Hello, ladies.
Welcome to this week's episode of hourly to exit.
I have a very special guest for you today, who I'm super excited about.
Heidi Araya.
Hello, Heidi.
Thank you.
Yes.
I'm so excited to be here as well.
Thanks for inviting me.
Yeah.
Well,
we can't get enough of AI.
And so we have a wonderful AI expert to talk to us today.
We're going to find out more about kind of, the latest and greatest with AI.
But before we do that, I really want you to get to know Heidi.
how she got here.
So Heidi, before we get started, can you tell us about yourself,
your business and your journey?
Sure.
So my journey, I actually spent the past 25 years helping
companies become more effective, efficient, and productive at work.
I just saw opportunities from the very beginning that no one else did.
So reinventions along the way.
But I saw that companies would.
Execute these process improvements without considering people.
So then I built a brand around inviting people into the process improvements.
And that took me deep into the software companies, agile ways of
working, of course, and finally leading transformations inside enterprises.
But honestly, a couple of things happened the system inside most companies.
Prevents actual change from happening number 1 and secondly, I
saw about 3 to 4 years ago that the job I had of leading large change
initiatives inside organizations was going to come to an end soon.
So I knew I had to prepare myself for a pivot and I just didn't know.
How much pivoting I would have to do in the course of a year.
So, long story short, I dived deep into AI, took a data science
program at MIT, sort of upskilling and building AI assistants.
And now I'm building an AI agency with a people first poke focus.
Wow.
That is amazing.
Yeah.
I mean, I will say, I mean, we're going to point out like all the
things that happened since you, MIT, I didn't know that about you, Heidi.
And so, a year ago, I mean, I guess it's a year and a half now.
I didn't even know like AI is formed to me as like Bitcoin or cryptocurrency
or whatever it was like out there, there's no way not touching it.
That's somebody else.
It's not me.
And now here we are.
And it's kind of all I talk about these days.
So for you, I mean, so much has changed, like, since you decided
to like, kind of dig into the AI, how has that process been for you?
Yeah, first of all, it's been very interesting that I'm not
where I thought I would be.
I don't think I could have predicted where I am now, but yet I feel like this
is kind of what I was born to be doing.
So a year ago, a year and a half ago, I just started experimenting with AI.
I was a consultant inside a technical consulting firm, helping enterprises
with their transformations and, technical, like, app modernization.
And.
I saw how it could help me in my work come up with workshop agendas.
And I thought, well, okay, this is probably the worst AI we will see, you
know, that's what they started saying.
Hey, this is the worst AI you will ever see.
And so I began experimenting more and more.
I found how to summarize web pages, podcasts and all that,
because I love to learn.
And I thought this is where I have to dig in more.
So I was laid off twice in 2023.
But I was already prepared for what I was going to do next.
So I hopped right into the data science program at MIT again.
At the time, I thought.
I'm just going to learn as much as I can, because I don't know what's out there,
but I know I need to know this thing.
And I remember having a conversation with the program manager at MIT when
you had to have a call so that they would accept you in the program and
talk about why you were doing this.
And she says, but Heidi, this is so different than
anything you have ever done.
the business statistics, the Python, the data science and all this data wrangling.
And so I remembered my words back to her were, Okay.
If not now, then when, like, this is the time.
And so I, spent a lot of hours learning that discovered by the
end that I didn't want to be a data scientist, but that was okay.
the time.
My goal was to just simply know enough about data science, machine learning, AI
to lead an initiative or something inside a company like an AI initiative or team.
Then I started to build AI assistants and I got very excited about the
possibilities there, especially because my first customers were content
creators and authors who had a lot of work out there that they wanted to
share their knowledge with the world.
And so I, thought, well, this is kind of my mission is sharing knowledge and
helping connect people with information.
So I just kind of all ballooned from there, I guess.
That's fantastic.
And so now you have an AI agency.
did you coin that term?
Or is that,
I didn't coin that term, but it is a term that's kind of new.
That's out there that people are using.
So yeah, in the past year I had to move from, agile ways of working to
this AI from a non technical role
to
providing technical solutions from helping large companies.
To serving solopreneurs, small businesses and from dealing with technical customers
who were typically engineers to serving a lot of non technical customers.
And lastly, uh, last and hardest maybe I think was from employee
to business owner solopreneur.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I am one of her challenge
clients.
Thank you very much.
They're wonderful.
So we're going to talk about AI assistance.
And by the way, when we say assistance, it's like the A N T S like, the
noun correct, uh, or plural noun.
basically the custom chatbots.
Is that basically what we're talking about?
Right.
Yeah.
And so, first tell us about, cause I believe it wasn't that long ago that I
was asking someone about adding a custom chat box to my website and they're
like, oh, it's super complicated.
And maybe they just didn't know what they're talking about, or has it just.
Progress that much in the last 6 to 9 months.
It's like, what is the history
there?
Yes, it has progressed very rapidly in the last 6 to 9 months.
When I first started building chatbots, there were very few
platforms available for them.
They were expensive, they couldn't house a lot of information and a lot
of them, like, for the 1 that we built for you and others, can kind of crawl
the website effectively and quickly and those kind of things didn't exist.
9 months ago.
So, yes, great progress has been made not only with the capabilities,
but also the storage of information.
So it used to be very expensive to do that.
And they were saying it would be, hundreds of dollars per month.
So that has the cost has come down a lot from that as well.
Those are some of the factors.
Okay.
So what is the difference
between
like,
The AI assistance, and like, when I go on chat, if I premium, I can make a
custom, bot or whatever they call it.
Yeah, that is a great.
Yeah.
Custom.
Yeah.
A great question.
So when you build your custom in chat, you can actually program that with.
Natural language, I want this and I want that.
how it responds and you can upload some files there.
But the limitations are it's limited to both.
The file upload, so it can't crawl your site automatically
and pull in on the data, but also the file uploads are limited.
And I think it's 20 files that you can upload.
the work around is to gather all of your information, transport it, Format to text
format 1st, and then you can upload it.
so you'd have to do some massaging there, but You also can't embed that
on your website as a chat in a pop up, like, we have done, or in an eye frame.
And so they just meant it to be if you did do that.
Say, you had some of your content there.
It would be a lot less content, and it wouldn't deliver the same
results as the custom assistance that you could embed on your website.
Right.
Yeah.
I'll say from my personal experience, it is amazing.
how well it can, gather the information on my site and help, people answer
their questions from a chat.
Very different from the customer service thing that you get, you know, when you're.
Trying to get through to your phone company or whatever.
I mean, it really is just kind of finding the information that you
have helping people access it.
So, when people are thinking about using.
an AI assistant on their site.
I mean, the beauty of it is it helps them kind of, really make accessible
all of the information on their site.
But I imagine that there's kind of some minimum requirements for it to make sense.
Yes.
And I've had a couple of customers that I actually said, It doesn't
make any sense for them to have a chat bot on their website.
And 1 was a gentleman who had visual solutions.
So he would do lighting solutions.
And so 90 percent of his website was just videos of the lighting
that he had set up in arenas and
big
buildings and all these things.
and with that lack of text information on his website, I said, well, the chat bot
Isn't going to perform for you, you would actually have to have documents where you
train the chat bot to answer questions.
So if you're willing to invest in building those documents, then we could train it.
but if not, then the chat bot can't operate with no information.
So that's 1 customer.
the other customer I had, which recently I told him it wasn't
worth to get a chap on his website.
has specialty cleaning business and.
He had 20 pages on his website, and the value proposition was clear.
People weren't going to get lost
in
what he was trying to offer.
So they could ask a simple question.
And I did a test bot for him so he could see, and it was, how
often should you clean your rugs?
do you do this kind of cleaning?
But at the end, told him, I actually don't think this would be a value to
you because, uh, When customers come to your website, it's pretty clear
what you're offering is they're not going to have to sip through reams
and have complex questions about that.
yeah, I actually told him to focus more on building his brand and his
authority in the specialty cleaning space instead of the chatbot.
Yeah.
And I would think, just good old fashioned FAQs.
Are adequate for some uses, for my site, which was, I guess, finally, all
these web, these blog posts and things that I've been doing finally paid off.
And so I have, a fair amount of content on there, so it's able to blog posts, right?
My podcasts are all on there.
So the transcripts from that, including some that I was a guest on and,
was there something else on there?
I can't remember that.
YouTube,
any YouTube videos, YouTube
videos.
Yeah.
And your other website, That's right.
And I have multiple websites.
Yeah.
So it all works together.
and so it is, truly amazing.
I'm loving it.
So it is a completely closed data set, correct?
so that's not outside of the website when we're doing it, chat box.
Okay.
All right.
Correct.
Yes.
And That's one of the reasons why I'm very careful about the solutions and
platforms that I offer because some of them, was using one back in October,
November timeframe that actually was hallucinating and it was impossible
to turn off the internet access to it.
And so it would do strange things like give recipes for tomato soup.
And it, it would also at one time, yeah, it would, so it was a management
consultant and it would give recipes for tomato soup that people asked
it for, it would, at one point.
Someone asked it a question and it gave a, like a link to a different website.
So I knew that it wasn't.
So,
yes, all those things have evolved so much over the past 6 to 9 months.
And so we have better checks controls over to ensure that it's
not hallucinating, not going outside.
And what I say, the little walled garden that you're supposed to be
playing in an answering problem.
the other thing that I really wanted to do when I was working on your
solution is to have the citations.
readily available so that when people get an answer to their
question, they're able to click and see where did the answer come from?
Because that gives more certitude and kind of confidence that it's not hallucinating.
Yeah, that is so important.
In fact, I was just like, interacting on LinkedIn today.
Had a post about AI and someone mentioned, yeah, you know, I realized
that I never get spurses when I use, chat GVT in this instance.
and I think people aren't aware that they can get spurses.
Get sources, but it's, people are just becoming way more aware.
Like we need to make sure we know where is this information coming from?
We know that, generative AI hallucinates, we know that it steals
stuff, we know, and so we need to have that comfort of having sources.
And I'm glad to know that, on my site, it's great.
Yeah, I mean, you get the answer from the bot, but to be able to go to the
source is really important as well.
and then back to that being a closed dataset.
I it sounds like some of the risks that everyone is afraid of when using,
kind of the chat GBTs of the world.
Those are eliminated when we're using our, custom chat bots.
Is that right?
Yes, correct.
Yes.
it's not trained on your information and material.
So it's all secure and private on a sock to GDPR compliant.
I so 27, 001 and all those compliant platforms.
so, yes, that's another reason for doing a custom AI assistant instead
of just going through a chat one.
Yeah, very nice.
Very nice.
And so are there any best practices?
Practices that we need to think about, like, , when does someone
know that they're ready for you?
Let's put it that way.
Interesting.
So perhaps there are a solopreneur expert that has a lot of information out there.
And 1 example would be an author with a lot of.
Books like my 1 client who has 28 books 1 of them has, I think about
500 and 500 blog posts over 17 years.
You have a lot of content to share even courses, right?
I have another client who's interested in.
Updating their courseware with a real-time streaming AI avatar.
So it would be, there's enough information there where the AI assistant could operate
in a way that it gets good information.
So if there's not a lot of information out there, then I would recommend that person
build their brand and create information first so that we could train the chatbot.
But if you already have a lot of information out there and you want
to share your knowledge or, monetize that knowledge in some other way
than you're doing today, then an AI assistant could be that thing for you
go back to what you mentioned with the course creator,
some kind of live streaming.
What was that?
Explain this to us.
So it is now possible to have a live streaming avatar where someone would.
So say you have a course that you wanted to teach
and
you have an AI, avatar that could kind of be waiting for a question.
So you'd go to a portal and then the person would ask a question
either by voice or type it in and then have your avatar reply to that
question based on your knowledge base.
Whoa,
that is so cool.
So it's basically teaching.
It's like having a teaching assistant, basically.
Yes.
It's new and not a lot of companies or people are going for that solution
right now, but you could imagine how much more engaging it would be to
learn something if you had sort of this person there in front of you,
instead of just engaging in the chat.
So that's one of the things that I, super excited.
So I'm exploring for my own self, how much it would take
to have that happen for people.
And, the other thing is I have a client who's interested in
updating their old courseware.
And they have the transcripts for that, and the content is still good, but yet
the videos are probably 10 years old.
So this person did ask me and I told him, oh, you could certainly
create an avatar of yourself and that would be your own voice and your
own persona, you know, physically.
And then we could actually.
Train it on your courseware.
So you already have the transcripts
and
all we would have to do is update it to however you looked currently
and make any tweaks to the content.
And then your avatar would just have your course.
So it's a much I'll say lower course creator.
Who's got some stuff they want to update if you have your old content.
So that's another opportunity.
That's not a real time streaming avatar, but it's still kind of the same where
you could have your avatar there.
That is amazing.
So as you mentioned that it reminded me of the way old video games used
to be made where I think they had to kind of produce multiple options
and then somehow it would choose the right option based on what you did.
Was that a I or is that just,
well, it's something that I was, I actually was wondering if we
would get to talk about today and that it's like a decision tree.
Yes.
Right.
So more like, okay, it's kind of falls in machine learning where you
would have a decision tree or So, not really the kind of conversant.
More intelligent that we have today, but those were annoying because remember, if
you call up the phone number and they say, do you want talk to this or talk to that?
You press a number.
And if you don't answer exactly what it wants, it gets
confused and it won't respond.
Right?
Yeah.
So we've advanced a lot beyond that.
But, yes, some, those were.
Probably typically decision trees, I would think.
Oh, interesting.
And now we have something dynamic and generative.
So we can take that is so interesting.
Well, that I mean, I really look forward to seeing 1 of those live
streaming lens with avatar is public.
Please let us know.
I would love to see how that works out.
That is so exciting.
I think people are going to be.
Extremely excited about that.
so what else?
I mean, obviously, that is more of the trends that you're seeing.
I mean, things are happening so fast.
I know it's probably hard to keep up, but what can we also can we look
forward to in the last half of 2024?
What a great question.
So, the next thing I think people really start to dial in on is
this idea of AI automation.
So, more than just an assistant.
So, a simple assistant can, you know, you can chat back and forth with, but it's
not really taking any action on its own.
Okay.
So, agents.
There's something called AI agents that will actually take
autonomous actions on their own.
So they might go through complex workflows.
There's 1 person on LinkedIn.
That's kind of advertising his advanced AI agents that he's created a series of them
that operate intelligently on their own.
They go out to the Internet.
They solve coding problems and they come back and, when he wakes up in the
morning, it's created 100, 000 lines of code overnight with his series of agents
and contributed to open source projects.
And so.
That's kind of coming up and also scary to think about.
Yeah.
but the other thing that might be relevant for small businesses and people thinking
what's next with AI would be just,
AI automation, so for content creators, they might have some way that they
automate their blog post creation in a way that it, generates an image as well.
So it could go through this series of gathering information, generating a
draft blog post, creating an image, and then have you, of course, add your own
voice to it before you go out there.
People who automate the whole thing.
And I don't recommend that.
Right?
and the next thing is voice in AI.
And that's something I'm also experimenting with.
So this weekend I set up a, Okay.
phone number where people could call in and schedule time on my calendar and
so it's not ready for prime time yet.
But, voice AI assistants are going to be big.
The AI agents are going to be big.
And I think that the avatars are going to be big.
It's still very new, but those are the kind of things I see coming.
Yeah, I think I saw it was in some, mastermind, I don't know, I think it
was one that we share, but someone was mentioning that their bank had
offered to have voice, authentication, so that instead of, pins or things
like that, but is that a good idea?
If we have, these voice avatars, if someone can take a recording,
they can take this podcast.
Recording and create a voice avatar and then use it to get into my bank account.
So actually that's a risk that no one had thought about when they put the voice
prints because I think that came out maybe five or six years ago when I was asked to
add that to my financial services account.
And so no, probably that alone isn't going to do it anymore.
I was risky, but now they have other more advanced applications to figure
out whether it's actually you, so I know they're advancing rapidly.
I don't know of any banking or any serious application that's only using
a voice right now because of that risk.
Yeah, very good.
Yeah.
Well, we know that we're having issues with actors and actresses
because of the ability to reproduce their voices, very accurately.
So, all sorts of fun times for litigators.
I'm not that kind of lawyer.
So, but someone's going to make a lot of money from
this stuff.
I was thinking, Aaron, well, I was doing my MBA years and years ago.
So it was about 2011.
I looked it up to February of 2011.
I'm in my MBA program.
We had to take a class on innovation.
And there's this thing called the theory of inventive problem solving by this
guy, Alt Shuler, who was a Russian guy analyzing patents, and we actually had
to write a paper on what we thought would happen based on his analysis of patents.
Patents, and how people could create new patents and
basically the future of things.
And so 1 of the things was removing the human from the loop or combining things.
So, just as an example, it used to be that heaters and air conditioners
were separate, but now we have heat pumps, which effectively can operate.
Both the other 1 was, of course, removing human in the loop.
So my paper that I wrote back in 2011 was soon we won't need actors at all.
And there's going to be an interim state Where the actor licenses their
likeness to a movie because we all want to see Tom Cruise or whoever,
but soon we won't really care because it's going to be good enough and we'll
get used to not knowing that actor.
But then imagine people who write books that they have this vision and
the series can go on for 20 years, like the James Bond series, and they
won't get disappointed because all of a sudden Sean Connery is too old to play.
That's exactly right.
We have a whole Dorian Gray issue here, I think, going on.
So we'll just.
Stick the actor in some room who never see him again so he can age
while he stays beautiful on screen.
I like that.
That was very prescient of you.
sometimes it's really hard to wrap your head around the possibilities,
honestly, They're just endless okay.
So as you know, this is a pretty meta podcast, mostly for female founders of
expertise based businesses to help them, make sure they're building a business that
is scalable and maybe someday saleable.
And so you fit into that.
Avatar, so I'm wondering what your plans are for your business and are
you thinking about maybe scaling your selling or what the next chapter would be?
Yeah, that's a very interesting question.
Because 1st of all, I never thought that I would be a solopreneur and end
up in this, but I absolutely am thinking about it because I see that there is.
There's desire and need and I have to turn down projects every day because I
can't handle them or they're just not in the area of scope of my business.
And so I have interns and already someone else helping me on the side and I'm just
wondering at what point Will I choose to scale or prepare my business for sale?
So I'm already planning on reaching out and thinking early about those
things in case it does happen.
And of course, you'll be 1 of the people that I reach out to make sure that I'm
doing things correctly along the way.
It's
never too
early to plan.
So I like to say that the things that we do to
Prepare for sale are the same things that we need to do to scale.
So it's not like, you need to be thinking 10 years down the line, those
things that you need to kind of help decouple your income from your time.
Those are the things you need to do now too.
So very good.
All right.
So a couple of last questions.
So, you know, I believe in creating a more equitable society and I'm
wondering if there's an organization or a person who's doing great work
in helping that happen that you'd like to share with the audience.
Yeah, so I recommend the Malala fund because it really focuses on girls.
And of course, education girls getting their proper
education is so, so important.
So I love their focus on girls getting their education because
without an education, we really can't begin to compete and know
what our potential really is.
So I love the Malala fund.
Yeah,
absolutely.
I agree 100 percent and there's very little more important
than making sure we have that.
Independence through education, so we will make sure that is in
the show notes and to that end.
Also, is there an offer?
I know you're probably overwhelmed.
I think you are going to be even more overwhelmed, but is there an offer that
you'd like to share with the audience or what's going on in your business?
Yeah.
So actually I'd love to hear from solopreneurs and small businesses who
are really struggling to scale, maybe struggling with too many phone calls,
unable to answer them, or perhaps like you, they got to sit in a meeting
that could have been just answered by the assistant on their website.
so definitely, we're looking to help those folks scale and grow.
And also there are some folks reaching out now who are ready for
that next step into automation.
So, automating some of their processes so that my offer to
just reach out and have a chat.
If you think that might be you.
But also I have heard a lot of stories that people implement automation
or AI assistance without talking to the people who are impacted.
And so 1 of the things that I take very, very seriously is including the people
who are impacted in the conversation when we're thinking about automation.
So I lead these AI exploration workshops that are also very people
focused and we talk about opportunities inside our company for automation.
so another conversation is.
If people are just uncertain where to start with AI in their company,
we can do have an AI exploration workshop with your workforce.
Yeah, we don't want to leave people behind, right?
that is the danger, isn't it?
To leave people behind in all of this conversation about
artificial intelligence.
So where can people
find you?
So you can go to my website at BrightLogicGroup.
com.
You can find me on LinkedIn, Heidi Araya, and yeah, those are the places
that you can find me hanging out.
Awesome.
We'll
have all of that in the show notes as well.
Heidi, this has been a pleasure.
Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us
today.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
I look forward to meeting you again and watching the podcast when it goes live.
Awesome.
Thank you.
Thanks, Erin.
Have a lovely day.
Bye bye.