From Pain Points To Solutions: Leveraging AI For Client Success With Phillip Swan [Episode 165]

From Pain Points To Solutions: Leveraging AI For Client Success With Phillip Swan

Welcome to the show. We have a great episode going on. Before I tell you what it is, if you are looking to double your sales or you’re looking for reliable, predictable mathematical growth in your company, let us know. Reach out to us at YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com. We can help you, so let us know. We’ve got an amazing guest. His name is Mr. Phillip Swan. We’re going to bring Phillip in a moment.

The question I have for you is what future are you solving for, and what are the migraine-level problems that you’re solving for your clients? We’re going to have a deep discussion on those two points and how AI is going to help you or AI is going to cause some challenges for you. Phillip is an AI expert on this subject matter. His company is The AI Solution Group. Let’s talk to Phillip. This is going to be a great episode for you, so get to a place where you can read. You’re going to be enthralled, excited, and a little concerned as well about what’s coming in the near future that’s going to affect all of our businesses. Without further ado, let’s go talk to Phillip.

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Phillip’s Role And AI’s Rapid Rise

Phillip, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

It’s awesome to be here. I’m so glad that we’re finally able to do it once we’ve all gotten through our illnesses.

He’s talking about how everybody’s had COVID. If you’re reading this and you might even have COVID, I’m sorry, but you will get through it. You’ll have great content to read because Phillip is a very smart gentleman. Phillip, tell people, if you would, what you do. Let’s set the frame. We’re going to talk about groking your customer, which I love. Set the frame, please. 

What I do is I solve migraine-level pain points for customers. When you’ve got a migraine-level pain point that you’ve identified, we’ve all had one and we all know how bad it goes. It lasts for days if you’ve had a real migraine. You’ll pay anything to cure that migraine. What I do is we identify those migraine-level problems and then work with the customers who have migraine-level problems and solve them in a way that’s compelling to them and a way that attracts them to it. It is putting the customer at the center of every discussion and of every process that you have within your company.

What kind of problems do they come and talk about?

They talk about all kinds of things. We’ve got one company that’s got a multibillion-dollar revenue gap problem. It is at that level. We’re helping them close that gap. That’s a big one for us. I can’t tell you who the company is because all of this is confidential. Another company is another very large multibillion-dollar company that you will all have recognized the name. They also have a print division. Within that print division, the quality has to be so high that the setup costs and the wastage that happens until they get to the quality are significant. We’re talking cost savings of tens of millions of dollars a year by setting these up. These are real-life problems.

Those are big problems for big clients. What’s the name of the company that you are doing this with?

It’s called The AI Solution Group. What we do is we offer services and offers. Our offers are to help companies get ready for AI and be prepared in all aspects of their business to adopt AI responsibly within their business before their competition out-competes them with AI.

TheAISolutionGroup.ai is the website, correct?

That is correct.

The Importance Of Responsible AI

You talked about responsible AI. We’ll get into groking the customer. Why don’t we talk for a moment? AI is coming on strong. The adaptation is not even like when the internet came on. This is blindingly fast. We went from dial-up internet to DSL to high-speed access. It took years for that to catch on. With AI, it seemed like one day, somebody was talking about it. The next day, all of a sudden, it was hitting the mainstream.  I see it going into hyperwarp. You’re in the middle of this every single day. Is it going into hyperwarp? What should people be thinking?

Let’s backtrack. AI is almost a 100-year-old problem. The first paper that was written on that started describing Artificial Intelligence was back in 1936 by a Cambridge professor called Alan Turing. If anybody has watched the movie The Imitation Game, that’s the same Alan Turing who cracked the Enigma code that effectively won World War II for us.

In 1950, post-World War II, he wrote another paper that effectively gave him the status of being the father of modern computing. He created the idea of the microprocessor. He also created this thing called the Turing Test in 1950. The Turing Test is very simple. It’s a human in the middle. If the human in the middle cannot determine that they are talking to a machine or they are talking to a human, then the machine has hit sentient intelligence.

Where are we at? 1960 started to see the growth of symbolic AI and in 1980, the rise of machine learning. What does that mean? If anybody has had a BMW before, BMW introduced machine learning into their vehicles to make them drive better depending on the individual driver back in 1990. Machine learning has been used extensively in the industry since the 1990s. Then drops in 2010 and into the era of modern AI. It’s not generative AI but it’s modern AI, starting to automate, starting to web scrape, and starting to create operational efficiencies. Along comes 2019 the first large language models and the era of generative AI. That’s the one that we are in.

Get ready to hang onto your seat belts for what’s coming out at the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 called AGI. What AGI is is artificial general intelligence. That is where a computer thinks as well and acts as well as a human, if not better. We had a demonstration because we have very close connections. It was being demonstrated by a NASA PhD, a literal rocket scientist.

What they did was that they put their doctorate thesis title in with some prompting. Out spat in less than nine minutes of compute time a complete PhD quality dissertation that would pass a dissertation that took him three years to do as a PhD student. This is the level of intelligence that we are rapidly barreling into. It will happen by the end of 2024 or in Q1 of 2025.

If you are going to be scared, be scared. The right question to ask is, “How do I integrate AI responsibly into my business and into my work life that is good for people and good for the planet?” The amount of compute and the amount of energy that is going to be required to support these systems is astronomical. It is beyond our capacity to do that. We are going to rapidly run into national security level type of activities and rapidly build out critical infrastructure to support AGI.

If you're going to be scared, be scared about how to integrate AI responsibly into your business. Share on X

Navigating The AI Landscape

It sounds a little like, “Science fiction. The Martians are coming,” that type of thing. The reality is this is an opportunity for people and businesses to capitalize on this and grow their revenues. CEOs, take note. You’re not going to get away from this. That’s not going to happen. What are some of the strategies that they can start to think about and get into so that they continue to keep strong revenue growth in their company versus getting steamrolled and blindsided? I never knew about 1936 when this all started out. I heard about it in 2019.

I started off life as a software engineer. I was programming in a language called Lisp Artificial Intelligence back in 1981. This is not new stuff. You as an individual are not going to be replaced by a robot or some Artificial Intelligence. That would be irresponsible. That is not what’s going to happen. What is going to happen, however, if you do not augment yourself with AI as an individual, you are going to be replaced by somebody who is using AI. It’s really important to start getting comfortable with what I call a tectonic shift of technology. It’s re-platforming everything.

You mentioned that I’m an old guy at the beginning of this conversation. I’ve seen the tectonic shift from mainframes to personal computing. I’ve been part of the tectonic shift of mobile going mobile. I’ve been part of the tectonic shift going internet. This tectonic shift is nothing like I’ve seen before. You cannot sit on the sidelines. If you do sit on the sidelines, you’re going to be left behind very quickly. I encourage you to start getting comfortable with this. There are lots of resources out there about learning how to prompt and learning how to get comfortable. It’s not cheating. You’ve got to be careful. Where you are careful with the AI, you have to have inspection points at each part of the journey.

Everything’s going towards agents. I am creating agents for myself, doing all the mundane tasks that I hate doing. Email, for one. I hate doing email. I’ve got six email accounts and I cannot keep up. I’ve got an agent that triages all my emails. I have no more stress in my day from email. That happens in seconds. The emails that have to get written, I write them. It’s not AI writing them. It’s a rapid purging. A rapid triage is what happens.

The next thing it does is all the content, scheduling, and managing marketing calendars from a go-to-market perspective. I’ve got that pretty much all automated. I write the content myself. AI is not writing the content because I want copyright, but it’s doing all the mechanics of getting it done and getting it out there with images and everything else. I have to write the content, press Publish, and it goes.

The other part that I’m doing in the go-to-market is finding ideal customer profiles and the actual ideal customers to go and sell to in a non-creepy way. These are the keywords here. Don’t be creepy. How many times have we heard hyper-personalization this and hyper-personalization that? That is creepy stuff.  How do you know that I’m pissed off at something and you’re giving me a solution to make me happy again? I don’t want creepiness in my life, and I don’t know anybody that does. If you have an assistant who is offloading you to give you time to spend on your superpowers, magic happens.

We’re speaking with Mr. Phillips Swan. The company is TheAISolutionGroup.ai. Firstly, I want to address this old guy thing. I didn’t tell the readers here that you were an old guy. I was talking to the production team [before the interview]. You brought that one up. I’m a year older than you are, so if you’re old, I’m your older brother. Everything you’re saying, I can relate to. I still write my emails, but sometimes, I’ll take prompts. I’ve got this idea and I’ll toss it into whether it’s ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever. I’ll say, “Write this in a humorous tone because I want to send it to Phillip,” or whatever. It gives me 3 or 4 ideas. I pick one and I send it off. It’s super time-saving.

This is what I’ve learned from being no longer a neophyte at doing this but not anywhere close to where you are with it. There’s not a choice here if we want to compete. If we want to compete with other people and other companies, this is going to be the new way of doing things. I took and created a 2, almost 3-minute, promo video using AI and I got it done within about 70 minutes of writing the script in the whole complete promo video. If I had sent that out to someone to edit that for me, it would’ve taken at least a week to get it back and cost me somewhere probably on a minimum end of $500. I created this thing for $25 a month, and I can create unlimited promo videos. It was amazing. It’s great. It even applies to AI voice.

What Phillip’s saying, please pay attention to, especially when it comes to things like identifying ideal customer profiles. I love what you said. Don’t be creepy because that hyper-personalization is a rapport break. All of you know from tuning in to this that we’re all about keeping rapport, building trust, and keeping the relationship meaningful and personalized but not hyper-personalized. You don’t want to know that they went for blood work and what their blood work scores are.

The other part is people still buy from people they like. People don’t buy with their heads. I don’t care whether it is a $100 billion piece of software or a $2 thing at the supermarket. You buy with your heart. Yep. With your heart, it means trust. You’ve got to like the person that you’re working with to sell to. How do you bring AI into this responsibly so that you are talking to the people that you will naturally bond with and will naturally have a great conversation with? Gone are the days of sales territories in my mind. It’s about merging the right salesperson with the right customer with the right personality that they get along with and they will buy from time and time again.

Typical sales tools like CRM and ERPs, I’m not saying they’re going to be a thing of the past, but there’s going to be a whole new wave of tools coming out in 2025 that are going to radically replace them. You asked the question earlier, “How do you start?” and I didn’t answer it. I want to answer it. You start with what future you are solving for. What’s the problem that you’re solving for? What is the use case, and is it a valid use case? It can be any number of things. The use case is up to you.

Can you do it in a way that is transformative? That means that the organization of your company has to come along with it. The larger the organization, the more challenging that transformation is. There’s a whole industry of management consultants out there and management consulting firms that do that change management work.  We focus on what’s possible, how to bring the organizations along, and how to make it sticky.

The larger the organization, the more challenging the transformation is. Share on X

The days of being a true software engineer are rapidly diminishing. Let me give you a very specific example. We have had access to GPT 4.01, which is a preview. It is their latest model that they released not long ago. We’ve had access to it for a while. We decided to do a test on Monday. We built an entire product that is executable in less than ten minutes. Is that code optimized? No, but it will be. If you’re a software engineer, transforming your career into an AI engineer will be highly useful to you. Have a guess. What does a prompt engineer on average earn?

$200,000 a year. I’m not sure.

$900,000. That’s on average. Your AI engineers coming out of school are getting offers of $350,000 and higher. When I came out of school in Scotland, I earned £8,000 a year. That was it. That was still a good salary when I was growing up in Scotland. That probably shows how old I am, but I don’t feel it. The challenge is adapting. How do we adapt? The trick that I have personally learned is how do I recognize when I’ve got a personal bias creeping in, stopping it cold in its tracks, letting it go, and letting the bus roll down the hill and see where it ends up? That’s what we’re on. We are on a fast-rolling bus going down a hill.

I agree. I have some friends around the world. We talk about AI. They’re pretty heavily invested in researching it. A friend of mine sent something where he was able to create a 2-page website within 9 seconds. It looks pretty good. The reason that I’m bringing this up is because if people are relying on, “I’m a website developer,” for example, I don’t think they’ll ever go away. Maybe 98% of the opportunities are going to go away.

Grok The Customer

Going back to your ideal customer profiles, we’ve been writing prompts for that because that’s a huge problem that many companies have. Firstly, they’re not clear on where they want to go. The second challenge I find is they don’t know their ideal client profile. They don’t know the ideal buyer persona, which is what I would call the apex decision-makers, the influencers, the stakeholders, and what’s meaningful to them on a business return on investment or personal return on investment. People buy on emotion. They justify sometimes with logic, but that logic is also justified with emotion. You have something that’s unique. You call it Grok the Customer.

I don’t claim ownership of the word grok. Grok comes out of a 1960 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein called A Stranger in a Strange Land. The concept there is that the aliens merged with the other beings to empathetically understand everything about that other person. It’s about empathy and understanding and having a 360-degree view of your customer to really understand the migraine-level pain points that you’re solving. If you’re solving a pain point, you’re a me-too. You’re swimming in what is called a red ocean where there are lots of competitors. If you’re solving a migraine, you’re starting to swim in a blue ocean, which means that you’ve got no competition at all. You own this customer. That’s the key here.

Sam Altman of OpenAI said something quite outrageous, which I agree with. It is that within 5 years, the 1st billion-dollar company with one person in it will have occurred. I don’t think it’ll be five years. It could be in 2025 or the year after that that the first billion-dollar company with 1 person exists in revenue. I’m talking about a billion in revenue.

If that doesn’t shock you into waking up that you need to learn how to do this, you’re going to be left behind because it is entirely possible. A few months ago, I did not think it was possible. I let that assumption go. This was part of my own bias because I’ve built $5 billion businesses. I know what it takes to build a billion-dollar business. I’ve suddenly realized that Sam Altman is correct. That occurred to me a few months ago. It’s all about efficiency and it’s all about what problem you are solving. Is it a big enough problem for that one person or that one company? If it’s big enough for that one company, chances are it’s big enough for many others. All of a sudden, they become a multibillion-dollar company.

Does it have to be for the company though or it can be for a mass of the population?

It could be a mass population for everything. I am rattled but rattled in a good way from what I have been seeing. When I wake up in the morning, I’m out of bed and I’m at my desk by 5:00 AM. The reason I’m up that early is not because I like being up that early because I really don’t, but because so much is happening and so much needs to get done.

Getting your day started knowing the direction you’re going for that day and what output and outcome you want from that day can change. For me, it is changing 2 or 3 times a day because of how rapidly this is changing. I am not kidding. That’s what’s got me rattled because I’m typically somebody who’s like, “I’ve got the plan. Now, let’s go and execute the plan.” My plans are so fluid. I’ve gone from having four plans to hundreds of plans. I pick one that’s the right one to go is how I’m executing. For all of my go-to-market planning, I don’t have one overarching plan. I have hundreds of go-to-market plans for each use case because they are so unique.

We’re speaking again with Mr. Phillips Swan from TheAISolutionGroup.ai. We’re having this fascinating conversation. I know what you’re talking about because I was in the technology business in a different discipline of technology. Software back then was still relatable. I’m also in the training business. I talk with companies, CEOs, and people all the time. I know what’s happening in the AI space because I talk to guys like you and some other people.

If I’m a reader, I’m thinking, “You got my attention because maybe I could become that billion-dollar company with a one-person executable,” or, “You got my attention because I don’t want my living to become one of the 98% that go away.” What I’m hearing is this is not doom and gloom. It’s another shift. I’m sure some father said to his son or daughter, “If you learn how to repair a steam engine, everything will be okay for the rest of whatever,” or carburetor on a car, which barely exists anymore except on an old vehicle.

Video conferencing has been around forever. All of a sudden, people call it Zooming because of the pandemic. That created a very rapid shift. There are a lot of positive things that can come out of what you’re talking about if somebody’s willing to let go and embrace this. This is the new way of doing things. It’s going to be the new way of doing things, and it’s going to go into hyperwarp speed. We better know the basics is what I’m hearing you say through the process.

That’s exactly right. If you’re a company versus an individual, and even if it is an individual, the way to start with this is to ask yourself the question, “What future am I solving for?” Start from there and work back. That’s it. It’s not about what you do. Otherwise, everything you do is going to be a bolt-on. We are being born in responsible AI as opposed to having AI bolted onto something. What would be a good example of an AI bolt-on, look at Microsoft products. They’ve bolted on co-pilot into virtually every product that they have. That’s a bolt-on. It’s not deeply integrated. It wasn’t created in that way.

Companies starting from afresh have the ability to radically out-innovate their competition and the big guys for the share of wallet. It comes back to, “What future am I solving for? Is it a migraine-level problem?” If it is a migraine-level problem, keep going and keep testing if it is a migraine-level problem and define what is the truth of solving that problem. When you do that, the magic occurs.

I love these questions. I heard you say, “What future am I solving for?” This is not a new question. People come to us, for example, and they’re like, “I want to grow my revenue. I want to do this.” The first question I ask is, “Why do you want to do this?” What I have found is most entrepreneurs and most business owners, even if they have large companies, built a business first and then their life afterward. They’re not happy with their life because the business owns their life, if you will. We reverse engineer that and say, “What problem are we solving for? We’re solving for how you want to build your life out. Now, let’s re-engineer the business to support that.”

Life goes by fast. The reality is it goes by fast and you get to a certain place in life where you realize, “I want quality of life versus what has been happening.” First question, “What future am I solving for?” Second question, “What migraine-level problems am I solving?” The third question is, “I’m going to keep testing until I validate that that is a migraine-level problem.”

It’s more than validating. You’ve got to pressure test it. Like you would pressure wash your driveway, this is about pressure washing the idea. You’ve got to put it under strain and stress. You’ve got to break it because if you don’t break it, it’s going to break in front of a customer. You don’t want that happening.

That’s a great point. I’m going to use it analogous to marketing. We validate the marketing idea, we build a prototype of some sort, we put it under real-life conditions, and then we learn things. This structure that you’re creating for people is time-tested is what I’m hearing. Once you put it under strain and stress and you launch it out, if it’s a migraine-level problem, you’re typically going to be in a more blue ocean at that point.

Everybody’s solving pain points whereas nobody’s solved the actual migraine that is causing all of your discomfort.

It’s the difference between the symptoms of the problem and the root cause of the problem. The migraine-level problem solves the root cause of the problem, not just the symptoms of the problem.

You got that right. There’s a reason why they pay you the big bucks.

Thank you. I’m so grateful you’re bringing this forward because I’m constantly telling people, “Don’t solve problems.” They’re like, “What do you mean don’t solve problems?” I’m like, “Let’s figure out what the cause of the problem is, remove the cause, and we remove the problem.”

That’s right. That’s exactly it. When you look at the products that we are getting ready to launch at The AI Solution Group, these are migraine-level problems.

How do people learn more about you and the company? What if they want to get a hold of you?

First of all, check out our website, the company. It’s TheAISolutionGroup.ai. To learn about me, my LinkedIn profile is @Phillip-Swan. When you go there, the first thing you should see is my weekly newsletter called The Go To Market Edge where I write about AI, go-to markets, and all the challenges therein. I strongly encourage you to sign up for that because you will learn. I put a lot of effort into that content. The way to reach me is very simply DM me on LinkedIn. I respond to all messages. I don’t guarantee the timeliness of the responses but I guarantee you they do get responded to. DM me there. That’s the easiest way to get a hold of me.

To those of you reading, please don’t spam the heck out of what he’s talking about and pitch.

Thank you.

I had to throw that in. I was on a podcast one time and I made that same type of offer. The next thing I know, I’m getting ads for everything that I didn’t want.

I’ve got one hint left for your audience. When you prompt, put the following three words in front of your every prompt, which is Do Not Hallucinate. Hallucination is a very real thing in Artificial Intelligence. It will go away significantly as further releases come along. Enter in front of every prompt Do Not Hallucinate because it narrows the model so that it does not represent data that is not true. We call that propaganda in our world.

That is such wise advice. I know people have directly messaged me and been like, “I’m fighting with my ChatGPT. It won’t do what I want,” because it’s been hallucinating. Putting Do Not Hallucinate is a command that it will understand.

It’s right in front of your prompt. You put it right in front. Treat the AI as if it’s the smartest toddler you’ve ever met that will do precisely what you say you tell it to do. You have to be explicit. Think of ChatGPT like an expert who will give you a solution to something as long as you give it precise instruction. The more precise you are, the better the outcome of the prompt.

Think of AI as the smartest toddler you’ve ever met—it will do precisely what you say, so you have to be explicit in your instructions. Share on X

I’m so grateful you’re here. Thank you for bringing your A-plus game on this. I’m very grateful and I know other people are too. I’d love to have you back on another episode.

I’d love to come back. It has been fun. I’ll welcome the opportunity.

That’s awesome. Thanks again. Folks, that was Mr. Phillips Swan of TheAISolutionGroup.ai.

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What kind of notes do you have here? Let me give you the formula. What future are you solving for in your own business and for other people? Number two, what are the migraine-level problems that you’re solving that are coming up in your client’s life? Not just problems, but migraine-level problems. Problems are problems and the migraine-level problems are those that they can’t ignore and they’re going to want to fix. We fix the problem how? By removing the cause of the problem.

How do you remove the migraine-level cause of the migraine-level problem for your clients? You want to keep on testing that and keep validating it. Make sure it is the migraine-level problem that they’re facing. You’re then going to want to pressure test that. You’re going to want to strain and make it stressed and test the validity of that process under stress. If you are going through this process, when you get on the outside, the offers that you’re going to create for this future, then you’re going to have the pain points solved. You’re going to remove the cause and have a blue ocean to swim in because a lot of your competitors are not going to do this.

What is it for you? There is Artificial Intelligence that is creeping into our lives throughout all aspects and it’s going to be a much faster adaptation than most people had ever figured. The good news is that we’ve got some power grid challenges. A lot of energy is needed to be had on this issue. There’ll be some challenges that are coming along for that too. It will make it a little slower, but it’s common. Bigger companies are going to adapt to it faster.

The question is what is in it for you? Where are you going to be not only 6 months from now but 1 year from now? What future are you creating? How do you use this for yourself? I hope you get that out of this conversation loud and clear because how you use it for yourself is going to be extremely important. It’s not something we’re going to avoid. How are we going to use these AI agents for ourselves? How are we going to use them for our clients? How are we going to do it in our business? What problems are we solving at a migraine level? How do we do this going forward? This is the future. The future is now and is evolving into tomorrow, next week, and next month.

This is coming fast. Believe me. I’ve been in touch with a lot of people who are in these fields. I can see what they’re doing. It’s coming very fast. You want to be able to be at the forefront of this versus adapting after many other people have adapted. It will be far more competitive for you then. You’ll have some blue ocean to swim in.

If you’re looking to double your sales and you’re looking to have reliable, sustainable growth with sanity, something that’s predictable and mathematical, we have that. Reach out to us. You can reach out to us at YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com. That is our email. Make sure you’re reaching out to us at YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com and we’ll respond back to you. You can reach me on LinkedIn at @DougBrown123 as well if you want to catch me there.

Please read this episode not just once. If you love this or it’s inspiring you, please share it with somebody else. If you like this episode or any of the episodes and you haven’t given us a review, I would appreciate you going up and giving us a positive review. Pay attention to this because this is not an episode that is scare tactics. It’s for you to understand what’s coming up.

Whether you own a major corporation, a mid-level company, or a smaller business or you’re even a solo entrepreneur, this is all going to affect not just you but all of us. Go out and sell something. Make somebody happy. Play win-win. Don’t discount when you don’t need to. Think about where you’re going with the future. Think about how AI fits into this. Give us some comments back. We answer all your emails. Until next time, to your success.

 

Important Links

• The AI Solution Group
• Phillip Swan’s LinkedIn Page
• A Stranger in a Strange Land
• Doug C. Brown’s LinkedIn Page
• YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com