Solutions for Today's Challenges: AI, Automation, and Smart Suite Innovations with Jon Darbyshire

and at the end the president of yator got up on stage with one of the largest AI investment Venture funds and they said you just don't understand what's going to happen like you're all tech people you're all using AI you still don't understand how big this is this is bigger than the Industrial Revolution welcome to the let's talk business podcast a project of the PEX group gain valuable actionable ideas from the world's top Business Leaders to help you take the next step in your business Journey and now here is your host Manny Hoffman coming to you from the PX headquarters in Brooklyn New York this is the podcast for No Nonsense advice to help you learn grow and lead today I'm so excited to welcome our guest John derbish John is the founder of smart Suite as a three-time Founder he sold his last company for $200 million throughout his career John has been dedicated to automating Everyday essential business tasks to create smarter more efficient organizations no matter what the industry in our conversation John and I discussed how smartsite user was able to save $88,000 per month thanks to Ai and automation learn how to incorporate feedback from your clients and everything you do know the way John breaks down the steps to finding the proper proper management tool for your business finally don't miss his advice of how to go about implementing new systems in your company this and so much more only on the let's talk business podcast let's get right to our conversation with John Derby [Music] Shire John thank you so much for joining me on the let's talk business podcast oh it's a pleasure looking forward to getting into it yeah so I've been following what you're doing now with smar Suite um we've been playing around with the software as well and and you know that this is not your first one you've been involved in technology youve been you've passed a couple of great exits um so for our listeners just to to set the tone give us a little bit of your backstory as far as how you got into the technology and some of the stories about pre smart site and then we'll get a little bit into the smart smart site story sure happy to yeah I'm probably pretty similar to a lot of entrepreneurs in that I came out of college with accounting and finance degree um and used that for just a few years to kind of sparked me into the tech space where I wanted to be that was there but that was my entry point uh that was there my first really big job out a school was I had the opportunity to be a direct admit partner at ernston Young and to build one of their global Consulting practices but became um cyber security U that was there and we had about 1500 people in that practice I was there for about four four and a half years that's where I really cut my teeth on understanding how to really build a business and all the internal workings uh Ern and young is very process driven so everything we did was broken out into a process so that's really stuck with me through my career on the importance of having process to really scale a business I left durston young with an idea to build a no code platform that would help manage cyber security processes inside large companies which later became governance risk and compliance um that company in the first three years uh 29 of the top 30 financial services companies became customers and in about 5 years 75 of the Fortune 100 that's there so we were very Enterprise focused we were very targeted on the people that we reached out to for customers that was there we that company um became a unicorn uh it's still in the same location we we built that company in Overland Park Kansas where I was living at the time uh it's still in the same location we've got many employees that are there over 20 years with the company it's just a great story on how C culture affects the business long term with the people you hire that's there and I'd love to get into some of that later in the discussion I sold um Archer Technologies and did what most people would do I thought I wanted to retire at a young age and got really bored after about 3 years played a lot of golf did a lot of travel I did a lot of investing advising and realized that at heart I have a passion for building software and and I want to get up in the morning and have a passion to go do something and I lost that when I sold Archer so fast forward we started um smartsite about four and a half years ago and um about four years ago I guess now in the no code space but we wanted to take a new approach to how organizations could manage any process or project in their company on a single platform and I think we'll dive into that a little bit more and what that means but that was kind of the the Genesis of of smart site very cool so I want to go back to to to um you you pass exit on Archer for a minute and then we'll get into smart site um and two things that you mentioned one is obviously there was an exit so I want to get into the mindset of of of of somebody in the tech space that has gone through exits and this is something that I hear a lot so sometimes you could see a CEO that's building a technology company and only for the purpose for the exit and there are people that are building it Brick by Brick day by day feature by feature and exit might be you know down the road but that's not in their in in the immediate um sight have you had exit as the you know the poster child so to speak of this is where we going this is where we're going yeah at Archer you know we built that business as a true lifestyle business meaning that it was a profitable business from year one and we wanted to to you know basically have a business that we had control over and could hire the people that we wanted to hire we were bootstrapped until year eight and a half and we brought in some external Capital at that time not because the business needed Capital but because my wife and I had all of our kind of financial Assets in the business that was there so it allowed us to take some of the money off the table to continue to grow U that was there but what happened after that is pretty interesting in that we we had a lot of acquisition offers that started happening in year 9 because we were such a profitable business the location that we are in the market share that we had so that lifestyle business became very valuable to larger companies kind of inside of their portfolio so we had I remember I just a little less than 200 employees we sold to EMC that had 43,000 employees give you an example so we became part of a much larger company I stayed for about a year and helped do the transition that was there but they really turned on the global sales engine for Archer something that we hadn't had we had some global companies but we didn't have a presence with the international sales team and they showed us very quickly that enabling a sales team with the type of technology that we built at Archer double tripled the size of the company just in a matter of years that was there and it had very high profit margins already and it just generated a lot of positive cash flow I want to get to something that you also mentioned which is you spoke about culture and I know in my listeners listening to the show knows know know pretty well how much I focus on culture and I always say you know if CEOs speak about culture I want to I want to see their calendar I want to see how much time they actually putting in to work on their culture because it's easy to say I want to have a good culture but then you know putting putting time to it and making sure that that's what you have I guess when it comes to the tech industry in particular a lot of companies are focused on talent and because we need to run fast we need to have the best Engineers we need to have data analysts and you are in the cyber security so that it's a talent and Zone how did you balance making sure that you're getting great talent but ultimately making sure that you're bringing in people that are great for the culture it's amazing that you're asking this question not many people understand the balance between those two facets that you just mentioned but the story at Archer is we started with a core team of about six to seven people in the first year delivered the first iteration of our product and then we needed to start to grow and the first thing that we said was how are we going to connect with people that make sense for us to hire and we decided that on average the people we needed to hire had somewhere between two and five years of experience and we wanted to bring them into our our company and train them on how we wanted to do things we thought it was a little unique so at first we were very specific on the years of experience that they had the second thing that we determined was that people that came out of ernston young IBM deoe centure that had a Consulting background were the perfect candidates across our company in a lot of different roles just because they had received so much training in the first 18 months to two years like Accenture has a year program that they go through before they start working so they came to us with readymade skills on not just Consulting but project management and a lot of process that was there the next thing that we did was we looked at our six to eight employees that we had and said who do you know that you would like to work with that you feel would fit the culture we're trying to build and we hired in the early days I can't imagine that we hired more than four or five people outside of referrals from people we hired at smart s and that got so much traction we actually gave $2,500 for any referral that an employee made that uh stayed with us for a year so there was like incentive like we don't want just anybody and they have to work with you each day but then we started paying that and people just were going in and saying this is the best person I worked with at a job you here and they fit the culture and there were two things that we looked at one was we wanted you know that top 1% really smart High aptitude people but if those people didn't fit the culture we didn't hire like the culture became the number one thing and we did something that is still done today there that I take a lot of pride in and that is each time we hire we would bring people in to interview in the morning typically around 9:30 or 10 because if we felt that we were interested in them after the first few people they spoke with we would invite them to go to lunch and when we would go to lunch we went to the same restaurant for years and years big round table fit eight people we would bring four to five people in different departments from Archer to go there and it wasn't an interview as much as it was we wanted to see how the conversation expanded right like if it was just a really Dynamic open discussion it was fun people were engaged we knew that they had all the other skills now they have the culture fit we're looking for some people that we were really high on just couldn't hold a conversation with the other team members it was really hard and we had to make the hard decision to say they fit but not with the culture you know the interaction so we didn't hire them but what happened over time was that we built this really unique group of people that all had the same experience of going through the same interview at the same place like we started to build this background story and it it's just amazing now you know people met and got married in the company we were okay with that people had kids and now their kids work in the company you know as interns like it just created a really unique uh culture and of all the things that we did right at Archer the one that made the most difference was the people we hired in the culture that that BR I think this is so valuable and and I think um um for our listeners to take take note what you just said because a lot of companies when it comes to hiring they look very short term which means is I need to fill a position I need to fill it now and therefore um yes they'll do interviews they'll do a fast fast process interviewing process but you're not looking what it's going to do for the culture long term or even not even if the long long past this person's left the company even you know what will that person bring to the culture as as a whole and I think this is what you're saying is so important and I'll just add another thing that I took out of what you just said is a lot of companies are short on staff and they'll pay recruiters and they'll do everything and spend a lot of money all kinds of ads to get the resumes in now why not why not incentivize your own team that knows your culture knows knows the infrastructure knows everything about it The Good the Bad and the Ugly they should go out and and and and bring you candidates it's the nicest thing you could do for your culture that's exactly what we did and I you know there's a difference between bootstrapped found ERS and Founders that have raised some pretty significant funds early on in that the bootstrap Founders tend to to find ways to go attract Talent like we did because you don't have a lot of you don't have $20,000 to spend on a recruiter for a job that's there right you want to pay that to the people you hire it's their Venture companies are under more pressure to grow faster typically and that it's harder for them to build a culture because they're just hiring a lot of people in a lot of different positions really early on and you just have to see if they mix and if they don't work out you just let them go and that creates a culture on its own when you bring people in and then let them go and we were really fortunate at Archer that we did have moments like that where there was people we had to let go but it was very few and I was also very adamant that the person that made the decision to hire the person was the person that had to have the conversation with me to let them go and that changed how people do interviews for us like nobody a couple people were involved and we had to let somebody go and like they never want that experience again like it's even if somebody's not performing you know if you're a human it's very hard to have a conversation and say this isn't for you you need to go find another job and just understand how they're feeling at that moment and you experience that a few times you realize all right I'm going to take an extra day a week and I'm going to make sure I've hire the right person because I don't want to have to have that conversation very powerful so let me ask you if you built a company with that passion and in in in putting the priorities obviously on the product but ultimately on culture when it comes to making a decision of who your potential buyer of the company is obviously was there a bidding war so to speak a multiple buyers coming to you and trying to figure out okay who's the best U you know Synergy and the best strategic buyer for us or was it a one-off offer that you that you weren't even in the market like if you could share some of that process sure yeah we knew at Archer that one of existing customers was likely going to become a buyer of the product in the case we sold the EMC but inside of EMC and the RS division they used our product to manage services that they provided back to their customers that were there so they we knew that that at some point they would probably be interested on that they came to us first but then we we had just brought in ban Capital as an investor in the secondary that we did and Bane said this sounds really great but we need a little more aage in the discussions we need to go out and see if anybody else has interest right so they found some other parties right away that had some level of interest and that just helped us with our discussions with EMC so that we felt that we weren't getting pushed around as much as it was more a mutual discussion of value on both sides and it was the the CEO and president of the RSA division of EMC that did the acquisition and we built a really good relationship and I felt really about the culture that they had and that Archer had that it was going to be a good fit now after the acquisition we learned I learned a lesson in that you know a 43,000 person company even with a good culture is very different than the culture in a 200 person company so there was a lot that we had to sacrifice and give up I'll give you a good example we had a person on the payroll who was our director of community and her only job was to get all of our employees involved in the community each each week we gave each employee I think two and a half days of time off outside of vacation and PTO for them just to go to their kids school events to be involved in Habitat for Humanity for whatever and our community director was responsible for finding all these opportunities in the community bringing them back and then making sure that every employee used their two and a half days that were there that's a whole conversation on culture that that builds when you go do something outside of work with your team members but EMC came in and said we don't need that position right so that was a struggle for us when we saw them cut some of the positions that we thought were so important to what had become the culture the second thing that EMC said to us was that um we're going to move your operations to Boston where we're located and we're going to move everybody from Kansas City and we're going to change the name from Archer to I think it was RSA security something Division and the customers went crazy that that would happen and 20 years later it's still in the same location that name still Archer it's F that the culture one is what I'm trying to say over the big guy in that that ex got it um so is the purchase public information like if when you made that exit like what type of purchase number just for for our listeners to get an understanding yeah yeah it's it's all public there uh since it was through a public company but was a little less than 200 million so let's let's fast forwards there's a lot of lessons there and I know we could do a podcast only on that but I do want to move to a smart Suite because this is more of a um direct to Consumer direct to company not an Enterprise product and I know that there's a lot of a lot of questions I have as far as what got you to develop it what problem are you trying to solve so obviously you you took some time off and as an entrepreneur you can't it there is a limit for how much time off you could take right so walk us through like where was the inspiration for smart site yeah you know when I when we sold Archer and then we took a period of time off what I didn't realize was that I really needed a mental break right we've been going so hard for so long I was just that way but I was getting tired and it took a couple of years to be honest to like just for me to get charged back and find the energy that I wanted to have to go after my passion again and what we did during that time was we invested in a lot of startups and through a lot lot of venture funds probably 400 companies in total at some level so I did a lot of advising with had a chance to meet with lots of entrepreneurs with companies that were small and struggling to companies that were just like on a you know a racetrack they were just growing so fast uh that was there there was one theme that kept coming out of the a lot of the discussions that I had they'd say John you're a process guy what product should we use to manage all the processes in our business right and we would we had this big diagram and all these different products like this is what you use for sales this what you use for marketing this what you use for HR for operations for finance and I took a step back and I'm like you need just people need a single platform that allows them to manage processes across those that I just mentioned plus a whole host of others where they don't need to have to go out and buy all these Point Solutions and then find ways to integrate the content between the point Solutions because they need data in dashboards charts to understand the the health of their business and understand how to grow it like what's working what's not working that's there so the idea behind uh smart site initially was one core platform to manage any process or project now we provide uh Native Integrations with um over 6,000 other products through our connectors that that we have so if you use Salesforce and you want to integrate data with Salesforce into all the other processes that you have because of accounts and contacts you just turn that on and the S kind of happens that's there so we realize that not every company will use us to manage all their processes but what we're finding is that once a company starts with one process we see them grow to two to to four kind of overtime and what's unique what we wanted to be unique about smart s early on was that we saw in this overall industry of software SAS companies we saw project management companies like a Munday a clickup a Reich and a sauna then we have more database process driven types of SAS companies like an air table a service now and open pages and then we saw this unstructured data starting to happen with like a Google doc a notion a Koda where they were documents but they were bringing in some structured data that was there and we thought you know to really manage things in a business I need all of those capabilities in one platform so I don't have to pick from those three categories as just three more tools to have so when you looked at these different um um software you just mentioned you figured that that if you have a no Code system like smart Suite then then people could start eliminating some of those additional softwares and those those processes could be run 100% through um smart Suite that's exactly true so what what we feel has happened over the last three to four years is that no code is just really taking off as a concept in products and every category use no code and no code's just a fancy word for using drag and drop to configure things and not have to write code right and you know just in the last couple of years you've seen like a hundred products just in the sales industry that are different point solutions to manage different things it's just exploded and then you see some in marketing some in HR and the problem that that creates is that now I have lots of great Point solutions that I'm happy with but they don't talk to each other Access Control now that to sign somebody up I have to give them access control to five six seven different products when they leave they've got data on all these different places I have to figure out what systems like I can't get the management reporting so the thought behind the single platform to manage processes was we natively and we solve all those problems now I can connect sales with marketing with product and some minutes and I can share that data it's access controlled at a level that's even better than the point Solutions and then management can run charts and dashboards across anything any process that's in their workspace to really understand the health of the business so once upon a time when somebody needed software was custom software so Enterprise was spending millions of dollars developing in the small business owner was left using Google Sheets or or Excel and what what I find is that that you know one of the things I deal with a lot of business owners and if a business owner doesn't have the finger on the pulse on the on the most important key metrics of the company they're definitely not um getting to the full potential because if they have to dig for information or if they don't even know like oh this I need to ask my bookkeeper this I need to use my as my project manager this I need to physically go over to this person asking where we are with this project there's so much wasted time and when it comes to decision- making you don't have the the data in order to make a a sound decision so I think it's there's no excuse today with no code systems regardless of it's smart Suite or any of the other tools out there with connections today the setup could be so creative based on the connectors and I think um another thing that really exploded in in and in kudos to tools like smart suite and the connect the connectors is Once Upon a Time time you have to force on uh you know pieces of Technology on your team and I could see it from my own team so we have a creative agency and I know that the more complicated the system is the less accurate the data is for my because if if a client calls up for five minutes or 10 minutes of a change on something if if it's a five-click process for them to actually um you know ATT track that piece of information it's not happening ain't happening but so throughout the years I've realized that look I'll give give you the most easiest time tracker but then I'll have for my for for for management we'll have a totally different dashboard but it connects and talks to each other so you don't have to force on pieces of technology to teams that that just ends up being a hassle on the team or not not accurate data yeah exactly what you hit on is so important to any product and it's something that we thought about early on a smart Suite in that who are we selling to and who are we building the software product for right and what we found was that we started to build the product in a way that Millennials and Jers understood the product based on their background meaning it was very collaborative in nature I could collaborate in the context of the work that's being done whether that's a comment or I'm want to notify somebody or I want to send an email I don't have to go into my email you can do it all inside a smart Suite in the context of what you're working on this there but we also found that the presentation of the information like you were mentioning was so important to Millennials and that they wanted more bright vivid colors they didn't like the old just black and white screen they got bored they didn't want to do their job you know people in some cases select the companies they work with based on the tech stack that the company has and that's because that's interesting to them and I think that's what's starting to take place right now in the software world is people are getting a little more focused on who does the work in the company each day and most time it's the younger people and then you have management that's a little older that are looking at dashboards and benchmarks and reports understanding the health of things but the work the day-to-day activities happening by the younger generation that's there so the software needs to support their needs so let me speak about you know people listening to this and I I've seen it many many times in in group chats or or even face to face at an events where people will say I'm looking for a new project management tool I'm looking for something yeah and what type of homework would you tell our listeners um as they're going through the process of vetting the proper system for their needs what is something that you would coach a person to say okay instead of going for every Bell and whistle and every new shiny object that's out there how do we come up with a list of what their needs are in order to figure out which is the best system and so for for them two two points that I typically talk to people about in regards to any software not just if you're looking for project management that's there the first one is do you understand the features that are available in that you need and if they say I don't really understand what's even available like I know what the end goal needs to be but how do I get there I don't know what feature I say okay most no code products SAS products are have a free trial 14 days almost everyone so you need to just jump in and spend 30 minutes 45 minutes and just look at each one just at a high level and you'll start to understand these are some of the features that they have that I would find interesting in my process but then stop for just a minute minute and think about your process like what's the actual process that you want to do that's there and just map it out in a it could be a simple flowchart on a piece of paper uh that's there once you do that then okay now let's go look at some of these products and let's build that use case very simply that's in there and then we can do a comparison in real time in the old days you weren't able to do comparisons and you had to have salespeople involved and it just got more complicated but now most of the time you can go start a free 14-day trial about any product you don't have to talk to a salesperson you can just give it give it a try what the products that that we like to use typically have some type of templates available and we build a lot of templates into smart Suite as well so that if you have a a process that you want to do we want to show you a series of ways to do that with a single click that you can see what a beginning process looks like more intermediate maybe more advanced maybe it's a cell CRM light versus this is like a fortune 100 CRM so you start to understand like where am I at where do I want to be and then make that decision and in terms of of how much would you advise PE leaders to how much do they should they involve their team in making a decision on which system to use like on the like you mentioned before the people actually going to be using the system I can tell you the research that we've done of the people that purchase our product in most cases like 80% are not the the people riding the check they're the end users doing the work and that's that's who we feel should actually do the analysis for you and make the recommendation uh that's there that other 20% we have CEOs that have purchased our product and implemented it across but when you have people that are doing the work helping make the decision they have ownership right at the beginning regardless of the product that you pick in that they were involved and it becomes more of their product versus this is what we're going to use right and now they have to nobody likes being told you're just going to use it that's the way it is like to be involved in the process so I I would say get your team members involved as early as you can and just looking at the options and having discussions I know you're very passionate about smart sweet and the features and everything that's that's being built into the software I I guess it's a twofold question one is um how much of the growth in on the on the feature side of things are you depending on your own internal team as far as building it out versus direct feedback from from your clients it's 90% plus that is the direct feedback from the clients we call it customer first and we often refer to it as customer inspired development so we have a public road map where every customer and you don't even have to be a customer you can see our public road map you can see all the features that have been requested you can vote on those features we respond back to those features and sometimes we do it publicly sometimes we reach out directly to the person for competitive reasons like we don't want all our competitors to see all the designs that we're working on that are there and then I meet on average with two customers a day talking about just features and I I try to bring it up to use cases so I understand the use case and like people sometimes come and say I need this one feature and we're saying okay I get it like they're saying just add this checkbox here and that'll work fine we like to be a little more thoughtful and say okay help us understand what you're trying to accomplish and we may even find a better way and that's where our team gets involved on the designers is now they understand what the outcome needs to be how do we build it in so everything feels like it fits into the software this is so valuable like I think our listeners uh needs to need to um listen to this again because so many people in the software business in particular but even every business even the service providers um sometimes we're so in our bubble and into how we want to see things and how we feel people will potentially use our soft our system software products whatever it is and and sometimes we we we just totally forget about asking our clients and commit you know a leader of a company committing to two clients a day that that's a huge commitment uh and and obviously it probably pays off in order to make sure that that that's the proper road map for the for the developers to do for for sure like I I'm number one is I'm a product person that acts like a CEO like I I want be in in my perfect world I'm working on the product the majority of every day you know that's there and getting feedback and a couple things happen when you get feedback number one is you start to build a relationship with your customers they begin to understand that you're going to listen to them and you have to deliver like you can't just get feedback and not deliver that's there but you you begin to build the relationship so that if they you don't have a feature or two that they need right now they at least feel like you're going to listen to them and have it at some point in the future that's there and the second thing it does is it once every two weeks we bring a group of customers together on a call between 10 and 20 people to talk about a particular topic a feature that we're building that's more complex bigger and they're experts in that area but then we get the customers talking to each other about the use cases and one customer thinking wow that's a great idea I could be doing that in my business and then that helps us have an even better outcome on the feature that's developed and then we have 10 to 20 people that when the feature does come out already kind of know about it that can help explain things on the decisions that we made to other users beautiful so let me ask you obviously you deal with a lot of customers as you mentioned and what could you give advice for our listeners um sometimes you could see companies get excited about the new system software process and and they implement it beautifully flawlessly and it's implemented nicely with adoption While others you could have companies Implement and they find out no there's no adoption to it there's no you know it's just not taken off what a device could would you tell our listeners of how to go about that process another great question most of the time that software implementations fail it's because of the process that you've built in it's either too simple and it doesn't get to the end point that you need at the end or it's too complex and you're not using all the inputs at the end of you know looking at the health of the business so you're doing a lot of busy work and people don't love to do that so A couple of things happen when you start to talk about complex processes you need to think about do I really need those steps and if I do can I use automation to perform the role of the user that's there so the user doesn't have to do so much busy work like there's a lot of people cut and paste this link from here to here and do this what could you just create a button that just click the button and it does all those things for you right so we we tend to when people don't have adoption we look at it as either under underd delivered or overd delivered on the you know the the state of the process it's there to help companies with that a lot of companies are doing what we do now is we have a daily office hours that are available each morning for an hour that you can jump on live and talk with one of our folks and you'll have sometimes eight to 10 other people sometimes 20 that are on that call and what happens is if you talk about your process you're going to get feedback not just from us but of the other people and we kind of jointly help you work through what the issue is we also have one-on-one capabilities you can click in the bottom right corner of our product and have a discussion with one of our onboarding Specialists and their goal is to help understand your process and then help you compare it to other customers that we have so we could say kind of here's where you stack up and here's what we see other people do to help you get that right but for our team it all start we model the process out even if it's on a piece of paper or a whiteboard as we're talking so we understand like do we really know what the outcome is and does the process support getting to the outcome that you're looking for so let me ask you um you know obviously speaking about technology in today's day and age um you cannot uh you know you cannot ignore the the part of AI obviously AI I've seen some of enhancement and stuff that you you mentioned about building AI into the platform I guess my question to you is seeing technology learning technology knowing technology living technology a what could you share with us like how is um smart site using Ai and to enhance the daily experience and ultim the work that your clients are doing with the platform and then just your overall opinion of where you feel AI is going in the near future sure yeah I I you know I I had the chance to be at the startup grind conference which is like the largest startup conference in the world um two two and a half weeks ago in Silicon Valley and you know this this conference I don't know exactly how many people but it seemed like there was 3 4,000 people there wait minute is that's where where you got an award we did we we actually won a global SAS startup of the year which was very very cool congratulations for you and your team thank you and what was interesting is that during the day they had a main session that had a few thousand people in it you could go to and they would have unicorn SAS companies that had done really well along with people that invested in them and they'd have a conversation for like 30 minutes about the company where it's headed what they're seeing in the industry that's interesting there's no question that every one of those companies talked about AI in every kind of industry you can imagine and at the end the president of Y combinator got up on board with one of on stage with one of the largest AI investment Venture funds and they said you just don't understand what's going to happen like you're all tech people you're all using AI you still don't understand how big this is this is bigger than the Industrial Revolution that happened like they just started going through things in and just said this is going to dwarf anything we've ever seen as a civilization is getting ready to change with AI because it's going to be used to perform all kinds of automated tasks that people need to go do but don't necessarily want to do that that's there and they were pretty adamant to say there's a number of jobs that are going to be displaced for sure but overall the the type of work that people do is going to change and that there people are going to become more familiar with how to ask questions inside of AI to get the appropriate responses that help them in their jobs now in the case of smart site we've been headed down that path but it was just so interesting to hear this from kind of the who's who of of how big this really is in smart Suite our customers first ask for just simple things like we have a smart doc field type that's like a notion code or Google doc capability and they said we just need the ability to generate and review and summarize content inside of a smart dog field so you could say I'm writing a marketing blog these are the key wordss that need to be optimized for XYZ here's the audience and it would create the content for you some people would say I get product requirements that come in from customers and when it first comes in I need you to summarize the information and create three questions I could ask the customer that helps me better dive in on the use case and in some cases I want you to ask those three questions and send them right back to the customer with no interaction from me but it's all about summarizing and generating content what happened next is people wanted to create workflows using AI so they could come in and say I'm an automotive dealer I need a better way to manage relationships with my customers and I have a service department and it would go create a CRM that was specific to what you just ask for inside of smartsite the next piece that we saw is that when you have a lot of data inside a table in smartsite let's say it's a list of all of your contracts with all the information about the type of the link and the size and type and all that you want to ask questions like who who are my most profitable customers all right how did I how did I get those customers right did I through marketing campaigns Word of Mouth direct Outreach right I want to do more of that that's what we're working on now is chat Bots that pull from the data that allow you to ask questions and in some cases you can say I I want you to also create a dashboard with a series of benchmarks and charts and graphs that relate to this question that I just asked you so I can really ize it there that is fun like we're having a lot of fun you know looking into different businesses pulling out the data and helping them understand how do you better manage it's amazing yeah like we like everybody says we're at the tip of the iceberg and this is already the capability it's like and I think you mentioned something so important for our listeners and people get like the shiny object okay it's AI what could I do with it I always tell um my clients that's not the right approach the approach is what are the tasks you don't like doing what are the things that you're not the best at and now ask is there a way from Automation and AI the combination of the two that that could be replaced you know I was actually at a conference um this week and I spoke and it was a conference a little bit on AI for beginners for business owners and I said you know my podcast um from out of 23 steps 21 of those are automated or using AI in order to prepare us for it because otherwise I don't have the time like I'm doing three three podast guess a week you know and and I have a full-time job so so which means is that that instead of saying okay let me start playing around with AI let me find a task or project that I'm doing that maybe somebody's doing manually or so so on and so forth that I can start using AI for it and it's amazing the capabilities like I'll give you just one use case that that that we use internally so we we recently rebranded PX group um P group.com and we put in a lot of effort to UI ux and obviously and en coding it to making sure that there's a lot of resources there on the podcast and so on and so forth now of course you put in some analytics you put in some tools in the back end so we installed Microsoft Clarity for our listeners it's free it's a tool that gives you so much so much Insight on your website they built in now ai to the recordings so instead of me watching all these recordings I hit one button and it gives me a summary that I could literally take and send to our developers hey there's a Java error that some of the people are hitting most people get stuck on this page or most people spend time on this page oh wow they're interested in this let me build it up let me add Once Upon a Time this is hours of work or most people don't even focus on that they don't do anything about it so to our listeners speaking about Ai and hearing like how smart site is using it in the same way how could we have the data you're putting all these input How Could You Now extract the data and make faster decisions how can you extract the data and expand use it for marketing purposes and I think that's the mindset everyday business owners have to have from here on for for sure yeah we had a customer that did a webinar last Wednesday that shows off the AI and Automation in the way that they have built and automated their business they're a podcast company with 18 employees they're all remote he says that through the Automation in 20 days from the time he started smart site until he did the demo was 20 days which is pretty cool he's saving $68,000 a month in costs because of the way they've been able to automate things when you post this podcast I'll put a link to that down below because in 10 minutes you will see the power of AI from somebody that's not super technical but is doing some amazing stuff because they just know how to ask questions they they did simple things like they took our API documentation and sent it to chat GPT and said I need to integrate U smart site with this product and I need code and I want it to be able to click a button inside a smart scen he gave him the code he typed in he goes I have no idea what this code does but now I've automated this whole process of a recording gets done it goes through descript it pulls the information in it creates my LinkedIn post my Instagram short story like all these things he said that we're taking hours of somebody's time now just happen beautiful yeah and we will actually link it up on the show notes and and on as I mentioned to you on the on the new PEX website we we break down the podcast with resources and everything so it's going to be in the show notes on on under this episode so last question on on Smart site uh you know I know you're ambitious you have have a lot of you know strategic goals like where do you see smart Suite in in a couple of years from now we're having an amazing time working with customers and just every kind of use case they have it's our job to figure out how do we manage that in a single platform for them so um you're seeing a lot of things happen with us right now on the interface side to make things even simpler for General users that need to just come in and interact but a little more feature-wise for the people behind the scenes that are doing the heavy lifting on things um and then the AI that we mentioned you know how do we integrate AI in a way that's non-intrusive to the people that need to use it and it's easy for them to kind of digest and understand the value of how when and how to use it that's there so a lot of people when they first come into AI or a little like they don't understand the concepts they really don't understand how to use it so we try to put it in context as much as we can like just write a sentence describe this I give you a good example we have a formula builder in smartsite and you can write a really simple formula Time Field a * You Know Field b or you could write formulas that are nested if statements that are four paragraphs long like super complex we're adding AI to allow you to just tell us that I need to create a formula that summarizes information on a risk assessment across all these data points that are here does X and it just creates it for you like you don't have to have a consultant do that for you you know it and you could also say include inline comments so I can understand each line of the formula and what it does seconds it just creates that for you that's a great use case for somebody that doesn't need to spend an hour learning how to write formulas in smart site amazing where could people find out more about smartsuite or or even follow you for more content you know go to smart.com we have a free 14-day trial we'll happy to extend it to 30 days if you need more time you can at the end of that time you could move to one of our pay plans we also have a free plan if you're not ready to make a decision yet and on our website if you go to resources you'll find our blog we have a video Center that just has lots of great content from partners and customers on how they're using the product and it helps open your eyes to maybe what the capabilities are different areas and obviously LinkedIn or follow me on LinkedIn I do a lot of updates there as well beautiful for the links resource mentioned in this episode check out the show notes at www.p group.com podcast where we link to all the resources mentioned this episode let's close with the four rapid fire questions are you ready I'm ready number one a book that change your life a book that changed my life probably outliers by Malcolm Gladwell great book number two a piece of advice you got that you'll never forget follow the customer I heard that early on in my career nice number three anything you wish could go back and do differently you know I might not have sold our last company Archer technology so soon you know we immediately miss the people and the customers uh once we sold yeah wow and last and final question what's still on your bucket list to achieve that's a good one you know my wife T and I love to travel and I think our bucket list is mainly just visiting places that we we haven't been able to visit yet cool yeah enjoying nature around the world John thank you so much for joining us I know your time is valuable that is why in the name of our listeners we forever be grateful for sharing some of your time with us today it's been a blast oh thank you very much it's been a great conversation appreciate it and that's a wrap for today's episode of the let's look business podcast I hope you enjoyed the Practical non-nonsense advice that our guests shared if you found value on listening I would be so grateful if you could share the episode with your friends and if you could give the show a five star rating on Apple podcast or wherever platform you listen subscribe to the show and get notified every time we publish a new episode The let's talk business podcast is a Pex group original production until next time make it a great day [Music]