Infusing Your Tech Stack with Effective AI

Presenter: Tim Butler  

Guest: Chris Watson-James 

Title: Infusing Your Tech Stack with Effective AI

[00:00:02] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Welcome to another one of our Revenue Rewired from Innovation Visual, the podcast where we explore how data and strategy are transforming the way businesses drive growth. I'm Tim Butler, the CEO of Innovation Visual, and with each episode I'll be talking to people reshaping the future of Revenue. From CROs to CMOs, tech leaders to transformation experts, if you are ready to rewire your business growth, then you're in the right place to be listening. 

[00:00:32] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Here, for this episode, I'm really happy to be joined by Chris, who is the technology manager in the Innovation Visual team. Hello Chris. 

[00:00:42] Chris Watson-James: Hi. 

[00:00:42] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Well, and when we were chatting about this, we thought we wanted to just have a conversation that people would find useful. I'm gonna use the word 'AI', such a buzzword at the moment. But we're seeing a lot of people in the revenue leadership space that are struggling to take AI adoption to the next level. Like actually take AI into their tech stack. So, we wanted to talk about that today. 

[00:01:12] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: So, are you ready for a conversation on that? 

[00:01:14] Chris Watson-James: Yeah absolutely. Let's do it. 

[00:01:17] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Okay, so you are the technology manager, you see a lot of different scenarios coming across your desk from new people that we're talking to about potentially working with them, to people that we've worked with for a number of years. What are you seeing in terms of actually getting AI, which is a vast area into people's tech stacks? 

[00:01:41] Chris Watson-James: Yeah I suppose there's a bit of a broad spectrum in terms of how businesses are using AI, you've got at the one end we have clients and prospects who have kind of come to us with a brief of, 'oh I've been told I need to be adopting AI or I'm hearing a lot about AI, so I think I should be adopting AI', and they don't really know where to start or you know that kind of thinking is maybe not aligned that well with business objectives. So, you kind of have that end where it's almost not been adopted, through to I suppose those where AI is in use, but maybe it's in use in pockets amongst the teams. So, you have kind of internal champions who've just started using it personally, and they may be using it more from a kind of search functionality, maybe research or like content generation. So, they're kind of at the copy and paste into ChatGPT side of things. Maybe they're using that as almost like a personal assistant, but essentially the broader use of it across the business is maybe not particularly well structured, not being managed that well. You know, the direction isn't necessarily been set that well across the business. 

[00:02:48] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Okay so well, let's talk about setting that direction then. If you are the CMO of an organisation and you help set that direction, or is it something that the CEO alone has to do? 

[00:03:02] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Nobody wants to sort of sit around and wait for others. Certainly, I’m Mr Impatient. So how do you actually get your organisation on the journey? 

[00:03:12] Chris Watson-James: I think the conversation at the top of a business is important because there's a lot of scare mongering around AI, there's you know, a lot of unknowns. I think, from a business leader perspective, it's like educate yourself is a good starting point, because I think there's that worry a lot of people's point of view when you talk about AI, it's about kind of people's jobs being replaced or it's about data privacy. 

[00:03:37] Chris Watson-James: Those are often the first things that I think people are thinking of, rather than actually where's the value in this. What should we be doing with this, and we need to be thinking about AI as one of the many tools or a collection of tools within the toolkit that a business has. Yes, there are things that need to be taken very seriously around the privacy of your customer's data, or you know how it's gonna affect your workforce. But, if you're not having those conversations, this is gonna essentially be happening without you being at the wheel, and you know technology is moving very fast. So, I think by educating yourself as a business leader and making sure you understand the implication of AI is gonna impact your business. 

[00:04:20] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah, I mean, I know that we're putting on some workshops in the autumn this year specifically for leaders around how they can work with AI into their organisation at a deeper level. 

[00:04:32] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: But what you are saying is you've gotta have a certain amount of self-education there, in order to be able to sort of understand the landscape of AI and where it fits. What's your take on AI policies within organisations and where they're sitting at the moment in terms of making things happen? 

[00:04:53] Chris Watson-James: A lot of businesses probably haven't really developed much of a policy around certainly the use of AI. I'm sure there are plenty of companies that are worrying about how they fit into their Ts and Cs and kind of trying to cover themselves legally, in terms of AI is doing. But in terms of a policy, how it should be used, where it can be used, where it can't be used, I don't think companies have got a good grasp on that at the moment. What's your take on it? 

[00:05:23] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: It's interesting because I was at an event with very senior leadership of different businesses just a few weeks ago and I was gobsmacked by the lack of AI policies cause we've been talking about AI policies in like our Leaders Lunches, the people who are sort of in the sphere. We've got a sort of, I say a group, it's a large group cause we have different people coming in different lunches, and most of those people over the last I would say 12 to 18 months, because we've been talking about AI and AI policies, most of the people coming to those events and part of that private LinkedIn group, actually do now have AI policies. 

[00:06:04] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: But, when I went into this wider room and we're talking about I spoke to more than a dozen, probably 20 odd different leaders. Honestly, I was gobsmacked by the fact that most of the answers were no, but I think we need to have one, or I think somebody's putting something together there. You know there was only I think one definitive yes, we've got one and we're confident in what it covers. 

[00:06:32] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: If you don't have a policy, you can't manage your staff, your employees properly around AI, cause you can't say you shouldn't do that if there's not a policy that says you can't do it. And the other thing which I don't think people are thinking about this, what's their risk from not having a policy? 

[00:06:54] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: So, if you have not got a policy which says, do not drop this kind of data into this type of model or LLM or whatever, it might be right. What happens when your employee takes a spreadsheet of 10,000 customer records which has private data on it and drops it into something that then actually isn't private and you know, what's a fine for GDPR is based on revenue of your company. 

[00:07:28] Chris Watson-James: Yeah. 

[00:07:29] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: And so, I think it's gobsmacking that people haven't, gone hold on a minute... there's a massive risk exposure from not actually having this written down and saying what you can and can't do. And I think people feel that they, I just think that they're mystified as to what should be there, and they probably think that they need to go to a lawyer, spend lots of money on some fancy policy, when actually in my mind it needs some thinking about in the first place. And again, coming back to what you said about being informed, do people actually know what are the limitations and the differences between these things are? 

[00:08:09] Chris Watson-James: Agreed. And I think there'll be you know Gen Z and millennial workers now in the workplace whose kind of natural instinct is to be using things like ChatGPT as a search engine. 

[00:08:22] Chris Watson-James: You know and have grown up in a world where data privacy of their own data is to come by and therefore, they're actually towards it, probably is looser than the company would want it to be. So, their natural inclination is gonna be to use these tools and think about things like data privacy second. So those policies do need to be in place.  

[00:08:40] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:08:41] Chris Watson-James: But they also need to be constructed in a way that's gonna encourage the business to adopt the tools effectively. 

[00:08:46] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:08:47] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: I'm not of the opinion where it's like, you must not use AI. I think that's the worst policy in the world. That's like saying don't use a computer. You're only allowed to use an abacus. Don't Google things. Yeah, but I think that you need the policy in place to then go to the next level. 

[00:09:05] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: When we're talking about infusing technology and AI into your tech stack, but actually it's adopting AI in your organisation is probably a more realistic conversational part. Although, in terms of our remit we tend to look at the sort of the bit which influences revenue. Because from policy, It's then into training and adoption and education I would say, and I mean, what have you been seeing on that? 

[00:09:36] Chris Watson-James: Again, it's very self-led a lot of the time isn't it, people are either using the tools, or they've been given the tools. We have seen some businesses, we've seen some partner businesses, that have been sharing resource out across the business in terms of you know here are structured prompts that will deliver certain value. There are companies doing that, but I think there are more companies not doing that. 

[00:09:58] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:09:58] Chris Watson-James: We talked about infusing AI into the tech stack whether you are actively doing that or not as a business. A lot of the tools that you are already using are doing it for you. Now, whether it be Photoshop whether it be your CRM like AI is now the buzzword for every SaaS platform in the world. And that means those tools are there team to use right next to your customer data whether you like it or not and therefore like that education I think is really important it be a structured approach making sure everybody in the team is going through a you know a certain curriculum if you like of training, or whether it's holding, I mean you know so we obviously we have our AI task force, we try and stay ahead of trends and then we make sure we're holding those training sessions internally around that. 

[00:10:46] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:10:46] Chris Watson-James: And I think that's definitely a really good approach. 

[00:10:49] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:10:49] Chris Watson-James: The scale of your business is gonna dictate how you approach that training.  

[00:10:55] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah, and you touch on the AI task force. I think some people call them AI councils, and I think having a group which is mandated to actually look at what's going on in terms of the relevance of different tools and different technologies to a specific business and then drive that forward. I think that's the next stage in terms of understanding what training needs to happen and what education needs to happen within the business and what then a roadmap might look like. 

[00:11:30] Chris Watson-James: Yeah absolutely. And these tools are changing so fast, you know we saw that update a few months ago where suddenly ChatGPT held memory across all of your chats. Which at a first glance seems great, 'oh fantastic my assistant is gonna learn with me'. Actually, you start getting this confirmation bias because it remembers everything you've ever asked it. 

[00:11:50] Chris Watson-James: So, the next time you come and ask it, it holds that information and it kind of starts giving you the answers you want to hear. So that change can be so rapid and the way that these companies are rolling out updates and new models, be actively, you know training and pushing forward. You can't set and forget in terms of policy and training. 

[00:12:12] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah, what in terms of an AI task force and an AI council, how do you think that should be made up? Typically, our audience is sort-of mid-size businesses, and are much larger, how would you like if somebody's listening to this who's a leader, and thinks well we don't have an AI task force, an AI leader, that sounds like a sensible thing we should do. 

[00:12:35] Chris Watson-James: Yeah.  

[00:12:36] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: How should that be constituent if that's the right word? 

[00:12:39] Chris Watson-James: I think you need people from across your business. So, we're talking kind of the breadth of business in terms of your different functions. But also, the depth in terms of from seniority downwards. So, I think you need a good cross section of people across your teams, but you also need to be making use of those people in the team who are natural champions and natural early adopters. So, there will be people who just are naturally inclined to try new tools, to read about things, to listen to podcasts to you know, soak up that knowledge. 

[00:13:10] Chris Watson-James: They're just so valuable as people within the business, and you know what they're gonna be doing it anyway, whether you involve them in your task force or not. So, you might as well harness that energy and have them in the discussion.  

[00:13:21] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah, Interesting. Slightly side note, but I saw a stat that employees that are good at using AI for their job, can get paid up to 56% more than their peers doing the same job. So, if you're listening to this and you want to get a pay rise, informing yourself more and more about using AI and being involved in things like a taskforce is obviously a very valuable thing to do as well. 

[00:13:50] Chris Watson-James: Yeah absolutely. It’s fascinating isn't it. What people haven't necessarily realised, that aren't adopting AI in their daily workflows, is it's not just about you know image creation, or getting it to write a blog, It's just about like efficiency. It's getting AI to do things that are repetitive or involve a lot of data or something you just do very regularly. They don't need to be highly complicated tasks that AI is doing for you, but the efficiency gains can be massive. 

[00:14:20] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah, I think it's interesting cause you're talking about some things there which are at a personal efficiency level, you know using some of these tools, as an employee rather than a system or business level. 

[00:14:36] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: And I think what we've seen is that where people are adopting within their own workflow, they're much more likely then to adopt the wider organisational AI initiatives I would say. 

[00:14:52] Chris Watson-James: Yeah, because they get it, don't they. They see the value. I think as with any tool, an employee or a team that feels forced into using something that they're not interested in aren't gonna see the value from it. The moment it clicks, and you know Claude or ChatGPT or whatever it might be, does something for you that you didn't know it could do and you kind of go- huh? That's cool and you get it. 

[00:15:19] Chris Watson-James: Then I think you start to buy in, and you start to go yeah, I can understand why management is saying we need to be thinking about how we deploy AI. 

[00:15:27] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah, okay. So, let's talk about some use cases for AI deployment. You've already mentioned that you know it's the buzzword already within lots of different SaaS things. So, let's talk about embracing AI via what you are already using in your tech stack. 

[00:15:48] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Can you sort of tell us a bit more about how that can happen? 

[00:15:52] Chris Watson-James: Yeah, so I think initially a lot of businesses were I guess bolting on AI. You know, they were using existing models whether AI did very well out of this, lots of companies started embracing that; whether it was HubSpot or Apple, they kind of Just sort of adopted that technology and bolted it onto the side. What we've seen more recently is actually you know these tools have now had a few years since OpenAI really kind of burst the AI bubble, to think about how to deploy some of these tools a bit more thoughtfully they're focusing a lot more on it being part of a daily workflow. How do we streamline the use of the existing platform on the existing tool by incorporating AI? Not just bolting it on, not having a kind of copy and paste relationship with it. How can we actually use this tool within here we're seeing that now? So, for users that aren't familiar it's gonna be a lot more similar to using something like Microsoft Word, where you have things like your spell check is built in. We take that for granted now is starting to do that when we're talking about things like CRMs for example where suddenly you have this kind of ever present assistant or this functionality that's AI powered, it's within the platform, it's within the tools, whether it's the wizzywig that you are writing copy in, whether it's within the tool functionality for building out an email template. AI is now there and therefore that ease of integration within your daily workflow I think is a lot more obvious. 

[00:17:21] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:17:22] Chris Watson-James: Some ways AI is becoming less in your face and more subtly part of the wider process. Although obviously you always get those little stars appearing wherever a platform wants to tell you there's AI within the tool. 

[00:17:34] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:17:34] Chris Watson-James: The actual functionality is becoming just baked in and I think that's what's quite interesting now because it really is just infused into the technology 

[00:17:42] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah, whoever designed the little star icon they should have painted it and charged 0.001 P for one of those and would be rich beyond their wildest dreams now. In terms of this embedding of AI within platforms, are there any dangers to that? 

[00:18:01] Chris Watson-James: Yeah. I mean there are in as much as with any of these AI tools the source of information sometimes is not always clear it depending on the platform you're working in if you are dealing with customer data I think there's always an inherent risk of you know where are we sharing data to So if we're simply turning AI features on without reading the small print without questioning what's happening to our first party data I think that's a real risk I think that's something that needs to be part of that policy that we talked about but I think With well-educated staff with well written policies with processes that consider the use of AI. You know and using software that you feel confident about and you've researched. I think they all of those things add up to a world where we can use AI safely 

[00:18:53] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Okay 

[00:18:53] Chris Watson-James: But it does need to be approached with a bit of common sense. 

[00:18:56] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Okay. Coming back to understanding the what's and the wherefores about things like data and things going there. Okay, so what about talk about using AI within tools and how effectively that's if you've got things like Salesforce or you've got HubSpot those kinds of tools you're seeing those appear the quality, I think is generally getting better. Although, there was an AI assistant, which I did yesterday, and it was basically worse than a search function. But anyway, that beside what about, like more custom uses of AI within people's you know revenue generating technology. What's the approach with that? 

[00:19:45] Chris Watson-James: So, I think this is where it starts to get really interesting and we've done some work recently with clients that you know, they're really interesting use cases that off the bat maybe weren't the most obvious uses for AI. 

[00:19:58] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:19:59] Chris Watson-James: I think this is where having that discussion around are the pain points, what is it that we're trying to solve, trying to understand a particular process flow from end to end. Whether that be part of your sales process, whether it be part of your marketing team, whether it be more customer facing and part of your product. Understanding where is a good fit for the type of task, whether it's a very repetitive task or volume data task, but also where it's gonna add value, that we don't wanna be doing is saying just stick that on it, it'll be fine. 

[00:20:33] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah, because I've heard people sort-of talk about like AI is the answer now... What was the question again? Kind of thing, and it's not that way round. It's good that you highlight that cause I think if people are looking at adoption, start with where's the need, in terms of as you say repetitive, time-consuming, problematic tasks and look at the process there. And I suppose process mapping plays a really important role at this point. 

[00:21:04] Chris Watson-James: It does because you need to fully understand. We've talked before about how business leaders aren't aware of what's going on within their technology or their processes, and you sometimes have these silos between teams. So, that full picture with process mapping and understanding where data is flowing across your business, what processes are interconnected, where teams interact with each other and where they interact with their technology. That will start to then highlight there's an awful lot of manual importing going on over here or someone's doing hours of research over here, and those are things when people start talking about data or research, those are things where you can start going: Actually AI is very good at that, and when built in a flow that is very structured and very set, you can harness AI in a way that it's gonna give you very repeatable outcomes. 

[00:22:00] Chris Watson-James: So, you know, good example, we've worked recently with a company where they wanted to automate parts of their sales process. We spent time with them understanding is the value gonna be, where are your real problems, where do we want to make sure that we're focusing on letting people do their jobs in a way that only the people can. 

[00:22:18] Chris Watson-James: Therefore, how do we put AI in the background of this process to be going off and doing things like research, bringing data back, formatting that data, structuring it in a way that can ultimately put out a very repeatable output, which in this case was a customised pitch deck to allow them to really understand that process from end to end. 

[00:22:40] Chris Watson-James: You need to have various different AI agents throughout a flow that can do a set job, nothing more nothing less. 

[00:22:47] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:22:48] Chris Watson-James: That's why we talk about infusing AI, because this is not a case of 'oh I just bring in a chat bot and it will do a thing for me', It's a case of each part of this is locked down in a way that it's gonna do what it is expected to do. But, that kind of the magic if you like, what AI can do is then go off and do that very fast. 

[00:23:07] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Okay. 

[00:23:07] Chris Watson-James: Really good results. 

[00:23:08] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Okay 

[00:23:09] Chris Watson-James: To go and do the proper work. 

[00:23:11] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Okay, I'm gonna take you back to the start of that interesting section there. You talked about process mapping. Now, no doubt a lot of people are gonna go off and ask ChatGPT to tell them, or maybe old school Google it. But can you just explain to the people listening, what does process mapping mean? Because I think people are probably concerned that it's more complicated than it really is. 

[00:23:38] Chris Watson-James: Okay, so in a nutshell process mapping is essentially bringing together all of the things that you are currently doing across your business; so can be everything from which systems, or which people do a certain function, what that function is, what it links to, and bringing that together in a visual map so that you can literally understand in this particular part of our business. So maybe it's the handoff of new sales leads. These people are responsible for these things, they use these tools, the data flows from here to here. This is the sequential process that happens mapped out visually and the reason is it’s a really powerful process is because what we tend to find within businesses is that individuals know their bit of the process and a lot of it's up here, it is in their heads, so they're not necessarily sharing it that well across the business, and generally there isn't somebody that's holistically taking ownership of that process from end to end. 

[00:24:38] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:24:38] Chris Watson-James: Mapping it out you, can start to go well hang on, what happens in this part? 

[00:24:41] Chris Watson-James: Where does the data go after that? 

[00:24:43] Chris Watson-James: Or who owns that bit? 

[00:24:44] Chris Watson-James: Or why does nothing happen here? 

[00:24:46] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:24:47] Chris Watson-James: Really good way of being able to break a process apart as well as mapping it out. 

[00:24:52] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah, thank you for that, and I think it has to be the starting point for any kind of customised AI implementation, solving the problem, is the process map defines the problem if you like in terms of you know, businesses a collection of processes working in harmony, hopefully. And it was interesting because yesterday there was a conversation about that prospective company that came to us and said, 'oh we'd like you to solve this with AI' and we actually had to go back to them and say: 'Well We can't because you don't have a defined process, you've got all of these things going off all over the place and you can't until you've mapped what you want it to be, you can't just throw AI at the problem.'' 

[00:25:39] Chris Watson-James: Exactly, and sometimes the answer, or at least the first port of call is, change the process. Technology is great, but it can't fix everything. Ultimately, if people are not engaging with technology the way that we want them to as a business, the technology can only go so far. 

[00:25:57] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:25:57] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: I do think also there's a thing about being open to changing process, because you've got the technology, so you know it should be something that when you are implementing technology, look at the why are we doing this? 

[00:26:15] Chris Watson-James: Yep. 

[00:26:15] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: If your route to getting to the objective is this way the technology can take you in a shorter route, faster route, then subject to you know quality and all of that, you shouldn't be afraid to actually say, well we could re-engineer the process underneath this because we want the objective. 

[00:26:34] Chris Watson-James: Yeah, absolutely. And I think like you say there, it's asking the why. I think we've seen a few businesses recently who it feels a little bit like they're going through a bit of a tick box exercise of, I've been told to use AI, I've just gotta tick that box. 

[00:26:47] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:26:47] Chris Watson-James: That’s not the right way to approach it. 

[00:26:49] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:26:50] Chris Watson-James: This really is a genuinely very very helpful tool. I don't want to go too much into the hyperbole of saying it's a game changer, but it is a big deal. 

[00:26:58] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:26:58] Chris Watson-James: And to just be ticking a box is not the right way to be thinking about this. 

[00:27:02] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah, but the flip side of that I would say is we had a really enjoyable conversation last week with that potential new customer where they'd got this kind of 'oh well we thought maybe you could help us with this' and then when we start asking them about problems there was the this whole sort of cascade, then of like 'oh well, this is a problem' and we went, have you thought about it If you did this technology? And I loved that conversation because I realised the power of having a conversation with us being knowledgeable about what the technology is capable of doing, just open the minds of that company as to ' Oh wow you could do that'. And they just thought that was how it had to be, I thought that was a brilliant conversation. 

[00:27:56] Chris Watson-James: I agree and it is that moment of asking the right questions of well could you get AI to do this? And obviously our response at the time was yeah absolutely, and that sort of almost jaw dropping moment of God we spent hours doing that... 

[00:28:10] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:28:10] Chris Watson-James: And that's you know, that's what we're talking about here, it's quality of life for your employees, it is time saved, its value driven. You know being able to kind of speed up sales velocity and things. All these things are things that we should be thinking about but asking the right questions of how to get there. 

[00:28:26] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah, Absolutely I suppose. I'll I mean to kind of bring it right round, you've come back to this sort of self-education bit of asking the right questions and gaining the understanding and we talked about how fast things are moving at the start. But we've kind of brought ourselves back around to the start, where you gotta know something in order to get moving. 

[00:28:52] Chris Watson-James: Yeah. 

[00:28:53] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: And then do the next actions. 

[00:28:55] Chris Watson-James: Yeah absolutely, I think that's the thing, don't just look at AI as this big daunting thing that's gotta happen overnight. Start with education, start with policy, and build. You know, I think the technology moves really fast so staying ahead of it is always gonna be a challenge. 

[00:29:13] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. 

[00:29:13] Chris Watson-James: Place to start is now, with what's in front of us. 

[00:29:17] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah 

[00:29:17] Chris Watson-James: You know, like I said change management, thinking about how we bring different elements of AI into the business. 

[00:29:24] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah. Well, I think that opportunities audit, like the AI opportunities audit that we do is just, I love those because they're so exciting when you have a systematic approach to uncovering opportunity, that then it's just like, some of the gains are gigantic. If you think about some of the other things, and this is why I think AI and technology is such a strategic game player for the companies that get it right. You think about doing something really amazing on like, I don't know some SEO project or some PPC, and picking on those things, it's sort of traditional digital marketing lead generation thing and you do something fantastic, and you get a 20 maybe uplift if it was absolutely knockout. Because you know you're assuming you're already doing some good stuff over here, anyway 20 would be a really big, like wow this is really good, but you could do something with this new AI? 

[00:30:25] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: And when we look at these opportunity audits and when you turn around and go oh, we could save 98% of your time, 98%. Like and imagine that what that person can do with that freed up 98% of the time. Now they're only spending 2% on that task. Oh, that's like wow. We haven't seen gains like that since back in the good old days of digital marketing when you know, people were still convincing companies to get a website, cause you'd get ahead if you had a website kind of thing. And it was a competitive differentiator that actually have a website. 

[00:31:02] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: I imagine there's people listening to that go what, you actually had to persuade people to have a website? Everybody's got a website. But I've been around that long, I had conversations with people about saying if you get a website you'll stand out in your industry because, so few people have a website. And they were like but we've got brochures, why would we want a website? Yeah, now the game has changed but, I think that's where we are with AI. 

[00:31:28] Chris Watson-James: Yeah. 

[00:31:28] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: We are gonna be at a point in five years at most maybe where everybody's going to be in the game and the winners will have jumped ahead, and the people that don't adopt fast will have fallen by the wayside kind of thing. 

[00:31:47] Chris Watson-James: Yeah, absolutely agree, and I think you know now is the time to be doing it because the technology is much more established, you know it's in a position now where it is enough that we can do really amazing things with it, it's moving really fast. 

[00:32:02] Chris Watson-James: So, now is the time to make sure you're ahead of the curve and you're really understanding where to enhance it. 

[00:32:07] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Okay. That's great I think we've covered off a lot. We probably should put a few bits and pieces in the show notes in terms of links to some of these things, education, development. I think that for summary it's like that education informing leadership, so things like having an AI policy, and that policy has got to evolve as you evolve your use of it. AI Task Force/AI Council for adoption, then start looking at what AI you've already got access to, and the tools that you've got, and then looking at the wider things. So, yeah, I think the AI opportunities audit that you know, and people do those kinds of things if they're well informed enough themselves. 

[00:32:50] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: But, that kind of thing is then the next stage for the more bespoke if you like AI implementations. Okay that's really good I've as always enjoyed chatting to you on this and I could chat for ages, but we'll get in trouble with the team for creating too long an episode. So, any more gems before we sign off on this one Chris? 

[00:33:17] Chris Watson-James: No I just think you know it's again, there will come a time where AI is just one of the names that gets given to a collection of tools, if not part of every tool that we use, I liked your analogy about the policy of saying oh you know don't use a computer is kind of the equivalent but it's similar as well of the way we're talking about the use of AI and you wouldn't expect somebody in the team to not have a keyboard with their computer, and it's gonna come to a point where AI is part of everything that we do within business. So, it is time to be adopting it, to be thinking about it, not as this big standalone thing that we can copy and paste in and out of it needs, to be something that we interact with in the same way we would any of the tools that we use daily. 

[00:34:04] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: Yeah, no that's good. Good finishing comment there, I like that. Well, thanks to you Chris for another interesting conversation, really great. And thanks to you all for listening, this has been another Revenue Rewired episode. So, if you found this conversation useful, which I hope you did please do follow us, like, subscribe all of that stuff, whatever platform you choose to listen to us on. And we're on all of the popular ones. 

[00:34:32] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: To find out more about Innovation Visual or AI adoption, in fact, just go to innovationvisual.com. And, until next time keep rewiring the way you look at your revenue systems. 

[00:34:44] Tim Butler - Host of Revenue Rewired: So, thank you very much Chris and thank you all for listening.​