Transcript

Michael (00:49.058)

Well, welcome everybody to The Family Biz Show. I'm your host, Michael Palumbos. And today we have Anthony DeSimone from I'm Your Expert Now. Tony, welcome. 

 

Anthony (01:10.99)

Thank you very much. Thanks Mike. 

 

Michael (01:13.23)

So as we always do with our guests, your website, you'retheexpertnow.com is all about helping small and medium sized businesses communicate in the language of finance more productively and more congruently. My gut says that you didn't finish college and start doing this work. So why don't you tell us a little bit about 

 

Michael (01:43.0)

What was your journey to get here? 

 

Anthony (01:44.824)

Yeah, thank you. I graduated from accounting school at UB and I was very fortunate to start my career at one of the larger audit firms Deloitte. And while I was there, I quickly realized that I hated auditing, but I truly loved all of the small businesses that I was going into and realized that I needed to pivot out of Deloitte, out of auditing. 

 

Anthony (02:13.806)

and worked with small businesses. So I began the process of first getting a job as a assistant controller and then moving up to controller and CFO. And as time went on, I began getting jobs as essentially default owner. I was beginning to get hired by small business owners. 

 

Anthony (02:39.254)

were really struggling with their business. It was almost like too late type of situation where they finally felt that they had nothing to lose, paid for like a real CPA to come in and actually run the company. And so I got really good at, at just turnaround type situations. And it gave me the opportunity to learn and grow and create types of tools, know, spreadsheets, things like that, that can help. 

 

Anthony (03:08.16)

other businesses. So I continued to do that. And in the process, I had the opportunity to teach as an adjunct professor at the University of Buffalo. So I started with teaching the accounting 102 or 202 to the individuals, the kids that were going into the school of management. And after about 10 years of that, 

 

Anthony (03:38.486)

I learned about a branch of UB called the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, which is essentially a mini MBA for small business owners. And I thought, man, those are my people. I got to get over there. And I went over there. I volunteered. I shared what my skill set was, and it was a good fit for what they needed. And I began teaching how to read your financial statements to business owners and also facilitating mastermind. 

 

Anthony (04:07.832)

classes and things like that. And it was a really good fit. And as time went on and I had all these tools that I, you know, I built up while I was working for these companies and turnarounds and things like that. I started sharing them with some of the people that I was volunteering at the center for entrepreneurial leadership. And I realized that they all need these tools, you know, they need these cash forecast, cashflow forecast tools and, and the budget. 

 

Anthony (04:37.23)

tools and all these P and L forecasts, everything. And as time went on, they wanted to just hire me. So I started doing that on the side as like a side gig. And then before you know it, it got to a point where I could take the leap. And so about eight years ago, I created my full-time consulting business and it's called, You're the Expert Now. And the whole concept behind You're the Expert Now or the name, 

 

Anthony (05:06.376)

is to allow you as a business owner to understand your financial statements well enough to use that information to improve your profitability and cash flow and to make decisions that are far less risky. 

 

Michael (05:22.104)

Yeah, it's a phenomenal, phenomenal field to be in because most of the CEOs and founders and entrepreneurs that I know today and work with, they know how to get stuff done. They know how to build something, they know how to service something, they know how to build something, they know the people side of things. 

 

Michael (05:49.784)

they've done a really good job with those pieces. I can't express the amount of times when it comes to the finances, you sit there and look at and go, they're always trying to sell more to raise more cash. And sometimes that's not the right answer. So I love what you're doing. We may have to have a whole nother show talking about that because today we wanna be talking about AI. 

 

Michael (06:15.296)

and family businesses and how family businesses can utilize AI to really take whatever you're doing, whatever field you're in to another level and introduce AI to it. I can't remember what the quote was, but basically if you're not using AI right now and just practicing, it's a huge, giant mistake from many, many, many, many experts because it will transition 

 

Michael (06:45.164)

it will transform all of our businesses. So I'm really excited to talk about that. How did you become, what got you into utilizing AI? You're the finance guy. And then you're like, wait a minute, you've got to know about AI. Tell me about that. 

 

Anthony (07:02.156)

Yeah. First, the saying that, that, that is said a lot in AI is that chat GBT will not replace you, but the people who use it, competitors that will use it will, and that's a guarantee. It's truly not a fad. is something that people need to take seriously. This is the internet times 10, you know, and, back in the day, 

 

Michael (07:25.848)

Yeah, 

 

Michael (07:26.069)

one more time. Chat GPT. 

 

Anthony (07:28.898)

ChatGPT will not replace you, but the people who use ChatGPT will. 

 

Michael (07:35.847)

I think that is so powerful and I won't forget that going forward. Thank you. 

 

Anthony (07:40.514)

Yeah, you're welcome. You're welcome. So I got into that. Everything that I do, my mission is to help as many small businesses as possible to improve their profitability, their cashflow, their efficiency so that they can improve the community. when I learned about ChatGBT and AI, ChatGBT actually became one year old. Its birthday was November 30th. 

 

Anthony (08:07.756)

A lot has happened in that one year. And I was very fortunate to be, aware of this coming out when it first came out at the end of 2022. So as I learned more about it, I realized, man, this is an efficiency gain like no other, and small business owners need to understand what it is, how to use it, because this is going to prove margins like, gosh, so like nobody's business. mean, it's, it's, 

 

Anthony (08:37.582)

It's incredible if you know how to use it. And more importantly, and this is part of the reason why I'm telling everybody to get into it and to start using it on a regular basis, not as much for what it can do today, but where it's headed. In the past year, there have been so many improvements and all this other additional AI on top of that, that if you're not keeping up, you are really falling behind. And that is truly problematic for your business. 

 

Michael (09:07.226)

And the reason it was so important for me to bring you on the show is because I think, you know, inside of the family businesses, sometimes we get a little myopic and we're around the people that we know, we're experts in our field or we're masters of our trades and we're really good at these things. And we're not always involved in something like Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership or Vistage or... 

 

Michael (09:32.046)

It does happen an awful lot of times, but a lot of times the family business becomes an island of itself. And I wanted people to be opened up to this conversation and hear it differently. So I really appreciate you coming on the show today. 

 

Anthony (09:47.938)

pleasure 

 

Michael (09:49.112)

So, you you learn about it. Tell us a little bit about, you know, some of the background of, you know, chat GPT and AI, you know, as a whole. And then we'll let's dig into maybe, you know, where do you want to go, wherever you want to go. But like, I'm thinking, what are some of the uses that people are doing that maybe they haven't even thought about today that they should be thinking about? And we'll lay some groundwork for that. 

 

Anthony (10:19.852)

Yeah, for sure. I think, think personally, it's, it's incredibly important for everybody to try it out, to actually sign up and try out ChatGBT. It's, it's free. There's a free version. And until you begin to use it, you won't understand the power of it. And one of the things that I encourage, I teach a ChatGBT and AI accelerator class. 

 

Anthony (10:48.408)

just to get you up to speed to where we are today. But one of the first things that I tell everybody to do is sign up and then use it like you use Google. Whenever you're on the computer, typically Google is one of those screens that's open that you're going to whenever you need to search something. That's the first thing that everybody needs to do with Chet GPT is to keep it open and treat it like Google because it's really Google on steroids. 

 

Anthony (11:18.486)

And, if you start there and you begin to create the habit of, I do this faster? Can I do this easier with chat GBT? Can I do this more efficiently with chat GBT? You will discover that it's going to do so much more for you than a Google search or anything else. So we always start there. 

 

Michael (11:41.912)

Perfect. whether it's ChantGBT or Gronk or one of the other platforms, they all do the same thing. I was using Gronk the other day and I asked it a question and it did research on Bing for me. And so I didn't even realize that some of these platforms are going out to the internet and doing the research for you faster than what you might've done yourself. 

 

Anthony (12:09.366)

Yeah, that's the beauty of these LLMs. They're called large language models. That's what they're going to do is that it really feels like you're talking to a human. that's part of what is occurring here is that it's been programmed to learn from all of the users and it only gets better and better. And yeah, there are competitors to chat GPT. 

 

Anthony (12:38.582)

Elon Musk with Grok and there's Bing, Microsoft Bing. However, Microsoft owns half, almost half of OpenAI, which is the creator of ChatGBT. So they're using ChatGBT as the basis for Bing. And then there's Google Art, all of which have free versions. So there's no reason why people can't use it. 

 

Anthony (13:07.628)

And they certainly should, and I'm glad you're using it, 

 

Michael (13:11.01)

Yeah, and this all, I remember one of the first iterations of this and that they were giving a little too much history probably, but IBM had Watson that was out there for years. And it's like, if you look at the curve of what happened from Watson to OpenAI and what's happening today, it just that acceleration curve is just ginormous. 

 

Anthony (13:43.436)

That was way ahead of its time, you know, and, and, and, and now, with, GPT, it is now truly learning from itself. In fact, there's a, there's a, a very famous story where the programmers, when they were building chat GPT, they finished up for the night. Everybody went home. They come back in the morning and somehow chat GPT taught itself how to translate over 20. 

 

Anthony (14:12.62)

different languages and the programmers looked into it and none of them could figure out how it did that. So that's, that's exciting. It's scary. 

 

Michael (14:21.92)

Right, the people that are worried about AI taking over, thanks, I appreciate you planting that seed for us. But at the same time, we do have to be cautious about what we're doing with it. And then again, I think it's also why it's critical that we learn it and become adaptive at utilizing AI on a regular basis. 

 

Michael (14:49.171)

here's one more question about history and chat GPT and whatnot, but what does the GPT stand for? Do you know? 

 

Anthony (14:56.364)

Yeah, the G stands for generative. So this is the part of the programming where it sounds like a human, like in the past, whenever there was like, say a new software built, there was these pre-trained answers to what were considered frequently asked questions. So you'd still get the same answer with the generative programming. It will respond to you like a human. You, you and I can ask the same question to chat. 

 

Anthony (15:26.582)

and get the same answer, but it's going to be the response will be different. And then if you don't like the response, you can ask it to respond again, you know, just keep doing it and doing it. And so the generative is that part. Now the generative piece also fills gaps where there are gaps in information. So it's going to fill it with what it believes should be there. Right. And this is where, if you've ever heard of the term AI hallucination, 

 

Anthony (15:55.148)

where sometimes these, these, you know, LLMs like chat, GPT create fake information. There's, there was a famous, story about a lawyer who was using chat, GPT certainly wasn't checking the work, but chat, GPT ended up citing six court cases that did not exist. And the reason why is because the information wasn't there, but the generative part of it. So the generative part, it's almost like having a 

 

Anthony (16:24.49)

a happy little puppy dog who wants to please you. So the generative part wanted to essentially please its lawyer with getting the information, but there wasn't any actual core cases. So what it did is it searched all these other core cases and took little bits and pieces from all these other core cases and created new ones. Wow. How about that? So that that's the G now the P is, is pre-trained. So basically this is all the information that was fed into 

 

Anthony (16:53.624)

ChatGPT, essentially the internet, know, that into the, so it has all of this, you know, learning already built in. And then the T is transformer. So this is that piece where it, it learns from itself and learns from all of the users inputting all of this new information and continues to build on that. And that's the piece where when the programmers left and then they came back, it taught itself. 

 

Anthony (17:22.848)

All the new languages and things like that. So that's where the GPT comes in. And then I guess to finish that off the chat, part of it is that when you're, when you're having a conversation, you feel like you really are having a chat with a human being. You, it feels like there's somebody on the other side of that computer. 

 

Michael (17:40.3)

Yeah, and we have used it, you know, just more for play, more than anything else. We're not allowed to use it internally for, know, being a registered representative. So a lot of the work that we do with it or the work that I've done with it is just play. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's a lot that I've learned. I'm like, I've watched it crunch data for me. I've watched it, you know, create the letters and stories and... 

 

Michael (18:09.538)

You know, we were playing with my nephews on vacation and we said, all right, tell me, you know, what you, what story do you want this, you want ChatGPT to create? And they started making things up and we plugged it all into ChatGPT and said, now write an outline for a book about this. And it created the outline. And then it's like, take that outline and turn that into a movie script. 

 

Michael (18:36.46)

And then it did that. And then, you know, and then you started building on the chapters inside of there were like, my gosh, this is so powerful. 

 

Anthony (18:44.3)

Yeah. Isn't that exciting? It's it's a, that's a great use case. And, it's just, it's so eyeopening of the potential that you see when you do stuff like that. You're like, this is, this is incredible. And it has, and within seconds, it gives you that information. It doesn't, you know, there's no thought. just boom. It's, it's there right in front of your eyes. It's, it's amazing. And then, we haven't even really touched on this is the paid version, but the images. 

 

Anthony (19:13.496)

that it can create text to image is photo quality. I mean, it is fascinating. 

 

Michael (19:20.91)

And now they've added the spreadsheet pieces. So if you take an Excel spreadsheet and you've got tons of data and load it in there, it'll start to help analyze that data for you in ways that you might not have even thought of. 

 

Anthony (19:32.93)

Yeah, chat GBT and those types of LLMs are very good, consuming an incredible amount of data. And that's summarizing that information and finding, you know, the trends and whatever you need. mean, it's really impressive. 

 

Michael (19:48.43)

Michael (19:49.07)

Well, let's dive into, you know, I'm a family business. I have, you know, somewhere between five and 500 employees. We're running all day long. We've got a lot of things going for us. I don't have time for chat GPT. Why should I even be digging into this? What are some of the use cases that you're teaching people, you know, in the business world? You know, again, our businesses are family business, but... 

 

Michael (20:17.388)

is anything gonna make a difference if your family business are not when you're utilizing chat GPT here, but what would you be telling them? 

 

Anthony (20:24.376)

Well, first and foremost, after you have it open, when you're getting into the habit of saying, how can I do this easier, faster, better with Chetch-e-Petit, the first thing that I always do is I am editing every piece of information. I'm editing all my email. then of course, I understand the confidentiality of things. working with a lot of law firms, but every email, every post, 

 

Anthony (20:52.342)

I even check my text because you you can get a phone app, for chat, GBT, and, some of these other ones as well, but everything that goes out gets edited by chat, GBT. And I'm telling you, Mike, I, I sound a lot smarter, because of that. And, and, you know, it, it makes more sense what I'm sending out. It's a better communication, but that first and foremost should be the first thing that 

 

Anthony (21:21.804)

Everybody does, right out of the gate. And that doesn't take much. 

 

Michael (21:27.256)

No. And I will take what you, so basically what you're saying is anything that you're gonna be written or communicating, utilize ChatGPT to put the idea in there or to check what you've written and say, make this better. Or make it more concise or make it shorter, but same message. And it will do all of that for you. 

 

Anthony (21:47.384)

Yeah. So the way I typically do it is, I basically say, please edit this or, something like that. And then I just paste my email into it and copy paste it back to my email. Now what I've, what I began to do after that is that I would, instead of answering on my email, on my email, it's not a whatever. I would go to chat, GBT and answer. 

 

Anthony (22:14.914)

the email on chat GPT. So I save a step and just have it added right there and then copy it over to my email account. Now I've taken that one step further. the past year, there've been a lot of features added. We can get back to use cases in a second, but I don't want to lose this thought is that there have been a lot of features added in chat GPT. One of which is called MyGPTs. 

 

Anthony (22:42.584)

where you can create essentially chat bots. can create these GPTs that specialize in just one area. So I created one that's called Grammar Guru. basically that My GPT Grammar Guru will automatically know that I want it edited for grammar, right? So now I don't even have to ask it to please edit or whatever. I just drop in whatever it is that I wrote. 

 

Anthony (23:12.472)

cleans it up and now I just paste it to where I need to bring it. 

 

Michael (23:16.76)

I love it. I love it. I'll share with you one that I used. I can't stand writing the note inside of the birthday card, the Christmas card, the wedding card. It's just hard. It's like when I stare at a blank sheet of paper, I'm like, but like I had a couple of good ideas. So I will touch this summer. 

 

Michael (23:41.142)

And my employee knows that I did this after the fact, I shared it with her and she just laughed and thought it was great. She's getting married. I know her and her husband, I know her very well, but you know, I know that she's a Harry Potter fan and he loved escape rooms. And I asked ChatGPT to write a really nice inside of a wedding card for them based on who was getting married. 

 

Michael (24:09.174)

and it created this beautiful thing. Now it was 14 paragraphs long. I said, make it one paragraph. It did it. And it was amazing. Now the kicker was when she got it, she goes, I meant to say something that was so sweet and so nice. And then I, you know, share, did share with her that I utilized chat CPT. She said, yes, but you utilized your thoughts about us to make something really meaningful and beautiful come out. And we appreciate that. 

 

Anthony (24:35.918)

Yeah. Yeah. That's perfect. That's great, Mike. That's a great way to use it. And, um, and that's really how people should be using it is, is combining. You don't want it to turn into a robotic response, right? You don't, you don't want it to be 100 % chat GPT. You want it to be a combination of you and chat GPT. And that's essentially what, what this is. It's a very powerful tool and you should use it. 

 

Anthony (25:05.228)

like any other tool. And if you use it right, it's just going to make you better. It's going to make your company better. And, there's just so many opportunities to do that, you know, and, and, and to just kind of go back to the confidentiality, you know, businesses like yours, law firms, very concerned about the confidentiality of things, because that's the other thing that I want to make sure is clear is that, even though the fine print, 

 

Anthony (25:32.718)

When you sign up for chat, GBT or any of these other competitors, it says that it doesn't share what your, your information that you're putting in there with third parties. Then it follows that up with, but we use the information to learn from it. And, and so when you hear that, you just have to assume, don't put anything confidential out there. I mean, it's as simple as that. Right. So, there are law firms that truly don't. 

 

Anthony (26:02.456)

want to do that. Now, there are a lot of software. I'm actually looking into three different law legal based software that are now infusing AI into it, which is going to solve some of those confidentiality problems. But what you need to do is to just avoid that, then learn to use it for other things. So what I am 

 

Anthony (26:31.488)

encouraging these law firms to do is to create beta group, a group of people within the company that are using it for safe use cases where they get together and they determine what can, what non-confidential ways can we use this? know, marketing and sales, things that you're posting on social media, know, really simple email, 

 

Anthony (27:00.014)

Spec and grammar, things like that. Reviewing data, mean, not all the data that you get that needs to be summarized is confidential. I mean, there are many use cases and until you get a group of people together to work on it and then to weekly and talk about it, you really don't know how many possibilities there are. 

 

Michael (27:24.846)

Agreed. What else? I like that idea of having a working group that you push them to say, find what we can do with this in the areas that work for us. But what are some of the other? 

 

Anthony (27:45.122)

simple things. 

 

Michael (27:46.119)

Yeah, use cases that you've seen people utilize or you utilized. 

 

Anthony (27:50.574)

Yeah. Well, there's no reason now there's no excuse for, for, uh, not having things on social media. I mean, you could, you know, this is the ideation tool. You give me, me 10, give me 10 new topics to talk about regarding family wealth legacy. You know, I mean, it's going to give you 10 and then you know what? I like number seven, right? A post that I'm going to put on LinkedIn. 

 

Anthony (28:19.342)

for number seven that you listed of those top 10. You know, write the post. You know what? That's too long. Take that from the 300 words there and I want it in a hundred words and it'll do it. And this will all happen in about five minutes or less. You know, I mean, that's the power of what you have at your fingertips. So there's no excuse. And then if you have the paid version, give me an image that matches this post and it'll give you an image to go along with it. 

 

Anthony (28:48.702)

And next thing you know, you have a great image, you have a great post, and now you have this unlimited content. And now you have a voice because one of the other things I learned in small business, working with a lot of small businesses is that if you're not on social media, you don't exist. There is no yellow pages. Right. And, and that's the other thing that gets missed by a lot of these small businesses is that they kind of ignore social media, which is. 

 

Anthony (29:18.85)

Such a great opportunity for branding and sales. 

 

Michael (29:23.69)

And that's to your point, I've seen a bunch of our clients over the last probably two years really start to step that up. were non-existent with social media or an internet presence besides a website. They're now investing in social media managers and marketing managers, even in, whether they're the construction industry or they're in real estate development so that they're 

 

Michael (29:51.8)

They're like you said, they're creating their voice online so that when somebody goes to search for them, there's more than just the website that gives them an awful lot with that people can learn from to say, ooh, I like how they talk about this stuff. I like what they're saying, you know, and that voice means something. 

 

Anthony (30:11.148)

Yeah. Yeah. And you could, you could, you could use chat GBT by saying something like this act like a seasoned social media expert and give me ideas on, what I should create for the following, social media sites, Facebook, LinkedIn, X and, then tell me after that, then tell me 

 

Anthony (30:40.398)

when are the best times that I should send out posts and how many per week, you know, you can do all of that. Help me create a calendar, a social media calendar for the whole month of January, you know, and give me ideas on topics. It'll do all of that. The thing is, is that one of the things Mike that, that people need to understand is that when I go and speak to groups on, on this and I, I, I've been 

 

Anthony (31:09.678)

Speaking to, I spoke to a group of chiropractors a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to be speaking to real estate agents in a couple of weeks. I spoke to lawyers. one of the things that I make sure they understand is that I'm not going to be able to tell you all of the custom ways that it's going to work best for you. You're going to figure that out. And the only way you're going to figure that out is first of all, start using it. 

 

Anthony (31:37.898)

And secondly, get into that habit of asking, how can I do this faster, easier, better? Cause you can just keep trying new things over and over and over again. There's no cost to that. It happened so quickly. It's easy to do. And that is how you get better and better at it. because. You we are, you're going to see that this, this technology is going to disrupt every industry. And if your industry. 

 

Anthony (32:07.166)

is computer-based, then you are more in line for disruption than let's say something that's hands-on, like a plumber. So if you're computer-based, it will be replaced. 

 

Michael (32:22.764)

Yeah, agreed. You just hit on something that I wanna make sure that people don't miss. And you said set up the parameters basically of what you want GPT to act like. So, when you putting it into an email or a blog post to edit, you say edit this. I want you to act like a world-class editor and edit this blog post. I want you to perform like... 

 

Michael (32:51.214)

a world-class social media expert. I have even said, I want you to act like a social media expert like these three people. And then said, take now, generate X, Y, Z, or D. And that I found even by doing that, it goes out and finds and starts to think like those people for you. like, so it becomes a... 

 

Michael (33:18.518)

My favorite term with my kids and with the people that I talk to about AI is it's a thinking partner. And it just happens to be your least expensive and probably most productive thinking partner. 

 

Anthony (33:31.916)

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I want you to think like a wealth advisor. and, I, and I want, I want it to be in the voice of Warren Buffett along with quotes from Warren Buffett. You will get all of that. I mean, it will start to give you responses the way that it believes that Warren Buffett based on all of the information that's out there on Warren Buffett. 

 

Anthony (33:59.126)

Yeah, you could. You could have a lot of fun with it. I mean, there's, there's a feature in chat. GPT called custom instructions. Okay. One of the things that you learn about chat GPT is that, from one use to another, once you're done with the thread of uses, like if you were to go home and do it, open it up again, it won't remember that previous thread and it won't remember you. But now it has what's called custom instructions where you can write. 

 

Anthony (34:28.982)

your basically your bio into your, your version of chat GPT. So it remembers you calls you by name, things like that. And, and then it will respond more like you because you can instruct it to respond like you, like you can give it, a bunch of samples of your writing from the past logs you wrote or whatever, and say, I want you to, when you're editing my stuff, when you're responding on my behalf, 

 

Anthony (34:58.4)

I want you to write it similar to this and, you won't know if it's chat GBT or if it's coming from you because you get good at this after a while. I know when it's chat GBT, I know when it's an image from chat GBT, but custom instructions certainly makes that a lot harder. Now, once one more thing is you can have fun with that because you can instruct it to respond like a fictional character. 

 

Anthony (35:27.806)

You can instruct it to respond like a historical character. And I was sharing with my class once how I instructed it to respond like my caring and loving grandmother. So now whenever I would ask it a question, it would give me emojis. It would tell me how lovely it was that I was asking that question and wondering how I was doing. I mean, it would do all that. 

 

Michael (35:53.272)

That's amazing. So really at the end of the day, you don't have to learn ChatGPT because it's fine. It does what it needs to do. What you're learning is how to preface the questions and how to preface what you want out of it. That's really becomes the hard part of working with ChatGPT or that's the exercise for somebody that's new to ChatGPT. It's all about 

 

Michael (36:21.634)

How do I speak to this thing that I never spoke to before, this inanimate object, to get what I'm looking for out of it? 

 

Anthony (36:29.09)

Yes. And the term that you're going to hear a lot is prompt. How do you prompt chance GPT? So, asking it the way you ask it matters because it essentially weighs every word that you put in there and determines which word matters more than others. so prompting matters, but you don't, don't overthink that. like I was with a client and he wanted to create a mission statement. 

 

Anthony (36:57.902)

for his company, right? And I'm like, let's just put it on ChatGBT and let's get this thing done. So it was on the screen. I put it in ChatGBT. We used some information from the website where I took a summary of things that said about the company on the website. And I said, create a mission statement based on this, right? So we just copy pasted, asked ChatGBT, create a mission statement. So it created something. It wasn't that great that first. 

 

Anthony (37:26.896)

that first, draft and, and instead of just, you know, you don't have to necessarily know the prompts. All I said to chat GBT was I don't like it. And then it wrote something else, make it a little bit better. And it just kept, know, and then, you know, we, asked it, we don't like this one sentence change that. And eventually it got there without really doing anything, but just having a human conversation is if you were talking to another human, who is a specialist in that area. 

 

Michael (37:56.823)

and doesn't have an emotional response to the fact that you're being critical of the work that it just did. 

 

Anthony (38:04.278)

Right. Exactly. That's the best part is you don't have to worry. But yeah, I think, I think the key here is to use it. Now here's the thing. A lot of things, a lot of times I've seen this where, people who have specialties, like say, I've seen this with some lawyers where they've used it, you know, they sign up, they use it, they try it out and they go right into their specialty and what they discover. 

 

Michael (38:07.362)

That's amazing. 

 

Anthony (38:33.674)

is that it is not as specialized in their area of law as they are. So then all of a sudden they determine, you know, chat GPT is not that great. Right. And what I encourage everybody to do is that that's probably true right now. You're the specialist in wealth management on whoever you're the specialist in, whatever you are more than likely. 

 

Anthony (38:59.478)

If you ask Chachibi to act like a, you know, a 30 year veteran in your field, it's not going to be as good as you. However, if you saw the transition growth from Chachibi T over 12 months, let's have this conversation again in 12 months, because eventually what's going to happen is Chachibi T is going to be better in a lot of things. 

 

Anthony (39:27.55)

And that's why you don't want to dismiss it. You need to get on board and you need to understand how these generative large language models think and work because that is the only way you're going to be, you know, riding that wave as it gets to the point where it is going to be better. Right? This is, this is the year of AI assistance. We're going to have, we're going to be able to create AI versions of 

 

Anthony (39:57.044)

everything. And it's already the, GPTs that I mentioned, Mike, they're already, they're basically AI assistance as the year goes on, they're going to get better and better and better. And, you know, we, we need to get on board. Everybody needs to understand how to use them because eventually you'll be able to replace employees with AI assistance. I'm pretty sure that. 

 

Michael (40:23.95)

And even if you don't, I wanna take that, cause I think that's a really good segue. You may not replace them, but even if you just make them 10 times or five times or two times more productive in what they're doing, this doesn't necessarily have to get rid of jobs, but it can really make you a lot more productive. And if that same employee, if the profit to employee ratio at your business is X and you can make it X times 10, isn't that better? 

 

Anthony (40:53.07)

100%. And I'm glad you brought that up, Mike. Cause that's the thing is that if you as an owner are not interested, then your employees will obviously not be interested. And if they're not interested, they're not becoming more efficient. And you certainly can get that efficiency out of everybody. If everybody started using it wisely. 

 

Michael (41:14.574)

So I want to share, know, Chatch EBT I know is your expertise and whatnot, but I know that you know about some of the other AIs out there. I want to share some of the things that I've utilized and that we see coming and what I'm hoping for. Five years ago, I wanted to get into AI around legal documents, wills and trusts. Because to be honest with you of all the things that I do, 

 

Michael (41:42.454)

Dissecting and debriefing, a will and a trust for my clients is the one thing that just puts me to sleep. I love them and I know I can have a lot of impact. as a wealth advisor, I'm not an attorney, so I never draft documents, but I can read them and tell people in plain English what they're looking at. And so I always said, I just want to download document after document and teach it what's good about this document, what is it missing? And so that when I can... 

 

Michael (42:11.788)

you know, send in another document, I could just have it look at it. I don't think that's there yet, but I bet you within a very short period of time, it's coming faster than I know about and I haven't done any research, so I should check it. But the one that's there now is, you know, I always wanted to debrief a tax return. What am I looking for? What am I missing in this tax return? Is there anything that comes to light? And now we have AI tax return checkers. 

 

Michael (42:37.23)

that are available at our fingertips. And you can just take the PDF, you make it, know, character-recognition, you OCR the document, set it up there. And then, you know, it starts looking for patterns over years to say, why are you not doing this? Or what are you missing about that? And as a wealth advisor, trying to impact, you know, I can't control the direction of the stock market. 

 

Michael (43:02.968)

but if I can help them control their taxes a little bit better and work as a partner with the CPA and the attorney, that's in everybody's best interest. 

 

Anthony (43:14.862)

100 % 

 

Michael (43:16.226)

What are some of the other tools, you know, or things that you've utilized in AI? And I like what you're saying about ChatGPT. did not, I've learned some things in this conversation that those little helpers and whatnot, I think are going to be fantastic. But what are outside of ChatGPT, what are some other ways that you, you know, have seen people utilizing AI or softwares that you talk to people about? 

 

Anthony (43:40.462)

Yeah. Well, first of all, just to touch on what you were saying, one of the things that I'm seeing with every software that's out there, they are bringing in AI. are incorporating AI into their software. So no matter what you use, you could almost guarantee that there's going to be AI, you know, a chat GPT style AI in that software, because they realize if they don't, 

 

Anthony (44:10.286)

Their lunch is going to be eaten so fast. It's going to be ridiculous. So we're already seeing that. So just assume that I don't care. You know, whatever the specialty is of the industry, you're going to see AI infused in the software that you're using. So, you know, first and foremost that secondly, much any mundane task, like you were saying about the wills, perfect use cases for chat GPT to help at least build it. 

 

Anthony (44:38.656)

One of the other things that I like to make sure is clear with everybody is that no matter what you put on there, it's 50 to 99 % done. It still needs to be checked by you before you put it out in the world. You know, don't get into that mistake that that lawyer did where, you know, he got into a lot of trouble after, you know, signing off on these cases that didn't exist. so you always want to check everything. 

 

Anthony (45:06.252)

Now, as far as some of the AI that I use or some of the kind of cool stuff that's out there, one of them is that I find is very useful is a transcriber AI called Fireflies, where it actually, it transcribes meetings. It just sits there. You can have it link that we could have had it linked to the Zoom meeting, and it would have transcribed everything and summarize this all for us. It also does some really cool metrics where 

 

Anthony (45:36.15)

Anytime there was a question, it would separate the questions and separate the sound bites for each one of those questions. It would give us a sediment on how the meeting was going when it was, like when the attitude was friendly, when the attitude was conflicting and when it was neutral. And it allows you to much more easily use that with your team. 

 

Anthony (46:05.24)

to share, know, topics or key points or to use it for social media. It's a really useful tool and that continues to get better and better. One of the other ones that I just recently used and did a video on was for headshots. You know, how expensive they can be when you're going, first of all, spending your time to go there. 

 

Anthony (46:32.75)

And then to pay somewhere in the 125 to $200 for a professional headshot for $29. I use AI to, all I had to do was give them eight selfies, up to eight selfies, six to eight selfies, different angles, things like that. And it takes that and within an hour gives you about 150 pictures, professional pictures with it. It puts on different clothes. 

 

Anthony (47:02.712)

for you, different backgrounds. One, I had a dog with me. I mean, it gave you all of these great shots. Mike, I never looked better. And, you know, I use those pictures for everything. 

 

Michael (47:16.526)

Wow, that's pretty powerful. like you said, if you don't start using it now, six months from now, it's gonna be different. so you've got to, and it's never gonna change. It's not gonna stop learning. 

 

Anthony (47:32.044)

No, I can't, you know, it's hard to keep up. It really is, is I'm spending hours per week just researching the latest stuff. And even my class, I've had a chat GPT accelerator class four times now, have it every other month basically. And the one that I'm going to be doing compared to the first one is like 80 % different. 

 

Anthony (48:01.122)

Wow. Because, know, it's just constantly updating with latest features. another feature that I didn't bring up with cat GPT is that you can get now the, out on your phone and it has voice to voice. So you don't even have to text it. You're having a conversation. You're, literally talking to C three PL. I mean, that's how it feels. Like I w I took a trip to Fredonia, right? And I wanted to think through. 

 

Anthony (48:29.534)

a strategic plan for a company that I was working with. And I turned on Chat GPT and we had a conversation about that strategic plan for 25 minutes. And then when it's done, it's transcribing all of that. So I could just copy paste everything that we discussed. It's amazing. Yeah. 

 

Michael (48:50.21)

Yeah, I want to hit on your accelerator real quick. If you were to go out to your, you, you, Y O U R E the expert. 

 

Anthony (49:00.558)

If 

 

Anthony (49:01.198)

you don't, know, one of the things I learned, that's a long, that's a long, it's a bad, bad social media name. So I changed it. I've no, no, no, don't cut it out. I keep, keep, keep those lines. I've learned from, uh, many of the clients that I worked with. Um, but it's now yen LLC, Y E N LLC.com. 

 

Michael (49:26.604)

And if you just go to services, even if you're not in the Buffalo area where Tony is and doing his live events, there's an online class that you can take for this. And I think it's really important that people know that it's out there. And if you are in the Buffalo area, you need to meet Tony if you haven't met him already. He's fabulous guy. We've met through Cell and I just know that you've got, bring all of the right stuff to what you're doing. 

 

Michael (49:55.416)

from just the conversation we had today. You ought to know that Tony's the guy when you're trying to learn chat CPT for sure. I wanted to share, I had it in my head three minutes ago. Come on. And then I lost that. So you said, don't forget, I want to bring this up right now. And I've lost it. I don't remember what I was going to say. That's what happens when you get over the age of 50. 

 

Michael (50:24.846)

Sometimes you lose them. 

 

Michael (50:30.638)

And I don't remember. What else? What are we missing? When you're closing out your classes, what are you leaving them with? 

 

Anthony (50:41.87)

You know what I end basically the way I start, get started, treat it like you're treating Google, have it open on your, your, your screen all the time. Get in the habit of asking, can I do this easier, faster, better with chat, GBT and use it every day. And then you're going to get better. Cause like I said, chat, GBT is not going to replace you, but the people who use it will the companies that use it will. 

 

Anthony (51:11.35)

And this is an arbitrage moment. This truly is. This is, this is like the internet when it first came out and nobody could get their arms around what that even meant. You know, they're talking about, you know, electronic mail. And that was pretty much how everybody described the internet. They had no clue. This is the internet times 10, Mike, this is an opportunity. And so I leave with this, just imagine. 

 

Anthony (51:38.434)

the industry that you're in, typically a lot of the industry, small businesses, they're old school industries. They're not changing all that much. So just imagine if you jump on board, you become one of the trailblazers of chat, GPT, and you lead your industry in that knowledge. If you can combine your specialty in that industry with the knowledge of chat, GPT, the advantage you have in your industry. 

 

Anthony (52:08.514)

the market share opportunities, the arbitrage moment. That's the way I want people to think about it. 

 

Michael (52:15.106)

Yeah, I want them to hear that and I want that to sink in because that's super, super important. Your niche, your industry plus ChatGPT is a formula for success going forward. And I want to remind people, you hit on this, I want to remind them when Web 1.0 came out, the internet first opened and you got AOL and email. 

 

Michael (52:38.348)

People are like, I don't need that. I fax everything. I don't have to do all of that stuff. I don't need to utilize. I've got this whole pile of encyclopedias over here. I can find everything in my fingertips. And that changed for every single person on the planet. Then Web 2.0 came out and social media and Twitter and Facebook and Google and all of the Amazon, you know, came out and they're doing things. And we're like, 

 

Michael (53:05.39)

I don't need that. It's okay. I'm fine. And there are people, no names mentioned, but you know who you are in my family, that are left behind. Then they can't do those things. And now they're not communicating with people in the family. They're not seeing things. We all use some type of social media, some way, or form. This is web 3.0 times 10. 

 

Michael (53:32.142)

and don't miss this opportunity. In the past, when the industrial revolution came here, it was easy for a lot of people to miss. It was easy for Web 1.0 to be missed by a lot of people, but now we've all been through 1.0, 2.0, now we're into Web 3.0. Do not be left behind on this one. 

 

Anthony (53:53.624)

Right on, right on. 

 

Michael (53:55.854)

So Tony DeSimone, yenllc.com and you can find him, Anthony DeSimone on LinkedIn, all over the place, Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Buffalo. Loved having you on the show. This was a great conversation. And I know it's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI. 

 

Michael (54:22.486)

So we're probably gonna have to reach out in a year and we'll do the Anthony and Michael show 2.0 and we'll talk about what's changed in that time. 

 

Anthony (54:32.558)

That'd be great. That'd be great. And if you want me to ever put on my CFO hat, could talk numbers one day too. 

 

Michael (54:39.95)

Love 

 

Michael (54:40.21)

All right. Well, this is the Family Biz Show. I'm Michael Palumbos from Family Wealth and Legacy in Rochester, New York. Thank you all for listening. Have a great day, and we look forward to helping you learn something new on the next episode. Take care, everybody.