The AI Sherpa Podcast

Podcast Transcript:

Jack Munson: Back on the AI Sherpa, chatting once again with RM from WSI.

Robert Mitchell: What's going on, man?

Good to have you back. We're back together one way or another.

JM: Everything's going on in the world of AI, and you and I have had many conversations about what's happening on the sort of enterprise marketing level or national or global marketing level for a lot of brands and franchising.

But I really wanted to chat today about what's going on at that local level because that's really where franchising lives. That's where the cash register rings. That's where people are actually making a difference in their customer's lives. So you brought along someone from your organization. Would you like to introduce him?

RM: No, I'm good.

Eric Cook: We might. Bump this 18-plus listenership.

RM: What we have on the call today is EC, one of our best and brightest in the franchise.

We're in the franchise arena for WSI, and I'll let him introduce himself, but why I wanted him on this particular podcast is he took what he's been doing with WSI as a franchise owner in the digital marketing space for decades and he's pivoted. And he's added an additional revenue stream to his business, which is, yes, AI consulting, and he's done a great job with it.

But Eric, go ahead and tell Jack and our listeners who you are and why you're here.

EC: Excellent. Thank you for being kind. I knew that you've got an audience. You had to behave yourself, but I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Yes. My name is Eric Cook. I hail from Michigan. I consider myself a recovering banker of 15 years.

I did that in Michigan and worked actually alongside my father who was a banker himself for 33 years And the stars lined up that for one reason or another, I decided to acquire a license with WSI as a franchise owner. And I left the world of banking to pursue my dream of going after the internet and working with clients and helping them.

Just basically discover the power that the web and this digital technology could produce for businesses, particularly community banks, because I saw it for 15 years of how we connected the community with each other as a bank. And some things in my life made me realize that this thing called the World Wide Web back in the day had the capability of doing that at a much bigger, more impactful scale.

So I became part of the WSI network in 2007, and we've historically focused our intentions around the needs of community banks, building websites and doing digital marketing, but Over the last couple of years, as I saw artificial intelligence start to become a thing very similarly to when I left the banking world and social media was scaring bankers stiff because they didn't know what to do.

They were fearful of things like reputational risk and privacy and confidentiality and time wasting. There were a lot of bankers I talked off the ledge and got able to engage in social media to help promote themselves and their individuals within the bank. And AI is just that at a much greater scale.

There are so many community banks that are fearful of this and rightfully as a bank, you don't want your money or those that are the custodians of your money, just jumping into any new technology and putting that at risk, right? How can you leverage these new tools and efficiencies and creativity and strategic thinking and all the other cool ways of AI impacting people's lives that you guys talk about here on the show.

How can we leverage that securely, confidentially privately in the world of banking? And so the last couple of years, striking a lot of conversations with our customers, and they're the banks that are the small community banks that make a local impact to your point in the communities that they serve.

And COVID opened their eyes a little bit about the power of digital and realizing that a community bank needs to have a digital presence. And so I think their appetite and their willingness to hear these things is great. But to coin a phrase that is part of this show, They need an AI Sherpa to help lead them up that mountain and understand both sides of the equation.

And I think we're uniquely positioned in that regard. 

JM: Tell us some of the things that local community banks Really need help with right now when it comes to something in the world of AI that you can help them with.

EC: Absolutely. Most of the banks are fearful of things that we refer to as PII in the industry, personally identifiable information. And when Robert and I have an opportunity to chat with a bank and on our projects together, one of the things we very early start with is say, think of the things that you don't have time to do during the day, or you would like to amplify or be better at that don't touch personally identifiable information.

I don't want to talk about customers. I don't want to talk about account numbers and balances. But let's think about the things that we do in the bank that help us be more strategic. How do we come up with articles and content that can be more educational and informational so that you've got informed buyers that fall in love with you because you're not just out there selling a product or a service, but you're really taking the time to educate and to teach people about what it is that matters in their financial lives.

Eventually getting to the point where, as you can well imagine, the banking industry is riddled with compliance and regulations, and that creates a lot of paperwork and a lot of forms to look at, evolving that into more of a compliant way of analyzing contracts and agreements and vendor documentation and underwriting and the things that we do as bankers because we have to, not because we add value to the process.

And getting the bankers, and I would say this for any business, but in the banking industry, What is it that's not adding value to your customer's lives by building that personal connection with them and figure out a way that we can get artificial intelligence to do some or maybe even all of that. So then we can spend time and not be guilty.

RM: But also Eric, I would say you took the safe route to his question, but as There's and which is funny. I gotta talk about the unsafe route Jack to your answer because I had a client meeting today with somebody in franchising. And I was able to parlay The conversations we've had with community banks about some of their needs and what i'm saying on the unsafe side is The use case where you do use the pii where you do Create a data lake of all of their information because this is what's we're the conversations we're having with banks is they want they've have ip they've had Information for decades that is data that is extremely valuable, but they're doing absolutely nothing with it, right?

Yeah, two or three generations of banking records that they could use for whatever reasons. Maybe they want to do a Slight pitch to somebody for a loan. Maybe they want to do risk mitigation for understanding their clients. Anyway, my point is that the use case that we're talking to banks about now is creating a data lake of all of their resources inside of their organization.

Of course, it's very secure vectorized and behind a firewall, right? But that whole use case. Other businesses that have similar data that they want to use to make insights and then to train an LLM on, that's what we're seeing as well. There is use cases in banking as well as in franchising where other businesses.

Where they can be duplicated.

EC: And banking is notorious for having data and duplicate and variety of different platforms that are not connected or communicating with each other. So building this data lake or this repository of all of your information securely. And make sure that you're not violating any sort of regs and you're keeping it private.

But once you get that in there, taking that next step, Data Lake has been a concept for a number of years. The thought of creating that in a foundational model, that to Robert's point, you can serve it as an LLM, or even then jump in and have a conversation with your own data. Hey, can you give me an example of customers that have a mortgage loan but don't have a checking account with us that live within the 20 mile radius of our main office, who have never been 30, 60 days past due, and have a credit score of 720 or above?

RM: That's four or five different places you had to go for that data.

EC: Yeah. Because those are not all in the same place together. And then export that to my marketing automation platform, generate social media advertisements, create an email drip chain that I can put together, create a direct mail piece that I could drop all sorts of different ways to be able to do that.

So allowing the bankers to be able to think strategically and take those ideas that up until recently. Would just hit a stopping block because yeah, that'd be great, but we don't have access to that data. Ideally, that'd be awesome if we could do that and building that environment so we can take advantage of it.

I think that's what I'm the most excited about. We just started broaching that topic with banks in 2024. 25 is going to be, I think, a monumental year for us.

JM: This is usually the part where I ask consultants. Why does someone need a consultant to help them with these things? But I think you already answered my first question because

EC: Rewind that conversation, right?

JM: Think about this. I know most banking Professionals know better than to do certain things. However, AI is still so new for so many people in business that imagine the disaster that could happen out there. If someone at a bank started just. Sharing information with GPT or other places without a consultant in this case, literally being the Sherpa to navigate them on what they should, and in this case, should not do with that data.

RM: It's advisory. You wouldn't do anything. Which is this, there's lots of things that you would have a lawyer for if you owned a large business, right? You'd have one on retainer, you'd have one inside your own organization. Even in franchising, there's legal counsel that we have to have when we're putting together franchise agreements, right?

This is the same thing with AI. It's too complex and it's too, there's a lot of risk involved. That you need a guide. You need a Sherpa. I hate going and saying that word, but it's the truth. I need an advisory to hold your hand. And the thing is, because every month it changes the knowledge base that I had last month, wouldn't apply to what's happening this month.

So I'm constantly having to teach myself. It's happening too fast for a client to keep up. It's extremely well used resource and well needed.

EC: It's in the engagements that we've been able to put together. It's not Robert and I feel the need to inject ourselves into every conversation the organization is having, but in one way, I think it's very important that happens because there are just questions that they simply don't know that they don't know to ask when they're talking with vendors.

Application platforms and other sorts of services, they don't know how to benchmark those against the evolving AI landscape and capabilities of language models and learning and data and other sorts of things that are happening. It's not that everything ultimately has to be done by us, but we are that first line of defense that comes in and says what about this?

And maybe that's right.

RM: That's another great point. That is thought of this. Desire we have to be on these conversations and to be involved and give them that insight. There's one element that we haven't talked about, which is the vendor or the supplier or the service that they're interviewing.

If they're not using AI there's a potential that they won't be as efficient, which means their prices will be more. Do we know, do they know how to suss that out in a conversation? Not just are they handling your data right? Or are they AI forward?

Are they the right choice? For you to work with as a company, it's, there's a lot of layers to that being on those calls Eric?

EC: Yep, absolutely. And the thing that's exciting about all of this, and I said this from the moment that I left the bank and started working with WSI and doing things, is if you can provide services for a financial institution in the regulated and compliance driven world that it is, A lot of the things that we do in the banking industry have trickled down effect into other businesses.

A perfect example is within WSI, the original roadmap that we created, and Robert and I have talked about this and shared this as an example, we started with AI literacy. We trained people on how to use artificial intelligence and got them all excited and then they went out and started doing things. Not realizing that they were violating policies and procedures that we put together from a banking perspective.

So we were able to weave that into the WSI process. So now we start with a conversation with senior management and say, what do you want people to do? What platforms do you want them to have access to? What are the no nos that you don't want people putting into these platforms? Because we've trained customers to look for HTTPS whenever you go to a website, because that means it's secure.

So a bank teller thinking that he or she is doing the company a favor, going into HTTPS, ChatGPT. com, now thinks that's secure. And maybe doesn't feel that putting anything in there that's sensitive or personally identifiable is a bad thing because, hey, I'm just doing what the bank told me. I'm looking for HTTPS because that's secure.

We have to define that for our employees. Nobody really is interested in violating customer confidentiality, but we have to give them the guidelines because they don't understand what we understand. And that helps us make sure that we're all traveling down the road together working from the same playbook.

JM: I like something you said a few minutes ago, Robert, too, about the cost of using AI. And it comes back to the old adage about the expense of using a professional. Yes, using AI can be expensive, but wow, wait, do you see the cost of not using AI, right? So I want to talk a bit more about the local business aspect of this, Eric tell me how you really see this addition to your scope of services of the AI consulting.

How do you see that changing your personal business and how do you see that growing over the next, let's say, two to three years?

EC: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's like in the digital marketing space, you get a website, you can come in and you can service that customer with some advertising or SEO or content writing or social media training.

Some banks that we work with were about that. And would allow for us to do it. Some had solution providers that they worked with locally and others just felt it wasn't necessary. This is one more of those conversation starters that we can go back to our clients with and to say, Hey, what are you doing in this regard?

Do you understand it? Even if it's just putting together a basic training program. Because back in the social media days, we wrote policies for banks whose policy was, we will not be on social media, but they had to at least have a policy. And maybe you're not ready for this. Maybe it's six months, maybe it's eight months down the road, but you can't say we've blocked open AI and chat GPT from the firewall and think that's not going to encourage or force your employees to download it on their mobile device and use it outside of the rails.

Of the network that you have, and then bring that information into the network. Every single one of our clients, I think at some point, should be having a conversation about this. Whether it's with us or somebody else, if I bring it to their attention, and they've got a technology company they work with, or an auditing firm that's got some AI services that they're doing, at least make sure that they're having the conversations.

At least make sure that they've got these conversations started so that you're not assuming that nothing is happening behind the scenes when in reality, you could really be damaged by what your employees are unintentionally doing because they just don't know what's right or wrong.

JM: I'm sure 125 years ago, there were some company policies that said, we will not use electricity here at Standard Oil or, whatever company, right? So yeah staying ahead of the legal aspect of what not to do, I think is a valuable thing that you guys are providing on the enterprise level and now on the local level as well.

EC: It's one more foot in the door. It's one more opportunity to create a relationship. We have advisory services and conversations going right now. With banks that don't have any relationship with us otherwise. We don't do their website, we're not doing advertising, but they fell in love with the perspective and the concept of what we're talking about from an AI perspective, and that gets our foot in the door.

And that could potentially open up three months, six months, a year, two years down the road, their website needs an uplift. Who are they going to think about?

RM: It's interesting you say that, Eric, because what I'm finding with the people that are reaching out to WSI, at least on my end for clients, is it was a while back, Hey, I heard this thing in AI, what do we do?

Now I'm getting people reaching out going, I know exactly what I want to do with AI. Can you make it happen? So it's like I had a call a couple hours ago and usually we go through, litany of what are your pain points kind of thing and kind of surveying high level, the organizational kind of stressors, right?

And this was very obvious. No, we know exactly where we are hurting. We know this is the area. And because their AI intuition has already been trained a little bit, not much, just a little, just enough to be like where the antenna were going. And so they identified this particular department and several needs that are in that department.

I'm getting a little bit of a smarter client is what I'm trying to say. They're smarter in the sense that they know they need help is what I'm trying to say. They don't know how to fix it. They don't know how to do it. They don't know how to build it.

And even with the solutions that they come up with, I'm like, you're not thinking great enough. You're not thinking big enough. You're just solving it like a human. I give the analogy, why robots are humanoid, right? It's because they're operating in a human world.

If they didn't have to be shoved into a factory that was built for humans, they'd have built a whole different type of robot. It's the same thing for AI, is stop thinking with human terms. You need to go a little bit above, try, think outside the box. You need a solution and idea in problem solve with AI, not with how you've done it in the years past.

EC: Yeah.

JM: This is one of the things I love about franchising, because everything you guys just said about how you can help those customers could not happen without franchising. And here's what I mean by that. Fifth Third Bank and Bank of America and, name, name every massive global bank.

They have what probably a team of people working on AI stuff to help their branches all across the globe. But if you're a community bank, In Northern Michigan, you don't have that sort of resource at your fingertips without franchising, without someone like WSI. So this is, again, this is how we bring all of that information and value down to that hyper local level that I think you guys are doing a great job providing this right now.

EC: Yeah. Absolutely. I agree. I look at the team that WSI corporate has put together and Robert and the rest of the folks that are at my disposal as a franchisee and the quality of deliverables and materials. We've got four editions of an amazingly useful chat GPT ebook that I've sent around to a number of bankers to just help educate them.

Not anything that I would have been able to put together at that quality or capacity on my own. And so leveraging the skills, if I were to do it even one step further, I'd take that ebook and I would convert it to just banking only. But I haven't had time. I don't think that our clients and the ones that work with us really mind.

I think they like seeing that variety with WSI really focusing on the small medium sized businesses that are out there struggling because that also helps not only relate to the banks but that also helps the bankers relate to their customers because they're serving mom and pop, restaurants, manufacturing companies, service organizations, professionals, law firms, doctor's offices.

So they have to understand what those businesses are going through, and if they understand it, and they can convey that value, now you're building relationships at that next level beyond just simply providing a great interest rate or the lowest fees. It's what value you're bringing and how are you as a community bank helping me grow my business helping me prepare for retirement Helping me put my kids through college and you know All the other things that we have for financial desires as human beings and business owners  

JM: Before we wrap up today, gentlemen, Robert, do you have any anything new on the horizon that you wanted to throw out there? I know there's been a lot of talk about some Chinese AI things coming at us these days and you were also mentioning some things.

Yeah, maybe that's a question we should be asking ourselves. How much time do we have, but also some, there's some new voice technology that is looking really interesting this month.

RM: Yeah. I know we've been hearing this from lots of our listeners Jack?

JM: Yeah.

RM: About having a little bit more of, okay, tell me what's going on in the world of AI. I know there's lots of different sources on there, but through the lens of franchising and through the lens of what we're doing and what's actionable and where we're at and what's going to impact it. I'm going to say that this week there was a lot of announcements regarding Deep seek, which is an open source model that can perform as well as a one at the time.

How and why and where it was created is irrelevant. It has upset a lot of the markets with regard to their claim of how much it cost to build that competitor to chat. GBT, right? And it's usable and the love of. Microsoft and Azure and Amazon web services and even cursor. You can actually use those applications and perplexity.

My point is it's changing of the pricing model. It's changing because when you have competitors out there, not only competitors, but. free competitors, you're causing the ones that are out there charging money to rethink their model a little bit and be competitive. 

What does that mean for our listeners? That means that The prices are going to come down on the tools that we're having to build because the tools we're having to build are using APIs to those Models like OpenAI. Another thing to think about is voice agents. And voice agents are a way for businesses to use AI in a really realistic way.

I'm talking, you wouldn't be able to tell it was not me talking. And you could use them for inbound where somebody's calling to book an appointment or reschedule an appointment that you can have the bot only responsible for calendar appointments. Very easy to have it set up that way, be trained on your content and be very believable and be very professional personable.

Take that at scale, take that at outbound for customer relationships. Everything you can think about that a human does with a voice, we're starting to see applications for where an AI can do it. So look at your business through that lens. What can we look at a franchise level, right?

If you own a store retail, if you own anything that has lots of phone calls being made. Rethink how you can use AI to take away that element, that stress level, the time of an employee and redirect that person somewhere else. But seriously, there's a lot that can be lifted up from AI use cases with voice agents.

JM: All right. Very good. Thank you for sharing that. And we will be on the lookout for. Your next tips on the next episode of the AI Sherpa. Gentlemen, thank you for your time today. Live from

RM: IFA, mind you.

JM: We'll see you in Vegas.

RM: Cheers, guys.