AI Check In with Scott Schang

Scott and I spoke together at NAMB this year. Haven’t seen him in a while. Wanted to catch up. This is probably the last Zoom, B2B zoom I’ll do this year being it’s Friday catch up. Tell me what’s going on. I know you’ve been digging more into the AI piece. You had some great feedback at NAMB on how to utilize that tool for content creation, but catch us up on what’s going on.

 

Scott Schang (00:30):

Yeah, yeah. No, I’m continuing to immerse in ai. I think not only is it probably the biggest and most impactful thing that’s happened in just the world marketing business, everything, it’s advancing so quickly, and I think one of the coolest advancements that’s come out is the ability that chat GPT gave us to create what they call custom GPTs. And everybody has different words for it, but really they’re these little chat bots. And what I find when I talk to a lot of people about AI is a lot of people think that AI is a thing, and AI really isn’t a thing. ai, you want to think of AI as electricity. Now what do you want to power with that electricity? But it’s really, it’s the underlying energy that makes whatever you think of a reality. And anytime you see a product out there, let’s say like Jasper, Jasper is a really popular one.

Scott Schang (01:53):

Those are called wrappers. Those are AI wrappers. And what that means is it’s basically a set of prompts, a set of instructions that they write, and then it connects to chat GPT on the backend through an API. So this, what custom GPTs allow you to do is build those on your own. We were just having this conversation before we pressed record. One of the things that I’m doing and that we talked about building for you is I do a lot of video. I want to turn those into blog posts or I want to turn those into social media. Actually at namm, that’s what we talked about, right? We talked about taking a single video transcript and then doing a series of prompts. Well, now we can create a little chat bot that already knows that that’s what its job is. And so all you simply have to do is paste your transcript into it and you can give it a preset set of instructions.

Scott Schang (03:01):

So maybe your GPT, maybe you have one that says, I’m going to give you a transcript, and when I give you a transcript, I want you to write a blog post, write a Facebook post promoting the blog post, write a LinkedIn post promoting the blog post, and write an Instagram post promoting the blog post. And so you paste in the transcript and it just punches all those things out for you. There’s no additional prompting required. So expect to see more and more things powered by AI in 2024. And I also think 2024 is going to be a time that people are going to start digging deeper and starting to wrap their head around what this is.

Scott Schang (03:56):

I think most of us, when we start with a new technology, we just kind of dip our toe. And I would say that the overwhelming majority of your competitors right now are doing what’s called zero shot prompting, which means you’re using AI like a search engine. You ask it a question and it gives you an answer. But where people I think are going to start figuring out, especially if they’re listening to us, is that there’s a way to train the GPT to go deeper, to give you better content, to make it sound more like you, to give you better answers by training it on giving it context.

Scott Schang (04:46):

And so that’s something that I’ve been talking to a lot of people about, primarily. Think of it this way, the first thing that you want to do is tell it what you want it to tell it who it is. You’re going to act as a copywriter in the financial services industry, SEO best practices. You understand online publishing and how to get people to read, and then you’re going to give it a bunch of examples of things that you want it to do. A good example of this is let’s say you’re doing a blog post about a topic. So what you do is you give it, here’s three articles from the internet about this topic, and here’s how I feel about these articles. I agree with these articles, I disagree with these articles. And so you’re giving it some context. So now you told it how you want it to act. You told it, you gave it a bunch of context from which to create output from, and now you start asking it questions, right? And you’re going to find when you go through those steps, you’re going to get a much better result, a much more unique result, a much more interesting result.

Scott Schang (06:21):

Yeah.

Anthony Balsamo (06:23):

Well, that’s actually one of the concerns I’ve had with Chat GPT is we look to it to do some assist with the SEO work we do. And at some point, Google is going to, if you’re doing none of the prompts and actually training it to be really you essentially, or an extension of you, isn’t Google going to just be like, oh, yeah, that’s just a boilerplate chat GPT output, and

Scott Schang (06:52):

No technologically, Google’s doesn’t know the difference and it’s not going to be able to know the difference. One of the things that we saw when AI came out is there was a bunch of AI detectors that came out to try to discern whether or not it was ai, and they all failed miserably. They tried to use them in education, and they would get it right half the time. It wasn’t good. There is no, here’s the thing,

Scott Schang (07:29):

It gives you a different answer every single time. And it’s just trying to guess it is not really cheating because it’s doing what you ask it to do. And so what you’re going to see, though, you’re right in your thinking, but what you’re going to see is people aren’t going to, they’re not going to be creative when they’re asking it to create content. And so the content is going to be real bland. It’s not going to have insight. There’s not going to be introspection or perspective or experience behind the content. So people aren’t going to read the content. They’re going to look at it and they’re going to say, this sounds like generic AI created content, and they’re going to bounce. And then that’s when Google’s going to say, well, people aren’t paying any attention to this content because it’s not interesting.

Anthony Balsamo (08:30):

That’s why the video transcription seems like a great first step because if you’re already creating the video content, that is your perspective. That is your key. It’s your, that’s all the things that you want or personal content. And then you’re just using the assist in

Scott Schang (08:54):

Different from hiring a copywriter and sending ’em your YouTube links and saying, write me a blog post about this. It’s the exact same thing. It’s the exact same thing. And except on how you set up the ai, it’s either going to be a good copywriter or a bad copywriter. But the great thing is it’s kind of free. So take the time to learn how to make it a great copywriter. But you’re right, using transcripts from your own videos is, I would call it the cheat code, because it’s your voice, it’s your inflection, it’s your perspective, and it’s just repurposing it. And I think repurposing, repurposing has always been important, but I think that that’s got to be the thing that people focus on now. If you’re going to make the effort to share your experience and your expertise, leverage these tools. And I guess that goes to the next big thing that I would want people to think about in 2024 is when you think of ai, don’t think of automation.

Scott Schang (10:08):

Don’t think of how can I get it to do something without me being involved in it. Think of it as augmentation. AI is a reflection of your imagination. If whatever you can imagine that you can ask it to do, it’s going to assist you with it. It’s not going to do it for you, but it can augment what you’re already doing. And that’s really the power of this. That’s when we are able to become exponentially more effective and efficient by leveraging these tools to repurpose. I do it once and then I can repurpose it and use it all these times.

Anthony Balsamo (10:53):

Wait, so just to be clear, I’m talking into the real Scott Shank, not an avatar.

Scott Schang (11:01):

Yeah. Hagen is getting really, really close to being able to just take 30 seconds of a clip and recreate video. You’re going to see that in 2024. That’s going to get really good, where you’ll be able to just, you can dictate, you don’t even have to dictate. You can just take copy, upload it, and then it’ll be a video of Anthony and Scott talking, and we will never have turned on our camera.

Anthony Balsamo (11:30):

Literally a different, whole different topic just for everybody watching. Notice how he didn’t directly answer the question, so that still could be an avatar.

Scott Schang (11:38):

I have the real Scott, but AI’s not that good yet,

Anthony Balsamo (11:44):

So it’ll learn your voice, your mannerisms, and then just pumping in. You just literally put in a transcript and it will ingest that and wow.

Scott Schang (11:55):

Yeah, you can tell that it’s not real yet because it’s like the face, they got really, really good. But there’s something weird about the body and the neck. It still doesn’t look like a human being, but they’re getting really, really good. And I would say first quarter of 2024, you’re going to be able to create video that is indistinguishable from regular video.

Anthony Balsamo (12:20):

That’s wild. Almost. People ask me about ai, and I’m not nearly as invested in the learning process as you are. I know you’re an early adopter and clearly kind of on the forefront of what’s going on. So I’m asking you questions just like people ask me questions because I actually really don’t know, and I’m curious, but it seems like when all these tools came out so fast, there’s a bunch of them. I almost looked at it like the hair plug industry. It’s like, do you want to be the first one that gets the first hair plugs? Then fast forward 10 years. The people that do that, you really can’t tell. It seems like, I guess my question is, do you see tools? Is there going to be a lot of tools that just go away, and then some that emerge as just real leaders? I know it’s not going to take 10 years, it might take 10 months. It seems like the time horizon’s a lot shorter, but it seems like there’s an AI overwhelm when I look at the market. How do you sift through that?

Scott Schang (13:25):

Yeah, I mean, I don’t think it’s any different from any of the other tech stack solutions that we’re bombarded with every single day. Anytime you go to a conference, everybody’s selling you a solution to something. No, you’re 100% going to see that. And we actually saw that with Chad GPT. So when Chad GPT came out, all the coders and the engineers knew how to use the API to create, write these wrappers, to put these wrappers around it. So you saw a lot of products that were search the internet with AI or scan A PDF, and give me an example of A PDF. Well, now chat, GPT does that natively. And so all of those companies went away. Again, AI is like electricity. So people are going to create new tools and new machines that are going to be powered with this technology. And let’s remember all AI is an algorithm that is designed that, what’s cool about it is it’s designed to mimic the neural pathways of the human brain.

Scott Schang (14:41):

So what it does is it takes information and it tries to predict the next thing that you’re going to ask it based on the previous input. So it’s just a way of processing data. So yeah, it is going to be a part of everything moving forward, whether you know it or not, it already is a part of almost everything moving everything that you use. Now, whether you know it or not, in some capacity, I mean, it’s kind of what a search engine is. You type into Google and it finishes your response. It’s predicting what you’re going to ask it. Yeah. So yeah, you’re going to see a lot of things rise and fall. It’s the buzzword of 2023. It’s going to be the buzzword of 2024.

Scott Schang (15:39):

Don’t get sucked into the sexiness of, Hey, this is AI powered. It’s not that big of a deal, and it’s not going to solve your problems, and if you can pay somebody a monthly fee to get the power of ai, so can everybody else. So it just ends up being baseline again. So yeah, again, I would just encourage people to wrap their head and understand what the technology represents and figure out ways to use it in your business, like I said, to create automations where you can free up space so you can spend more time thinking about things beyond. I think that’s the biggest shift, Anthony, and it’s not necessarily a product, but what it is going to do is it’s going to allow us to spend less time doing $10, $50, even a hundred dollars an hour work, and then we can start focusing on thousand dollars an hour ideas and $10,000 an hour ideas. So when you can take some of those menial, repetitive tasks off your hands, then you can spend more time really thinking about, how do I differentiate myself? How do I create value for my customer and for my employees, and things like that.

Anthony Balsamo (17:15):

What do you find yourself using it for, either for you or people you’re consulting with the most right now?

Scott Schang (17:23):

I think some of the coolest things that I’m doing with it right now is I am taking, I’m doing SWOT and gap analysis work with it. And here’s what I mean, and our customer’s first impression is typically our website and our reviews. So what I’m doing is I’m using AI to analyze a website and then analyze reviews. So I’m taking two or 300 Google reviews, putting it into ai. So one of AI’s superpowers is analyzing data and looking for patterns. So what I do is I ask it to go through the reviews, look for patterns in the reviews, what are the top five? I’ll ask it, what are the top five words or phrases that appear in the positive reviews? What are the top five phrases that appear in the negative reviews? Then I’ll do the same thing for a competitor. So you put in the competitor’s website and then you put in the competitor’s reviews and then a gap analysis.

Scott Schang (18:35):

It will compare the customer feedback and it will say, their reviews show that they have more positive reviews on this aspect, and you don’t. And so that’s an opportunity for you to focus on those things. So it can reinforce the positive things that you’re doing. And again, this is, we are who our customers say we are. We are what our customers see on our website, and that’s why I love V websites. They’re beautiful websites. They’re easy to read, they’re easy to digest, and there’s so much flexibility, especially with your blogging capabilities. You have the ability to share your experience and your expertise. So I think it’s so important that you have an online presence that represents who you are uniquely as a business or a business owner. And so that’s what I’m using, that’s what I’ve been using it for. And then you can ask it to do a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and then that gives you a different perspective.

Scott Schang (19:53):

That’s really what I think it is, is as entrepreneurs, we spend so much time in the trees, we don’t see the forest, but what AI allows us to do is put a mirror up to how we are seen by our consumer and see that reflection and potentially get a different perspective on how we’re perceived and then using that business intelligence. So my short answer is I use it to redefine business intelligence, and so look at the data in a different way. Look for new ways to perceive your business and look for new ways, new opportunities to take advantage of your competitors weaknesses. An interesting one that I did, I did one of these gap analysis off of the customer reviews, and we took all of the client reviews.

Anthony Balsamo (20:51):

One question, do you have to manually feed those in?

Scott Schang (20:54):

Yeah, you do for the most part. So there’s a website out there called Bird’s Eye, and Birds Eye is sort of an aggregator of reviews. So it will pull in Google reviews and sometimes they can see it, but the best way to do it is to copy and paste the Google reviews. And what was interesting is what the AI recognized in the SWOT analysis, it said, all of these reviews mention you. So there’s a heavy reliance on just you. So if you ever want to grow your business and not be the single point of contact

Anthony Balsamo (21:35):

Dancing band,

Scott Schang (21:36):

Yeah, you want to do that. And we don’t think about this, right? So let’s say I’m a solopreneur, but I want to start building a team. So 20, 24 rates are going to come back down. We’re going to go through a growth spurt. If you don’t want to be the only point of contact for your business growth, you need to start collecting reviews or start asking for reviews that talk about their experience, not you personally, right? So if all of the reviews say, Anthony is the greatest ask for Anthony, well, guess what? Every single person is going to ask for Anthony. Anthony’s never going to be able to build a business because he’s too busy working in his business. So it’s that kind of cool perspective, that kind of cool stuff that maybe you didn’t think about that, and then when it reflects that back to you, you’re like, oh, man, I don’t want to be the only one with a shovel. I want to hire people and give them shovels to dig holes. That’s how I want to grow my business.

Anthony Balsamo (22:46):

That’s good. While you were talking about the reviews, I started thinking about wouldn’t it be great if you could do that with, and this is why I asked manually. I think it’d be too overwhelming manually, but if you could plug it into your email and be like, look at all the questions I’m asking, like find patterns and common questions, and maybe that could be content for upfront in your marketing to you’re like, oh, most people are asking these five things. We’ll just address ’em upfront. That would be a cool idea. Same with support like a ticketing system. If you have that, it’d be great to be able to go in and maybe some of the softwares do that already, but analyze a lot of the common even errors or common tickets you’re getting and just fix the ones you’re getting over and over.

Scott Schang (23:30):

Yeah, those types of automations, those types of customer support tickets, that’s something that AI is really, really good at. And actually, if you use things like Zapier, you can do things, for instance, you can have it when a new Google review comes in, pull it in. Well, or let’s say you do it with an email, if you have an email, if you have an email and you put it in a specific folder or a tag through Zapier, you can say, when a new email appears in this folder, read it, write a response to it, and then it’ll put the response in a spreadsheet, and then you can copy and paste the response to send it back to it. But you’re absolutely on the right track, filtering data, analyzing data, responding to things, reading it, understanding it and responding to it. All of those things you can absolutely do. And it’s going to be, it’s going to get easier and easier and easier to do it. So you’re going to start finding, well, a lot of CRMs already do this, but there’ll be Outlook plugins and the browser plugins that’ll automatically create responses for your emails. I’m pretty sure those are already out there

Anthony Balsamo (25:03):

Probably. It seems like someone would’ve jumped on that already.

Scott Schang (25:08):

But also to your point though, one of the things I’ve been saying this for 10 years, the best source of content is the sent folder in your email box. Because every time somebody asks you a question and you respond, you can take and download all of those questions from your emails, put ’em in a chat, GPT, and have it say, what are the 10 most common questions that are asked? I’ve also said this a million times. There are not 10,000 questions about qualifying for a mortgage. There are 10 questions asked 10,000 ways. So you can analyze that data, break it down, and then say, okay, I’m going to focus on this content.

Anthony Balsamo (25:53):

Yeah, I mean, I know for me, I do a lot of the demos here. I see the patterns intuitively. I know what the common questions are, but it would just be great to memorialize those and repurpose them in a way that addresses them so they stop becoming common questions. Not that I don’t want to answer ’em over and over, but we may be, as a business for myself, I may be losing people that aren’t willing to ask the questions and then filling in the narrative gap with either maybe they don’t do it or whatever they decide on their own versus getting the information for us. I’m probably losing people that way. Just the same thing for it doesn’t matter if it’s mortgage industry or anybody in sales, you’re losing. Some people will be deterred if they’re too confused. So if you can address some of the common things in advance, I think that can be pretty powerful.

Scott Schang (26:45):

Yeah. I think another one of the most powerful strategies that I would encourage people to think about implementing in 2024 is have all of your discovery call conversations on Zoom and record it, because there’s two types of content that we can put out there. There’s evergreen content, which is the same questions everybody asks, and then there’s timely and relevant, which usually is more specific to the market. And in this market where we’ve got dropping interest rates, so the trend is rates are dropping, but they’re still pretty high historically, record those conversations, you can then take that transcript and turn that into a timely and relevant, because for every person that asks you that question, there’s an exponentially larger number of people that have that question. So if you record those discovery calls, you can put that transcript into Chad GPT and come up with three articles or three blog posts or 10 social media posts that say, Hey, I’m getting these questions in today’s market. If you have these questions, here’s the answer because you already gave the answer in the call. So those are kind of the smart ways to use AI to augment what you’re already doing. It’s not creating something from scratch. It’s taking a conversation you’re already having and turning it into something that can benefit more people.

Anthony Balsamo (28:22):

They should rename it augmented intelligence.

Scott Schang (28:26):

Well, yeah. I actually, yeah, I stop. I don’t use artificial intelligence. I use augmented intelligence or augmented imagination. I think AI is a mirror for your imagination. Anything you can possibly imagine, it’ll give you a feedback loop and it’ll tell you, it’ll show you what you’re thinking based on what you give it. And then you’re like, I thought I was thinking this, but based on what you’re telling me, it looks like I was actually talking about this.

Anthony Balsamo (28:58):

Oh, that’s wild.

Scott Schang (28:59):

Yeah. Yeah. So expand the way you think about it. It’s not an easy button, but it is probably one of the single most powerful communication tools that we’ve ever seen and that we ever will see.

Anthony Balsamo (29:16):

Alright, well, you sold me. I’m going to have to get back into chat gt, so get a little bit more sophisticated.

Scott Schang (29:22):

I’ll always geek out with you. You know that.

Anthony Balsamo (29:26):

Well, this was awesome, man. That’s always good to talk to you. Interesting, dude. Hopefully we can do more of this next year track. By the end of next year, you’re going to be the conversation. I might not even be able to understand what you’re talking about.

Scott Schang (29:43):

I try to keep things as simple as I can, but I mean, it’s the real deal. I encourage people to at least understand it so they’re not tricked into investing in something because it has this as seen on TV sticker. It’s like, don’t get romanced by the fluff and the clickbait, but really understand this tool and where it’s going, and start thinking about ways to use it in your business. For sure. Well, happy New Year, Scott. Absolutely, brother. Good catching up with you. And let’s do this again soon. Absolutely.

Anthony Balsamo (30:29):

Until next time.