you'd leave the listening audience with, what is it?

Wes Lemos: I'm sure, it depends on the day and the hour. You'd ask me the same question, it's gonna be a different answer. Just a way of thinking that I had, and it's crossed my mind a few times. I don't know if this is probably the best thing or not, but, you can use these AI tools, to solve a one-off issue.

Wes Lemos: Like, I have this email, I don't know how to write it better. what do I do? I'm sending it to this one person. AI will help you with that. And a lot of people, that's how they use AI. And I want to encourage you. Like there's two levels past that, right?

Wes Lemos: The next level is can I build this into a tool that consistently before I send out any email, I just drop it in there and it spits out like a better polished version of that email, right? Instead of just solving it once, you're solving it for yourself multiple [00:36:00] times.

Wes Lemos: And that's an unlock of a bigger way to do it. And then the third unlock, I would say was, can you build this into a tool that you can monetize, you know, for your business, you know, for thousands of people outside of you? So one is you know, doing it once is kind of how we normally do it.

Wes Lemos: And that's how we're kind of trained to think. I'm trying to catch one fish, you know, and you kind of focus and fight and do whatever and you get one and then that's it. But can I build something that actually can kind of constantly fish for me? And can I do this and then actually put it on every boat and sell it to other people so they can do that too?

Wes Lemos: For so much stuff, that's kind of my flow. Anytime I build anything, I'm quickly thinking of that third degree. How do I build this? So that I can build it into an engine where it can be actually an extra source of income for my organization if it takes off or things like that.

Wes Lemos: Even if you don't do it, but just thinking like that, I think it's a way that will add a lot of value to how you go about solving your problems. You're not just seeing it in the one email, you're seeing could this be a tool that'll help you play more with what's available to you.

Wes Lemos: It'll start unlocking more skills where you'll learn how to, maybe build a [00:37:00] website that can actually accept credit card payments and take subscriptions and deliver a product and, go on and on from there. That's, one piece of advice. Don't be afraid of it.

Wes Lemos: You know, the news puts out a lot of stuff that's on the negative side, but that's for everything. Right?

Erik Martinez: That is for everything.

Wes Lemos: Yeah. Just how the news goes. They're gonna find the stories, the horror stories, and make them, the ones that get the headlines. But for the millions of users that are using it in productivity ways, the heart behind it is really the one to help you.

Wes Lemos: And as long as you're pretty much asking it for something that's helpful, you're fine.

Erik Martinez: Fantastic, a very optimistic view of the technology. Wes, thank you so much for coming on the show and spending a little extra time. I know we went a little bit over here, but I really appreciate.

Erik Martinez: Wes said something in this conversation that I keep thinking about. There are three levels to how you can leverage AI. Level one, you solve a problem once. Level two, you build something that solves it for you every time. Level three, you build something that solves it for other [00:38:00] people and turns it into a real asset for your business.

Erik Martinez: Most of us are still at level one, and that's fine, that's where you start. But if you're listening to this show, you know there's more opportunity. The question is whether you're going to set a vision to get to level three. Well, that's it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Thank you for listening and have a fantastic day.

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