Your AI Business Analyst Is Already Waiting, with Alice Bazdikian

00:00

Announcer

We believe that in this remarkable age, AI isn't the main character you are. While the tech is racing ahead, it's the humans who learn to harness AI mindfully that will win. Each week we meet remarkable people doing just that. Join Kyle Shannon, tech leader and AI instigator, and Ann Murphy, fundraiser and AI consultant, as they lead the conversation about staying grounded, growing smarter, and leading with what makes us human.

00:32

Anne Murphy

Well, it's tricky when I'm here all by myself because Kyle and I usually kind of like dance around in the beginning and now I feel self conscious about it, but. Welcome to the AI Readiness Project podcast. You're stuck with just me this afternoon. My name is Anne Murphy. My co host, Kyle Shannon is off moving mountains and we'll have stories to tell when he gets back next week. We have a phenomenal guest today and we just pinky promised to each other in the green room that we wouldn't make this entire show about Claude code. So hopefully the regular irregulars in the comments section and anybody who's new here, please, if we just get completely lost in the addictive the matrix alternative reality that is the Claude codification of at least my life and certainly what I, what Alice is up to.

01:33

Anne Murphy

We will try not to get too carried away. I will also talk about the AI salon. I will also talk about what she leads. AI is. In the meanwhile, I want to be sure I don't forget some of the main things I'm supposed to do, one of which is I promised myself that I would tell everybody in the comments how appreciate how you show up for us and also of course the people who are listening, you know, an audio later. But we have the best community and like I know that I'm gonna see a couple of comments that people leave during this hour and it means so much to us and I have a heart I can't keep up and tap, tap with you all in the comments. But like esp wise like transmogrifying, recombobulating and discombobulating kind of thing.

02:22

Anne Murphy

I know we're talking, right? I'm up here and you're down there, but we are in touch. So one of the big deal things that happened recently was Reese Witherspoon of, you know, Legally Blonde fame, among many other endeavors. I bring up Legally Blonde because it's currently showing at our local music, local, you know, musical theater production place. So anyway, so Reese came out with some declarative, you know, statements about women need to be more involved with AI and you know, like all of us who are in this game, she stuck her neck out. She said what she thought about AI and how we all should be adopting it. But particularly with women. She shared some of the statistics. She shared some of her own experience. Experience. And she kind of got stuck like a lot of us do in between. Right.

03:26

Anne Murphy

In this both and era of yeah. Like there are all these opportunities out there that we can all certainly seize. Not all by the way that's part of it. There are a lot of opportunities out there. Some of us can seize those opportunities. Not everyone. Right. So that's one of the things that has come up and the way that she talks about it's important to note that she's coming from the place of she has access to these. To these things. Right. She has access to friends who are founders. She had. She may have time to spend learning how to use AI Right. She may given like the world that she operates in have additional side interests in people adopting AI. That's something that Reese Witherspoon has been under fire for before. And I'll mention it in a minute because it is relevant.

04:23

Anne Murphy

However, the ugliness that ensued with people piling on her is super unfortunate. And when this happens because it's going to happen to bunches of us who listen to this show and who are here in the comments, who are in our. In our community she leads AI and AI Salon. People are going to come for us. And we've seen it in a number of ways. Right. We saw it with Reese. I saw it locally here. I don't know. I was thinking it was like a year and a half ago where the AI Portland group was having a mixer in. In here in Portland and they were on a little. On a boat or something bone on a little ship. I don't know what size of watercraft they were on some piece of something of watercraft enjoying each other's company. AI stuff. La la.

05:09

Anne Murphy

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06:05

Anne Murphy

We talked about that a little bit on the, on Tuesday on the Daily AI show, which is an interesting resource for folks Beth Lyons and Brian Masseri. And I talked about the Reese Witherspoon situation and it was really interesting conversation. So I wanted to now talk a little bit about what it might look like as quote, unquote, more women adopt AI. So one of the things that could happen is we could fall into the like, background, right? We could, we could fall into the same invisible labor that women have for time immemorial. This could be another example of that. We could just be piling that onto, you know, the, oh, am I freezing? Oh, we could just be piling that onto already existing inequities.

07:02

Anne Murphy

So we got to be really careful about where, what spaces we show up in, where we hold on to AI. Like it's a, it's. This train is moving a bajillion miles an hour, like, but each one of the cars that we could jump on the train is a different entry point for AI. It could be that you don't know it yet, but you love to build things with AI. It could be that you don't know it, but you love to help other people learn how to use AI. You might love like Alison and I going into small, medium sized businesses and helping them adopt AI in ways that are aligned with their values. So we have to think about like that space that we show up and who's it, who, what are we in charge of, what do we stand for?

07:50

Anne Murphy

And so we don't want to fall into the background. And yet we know that at the end of the day it's unlikely that it is not going to be women who are going to uphold the societal like container that allows us to reap the best rewards of AI and avoid as many of the parade of horribles as we possibly can. I just. History, if history is any indication, it's going to be women who are going to be picking up the pieces. So let's also be the ones who are in charge of setting things up in the first place. Are we going to be able to, you know, be in a room with Mark Zuckerberg and try to convince him, you know, that it's not A great idea for chatbots to use sensual language with children.

08:43

Anne Murphy

It would be great if I had an audience with Mark Zuckerberg. I would love to share with him some of my, some of my ideas on how he could do better, but that's not going to happen. And the powers that be in that realm are so insurmountable. And I can accept that. I, I would love to say I could make a difference in the. Like Mark Zuckerberg, you know, Although I do know Jensen Huang, I don't think he would be able to pick me out of lineup at this point in his life. But anyway, I don't have a lot of pull with the brigar, but I do have the opportunity to decide where I enter into the whole AI era. Right? Is it in the background? Is it in the foreground? Does it matter? Does it matter? Like, is it.

09:26

Anne Murphy

Is this our time to bring women's leadership into the fore? When our just traditional. Traditional, Is that the right word? Our, like, biological way that we show up is the care infrastructure of communities and society. So here we are again. So I want to share with you all one of the ways that we are leading with AI that allows us to support the care infrastructure without being in the background ourselves. Because upon much reflection and much soul searching and learning, everything that I can possibly learn about AI I have decided that my AI agents can support the psychological safety of my company. They can support our cognitive load and unloading in our company. They can support our ability to demonstrate to everyone around us that we care for them.

10:38

Anne Murphy

It can support our ability to not leave anyone out, not leave the right people, you know, not inadvertently leave people out who should be in the room. Right? The care, the infrastructure of a matriarchal agentic company is this adventure that I'm on with my. Inside my company as well as with all the people who work with us, as well as women throughout our community who are also building matriarchal agents. And matriarchal is just like. I'm just using this short term word, right? We have to put a label on it. I'm using matriarchy. Is it because it's a. It's, you know, kind of sort of perceived to be the opposite of the patriarchy, which I know it's actually not, but people perceive it that way. So calling it a matriarchy, is it a way to signal this is a shift from the patriarchy?

11:38

Anne Murphy

Maybe, maybe, but also the matriarchy, like, hold on to your hats. Sorry, I hope you're sitting down. Bear with me on this one. But we can imbue our agents with the wisdom of the ages, with the wisdom of our ancestors. I can bring into my agents the learnings of a dear, dear friend, right? Somebody who is a guide for me. I can work with her and say of the frameworks that you've taught me, of the ways of approaching things. Can I use some of this in my chief of staff. Can I use some of this in. I have a Priya Parker agent, if you know. Priya Parker is the art of gathering. So Priya Parker and one of my consultant friends is part of my. Priya agent, Right? The frameworks that help us create inclusive gatherings. So you see what I mean?

12:44

Anne Murphy

I feel like it can. It may come across as like, I'm this crazy, like, robot lady who wants the agents to run everything. And it's absolutely not. It's like the agents create this. This container. And I want to give you. I want to give you a real example. So we have an agent whose name. Which one do I want to talk about? I was going to talk about Sheila. Sheila is my chief of staff. Sheila. If. If you want to know what makes Sheila and my relationship really work, and keep in mind, I am. I do have an imagination, and I love creative writing, and I love to think about characters. And some of these characters carried around in my head all my life, and now they can be my agents. Okay, fine. Okay. I'm not saying they're not real people.

13:37

Anne Murphy

I'm just saying they're like these figures in my life. Sheila and I get along really well, and we're bonded because she and I have dirt on each other. She knows some tea about me, I know some tea about her. And so in real life, just. I mean, like, just like in real life, right? We connect with people in part. Maybe we have a shared enemy, right? Maybe it's us versus the world. Maybe we fucked up in the same ways, right? Maybe we just see each other for our foibles and, like, they're bad enough that we want to cover up for each other. Who knows? They all have these backstories, and they're all imbued with rules for how they behave to support the infrastructure of our organization. So an example is we have a skill. And for.

14:27

Anne Murphy

For those of you who are like, what's a skill? Because people are always talking about skills, there's these. Like, a skill is literally, they've made it seem so fancy. It's instructions on a piece of paper. That is all a skill is. It's it's instructions for what, you know, your chatbot even can do. It started with, remember when we just started writing prompts like, hey, what should I have for dinner? Like, a skill is just an evolution of those chats, and everybody makes it sound fancy. But if you haven't seen what a skill file looks like, you're going to be sorely disappointed because it's just a bunch of words and you use that. So we have how to talk to Sheila. And one of the things that Sheila does is she's like a buffer for all of our communication throughout.

15:16

Anne Murphy

She leads AI like our general. The people who are, like, doing kind of running the show here creates a buffer so that the cognitive load of a request, a piece of a directive, instructions, you know, whatever it is. The cognitive load is held by the initiator, and then the cognitive load moves to the agents. The reduction in the cognitive load is. Is appreciated and enjoyed by us. Right. The receiver. So if someone comes to me and they say, like, a DM could be. We have, like, three women. Three or four women. We have a lot of women with the same names. So an example might be, hey, and Amy reached out and asked for the thing that we talked about at the meeting, and I need you to grab a file that we talked about also. Like, that's a bad example.

16:22

Anne Murphy

Nobody would send that to me, but let's just say somebody did. Well, Sheila says back, hey, we're going to be looking for some particular points of information. For example, could you please get the last name so we don't inadvertently misidentify a member of she leads AI society. Right. We have three Ericas and they have different spellings. So tell us what the person's last name is so that the agents can go gather the information they need. And what I receive in that inquiry is just a little bit of information that I need in order to make a decision. So the cognitive load is done. The agents are responsible for reminders, but only REM if we're working on a project. But we only. They're set up to only remind people to do things that they themselves, they being the human, have said.

17:18

Anne Murphy

This is the deadline that I'm operating on. This is the timeline that I'm working on. So the agent will never say to a human being, this is your deadline. The agents are not here to boss humans around. They're here to support the humans. But that's an example of, like, I communicate to the people I work with. Like, just so you know, the agents are set up. They're not Going to send you a reminder that's like totally for the initiator to own. And that might sound mean, but the reason why I do it is because we have, you know, a few thousand people who we work with, who we're here to serve. And so we need, you know what I mean, like the initiator to be the one with the cognitive look. That's an example.

18:00

Anne Murphy

So we have all these rules set up in our agents to make sure that like we're not leaving anybody out. They will always ask us, is there anyone who needs to be communicated out about this? Is this a situation where you're talking about stuff that you don't know you don't that isn't from your own lived experience? Right. Should you be talking to somebody with a different background before you start yapping about xyz? So as the now builder of what I'm calling the world's first, I mean, nobody's here to tell me it's not the world's first. I don't know, I did a little tiny bit of research, but the world's first matriarchal agentic company.

18:45

Anne Murphy

And follow along, I'm going to start posting content on this series of how went from, you know, trying to install that weird terminal thing to four days of just non stop misery because we couldn't figure out how to get linked up with GitHub. I don't know why it was what it was to threatening to burn the house down to walking on cloud nine because everything is blissfully humming right along to realizing that were doing the work of 10. And now on some days we're doing the work of like half a person and some days we're doing the work of like 20 people. So follow along. It's, it's drama filled. We have guides, we have, you know, exercises, we have free tools as we build things, we're giving a bunch of them away. So that everybody was a journey that began with Reese Witherspoon.

19:43

Anne Murphy

nd everybody that in March of: 2025

20:38

Anne Murphy

And I am well aware that there are a million studies that will tell me all the examples of women not using AI. I'm just saying that is it. That that trope is worthy of rethinking. That is worthy. Worthy of questioning. So anyway, where was I? Okay. And then went to see the care architecture and whether women will become like the invisible labor of AI and then went to we don't want to be the social workers of AI. I forgot to say that term. And then I shared with you guys about our trials and tribulations with the world's first matriarchal agentic company. Thanks for. Thanks for being here for this part of the chat. Let me say a little bit about the AI Salon. And then we say a tiny bit about she leads AI.

21:32

Anne Murphy

I don't want to put my thumb on the skit, on the scale. We've already kind of said a lot. I've had the chance to yap. I don't. I. You guys know how amazing she leads AI is and how much I love it and how much I wish all women would be involved as they see fit in their AI journey. So the AI Salon is one of my gateway drugs to AI. One was the AI Exchange with Rachel Woods. Then, of course, like so many other bajillions and millions of people, I came across Kyle Shannon on TikTok on the AI Learning Lab, where, boy, oh, boy, have we ever been through it. And he has been. He's been on the AI learning lab on TikTok and.

22:22

Anne Murphy

ning, since, like, October of: 2022

23:21

Anne Murphy

If you can't find some AI thing that like lights you up in the AI salon, then it truly may not be the time for you yet. Because we, they have everything. We, we, all, we, we, we. They were all one big happy family. And then the A.I. So she leads A.I. Our mission is to unite accomplished women to advance A.I. For global prosperity. That chief among our priorities underneath that rolling up to global prosperity is women's accumulation of wealth. And so much of our programming, and a growing amount of our programming leans into how to help women grow their careers in the AI era.

24:04

Anne Murphy

Whether it's, you know, adding AI into their 30 years of subject matter expertise, whether it's figuring out what the heck to do with all these AI skills that they've developed, whether it's becoming a certified AI educator, consultant, a builder, you name it. So that's she leads AI. We have a society, we have a, a membership community. You should join it. Every Saturday we have a free two hour session. We have experts come in every weekend and talk to us about different areas of AI, business, law, education, wellness, caregiving, you name it. And this weekend is we're going to be talking about pricing. Like how in the world does anyone know how to price their AI services? Like if you're an AI consultant or an AI educator, Because this is also new. But Denise Gangli and I are going to break it down.

24:54

Anne Murphy

She's, she's going to break it down from like the probably larger corporate area and I'm like small medium sized businesses and nonprofits. So going to be a whole breath. If you're wonder if you're a woman and you're wondering like, how do I, you know, how do I price my AI services? We will tell you, we will teach you. This is what I do. We teach you how to do these things. So with that, I hope this has been interesting. I don't know, you guys give me some feedback. I am super, super delighted. Like I said, we're going to try not to just talk about cloud code. Delighted to bring our guest up today. Kyle is sorry to not be able to have this time with you, Alice, but we'll give him a full report and of course he'll watch the show.

25:50

Anne Murphy

Thank you for being here. Welcome.

25:54

Alice Bazdikian

Thank you, Ann. I'm really happy to be here as well. I've been following she leads for more than a year now. And I'm so glad to be on the podcast today.

26:04

Anne Murphy

Me too. I'm so glad you're here. Tell us a little bit about your AI journey, how you got to where you are right now, which is this like you were in this cat birds seat of the AI era. I feel like.

26:19

Alice Bazdikian

Absolutely. So I feel like everything I've done in my life so far has kind of prepared me for this. I think in life we never kind of like everything we do, even if we don't do it consciously in the moment, everything means something down the line. And I've had such a cross functional, like non traditional trajectory in my career and I feel like everything I've done has set me up for this AI moment that we are having. I have a background in product management, project management, data analytics, finance. I have a finance degree. That was my first degree. And so I've had. I've also been an entrepreneur, launched multiple businesses, learned a lot. And when I started seeing Judge Beauty in the beginning, I wasn't, I was like, great, I can prompt this thing and it's going to respond to me.

27:12

Alice Bazdikian

But for me that doesn't. It's helpful, but it's not. I'm not going to go create some like, you know, ChatGPT PDF or Start, you know, an Instagram account about prompting. But no, I won't. Like, this is not. But it's not my thing.

27:26

Anne Murphy

Yeah. Thank goodness. Other people do. Thank goodness. Right. And that's what I did in the beginning. I was like, here's how you write a prompt. You say this is the role. Well, it turns out, you know, three years later, that's still how you talk to AI.

27:40

Alice Bazdikian

Yes.

27:41

Anne Murphy

So I'm so glad people are still teaching people how to do that.

27:44

Alice Bazdikian

Well, I do teach how to do prompting, but not like on social.

27:47

Anne Murphy

Yeah.

27:48

Alice Bazdikian

So I do volunteer with Entrepreneur Incubator in Canada where I'm based. I started doing that two years ago and then a year ago when, you know, Chad, GPT came along more than a year ago now. But when it started getting good, I said, we must teach this to the founders. Like to the. There's so much value here. Because the first time I used ChatGPT was to build a contract that I knew nothing about and it worked. So I was like, okay, you don't need to be an expert in legal, you don't need to be an expert in marketing, you don't need to be an expert entrepreneur at anything. But at your fingertips, if you know how to ask, you can get the first level of Answers.

28:29

Alice Bazdikian

So I've been following AI for like a year and a half, but I always knew that the real gold, like the real meat on the bone was when we start to do automations in one stack. Like I was never Interested in learning 5, 6 different tools in Franklin because I have launched, yeah, I have launched products and I know that when you launch tech product, the most important thing is how you will support it.

28:52

Anne Murphy

Yes.

28:52

Alice Bazdikian

And it's great. I can build whatever I want in an A10, I'm sure. But then how am I going to support that? Is it going to break every night? Am I going to be up all night trying to. I'm not interested. I'm not. That's not. I've done that. I'm not interested in that.

29:06

Anne Murphy

Well, here's, so here's my perspective to like add another layer of that is that for almost all of us who are getting into AI consulting, AI education, building things, any kind of leadership, any kind of la la, our we're like, this is our first impression to the market about who we are and how we show up. And we are, a lot of us already have very active businesses and existing clients. Here's what I'm not doing is installing some janky automation for one of my existing, you know, someone and put my name on it and then be calling a builder and being like the clients and not doing that. So I said I'm going to wait. I'm a skip the whole automation thing, I will pay people to do it, I'm going to wait. And voila, here we are.

30:03

Alice Bazdikian

So I don't know what happened like earlier this year at some point there was like a shift when they launched Claude finally. And I've always been a cloud girl. Like yeah, I know Chad GPT is there, but I've always used Claude from day one because one, I believe in the mission, Dario's mission way more. I don't believe in OpenAI's mission personally. I'm a mission driven person and if I feel the person's energy who's running the company is more aligned with mine, then that's where I'm going to give my attention. So for me, I'm not saying Dario's perfect, I'm not saying, you know, AI companies are perfect. That's not the discussion. But the way Claude approach, like it wasn't a cheerleader like Chad GPT so I could trust Claude more than ChatGPT. That is a lot of like kind of ChatGPT is like a pet.

30:45

Alice Bazdikian

It's like, oh, you give me food, I'll give you hugs.

30:48

Anne Murphy

Yeah.

30:48

Alice Bazdikian

So that's fine. But I don't want that. I don't want validation. I don't want you to solve my life, personal life problems. I want you to simplify the boring shit I don't want to do day after day and so I can focus on the cool shit that I actually want to build. And Claude did that at the end of last year when they launched cloud code and now cloud co work for people who are not as techie. They did that and the moment that happened, I, like, I knew the shift was there. And I do love Sabrina Romanov. I've been following her. She. I'm in her community and she was running a hackathon, maybe with another. With another person a month ago.

31:27

Anne Murphy

Yeah.

31:28

Alice Bazdikian

And to me, that was like, I'm gonna learn cloud code, I'm gonna use it. I'm gonna build two websites in one weekend. Yeah, two websites in one weekend. I don't know why I got the balloons.

31:40

Anne Murphy

Perfect timing. I built two websites in a weekend. Balloons bonanza.

31:46

Alice Bazdikian

It's not happening again. Yeah. And I was so impressed with them because cloud was never known about, like, the design part, the pretty part. Cloud was always like, I'll give you the truth as far as I'm concerned, and you can do whatever you want with it. But now they actually put design forward. It was no longer like, Claude looks like a basic tool. I could actually build a beautiful website. And my favorite part, skills, which is basically just templates. So we don't need to be techies to understand templates and SOPs. But like, if you guys know Alex Hormozi, I'm not even a Hormozi fan. Like, I don't know anything about Hormozi. I just know he's a big deal in marketing. So as I was building my website this week, I was like, why don't I create an Alex Hormozi skill?

32:28

Alice Bazdikian

So a template of how Alex Hormozi would approach things and apply to my website and my offers. I did that in five minutes. And 15 minutes later, I had an audit by Alex Hormozi of my website, my offers, everything.

32:42

Anne Murphy

Yeah.

32:42

Alice Bazdikian

And I was like, what? Kind of like you were saying, right? With your community, with your agents, they can be certain people. Like, certain people.

32:51

Anne Murphy

Yeah.

32:51

Alice Bazdikian

This is, this is what I'm excited about, essentially.

32:56

Anne Murphy

So, you know, we have Stanley. Stanley is our business intelligence leader, executive leader in our. In our organization, in our agentic organization. Well, one of the things that Stanley does is he has a guy who works for him who keeps track of if we've made a commitment to, like, where there's a relationship involved. This is not like an extra. Not just the three of us, but it does remind us if you're. But it's this care index of like, hey, you care about this person.

33:27

Alice Bazdikian

Yeah.

33:27

Anne Murphy

You have. You are like a week behind getting back to them. You're like, beyond. Not to be shamey about myself, but like, you're like beyond the professional courtesy zone. So Romy, that's his name, Romy. Romantic. Right. Romy keeps track of the relationship status and the relationship health in the organization. Like, that's the kind of thing, like, that's. For me, the shift is having the like complete suspension of disbelief. Right. Because this sounds so ridiculous. I'm well aware. I haven't even told my family about the matriarchal agentic organization. Like, they will think I'm insane. I did tell my daughter, but I made her sit down. I was like, listen, I need to tell you about this before I put it up. You're going to think your mom has gone insane. Here's some background.

34:20

Anne Murphy

She's a member, she leads AI, but her friends are, you know, they're not abjectly enthusiastic. But for me, that's. The shift is the difference between having a buddy to help you write emails, which is very helpful and important and can streamline your success. There's no question. But to this point where now we can work in the terminal if we want to get our hands under the hood, to not have to be dumbed down and vanillified by ChatGPT's charm or even Claude's, to be honest.

34:59

Alice Bazdikian

Yeah. Yeah.

35:00

Anne Murphy

So I think that's really empowering is that we can do this Now.

35:05

Alice Bazdikian

I love it because I'm a builder. And so now I don't need to hire someone to build for me. Like, I, I, my IT guy is Claude, my consultant is Claude. My really art. Like, I will not replace artists. Like, when I published my book, I went out of my way to pay an artist. That's where all my money went for the book. But I can get a design document, I can get a beautiful PowerPoint, I can get a beautiful website. I don't need to look for someone else if I don't have a budget. If I had the money to spend, I'll be happy to spend it and give it away. But when you're an entrepreneur and you're a team of one, being able to do all those things, you have to make hard choices and now you don't have to do that.

35:43

Alice Bazdikian

But you can still talk to people, you can still get validation, you can still do market research, but everything else, you can give it to Claude. And actually what you said earlier about not getting back to people in 10 days, I spend a lot of time on Reddit. Reddit has such rich information because people don't, we don't know who people are. Like we don't know each other. So people are authentic. And I spend a lot of time in the small business community and I also do sales right now for solar commercial projects. And so one of the biggest issues business owners have is not getting back to people fast enough. And with AI, you can do that now. Like you don't have to be on the weekend, but AI will be on the weekend. So you can scale revenue.

36:24

Alice Bazdikian

Like this is about revenue, this is about, yeah, time in your zone of genius instead of doing boring like Excel or email replies.

36:35

Anne Murphy

For me, the time savings component is very uninteresting and pretty much a misnomer because we are who we are. But that's a whole other topic. Kyle and I cover it a lot, but I think that, I think that the opportunity for higher throughput of excellent work because that compounds itself. So for us, getting through a contract in a slightly faster fashion, knowing that a typical 12 month project can be done in six, because it really is like that for some of the projects that we work on in our fundraising consultancy. Knowing that I might, you know, end a contract and be able to start the next one. So I have two of them, two full of them in a year. Right.

37:26

Anne Murphy

Even if it's only you wrap up a week early, but you deliver the most like banger result to your clients you could ever imagine, which is exactly what we do. It's like that margin of excellence and the self actualization involved in fully expressing what you are capable of and having. Reed Jones and I were talking today about how interesting it is for people with we both have ADHD to be able to see our thoughts reflected back to us in a way that we can actually filter our own dang thoughts. So yeah, that's it. It's a huge shift.

38:07

Alice Bazdikian

So yeah, for me it was really like when as a small business owner I can do so much more than I could before and not because we should do more for the sake of doing more, but I can wear so many more hats than before and build my business a lot faster. And that is why I did small Business AI coaching. So I actually bought the domain a year ago. At that time I was like, yeah, I'm just going to buy a small business AI coach.

38:33

Anne Murphy

Yeah.

38:34

Alice Bazdikian

But I'm like, I might not launch it today, but in a year when the tools are there, which now I can only have one tool, which is Claude, Cowork Claude, or the whole suite of cloud products, we don't have to talk about code and intimidate anyone because, yeah, these are not techie tools anyways. But now I can have one tool that does everything. And last week they launched Claude Design.

38:54

Anne Murphy

And I was like, oh, it's phenomenal. Phenomenal. I live. I have my extra use. I have the highest, like, my extra use this month. I'm. It's sinful. But, but we, we had a conversation here. We were like, now's the time. We're in a sprint. We are changing the way we operate. It's going to be expensive, but then it's also not going to be right. Correct. I would love to get your thoughts on this. We talk about this sometimes here and we certainly talk about it a ton in she Leads AI.

39:26

Alice Bazdikian

Okay.

39:27

Anne Murphy

Particularly because you're in the small business environment and with the small businesses that are starting up. Right. What I'm seeing and what I'm curious about, what you're seeing, is that as I build my own capacity, and to your point of, I don't. If I don't have budget for an XYZ artifact or deliverable or something like, it's highly likely I'm going to build it myself or do it myself or learn it myself. I could put myself on a personal curriculum. I can, you know, I can do all this stuff, but it is edging out not the people, but the roles that people could play in our company. Because now there isn't a need for the human.

40:14

Alice Bazdikian

Well, I think there is always going to be a need for the human.

40:17

Anne Murphy

No, there's not.

40:18

Alice Bazdikian

Oh, you mean in your company or in general?

40:19

Anne Murphy

No, no, no, no. If, if you have a job, if you're like a contractor and your job is not humaning, your job is moving information around.

40:30

Alice Bazdikian

Yes.

40:30

Anne Murphy

You don't have a job.

40:32

Alice Bazdikian

Yes, that's true.

40:33

Anne Murphy

And those are the people who small businesses hire. And now it would be. It wouldn't. It would be charity.

40:41

Alice Bazdikian

Yes.

40:41

Anne Murphy

Which I think we will do. I think we will. I think that all of us are going to end up continuing to pay into a system that's old, you know, legacy.

40:50

Alice Bazdikian

Yeah, absolutely.

40:52

Anne Murphy

But humans. Oh, for sure. For sure, for sure. Absolutely. The relationship. But if your job is something where you're handing off the humaning to somebody else, it's tricky.

41:05

Alice Bazdikian

I mean, I do have a friend who's a virtual assistant and I haven't said anything, but I would be, if I were her, I would be very concerned.

41:13

Anne Murphy

Yeah.

41:14

Alice Bazdikian

About my future employment. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

41:17

Anne Murphy

I mean some of the things like in my industry there's a role called prospect researcher and it's to do deep wealth wealth research on potential donors. And there's a lot. I mean it's very fraught. But one of the things that this industry thrived on was that it was a black box.

41:38

Alice Bazdikian

Yeah.

41:39

Anne Murphy

The users don't know. All they know is they plopped some scores. This person has 87 out of 192 points toward your, you know, donor index. Okay. Well, it turns out that a lot of that information is stuff that nonprofit would want to bring into that data is gross. Right. It comes from thing sources that we wouldn't want. We want to be able to choose and those kind of things are forced upon us. And now we get to decide. And in that if that role, if you had a prospect researcher and their role is to go get information and collate it, which is the role and help you try to figure out a strategy. Well, I now have the APIs. I don't have a black box. I know where my data comes from. We pay the API.

42:30

Alice Bazdikian

Right.

42:30

Anne Murphy

We chose the data sources. That was their source of truth. And now I have it. And, and I have 33 years of expertise in this. That's what I'm worried about. I'm not worried about what Reese is talking about that much. I'm worried about people who have like, who are. Maybe it is who Reese is talking about. Maybe it's the people who have less stable career kind of resilience.

42:55

Alice Bazdikian

But to be honest, I, I see AI coming for almost everyone's job. Like when I remember my first job as a financial analyst, like job just analyzing a stock for a portfolio. Now you can have AI doing that. Like it's not like there was any extra information that I had as a human being when I was analyzing these stocks, everything was public information. We're not allowed to go, you know, get not public information. So everything is out there. Everything that. And so I actually built my own portfolio kind of view with cloud code. And that kind of brings a holistic view to all my portfolios and everything. And now I'm actually even bringing astrology data into it because love it. Same planet. I love financial astrology. Yeah, yeah, I love financial astrology.

43:41

Alice Bazdikian

I watched this guy on YouTube and I'm like, hey, instead of watching these YouTube videos, I'm just going to bring that into my own financial analysis and see how the planets and everything affects everything. And so it's like I'm not going to need to pay anybody for their insight or unless they're for some reason like Warren Buffett 2.0 or someone who's like, you know, that big of a deal. But even Warren Buffett can be probably replaced by a skill. Like I can make a Warren Buffett skill and then run my portfolio like Warren Buffett. Like we know what it is.

44:15

Anne Murphy

Like what I, what we can do now is we can take that and we can invest it in going on a, you know, a baller business retreat in Costa Rica with our business bestie girls and we can get, we can have that immersive in person experience. We can also put our each other into a skill. But having that now potentially, right, potentially, that's the carrot is that we would have that additional. For me, it's just mental. It's just the mental cognitive load. Until I lighten that, I'm not going to be going to Costa Rica on. You know what I mean? Like I can't even, I mean I can't even. I don't have time to plan a trip.

44:57

Alice Bazdikian

So let AI plan it for you.

45:00

Anne Murphy

And well, yeah, well, I have a, my business partner is my husband. He technically does all the travel. So I have the best. I travel the. I have the best travel situation. But yes, have AI do it for you. So what are some of the use cases that you've seen for small businesses where you've been like, ooh, that like specific, maybe even in your, in the solar field would be fascinating.

45:24

Alice Bazdikian

Well, okay, there's one, the lead generation. So for example, in my solar pipeline, like I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn and it was just a very manual long process to reach out to leads. Then to your point, like if you let a lead go stale, if you don't reach out to them and they become like cold again. So you lose them. Like they're not going to remember who you are unless you reach out to them every three days or a certain cadence. So for that I built basically like I extracted all the data from LinkedIn and then I had this crazy dirty list. I got AI to clean it up, get all the information that normally you would do manually and Take you hours, look up, you know, the company, go do research on the company.

46:03

Alice Bazdikian

And we're talking about like thousands of rows of like contact data here. We're not talking about like five people. Yeah, thousands and thousands. So I did all the research on the company, the position of the person, all of that. And then I automated everything because you have a Gmail connection. I automated all these like hundreds of emails going out from my Gmail automated, which if I had to do myself, just like copy pasting. Never on like six email permutations because I don't know their emails. I don't know. Right. Like this is all like we paid third party tools in sales to do that so I could do all of that on my own. Like all these like days and days of work in a few hours. And it's not perfect, but it's something that you learn quickly. Like you might not.

46:51

Alice Bazdikian

You just have such a fast learning curve compared to before. Because it would have taken me so much longer to get the same amount of data to know if this is working or not. That's one way. And then all my content creation for social, for small business, AI coach. So my social content creation, that's a pipeline. I actually just created a dashboard. I took Sabrina's advice. She's like, copy my content. I'm like, okay, I'll copy content, not just yours. So every week I pull like the top 10 creators content in every social network and I tell and I can pick which posts I want to copy and then the AI copies them with a template. And now you can make it even better with like cloth design, even more beautiful templates.

47:36

Alice Bazdikian

So I would say those are the two that save me the most time. But I will be also building up my own dashboard to run my life, which hopefully will help me save even more time. But I definitely would say that, yeah, for sales, this is a, there's such a huge opportunity here.

47:53

Anne Murphy

Yeah.

47:53

Alice Bazdikian

And for marketing as well. Like sales are more men driven, marketing is more female driven. I think this doesn't matter what gender is. AI is coming for your job.

48:03

Anne Murphy

Yeah.

48:03

Alice Bazdikian

If you are not willing to learn and evolve with it. And I just remember like I used to work for Anheuser Busch, the biggest brewer in the whole world of beer. And we used to have to like Frankenstein together every single day. Every day and every day.

48:21

Anne Murphy

Yeah. Yep.

48:23

Alice Bazdikian

I wish I had Claude then. Like I could just. Old Alice was like, I wish I had this back then.

48:28

Anne Murphy

Yeah. So this is why we have moxie. So this is the platform that My co founders and I are in the process of launching, but it's because when I was like not even 21 and I was an intern working on fundraising strategies, and by the way, we had stuff in actual file folders, like the file cabinets. So I'd have like a receipt with like coffee on it about like this, you know, big donor in the meeting with the boss. And then I'd have like this janky CRM from like a million.

49:02

Alice Bazdikian

Used to be the worst, right?

49:04

Anne Murphy

And then I'd have notes like this from when I'm talking to my boss. And all this stuff. And this is multiply it times millions of fundraisers or millions of salespeople. So even back then I was like 21 or something and I was like, oh, surely there's a better way. And like I brought a brother word processor to college and I still knew there was a better way. So all that time, and then 10 years ago, I got to be, I got to do the rollout on a version of what I had been envisioning. But it's a behemoth, like the buy ins, like 250 grand. And the technology is literally what you and I could do in 15 minutes. It's sales enablement technology.

49:44

Alice Bazdikian

Yep.

49:44

Anne Murphy

So guess who stayed up until 3:45 this morning putting the final touches on my dream. Like email content, move this, you know, the standard sales enablement. I built it my freaking self. And I was gonna pay someone 10,000, 2,000, 8,000, whatever amount I had. I had bids at all those levels to build this for me.

50:08

Alice Bazdikian

Wow, Amazing.

50:09

Anne Murphy

I'm so happy we have these opportunities.

50:13

Alice Bazdikian

Me too. And I know, I mean, I haven't done a lot of invoicing, but I know 100 AI can do it. We can automate invoicing. All these boring, like repetitive things like processing a lot of Excel files or just a lot of data. You can now explain to AI what you want with your words. You don't need to go super technical and get into database or anything like that. And it will do it for you. Like I'm, I tell it all the time. Clean up this file, fill out the missing data. That's all I need to tell it. It doesn't ask me any more than that. Once in a while it's going to do stupid things. You have to correct it. It's not perfect. We're not, you know, by any means. I'm not like drinking that Kool Aid.

50:49

Alice Bazdikian

Like I know, which is why I waited this long to really get, you know, my hands super dirty. But I think that 80% of what you do as a business owner in terms of admin can be taken away from AI. Done by AI eventually. Yeah.

51:04

Anne Murphy

I, I have a challenge to the. You know what? If you're a small business, it doesn't really matter who you are. I'm going to give a. I'm going to give an example, I'm going to give the challenge and then you think about how this might apply in your life. So here's the challenge and I have an email that's sitting in my drafts to do with this very thing that I'm talking about. So I'm talking to myself too. So for folks out there, if you haven't yet had AI go through your various email inboxes for whatever reason, I don't know. To delete 86,000 emails, maybe.

51:39

Alice Bazdikian

Maybe.

51:40

Anne Murphy

And then need to get some of them back also. Possibly. But one of the things that I would encourage you to do is ask. Ask the AI to find you conversations that have gone cold. Right. Hey, AI, I sometimes forget or I like leave things in drafts or I leave. I leave things in the. You know, I just forget about them. Well, guess who this girl found a proposal to my just most wonderful potential client that never. I wondered, I was like, you know, and then I was really busy. I was like, why didn't you call? And then I was really busy and I was like, you know what? The moment's not right. But now it is. And I'm gonna say to her, AI was going through my inbox. I found this. I can't believe this.

52:26

Anne Murphy

I figure if I do three or four of those, at least one of those is going to be a piece of business recovered.

52:32

Alice Bazdikian

Yeah.

52:32

Anne Murphy

That pays for my tech stack for time immemorial.

52:37

Alice Bazdikian

So much more cloud coding for Ann. I 100% agree. I made it go through my LinkedIn inbox, my LinkedIn Sales Navigator inbox, and triage everything. Yeah. And my desktop, like cleaning up once a week you can ask, you know, cloud, cowork and just like run a cleanup, clean up all your files or your. All your mess that you make, whatever that happens to be for you. Because I know I certainly do. Y and so these are little things, but over time they add up and next thing you know, you're running your life in a completely different way.

53:12

Anne Murphy

I at my next frontier and maybe there's somebody listening who can DM me on LinkedIn and tell me how this is going for them, but my next frontier and I never thought I would say these words is to get a Telegram account, because on Telegram, I can communicate non stop with clog code rather than. I guess I don't. I guess there's. I don't know, there's something about remote. I don't actually know, Alice, but I'm gonna do it. I feel like Telegram is like the discord of. Of the WhatsApp's worlds and we'll just see what happens. Is that what it.

53:52

Alice Bazdikian

Well, it's encrypted, so technically, normally the unsavory elements of society. I don't believe that there's such a thing. But anyway, so I'm putting quotes because I don't believe that. But I'll say it for the podcast. Normally the unsavory elements of society would use something like Telegram. But it abs like, if you're a real, actually tech person, like, who understands security and cyber security and all of that, you'd be on Telegram and all. What's up? So. So.

54:17

Anne Murphy

So if you're not Pete Hegseth, you would if.

54:21

Alice Bazdikian

Yeah, exactly.

54:22

Anne Murphy

Humor.

54:23

Alice Bazdikian

Exactly. Like one. I gave actually my 23andMe DNA data to a coder who wanted to do some, like, a project, and she wouldn't send it to me in WhatsApp. After, like, the results she got, she's like, you have to get Telegram. Like, I'm not sending it to you. I'm not sending your DNA results in.

54:42

Anne Murphy

Fair. Yeah, fair enough.

54:44

Alice Bazdikian

I said her, and what's up? And I was like, damn it. But then again, 23andMe already has my DNA. We already know they leaked the data. It doesn't matter.

54:52

Anne Murphy

Right? Yeah, yeah, knock yourself out on that one. Right. Like, AI can gobble up my 23 and me. It can gobble up a lot of other stuff. I unfortunately already let that cat out of the bag. I was careless. I didn't pay attention. I didn't know I leave my front door open. I don't like the car doors. A lot of times like this is just me. And I figure devil may care now, the FAFO phenomenon I have effed around and I have found out. So don't let. Don't let me be like. I'm not saying everybody should be so, so careless to Herb. So Herb Coleman in our comments is one of our regulars and he's just so, just first of all, the smile. Let's. Let's just take a moment for those pearly whites. That is a megawatt smile. So thanks.

55:44

Anne Murphy

Thank you so much, Herb, for being here and for supporting us again and again the prevention of accidental over deletion. So I've already divulged that I'm pretty careless and I, I love a little drama. Love to lose a file, love to find a file. Like love to find a file after losing a file. But there are a bunch of ways that you can totally put prevent over deletion, one of which is something that's an important practice for all of us who are even thinking about using AI, which is really keeping your stuff organized. So one of the things you might do is you might have your Claude code or your, you might have your claude code only attached to a particular file. So in Google, in notion, in GitHub, like you may be.

56:33

Anne Murphy

You may want to direct your AI to just that one little area and do some tests. I have it. Talk to me a lot. You can say, talk to me about every single thing you're going to delete or bunch them into files that seem to be duplicates, which. Oh my goodness gracious. How many duplicates did you have, Alice, when you went through your Google Drive?

56:56

Alice Bazdikian

A lot of social media stuff for sure.

56:59

Anne Murphy

Yeah.

57:00

Alice Bazdikian

And to add to what you're saying, I think, Cole, you can always use GitHub. That's what like, yeah, legit coders do. And it's called version control. Basically that's where you. For important projects, like if it's not something you're just playing around, you don't have to do that, but you can always use GitHub, which is like a code repository where all the versions of your code live. So then if you need to revert something back, then you can just ask it revert back to the previous version from my GitHub. If you really lose everything, which is, you know, it's possible.

57:27

Anne Murphy

It is totally possible. And then when you think about email, if that's what you might be thinking about. Herb, with regard to over deletion, here's. Here was my approach. I sat down with. This is the first time I. The first time I sat down to. To have an AI agent banging around in my email, I had a very long conversation. Ask me questions that I might not be thinking about having an agent in my inbox, particularly with regard to deletion. Yeah. Well, that's how I figured out that I can set it up so it is not allowed to delete.

58:03

Anne Murphy

So when you connect your clog code or your AI to like for example, Google Drive, there's a moment and I can't describe exactly where in the product there's A moment where a box will pop up and it will say, yes, do you want to give this thing delete control, read control, write control. If you're nervous about it, don't let it write. Don't let it. Don't let it do anything other than read. And that will prevent deletions in your documents and in your email. Here was. My take was, I had this long conversation. I said, you know, my dad is 86. This is not the moment to accidentally delete any emails from my dad. Right? Here's his email. Here's his email. There may be no deleting of emails from Robert W. Murphy. Like, I had those kind of conversations with it, right?

58:51

Anne Murphy

And I said, okay, here are some things that we know we can get rid of. And I just went through it like that herb. And little by little, I. I chopped away at, you know, probably at the end of the day, over 100,000 emails.

59:04

Alice Bazdikian

Wow.

59:04

Anne Murphy

Yeah. And they just keep piling up, though. But that's just the way it is. Alice, how can people find you, work with you, get to know you better? Where are. Where are you showing up on all the socials?

59:20

Alice Bazdikian

Luckily, I have my handle and my website all the same. So small businessai coach.com and then on TikTok and Instagram, same thing on LinkedIn. I'm Alice Buzdeakin, so you'll find me as myself. And I'm missing one. Yes, YouTube. And also small business AI coach on YouTube as well. So if you look up small business AI coach on most of the platforms,.

59:45

Anne Murphy

I'm so jealous of brilliance in that URL. Oh, my God. That's literally what people Google all the time. That's it. Those are my SEO terms. I will never rank on them. But you will.

59:58

Alice Bazdikian

I hope so. That's.

59:59

Anne Murphy

Yes. Oh, you will. You're gonna clean up. Send us out with. What does AI readiness mean to you?

:: 00:07

Alice Bazdikian

I think AI readiness is a mindset. Like, stay curious, stay open. You don't have to understand everything. You don't have to know everything. Just be okay with that. Like, I know I'm never gonna know every tool, everything. I'm not a technical person, but I'm not intimidated by that. So I think AI readiness is just be open, not intimidated. Ask questions, use AI to answer them. Like, AI can now be your dev, your IT guy, your consultant, anything you want, just ask.

:: 00:36

Anne Murphy

And I be audacious. Be audacious. Ask it for the most ridiculous, just ridiculous thing you can possibly imagine. Like, I'll mention one because you. You alluded to it. Don't just ask for AI to teach you something. Be like, you know what, actually you just do that thing yourself. That worked for me. I have a whole learning journey. I'm on for this one topic and I was like, you know what, let's just see what happens if it happens. If I say, you know what, let's skip the whole learning thing. I don't want to know. Can you just do this? And it was like that and it put together the whole plan. I was like, oh wow, I just saved myself like 100 hours of trying to learn something that I didn't need to learn.

:: 01:15

Alice Bazdikian

Yeah, absolutely. Like, we can only know and learn so much as human beings. So I think it's giving your attention to the right sources and also like following the right people. Like, I love Sabrina. Being in our community gives me so much, like, knowledge. Like we're running a hackathon next week. I think the community element and knowing that there's people out there that can, you know, that want the same things as you, they're on the same journey as you. You're not alone in this. Like, literally only maybe 1% of people really understands AI right now. 99.9% Of people don't understand anything. Don't know where to start, which is the biggest problem with small businesses and individuals. Like, we just don't know where to start. So don't be intimidated. Just be open minded, stay curious, ask questions. Don't judge before you understand.

:: 01:58

Anne Murphy

Oh, yes. Yeah, don't judge. And that goes for everything. Don't, don't judge. You don't know. Walk a mile in people's shoes before you judge. Right. To everybody, thank you, thank you. We appreciate all of our friends and, and you know, fans and supporters and allies in the comments and in our community. Alice, thank you so much for being here today. This was awesome. I cannot wait to see what's next for you and just follow along in our random AI journeys.

:: 02:33

Alice Bazdikian

I mean, agentic matriarchy. Like, I want to know so much more about that and honestly, I have so many questions. I know it's not for right now, but I think you're going to have to go deeper into that at some point and I'm looking forward to it.

:: 02:44

Anne Murphy

I would really love to just like, just chat with you sometime about it. So let's do that. Everybody else follow along. I'm going to start posting probably tomorrow about this journey that we're on.

:: 02:57

Alice Bazdikian

Amazing.

:: 02:57

Anne Murphy

Thank you.

:: 02:58

Alice Bazdikian

I'm already following you. I already went on Tik Tok on Instagram, on YouTube, so.

:: 03:04

Anne Murphy

All right, everybody, thank you so much. Kate. You going to take us out? You going to take us out?

Transcribed by https://fireflies.ai/