Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode
of Vision Pros Live. I'm your host and coach,
Fletcher Ellingson. Today, we're talking AI and
business automation with Brad Grew. I told him
up front, I'm not an expert in AI. I'm just beginning
to dabble myself. So I'm either gonna be a good
fit for this or I'm gonna be good, I'm sorry,
or I'm gonna be terrible. But we're gonna jump
into this anyway because he's got a vision. We're
gonna find out what that is. and maybe who knows
maybe you listen to him and be like that's the
guy i need to connect with so let's get to him
uh welcome to the show brad thanks for having
me fletcher really appreciate it yeah you bet
hey uh before we get started let's remind the
world you know everyone that's listening that
there are still a lot of good things happening
there's still good in the world um there's a
lot of uncertainty but We need to practice focusing
on what's going well, especially if we're in
the business world, right? We need to take our
best selves to work so we can be productive.
What's something that's going well in your life,
either professionally or personally? Yeah, so
like my company's been around for two years and
about two weeks ago, we launched our first product.
So that's a, hey, we hit the finish line, whether
it succeeds or not. Hey, we built it. It's there.
It's out there for the world to consume. And
whether it works or not, that's where we are.
And then last week, I was at DFW Startup Week
and got to judge in the Texas AI Challenge. And
just to see that there's so many medium and small
businesses doing what I like to say, punching
above their weight class, makes me really, really
proud to know that there are folks out there
who want to put good out there in the world.
Oh, that's exciting. And also, congratulations.
I was in a technology company many, many years
ago. We were kind of at the forefront of this
cool technology, which allowed people like you
and me to go online and search for homes. Yeah,
right. I mean, now we're like. okay what's the
big deal about that well there was a time when
that was not possible and uh our company was
on the forefront right in that wave of bringing
idx technology internet data exchange regarding
the housing inventory to um uh you know to the
regular people and so that was a big deal at
the time so i remember yeah bringing those new
products to launch is very exciting so congratulations
thank you so much yeah yeah um so we're gonna
get into that that product what it is but before
we do that I want to ask you because this is
called vision pros and I define a vision as a
clarified story that lives up here in the mind
and we then try attempt and work toward bringing
that that clarified vision into the physical
realm so Brad what is your vision My vision is
for letting people know, I love being an evangelist.
So like evangelizing for all the great things
that technology brings to our world and our lives.
And I say technology is a great equalizer, and
I truly believe that. It lets people, like I
say, punch above their weight class. And my goal
is just to spread the gospel of AI and automation
and create the cult of AI, jokingly, as we say,
because I think a lot of fear is out there for
folks about AI and automation. But I think much
like many of the technologies before us, if you
get ahead of that curve, if you take that first
step, step and take that first leap and believe
in yourself, you'll be able to succeed. Okay.
I like that. And I'm really keen in on these
two things you've said. Number one, you like
it when people are punching above their weight
class. I like that analogy. They're just totally
going for it, taking a risk, putting it all out
there. Thanks for sharing that. And the other
thing that I really keyed into is, yeah, technology.
can be an incredible equalizer, right? And it's
important. And that's the messaging that I really
want to focus on. I was just having a conversation
with my daughter who is 28 or 29 years old. And
she's like, Papa, I'm freaked out about all this
AI stuff. And I'm like, babe, you know what?
I just watched this show. And when... When books
started being printed for the masses, people
got freaked out. What do you mean books are going
to be available to the masses? What, you were
just going to have people reading anything that
they want to read? We're making these available
to anybody? We're not taking into consideration
their educational level? I mean, there were people
who were protesting books because they thought
it was going to be the downfall of society. Seems
I mean, that seems ludicrous now. Right. Then
it happened with radio and it happened with television.
Then it happened with the Internet. Right. And
it's happening again. So there's a clear pattern
now. Granted, AI is very different than books.
But what's your take on on that? When people
are like, dude, you should be afraid. I look
at it as the fact that you literally have the
world's, the complete history of the world at
your fingertips, right, with your smartphone.
Again, some of your listeners are probably old
enough to remember their Dewey Decimal System.
That's what I grew up with, right? If I needed
to know how to do something, I had to go to the
library and look up the Dewey Decimal System
and go figure it out. And my dad, thank God,
when I was, I graduated high school in the mid
-90s, and he was like, son, if anybody ever asks
you if you know how to do something, say yes,
because someone's written a book on how to do
it. And then Wikipedia came along and Google
and then YouTube. And then now we have ChatGPT
and all these other models. And so I think you
just need to have faith in your ability to figure
things out. And you can't really learn that.
That's something that you you have to just it's
a war of attrition. You learn that over time.
Right. That this you have to put in the steps
and put in the faith in those things out. And
you have the ability to do that. I have my 72
year old mother using AI. If she can do it to
help balance our books and our company, you can
do it as well. I guarantee you. Right on. Right
on. Yeah. So. So, yeah. So it's all about focus.
Right. It's all what you're going to focus on.
on the fear or are you going to focus on the
opportunity that might be available to us, right?
Correct. Yeah. And clearly you're a person who's
chosen to focus on the possibility that's available
to us. And what do you see as that, what do you
see that possibility is? I mean, in the next
probably five to 10 years, we're going to have...
five to 10 person companies that are billion
dollar companies. That's the beauty is you can
take your idea. If you had an idea in the past,
but you didn't know how to bring it to fruition,
now you have that. Go talk to ChatGPT. I have
this idea. I have this many hours in the day.
Please give me a plan on how I can get that to
an MVP or a minimal viable product or a proof
of concept within six months. And they'll give
you a pretty good plan. It's 70, 80 % there that
gets you on the step. Take that first step. I
started a podcast called Start Small, Think Big,
but that's very serious. You have to take that
step. We're training you for like that. AI is
coming. You need to be able to learn how to run
a marathon, but you have to get up off the couch
first and then walk to the mailbox and then couch
to 5K and then worry about getting that marathon.
The good news is you have time. In the age of
AI, we're toddlers right now. We're AOL, the
dial -up days of the internet. And so just know
before Facebook and all this came around, there
were several years to adjust and adapt, and I
think you can all do it. The beauty is AI is
the first tool to help train you on how to use
AI better. It's the first tool you've had that's
helped you train them on how to use it better.
That's a mind -blowing comment. We developed
this thing, and this thing is going to train
you on how to use it. Yeah. That's wicked. I
ask it all the time. What's a better way that
I can prompt you for this specific task? And
I'll compare and contrast the different models
and get different answers, and it does work.
Dude, I'm writing that down right now. I've never
considered doing that. Hold on. I'm literally
taking a note. Yeah, I love the deep research
aspects of it too. So something that would normally
take you two or three weeks of research to even
understand if your idea is a good idea to move
forward with, like you'd have to go again, do
that deep research and go down Wikipedia and
check all the Google reviews and Yelp reviews
of these companies. And you can actually just
have ChatGPT or those go use the deep research
aspect of it. Most of them are free to do it
for the first initial research and they'll go
off for 10 or 15 minutes, come back with you
with a nice research report to give you competitive
analysis of your competitors and things. Again,
in what way was that available before? where
again, there's man at work, men at work, and
money work. And most small businesses are man
at men at work, right? They're a team of people
or one or two people. And so time is your finite
resource and this frees up time. Yeah, yeah,
exactly. I mean, one of the things when we own
a business is we're always looking at like, where's
that bottleneck? Where's that bottleneck, right?
And what I hear you saying is, man, if we can
offload some of this to chat GPT or whatever
large language model, you're going to have...
You're gonna Create more flow right and reduce
that bottleneck. Yeah, if you're doing anything
repeatedly, that's where you first start look
and I use the terms AI and automation in the
same thing to me um you just ingest ai a little
bit in automation aspects of things and automation
has been around for decades right since henry
ford so there's no reason that you can't adopt
that accounts payable most organizations have
have invoicing like that doesn't need to be a
manual process ai vision models know how to do
that really really well that's one of the easier
lower barrier of entries for many small businesses
it's like automate your invoice ingestion your
receipt ingestion your timesheet ingestion that
kind of stuff Cool. Cool. So tell me a little
bit about Digital Meld. That's the business that
you're the CEO of. What is Digital Meld all about?
So I've been a consultant for the last 10 years
or so. I worked at Microsoft for five of those
years and I worked in corporate IT and I saw
the best way to run a corporate. uh you know
environment and the best and the ways not to
do it all the largest companies in the world
i've been in over 100 fortune 500 companies in
my career very blessed to say that um and then
i just found out that you know i loved consulting
i hope being an evangelist and telling people
this is the right way you should probably go
about doing that and so about two years ago i
started a company to build software but then
i quickly found out that most people they know
they want to utilize ai but they don't know how
to utilize ai And so we kind of fell into consulting.
I'm like, I guess we're consultants now as well
because I think we're business development more
than we are consulting because I tell people
all the time, you're the AI expert. Fletcher,
you know about your business more than I could
ever know about your business because you've
been eating, sleeping, and breathing for 10 or
20 years, right? I can just say, listen with
you, sit down with you and listen to you about
how your business is run and what your headaches
and bottlenecks are and then say, okay. You could
use these tools and inject at that certain process
to refine things. And so I listen more than anything
else. And so we do build products as well because
you can scale software a lot easier to scale
people. But I think the biggest thing for us
was we wanted to deliver real value to customers.
The only way to do that is to listen. Oh, man,
I couldn't agree more with that. Yeah. Yeah.
I love it when people are in a place to actually
listen, right? They're not preparing their response.
They're not trying to lead me somewhere. They're
actually listening to help me just get curious
about what actually is occurring. Excuse me.
Is this an opportune time to talk about this
thing that you just brought to market, or is
that a longer interview? Because you mentioned
that. I'd love to hear about it, if that's something
we can dive into, or is it too advanced? You
tell me. I could probably break it down really
quickly, but again, we've been talking to business
leaders. Business leaders are going to leadership
conferences or talking to other business leaders
in the golf course and stuff, and they're saying,
we know we need to utilize AI. We just don't
know how. Yeah. Trying to explain a lot of the
automation aspect that happens in the background.
There's nothing you can really show that makes
it click in people's head. It's just automation
at the end of the day. But and so we built a
tool with vision learning. And so it literally
just looks at any camera feed you have. And so
we work with being in Houston, Texas. We work
with construction engineering a lot. We work
with oil and gas a lot. And they all have. cameras
on sites and um you know they wear ppe or personal
protective equipment and so the first model we
built was like can we watch to see if their workers
on site are wearing their hard hat and their
vest and their steel toe boots and their gloves
and so that's what we built we built rubicon
a platform that that just monitors that and it
just lets them know and it can recognize the
person via their gate or their walk and re -identify
them when they walk back in but they can do stuff
like fire detection so we can do anything you
can train a camera to do or you watch a camera
to do we can train a model to do that really
easily and that That helps. We built the platform
literally just to showcase what's possible with
AI. Because, again, most people don't know. And,
again, the leaders don't necessarily talk to
what we call the boots on the ground, the people
who are dealing with the day -to -day business
operations. And that's who you need to talk to
to figure out what the actual pain points are.
If you talk to executive leadership and you talk
to the boots on the ground in mental management,
it's varying degrees of difficulty separation
between all of those. That's fascinating. OK,
so thanks for the lesson. This is so cool. I
hadn't heard about heard about vision learning
before. I told you I'm a newbie in all of this.
So vision learning, what I heard you say, and
I like to break things down. So because if I'm
not getting it, I'm sure there's other people
that are going to get I want them to hear this
vision learning. You've got a product, an AI
product that is able to visually. assess data
and then turn that into meaningful feedback for
um the client is that accurate yeah so i mean
basically you train a model to recognize certain
patterns um this is a dog that's a cat that kind
of thing it literally breaks it down like that
and so this is fire and smoke that's not fire
and smoke um this is a hard hat not hard hat
you know those kinds of things it literally is
that simple when you're just training it on thousands
and thousands of pictures and stuff and the beauty
of vision learning models is we have decades
of cameras, like, you know, recorded history
that we can trace. And how many images are out
there on the internet of all these sorts of things.
And so and the same thing with with scanning
an invoice and being able to auto ingest that
invoice, that's vision learning as well. It's
just it's black and white instead of, you know,
a moving image. And so there's a lot of things
you can do. I know there's a lot of businesses
that deal with OCR. So that's where you're scanning
documents from a legal perspective or something
to retain it. digitally you can ingest all that
no more manually typing if you're manually typing
things in over and over and over that's the easiest
place to start because those documents are easily
trained those models are easily trained um as
an example we had someone who was who was doing
manual entry for 80 invoices a month as an engineering
firm and we automated 90 of her job there was
still what we call human loops so someone's eyes
are always looking at it at the last it's like
yes this is good but we took those 80 invoices
and ingest them every month for about 40 bucks
forty dollars and it frees up days and days and
days of her work so she's out bidding on extra
work now instead of like processing this data
whoa that's that's amazing yeah yeah i mean if
somebody i mean if a if a business owner hears
that and they're like gosh how can we get creative
and reduce our bottom line that's that's incredible
um and then now and now i'm gonna play devil's
outfit for a second okay Because in that story,
in that example you just gave, right, somebody
listening might be like, well, now, great. So
Brad, just putting this person out of work, not
necessarily because what you said is that frees
that person up potentially to do something more
meaningful. Yes. To increase revenue, to, you
know, yeah, there might be a ton of other things
that they can do within that office setting.
Is that accurate? Yeah, we preach that because
I think as a business owner myself, as someone
who's been a hiring manager, I'm sure you've
been a hiring manager in a leadership position.
Finding good people is literally the hardest
thing to do. That's the hardest thing to do and
the cost associated with that, especially at
a senior level or a mid -level. So in this particular
position, this woman had her master's degree,
but the data was so important she was entering
in because it's millions of dollars a month for
a government contract. It had to be right. It
had to be right. And so we freed this brilliant
woman up to actually go chase more work. And
it paid for. So this is someone who was chasing
two hundred and fifty thousand dollar plus projects.
And so she gets one of those and it pays her
salary for the year. That's a no brainer. Right.
Yeah. The ROI is there. And I think that for
us, we always preach is like we're going to bring
in automation so you can punch above your weight
class. Your business is going to grow without
necessarily having to grow your headcount, but
you can still grow your business. Got it. Well.
i'm really appreciating um this conversation
it's it's making the wheels spin and it's giving
me um a lot more educated information so i can
you know dialogue with other people about this
very controversial topic and it's cool because
like you're actually on the ground doing it um
that's why i appreciate you sharing that with
us um we're just about at the uh end of our our
time here is there anything else you'd like me
to know well first of all please Give us the
domain name. How can people reach out to you,
get in contact with you, have a conversation,
and anything else that you'd like us to know?
Yeah, so I'm Brad Grubb. B -R -A -D -G -R -O
-U -X. I'm literally the only one in the world.
If you Google me, you'll probably find some embarrassing
things on sports forums from 20 years ago. I've
used my real name on the internet, but I'm happy
to talk to anyone about anything regarding technology
and just say for, you know, no strings attached
to say, Hey, if I were you, this is what I would
do kind of thing. I think if you put good things
out there, good things will come back. Digital
melds named my company, digital meld .io, digital
meld .ai. As you can see that product, we just
released Rubicon. If you'd like to do that, reach
out to me on LinkedIn. Happy to, to do that as
well. I think the, Again, I think AI is coming
whether we like it or not, and I'm trying to
let everybody know you can adapt to this. Yes,
it's scary because there's so much unknown, but
you can do this. If my 70 -year -old mother could
do it, if other business owners that I'm talking
to, where I'm talking about plumbers, electricians,
like beauticians, like we're doing some automation
stuff for people of all shapes and sizes, and
you can do it as well. Right on. Great message.
Thank you so much for your time today, Brad.
Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy
that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking
forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes
continue to move forward. This is going to get
more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement
as well. We'll invite people to participate in
the show. And thank you for giving us your time
and attention. Have an excellent time building
out your vision and becoming a vision pro yourself.