Usher Your Company into the Age of AI with the Right Leadership

Scott Schaper: Welcome to Spirit Health and Hustle podcast. Our guest today is Beverly Flores, an AI who helps businesses cut through the hype and actually use artificial intelligence to grow smarter and operate better. She's worked with companies ranging from scrappy startups to established operators, and she has a gift for translating complex tech into real world business results, something we all need at all times. Beverly. Welcome to the show Give us the backstory, how'd get here and what part of the world are you in right now?

Beverly Flores: Yeah, thank you first of all for the opportunity to come join you guys have a little bit of a fun conversation here around a really relevant topic that not everyone sees as a fun topic and I think that's a lot of the background. I started with John Deere so I had a 24-year career with a Fortune 100 company. I started as an intern. and was very fortunate to have just some really diverse roles. I've been on the sales side of a territory and I've worked on the mergers and acquisitions among the dealer ownership groups. And then I really kind of took a right or a left turn depending upon how you want to look at it. And ⁓ I to go in and be in our government affairs. So I became a lobbyist. And ⁓ so this not that was on my list of things and yet probably was one of the most impactful full roles I had. And so I lobbied at the state and federal level ⁓ John Deere. And learned a lot about strategy. ⁓ I a lot more about communication and people. And through that really opened up a lot of doors then ⁓ within John ⁓ and had opportunity in 2014. ⁓ John Deere gosh, you know what? ⁓ We're more a manufacturing company. We are a tech company. And this is kind of an untold

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Beverly Flores: A little bit of it at the time was very much a secret about agriculture and how technologically advanced it really is. We've moved beyond the old pharma McDonald's out there and really are looking at how can we be sustainable, how can agriculture be affordable and it be productive as well. And so I was tasked with how do we position a 175 year old plus company as a tech leader. And so I came into that, I was tasked with that, and I got to do some just incredible things like going to the Consumer Electronics Show. We went from the first year literally like walking the halls, kind of begging journalists to talk with us, to the end result was being the keynote speaker in 2023. And so I transitioned out of the role at 2018-ish timeframe and just

Scott Schaper: Wow, fantastic.

Beverly Flores: the incredible speed at which we were able to bring forward this conversation, but more importantly, the proof points. And I think that same thing is true when we talk about AI, there has to be proof points. It can't just be cool. And so I found that I just, love tech. I love tech when it comes to like my exercise I have from day one. If we can measure it, we should, right? But just because we can measure it,

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Brian McMaster: Love that.

Beverly Flores: doesn't mean that everything is relevant either, right? And we kind of laugh if you see the memes out there, I happen to have a Garmin. a joke out there, right? Your heart rate status, you could be having an incredible workout and it will tell you you're about to die. It's not always accurate. Open to interpretation, AI is also the same way. It can have hallucination.

Scott Schaper: Hahaha.

Beverly Flores: So at John Deere, I led our training for North America. So I understand kind of the adult learning aspect of it. And then I got to go into a role that I never in a million years would have imagined I would do. And that was to lead our advertising and events for North and South America. So I also speak Spanish. I can get by in Portuguese, but just this incredible opportunity to lead people across two continents. in five different countries, ⁓ languages obviously that we were working through. And I was tasked with how do we move from a very traditional paper media radio heavy advertising to a digital first, digital advertising. And yeah, I got to bring that forward. And again, ⁓ the that made it challenging was not the systems, it was the people. So we had this brilliant idea on paper.

Scott Schaper: Mm-hmm

Beverly Flores: that my leadership team, we developed, and yet what caused the challenges were the veterans in the department who have always done it one way. Now keep in mind, they hated the way they did it, and they let me know that every single day, how much they hated it, and they would tell me, we can't do that, we shouldn't do that, we've done that, it won't work, and we don't like it, but don't change anything. And I just don't do that mindset. So.

Scott Schaper: Wow.

Brian McMaster: Hmm. Right?

Beverly Flores: You know, it was figuring out, it was learning. And what I learned through that is if you will take the human piece first, especially when it comes to technological change, you are much more likely to create the advocates that you need when you're not in the room as the leader. But then secondary to that, if you create space for the emotional requirement of change, then you're able to move that forward not only quicker, but you're also able to get it to stick. So I did that role for about three years. And then I went into our order fulfillment and forecasting. So I went on the manufacturing side, interestingly enough, and with 40 different product lines, factories around the world. And I had the call center ⁓ that was with this. And so the interesting piece of this is these individuals in the call center are some of the lower salary grades in the company. were some of the most passionate, committed,

Scott Schaper: Amazing. Right. Yeah.

Beverly Flores: people that showed up every day and they just wanted to do their job well. They also wanted to go home at the end of their time, right? They didn't have a laptop, they didn't have company cell phones, like they could actually fundamentally shut off and go home. So I came in and there was a lot of manual work and I said, gosh, you know, we've got this new AI pilot that's starting. I'm a huge early proponent.

Brian McMaster: Wow. Right.

Beverly Flores: what do you guys know about, you at the time chat GPT was one of the main components, Jim and I was starting to come about. So what do you guys know about this? I said, what is chat GPT? Nobody even in the leadership team was even using AI. I gosh, what if I could make communication easier? If I could give you back more time to problem solve the challenges we're getting in the order process with our dealers and our customers, would that be beneficial? God, that'd be brilliant. We hate sending out these emails. They're usually bad news. So I got us into the AI pilot. We were the only non-IT, non-engineering team that was in the pilot. we were able to identify not only automation tasks and the order entry process, but then also in the communication process of like, just don't know what to say. And then you get delayed because you're not sure what to say that we could then put it into

Brian McMaster: Hmm.

Beverly Flores: the AI component that Deere was using at the time. And so that's kind of my background through that. And I got an AI executive certification with Cranfield University in London, because I wanted to understand the behind the scenes of it. I actually love the ethics side. And that ethics side is actually what drives me to have more than just a systems conversation with businesses and leaders, because

Brian McMaster: Hmm.

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Beverly Flores: If you see AI as coming in as a fundamental replacement, I think we are actually creating a bigger future gap when what we really need is more human engagement right now so that these unintended consequences become less unintended. They may actually become intended, but more importantly, we're influencing them.

Scott Schaper: Well said.

Beverly Flores: So to me, AI is not about doing less. It's actually about creating space to do more value added uniquely human components to our business and letting AI serve as that tool and that sidekick for the things that are less valuable as that output overall. So that's a little bit of the story. So I left John Deere in 2024. They had a restructuring. And for me, it was time to go make a change.

Scott Schaper: Beautiful. Yeah.

Beverly Flores: ⁓ And so I thought, gosh, let's take a super easy option and go build ⁓ my own business. As you well know, it's why wouldn't you do that? ⁓ So I have three boys. ⁓ You know, with all the things you could do, let's take the easy option and let's do it not while I'm in a current job. Let's do it when I'm, you know, ⁓ going to build it from zero. And ⁓ yeah, so to me, part of it was like,

Brian McMaster: ⁓ yeah.

Scott Schaper: Welcome to the dark side. Yeah, perfect.

Brian McMaster: when you have to.

Beverly Flores: It was just, was time to reinvest in myself and that belief that I put in other people into John Deere, like putting it back in myself. I'm a solo parent of my three boys in setting that example for them of like, when you invest back in yourself, like the world is open to possibilities. And, you know, my twins who are 16 have started their own landscape business. This will be their second season and they're fantastically entrepreneurial. oldest is graduating K-State and he's currently in the job market and so helping him with AI. ⁓ he actually spent yesterday prepping for an interview and we created a gym in Gemini, which would be a LLM. Like, hey, help him prep, give him questions. ⁓ You he's using the audio version and getting feedback from his interview prep in that way. ⁓ It comes full circle. me, AI is not just a professional solution, it's a life solution.

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Brian McMaster: That's fantastic.

Scott Schaper: Yeah, I got a question. Back ⁓ at John Deere, kind of got two, I'm gonna bring up culture for a minute. So ⁓ two statements, I believe. ⁓ One was ⁓ resistance change at one point, and you had to help them with that narrative and lead those people, vision and leadership seem to be the answers there. And then the other cultural one was the passion that the call center people had. ⁓ How did, so there's kind of this culture of change you had to institute and then where do you think the passion from those center people came from? Was that a cultural kind of byproduct from John Deere for a long time?

Beverly Flores: So I think there's, so taking, I'll start with the second question first, just because I think there's some relevancy in it. For me, I changed roles and positions almost every two years. And that was really kind of the expectation. For the first 12 years, I moved every 18 months to two years. And I kind of had said, once my oldest got to middle school, I'd prefer not to move.

Scott Schaper: Hmm.

Beverly Flores: was fortunate then to have opportunities in front of me. And the reason I highlight that oftentimes in companies we see development as position changes instead of leadership development. And what made that call center function so incredibly well is they had three managers who loved what they did. And they had been in those roles for a long time.

Scott Schaper: Hmm, beautiful.

Beverly Flores: were proud of the work they did. They were more proud of their teams and they were proud of that they were able to get their teams promoted. actually, should have been position wise, they easily could have been in higher positions, but that wasn't what excited them ⁓ the work they did. And to me, that was a huge differentiator. think it's easy to get focused on like, who are your A team players that you're constantly pushing forward?

Brian McMaster: Hmm.

Beverly Flores: when what I would rather have is a couple of A performers and a solid team is passionate and committed to the work they're doing and then you're rewarding them for that performance. And so then you get into a whole conversation around what does motivation look like? Salary is awesome. We of course all want to have more money.

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Beverly Flores: we could do nothing and get paid a lot of money to do nothing, there's a lot of people that might choose that option. Now, for other people, getting a promotion is not a motivational driver. They might actually, so this one manager in particular, she making sure everybody's birthday was celebrated if they were okay with her, if they shared them. She wanted to celebrate employee anniversaries.

Brian McMaster: Sure.

Beverly Flores: Like she would go out and make this fantastic big deal. said, make sure you put that on the company credit card. She don't worry about it. It's on my way, right? was like, like fundamentally, you don't have to pay for this. We'll pay for this. And she's like, yeah, it's okay. It'll work out in the end.

Brian McMaster: Heh. Wow.

Beverly Flores: So what I started recognizing is like, but nobody was really celebrating her, right? So, and she didn't want public celebration. That wasn't, so I would write her small notes. You know, I'd leave her something on her desk. I wouldn't make a big deal about it. And what I started to notice, like those wouldn't all be, you know, magnets. She'd put it up on her cabinet. She wouldn't say anything. She put it up on her cabinet. So you got to understand what are the motivating factors for individuals. It is not always a promotion.

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Beverly Flores: It might be time off, it might be quiet recognition. For me, I'm one of those strange people that like if you gave me an opportunity to go talk in front of external audiences, to me that meant you trusted me.

Brian McMaster: Very nice. Isn't it funny how it always comes back to leadership? Kind of lead by example, lead by example. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Scott Schaper: does modeling.

Beverly Flores: And then, remind me your first question. started with the second one because I'm so passionate about it. Change is funny. The way our brain works is we like what we know, even if it's not beneficial, it's uncomfortable.

Scott Schaper: about the resistance to change from the product. Wired for safety.

Beverly Flores: And so you have to be able then to create more of a, what if, and people can get curious about that, but they need to be able to have space to ask the questions. what I talk about in like my leadership development, especially like if you're going through a reorg or you're implementing a massive change, in most cases, the leadership team, you've likely sat down for months evaluating, testing. discussing before you've come to your decision. It wasn't just an overnight solution that was made in a vacuum, usually, sometimes it is, you've had a lot of time to discuss the pros and cons. And then you launched this out here with this expectation that the broad population is just going to accept it. And then you wonder why they've asked questions. Well, you had months to ask questions. Can you at least give them a couple of weeks to ask questions? But then we get into this position where we're like, ⁓ we don't want them to ask any questions, because what if we don't know? Brilliant. If I have an individual contributor ask me a question we didn't think of, that's on me for not creating a space that they could have made that better.

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Brian McMaster: Beautiful.

Scott Schaper: And kudos for them.

Brian McMaster: Yeah. Wow. That is incredible. I a question too. Why don't we ⁓ Beverly go back to ⁓ the piece. And this a big one for me because being an entrepreneur, business owner, this is broad, broad topic. There's a lot ⁓ of misconceptions. There's lot of thinking around it and some, you know, being scared, you know, it's like, what's this going to turn into?

Scott Schaper: That's amazing. Thank

Brian McMaster: What do you find is the biggest misconception you go to your and kind of early on ⁓ when starting to talk about AI? What are they coming to you and saying, hey, this doesn't make sense to me or this is my opinion ⁓ and kind go from there.

Beverly Flores: Yes. Those two are probably the biggest concerning pieces of it. ⁓ The first one being, we're doing AI. Okay. Tell me how you're doing AI. Well, we chat GPT it. Okay. First of all, chat GPT is not a verb. is not also the synonym for AI. And chat GPT has some great things. There are also a lot of other solutions. that are out there that also have great strengths and have even better strengths in some areas than chat GPT. So if you look at like Claude, you look at chat GPT, you look at Gemini, know, Grok is another one. There are so many options out there that do different things. So how do you know, first of all, that every employee is using chat GPT? What if they're using Gemini? What if they're using Claude? Right?

Brian McMaster: Hmm.

Beverly Flores: it's not synonymous with AI. So that's the first one is, we're doing AI. How do you know that it's impactful? So when I start working with a company, the first thing that we actually talk about is, what do you want to gain from AI? What are we going to measure? yeah, so if you want to make improvements in communication,

Brian McMaster: start with the end in mind.

Beverly Flores: Before we even start encouraging greater AI adoption, how much time are you spending on general communication creating right now? Have people track how much time do you spend on emails? How much time do you spend on report generation? And the reason you want to do this on the front side is, I was reading an article in London Times as an example, employees are starting to misreport the value AI is creating because of one of the key underlying fears. They're concerned about their job. So if you say, go forth and use AI, we want you to use it for communication. And let's say it actually saves me two hours a week because I've cut down on the I don't know what to say bit. So now I've saved two hours and you come back and say, how much time are you saying? ⁓ it's only about 30 minutes. ⁓ because I'm worried either one, you're gonna give me more work to do. And I actually was using those two hours to get caught up. I don't want you to give me more work to do because now I'm doing the work I already had better is one option. Then the other option is, gosh, you're gonna replace me if I tell you how much time AI is doing. in ⁓ executive certification, one of the sessions was around economic and job creation or job elimination. ⁓

Brian McMaster: Right?

Beverly Flores: it's very easy to focus on the fear aspect of this is going to reduce jobs. What we're not talking about is this is going to create jobs and what do those jobs look like? So I'll give you an example. ⁓ I use Notebook LM pretty substantially for creating a private ⁓ solution and then through that content creation. but it can't read its own slides. It can't see that the text misinterpreted a number into a letter. AI is challenged by the number five. It can't easily distinguish if it's an S or it's a five. I need somebody to edit and validate that content. I can't just push create slide deck, send it out. What I can do is create the slide deck, go do something else. which might have normally taken me a couple hours at best to create the deck, still need to verify ⁓ validate what's in the deck. So do we move potentially from content creation to authoring, editing components? How do we make some of that shift? The other side of that is, so I had a client yesterday send me a slide deck and say, hey, could you create me a one page infographic? How do I do this in Notebook LM? So I gave them a couple examples. I actually came up with four examples in under an hour for them. And from a visual perspective, they were outstanding. So their response is like, we've been working on this for months. You just did this in under an hour. What else could we be doing? And that's my most favorite question when I'm talking with leaders. So if we can find you time savings as an early ROI investment. What else can your leaders be doing? Can they be more strategic? Can they be investing in people development? Can they be investing in themselves? Can you just by getting two hours back, maybe it gives you just a moment and you guys know this, just to think. Right, Ryan? I know your schedule. If I can give you an hour in a week that I say there is nothing else pressing.

Brian McMaster: Great question. Absolutely. Yeah.

Beverly Flores: And I want you, you can do with that hour, whatever you want to do. You can just breathe for a moment if you want to. You can go take a walk, take a run, exercise. You can whiteboard a new strategy you've been wanting to map out. You got freedom, right? And I think as we look at, I was using a kind of more in-depth tool starting on Monday, because I was speaking with a marketing company.

Brian McMaster: Yep. Yep. Pure gold. Pure gold. Yep. Yep, absolutely.

Beverly Flores: around do I want to take my marketing to the next level, which would be a significant financial investment on my side. I'm in this little bit of a gray area of I could, but do I want to, can still keep doing some things myself? Is there a return ⁓ on marketing investment? And I say all of that because of my experience at John Deere where I'm running massive budgets and I needed to know down to like,

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Beverly Flores: We managed our budget to within 0.05 % of accuracy, over $100 million budget. Like, I know how to do this. So what I'm asking for on my business is like peanuts compared to that. But it's still my budget, right? So I appreciated this marketing solution. He said, gosh, you really are in this gray area. He said, I can tell you're very comfortable with AI. ⁓ you using this agentic solution, which is called anti-gravity? It's also a Google solution.

Brian McMaster: Ha.

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Beverly Flores: I knew about it, but I hadn't yet played in it. And he said, hey, you know what I'd rather do? Let me show you what I'm using it for. And he's using it for website creation. And in a day, I created a whole new website with three different calculators for the AI solutions I provide, largely focused on what is your time worth to you? Because if I'm talking to a business owner and you're busy, you're already using

Brian McMaster: Hmm.

Beverly Flores: all the time in your day, you don't have a concept of one hour free.

Brian McMaster: No, you're right.

Beverly Flores: So how can I give you a business number? How can I put a dollar sign to your time? Because now we're talking the same language. So with AI, by using my Gemini, using my Notebook LM, connecting that to antigravity, in under a day, I have an interactive three calculators of almost 900 lines of running behind it. I don't know how to code.

Brian McMaster: Absolutely.

Scott Schaper: Yeah, that's amazing.

Brian McMaster: That's incredible. That's incredible. don't know how to code either. I even know code means. ⁓

Beverly Flores: And I love the marketing CEO's honesty with me to say, you're in this gray area, you can do this yourself. And then once you get it to this next level, hey, here's how we can support you. He automatically built trust by having that conversation with me. And that's why AI is not about replacing the human aspect, but you have to identify what is the value to you.

Brian McMaster: That's fantastic. But that's what most people think. Most people think it's going to replace humans. And they're watching Elon Musk and all these guys with the robots and they got sensors in their lips and they can talk and you know all this kind of stuff but they think it's going to replace. But it reminds me of the internet. When the internet first came out you you read all this stuff and it's like it's going to take all these jobs but all it did was what you said. It created more opportunity and people just need to look for that opportunity. Where are the jobs going to be created? and yeah.

Beverly Flores: Yeah. Or create your own, right? So when I started, I was primarily focused on leadership development because that's what my real passion is. Like how do we help people reach their potential and unlock them? What it has evolved into is there is a component that I can bridge between AI implementation and human utilization of AI, right? I created this space because I saw it working with my leadership teams. All I had to do was take what I'm passionate about on the tech side, put structure to it, make sure I'm experienced and I use it every day. The same thing, like, so if you're a copywriter, this is one that I think is a really sensitive area. You are paid to be a good writer. Even copywriters have challenges. So if we take like the pharmaceutical industry, there are a lot of rules around what you can say and not say in advertising. That's a lot of information you are required to know that can change very, very quickly. So if you're spending a large portion of your time researching what you can and can't say, that means there's less time for you from a creative perspective. So if I can help you from an AI side of it have an LLM that's constantly updating on the requirements, and now you have time to be more creative and uniquely creative, you still have that same value. What else can you be doing? Maybe you're creating additional ads. Maybe you're creating larger campaigns, working with the rest of the team, right? It's how do we have that evolution that I think is the exciting part of it.

Brian McMaster: Beverly help with, ⁓ I'm sorry, Scott. ⁓

Scott Schaper: I view, oh, I was just going to say to that, I view AI and I talk to a lot of companies throughout the week. It's a force multiplier for you. And so if you use it very little or if you use it poorly, AI is going to multiply that effort. If you use it very well and you use it a little bit or a lot of bit or a medium bit, it's just going to keep multiplying. at some level, it's a 3X or a 5X. It's whatever. you dive into and how you progress as your kind of use gets more more mature with it. So we use it as a force multiplier because your are, other companies are, other individuals are, and as a leader, your employees are. So shouldn't you get in front of that and enable, ask and make it part of the culture?

Beverly Flores: Well, Brian, one of kind of questions you, you know, secondary to what you asked was I see a lot of leaders and Scott, you just said it, that are investing in AI because they're supposed to, but they actually don't use AI very well themselves. like generative AI is not a search engine. It's not, you just go type in something because fundamentally generative AI will do what you ask it to do.

Brian McMaster: Now it's... Yeah.

Beverly Flores: So if nothing else, learn how to do a good prompt. Nothing else. Right? And it's not what is my competitor doing, right? It is you are a specialist in the logistics space that is looking at the evolution of requirements in trade and what the top three providers in

Brian McMaster: Got it, I've heard that as well. Right.

Beverly Flores: x category are doing, how is it being demonstrated publicly, I need a report less than five pages, decided information.

Brian McMaster: ⁓ I was gonna say

Beverly Flores: very different than one of my competitors. Yeah. And verify and validate. I love my LLMs. I give mine a little bit of persona. in principle, treat them like an employee, if you want to think about it that way. They have names. they have functions. I have a marketing PR one. I have one that's web design. I have one that's adult learning. I have one that is career development. I have an AI specialist.

Scott Schaper: and then tweak from there.

Brian McMaster: Yeah, then edit. Yeah.

Beverly Flores: All of those, I only use them for the tasks they are created to execute. Even then, they at times will have hallucinations. So don't take it 100%. Normal employees. Yeah, AI is going to do what you asked it to do. So if you asked it to evaluate a list you sent of possible leads, I've had it create a whole new list. Because apparently it didn't like my list. It was like, here's the list. And I'm like,

Brian McMaster: Wow.

Scott Schaper: For sure. Just like normal employees.

Brian McMaster: Yeah.

Beverly Flores: I don't think those names were on there. yeah, I made up a new list that fit the demographics you should be looking for. Okay, not sure where that went. That's not correct. ⁓

Brian McMaster: Wow. wasn't what I asked for, Help me Beverly with LLM, my four year old AI brain. What is that? And for our listeners too, because I'm sure people are asking what LLM is.

Beverly Flores: So yeah, large language model. So as you look at it, it is creating a unique response. So if you think about general AI, we could go into Gemini, we can go into ChatGPT, we can give it a basic prompt. It's going to do that. But you every single time have to go back in and remind it, here's what you are, here's what I'm looking for, here's the tone. You can also go in and then create these LLMs if you want to think about it that way. So a gem in Gemini. So I'm going to go in, I'm going to tell it what it does, and then going to give it the tone that I wanted to take, the persona, its focus areas, here's potential sources that I want it to connect to. So I'm starting to bring it into scope of the output. It's just like you wouldn't go ask an accountant to do an engineering spec.

Brian McMaster: Got it. Hmm. Wow.

Beverly Flores: So we're narrowing that down, if you think about it that way.

Scott Schaper: Yeah, I've heard this analogy and I like this one. If you think of a Google search, you're querying a large data model. And so then switch over to a language model because it's putting words in a row and forming sentences, paragraphs, and language. So instead of using a data model, which it is using data, it's using a language model to do that. So there's kind of a leap over to that concept.

Beverly Flores: learning from itself because it's more self-contained, if you want to think about it that way. As you're it those prompts and those interactions, it's learning. And so one of the things I encourage users is we're very quick to tell it when something is wrong. Are you also as quick to tell it when something is right? Do more of ⁓

Scott Schaper: Correct. Yeah. I asked for funny thing. I asked for a summary. ⁓ was curious about a particular character in a John Grisham novel we were in. ⁓ I asked its motivations of this character. And it basically said, John did not write The Widow. And I just said, here's an Amazon link to that book. Let me know the answer to this question. I stand corrected. He did write that. And then it went into a summary of that character's motivation.

Brian McMaster: Hmm.

Beverly Flores: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian McMaster: That's phenomenal.

Scott Schaper: And it's just kind of funny. But yeah, I like if two people ⁓ the old days of Google search, two people search the same thing, some plumber near me, for example, they're likely to get the same result. You're likely to get the same result in the large language model because of the way the system works. So you and I can ask a very similar prompt and get. autocomplete engine produce different results, ⁓ both in its right, level of good or more better or best.

Beverly Flores: Yeah. Yeah.

Brian McMaster: Beverly does does that mean that I could create an LLM that has my features how I would respond how I would do things and then my assistant could go in ⁓ could answer an email like I would answer an email. ⁓ just incredible.

Scott Schaper: Of

Beverly Flores: Yeah, so what we're gonna do is we would provide examples of communications that's authentically you. And we would wanna look for some different scenarios. So one might be an initial thank you, one might be a follow-up, one might be a request. So we wanna look at the different forms of communication that you leverage on a regular basis, providing those examples into it. You also then take you in a step further and you look at a gentic solution. So this is an agent actually ⁓ ⁓ behalf of a task or an individual in a sense. That takes a lot more ⁓ coming in on the front end and corrections so that it's again, it's learning. as it's going through this, but yes, we could easily go in and create a gem called Brian's communication support. then your executive assistant could go in and say, I need an email that's going to Scott that just as a thank you for his time and introduction. Now she also knows you well enough to know like, yes, that's 90 % correct, but we need to adjust this because what the... ⁓

Brian McMaster: Wow.

Beverly Flores: Model doesn't know is you and Brian might have actually had a fantastic coffee together and you both love coffee And that's actually an important piece of your relationship now your executive assistant knows that So she may want to add in there. Hey over this great cup of coffee that we had She's gonna add that in but she doesn't have to do the whole email and that's where then that time savings begins to really jump in there

Brian McMaster: Mm-hmm. sure. It's incredible.

Beverly Flores: ⁓ And Scott, you talk about using it. What I encourage, I do once a month, ⁓ an hour workshop. That's really kind of like this podcast. It's just fun and allowing you to ask these questions where again, you may not actually feel comfortable asking it in your own company. You don't want to say, gosh, don't know what that actually is doing. I mean, I put budget towards it, but I don't know. That's the IT department to do. So we have kind of this fun debate, but what I encourage people is, know, minimum 15 minutes a day, purposely playing around. ⁓ things that you're learning as you go. So for example, I've created ⁓ two of my gems. One is a chef. So it has European, because I like to cook from scratch, like making meals for my family is really important at the end of the day.

Brian McMaster: Hmm. Huh?

Beverly Flores: Sometimes I have a lot of times, sometimes I'm kind of rushed, but I can go in there, I can put in, I'm thinking ground beef, here's the vegetables and I want to carve with it. Now I've set it up, it'll give me three different options that I can choose from. They're all kind of European based recipes. And I'll say, you know what, I'm thinking option two. then it'll create a recipe for me. Now the end of the meal, we go back and we score it out of five stars. what we think the meal was because I need the LLM to learn hey that was really spicy but it wasn't very flavorful. We need more depth of flavor in the next recipe. So I'm learning in a safe environment there's no risk. The worst thing that's going to happen is the meal doesn't taste awesome okay and we don't make it again.

Brian McMaster: That's incredible.

Scott Schaper: Right.

Brian McMaster: Yeah.

Beverly Flores: The best thing that happens is I'm now creating this interactive gym that's helping me to have less stress at the end of the day and still creating a healthy, enjoyable dinner for my boys and I. There's no risk, okay?

Scott Schaper: That's amazing. And you can hand those recipes off to the boys and see if they can dabble in cooking a little bit.

Beverly Flores: Yeah, yeah, go ahead and yeah, like I love messing around. Like I made a hibiscus infused gin this summer from my own hibiscus flowers. I don't know, tried to, tried it. I figured the worst thing that was gonna happen was that it was bad cocktail. And I lost a bottle of gin through this. ⁓ But what doing is creating this interest and excitement. ⁓ I these aspects of my life.

Scott Schaper: Right.

Beverly Flores: So how can I enhance them? Then you take that to the business.

Brian McMaster: That's amazing.

Scott Schaper: One story I have is a marketing, a small marketing company in the education space, ⁓ friend of mine, she said that she created an agent, which is a board of directors, and she follows a lot of their content, YouTube videos, blog articles, seminars, from four or five, I think it was five different people, uploaded all their content, they're sales experts, one is a business ⁓ &A expert, one was a,

Beverly Flores: I'm brilliant.

Scott Schaper: pure marketing genius. ⁓ all these people. And so she uploaded all their content and then prompts that board for I'm struggling with this hire, I'm struggling. And she gets responses and discussion from all five of them. that informs her she's like, I got to check with my board to see if this is something I want to do. And she uses it. That's a great, ⁓ not, it's not difficult to program. And the more you use it, the better it gets. And then my question,

Beverly Flores: Hmm. Yeah! I love this idea! Yeah!

Brian McMaster: That's phenomenal.

Beverly Flores: Yeah. And so then the other thing you can do is depending upon where she's using that, like she could bring that into Notebook LM, which is considered like a, it's called a closed garden. She probably has it in there because it can only use the sources you give it. So instead of like generative AI, where it goes out and pulls any information in.

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Beverly Flores: In Notebook LM, it can only use the sources, so the links, the content, so it's not searching for new information. And it really is this incredible strategic solutions. ⁓ I'm gonna absolutely share that idea. I love that idea.

Brian McMaster: Hahaha

Scott Schaper: My question was, you know, using, I've seen people just using chat GPT as a search engine. They're just not using Google. It's two different tools. One's a wrench and one's an adjustable wrench. You know, it's just like people should, but that's just one example. What are some other areas you see business owners, they're asking questions, they're asking the wrong question, they're using it wrong. What's the trap that newbies, especially in the business leadership area, where are they going wrong? What's the trap they're falling into?

Beverly Flores: Well, and especially with small businesses, you're wearing multiple hats. And at the end of the day, you have what I call the leadership paradox. You're focused on growing the business. whether that's through funding, creating revenue, that's what you're focused on. You're not as focused on the people side of it. And so I think one of the things that AI can do is it can give you as a founder, as a leader, a lot of ⁓ awesome and you can get pulled down into that rabbit hole very quickly. And I've seen a couple of small businesses that I've worked with, like he is an idea person. Every day, seems like he's got a new idea. Now I work with some of his team and his team is like, I was working on the idea he gave on Monday and now we're meeting on Friday and he had two more brilliant ideas and I'm still trying to get idea Monday completed.

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Brian McMaster: You

Beverly Flores: And so you have to be very careful that it's easy for AI to give you ideas, but AI fundamentally doesn't have to do the ideas, your people do. So if you are moving that quickly, you asking the people first questions to your team or are you treating them like they are AI?

Scott Schaper: 100%.

Brian McMaster: Yeah.

Scott Schaper: Wow.

Brian McMaster: Wow. Well, the other thing too is saw this all the time with fellow CEOs. They read a book and then they come in the next day and, ⁓ going to go this direction. Then they read another book and the direction totally changes. ⁓ it's just faster with AI. Now you can get a book summary and you're ⁓ this book. So ⁓ I can see where that can be. And I'm an idea guy. ⁓

Scott Schaper: Idea of the Week, that's what we used to call it in my organization. We've done away with that dynamic.

Beverly Flores: you you

Brian McMaster: need to be very careful about how I do that, but this ⁓ is fascinating. I mean we could ⁓ could probably spend like four hours just talking about this stuff. I was I was just to ask Beverly, you know, there's a lot to talk about here and there's there's a ton of other things I wanted to ask you. But you know if I'm a. a business owner and I'm saying, I want to get into AI and I want to use somebody like yourself. What can I expect the ROI to be? It's like, how quickly does that happen? What can I kind of expect when I go down this path?

Beverly Flores: Yeah, so I think there's a couple of qualifiers in that question. One, how many people are in your leadership team or your company? Those are kind of two separate questions to that. What is your current revenue? Also to come into that component. And then ⁓ through calculator that I built on Monday, I could actually answer this question for you.

Brian McMaster: Ha

Beverly Flores: So then we go in, know, like what is average salary of your leadership team? And that's where again, I think AI can oversimplify the question. But my goal, like if you do the initial implementation package with me, my goal is for you to recoup your investment in the first 30 days. That's simply from time management. Now what we unlock through that is then the next step. But I can't answer that fully until I know what we're measuring the ROI off of.

Brian McMaster: Got it. Makes sense. sense. ⁓

Beverly Flores: And I think that's the challenge with AI is it's easy to be like, hey, again, let's do AI. But you don't know what you're measuring.

Brian McMaster: Yeah, it. Yeah, sure, absolutely. And then again, you know, for an idea guy and you know, kind of high, high level and always thinking at that when you start getting into the intricate details, I use it quite a bit for email generation and that kind of stuff. And I base it off of emails I've done in the past, or I'll take a whole email chain and put it in there and say, I need to respond to this. And it has been phenomenal. ⁓ And those are just at its simplest.

Beverly Flores: Yeah. Yeah.

Brian McMaster: at simplest tasks so I can't even imagine based on some of the things we're talking about here what it's capable of I mean it's just absolutely fascinating but

Beverly Flores: Well, it's going to continue the speed at which it evolves. think is the other thing to be really mindful of is you could be an expert today and a beginner tomorrow.

Brian McMaster: Yeah. You just-

Beverly Flores: So you have to be in this constant space of learning. And on the other side of that, it can also then be a big contributor to burnout among your employees. Because they're trying to do that hands-on components of the job that is their job. Meanwhile, they're also trying to learn. And the speed at which AI is evolving, it can feel like a lot of pressure. So the other side that I also talk about is, what are your processes? What should AI be used for? What should it not be used for? Right? So if you're working with confidential client information, and we all need to be very mindful of that, AI should not be your repository for everything. And are there other tasks that we're like, hey, I want you to do a human approach to this. We think this resonates more. So for example, like in my LinkedIn stuff, I don't use any automation. I think we're bombarded with automatic messaging.

Brian McMaster: Sure. Sure, sense. Yeah.

Beverly Flores: So I'm very purposeful that all of my LinkedIn communication is still generated from a human perspective.

Brian McMaster: That's amazing.

Scott Schaper: I think this year I've made it a point to put some agents to work for myself this year. But if you had a viewing glass to look out two to three years, mean, predicting a year in AI is nearly fruitless. Three to five years is ridiculous. But if you had ⁓ something to say about the next 24 months, what should we be preparing for now if I'm already using AI? coming?

Beverly Flores: Yeah. I think you're going to continue to see more editing capabilities because right now, again, AI is great at creating content. It hasn't been very good at editing content. So I think you see an improvement there. You're going to continue to see some improvements in the video creation space. then I think you're going to start to see the of with existing apps. So we begin to move from this is a very complicated process to get something in place to I can actually use AI to create the agent simply because I know what I want the outcome to be. So again, I used Google solution. So here, even in the last week, my Gemini. I was up late ⁓ night and I was like, ⁓ I need to make sure I contact this person tomorrow. And so I went into my Gemini admin and it was like, put this on the to-do list. Now in the past, it would have just saved that in the conversation. It actually opened up my to-do list in my Google workspace and created that. And so then that got me to thinking the next morning that I was like, ⁓ I hadn't done that before. So then I was like, hey, can you go in, review my calendar and prioritize the meetings that I have in front of me, create any briefings based off what you see on the calendar? It did that. So then I was like, oh, what else? So then I was like, go through my email and identify any emails that I've sent that I haven't yet heard back from someone. Brian, you were on the receiving end of one of those earlier in the week, right? That's because I asked my...

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Brian McMaster: Yeah

Beverly Flores: know, admin solution to go through my email and evaluate any waiting on responses.

Brian McMaster: That's amazing. just ⁓ kind of speechless. ⁓ need to have you back on Beverly. ⁓ been absolutely and excellent conversation. ⁓

Scott Schaper: to say we tend to wrap things up about the 50 minute mark. We're right here. We have a tradition at end of every podcast. And that is to issue a challenge for the next week, kind of a little bit of a just start of challenge. What would you say for someone who's new to AI that has been prompting for a while, but really hasn't graduated from there? What would you challenge them to do in the next seven days?

Beverly Flores: Yep. I would challenge you to find something fun to use AI with. So something it's low risk, it could be exercise, in my case it could be chef. I've created one because I like to bake, so I've got one for doing cake. Maybe it's even just scheduling a little bit of your life, like help me schedule more in my life, right? In a good way. But find something fun. ⁓ The other side I would say is if you're using it on a regular basis But you haven't yet used it for some content creation like purposeful content creation Start understanding because those prompts require a little bit more detail like you have to kind of you have to mess around with those prompts a little bit and it Doesn't always listen. Well

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Brian McMaster: Yeah. Ha ha!

Scott Schaper: Brian, put a challenge to you. What was the one thing, what was the one gem you heard from Beverly that you're thinking, ⁓ I'm going to start doing that. That's a good one. What would you hear from the conversation?

Brian McMaster: Well, I haven't been taking advantage of the LLM. I haven't created any of these language models. I think just going, that'll be my thing in the next seven days is I'm going to create this little thing and start teaching it. ⁓

Scott Schaper: Custom.

Beverly Flores: Well, I'll send you for having me on the podcast. I'll send you the one pager. So after my one hour workshops that I do, you get a one pager that's very like, here's the four P's of a prompt. Here's how you create a gym. Here's how you interface. I call it the power couple between notebook LM and a gym and I. ⁓ so yeah, I mean, it's, kind of like, if nothing else, challenge yourself of what would

Scott Schaper: Yeah.

Brian McMaster: Awesome.

Beverly Flores: What would you do if you didn't have to do the low value task?

Scott Schaper: Yeah, great. Me personally, I would say my favorite thing was, and I just want to thank you for the reminder to have some fun. Like the internet is fun. It's also where we do a lot of work. It's not 100 % work. There's a lot of fun on there.

Brian McMaster: Yeah. Love it.

Beverly Flores: Yeah.

Scott Schaper: And I have to be reminded that AI should be fun. Have a little fun with it. I love the recipe and involving your boys with that. I think that that was a gem. thank you so much. This has been genuinely excellent, the kind of conversation that makes people pull over, take notes, stop, pause. So we really appreciate this ⁓ and have an awesome day. And thanks for coming on

Beverly Flores: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian McMaster: Yeah.

Beverly Flores: I appreciate it. Thank you guys.

Brian McMaster: Yeah, thanks Beverly. Appreciate it.