Should I Hire An AI Expert? Will An Online Course Do?

AI seems to be moving faster than ever, and it can feel like you're already behind. Every week there's a new tool, a new strategy, and another expert promising the secret to staying competitive. The hard part isn't deciding whether AI matters. It's figuring out how to approach it without wasting time, money, or momentum.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:59Speaker 01

  Should you hire an AI expert for your business? Or should you just buy an online course and figure it out on your own? That's today's Q and A Wednesday's question from Manandi, and we're going to be answering it right here on the show. How do you get to know how to use AI and make sure it's useful in your business? And have a plan to implement it and get a return on your investment? That's what we're going to be discussing. We're also going to be sharing how we use AI in our own business, what works, what doesn't. And when you could just say, hey, I don't need to use AI. I could solve this problem in another way. Nicole, thanks for joining me today for Q and A Wednesday. Let's dive in.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, excited for this question.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  So I want to start a little bit about, a lot of people are like, I don't know where to start with AI. How do I wrap my head around AI? In the context of like, how do I improve the efficiency in my business? How do we get more productive? How do I make more sales? Marketing, all the things that AI can help you with. So there are many tools to solve any problem. I like to use this example, you have a nail, you can use a hammer. But you can also use the heel of a shoe. You can also use a kitchen ladle or something like that, right? They're all going to hammer the nail in some shape or form. It's not perfect, but it could do the job. So for example, you might get somebody to write you some copy for social media. That is a solution to a problem that you have. AI can help you do that.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  But if you already have a solution that's working for you, maybe you don't really need AI. So let's talk a little bit about that. Like, a lot of people just jump to the fact that like, I gotta start using AI. Do you agree with this? Do you find that you kind of tend to think about these things in our own business?

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Well, I find it interesting that the question is phrased, hiring an AI expert. I'm wondering how many people really are experts? Or how many people? It's fairly new. I mean, it's maybe AI is not new new, but the implementation and the way it's picked up steam in mass kind of use is definitely fairly new. And I feel like we're all figuring it out. And so I can understand, like, as a business owner, you feel like you're already doing so many things. And AI is this other thing that you need to implement because it feels like it's running away from you. Is anything broken that AI can fix? Like, shouldn't I be looking at what my business needs first before I decide that it needs AI?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's good to do an audit of your business. Where are the areas you want to improve? Where you believe you could be more efficient? What are some ways you want to grow as a business? Whether you want to get more sales, you want to get more leads? What do you want out of your business, right? And then ask yourself, what's the best way to accomplish that? Do I need AI to do that? Is AI the best solution? Is it the most affordable solution? Sometimes we kind of default to the latest trend, like we default to AI. And it's actually not the best way to solve that problem or to improve your business. So I just wanted to give you permission to not use AI. You don't have to use AI for everything, okay? You don't have to jump on this trend right now because everybody's using AI.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Now, having said that, we use a ton of AI in our business to be more efficient, to be able to have like a second brain to recall our meeting notes, for example. There's a lot of ways we use it, but we have also rules where we don't use AI, like intentionally. So just keep that in mind. I think that this is kind of a good place to start before you start thinking about hiring an expert or even taking an online course.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  I don't know if we're at the stage now where there are people who can just step in and say, well, AI can fix XYZ in your business. The default to find someone who knows more than you, I think that's probably the issue here. I do think that we have a responsibility as business owners to inform ourselves. An online course? I mean, we've picked it up just by.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Using it.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Using it.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know there are people out there that actually enjoy taking an online course to learn about something, to be introduced to a concept, maybe just get the fundamentals down. I am happy to give a 90-second online course right now. And the best way to look at AI is that there are levels to everything, right? You could play basketball for fun. You could play basketball for a rec league. You could play basketball semi-professionally or for a college or university. You could play professionally, like there's all these levels, right? And the same thing with AI. You can use AI to just simply ask questions. You're going to get better answers than Google, right? You can use AI as a way to be a creative partner, a thought, someone to bounce ideas off of,

• 5:48Speaker 01

  somebody who's going to be able to actually do things, like we're using like Claude Co-Work, for example, where they're going to get into your computer and create files and all that kind of stuff. And then there's like this highest level of people like, you know, creating autonomous agents that are working and doing things and using their credit card. And a lot of people are just uncomfortable with that at this moment, especially business owners, just because they want to be as efficient and a little bit scared about, you know, a robot spending its company's credit card or whatever it might be. So you have to understand that, like, you don't need to jump to the highest level. You can start by just chatting with AI. Choose a tool, like there's all these, you know, there's Gemini, and there's ChatGPT, and there's Claude. Like, we personally use Claude in our company, that's what we do.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  And just literally asking Claude, hey Claude, I would like to start using AI in my business. This is what I do. And I find it's much easier to give a brain dump and give a lot of context to AI tools when you're using the voice option, where you can just dictate and just ramble and say everything that your company does. Let me know if AI is going to help, how, what are some ways I can implement AI in my business? Just literally ask AI how it could help. And ask it to be impartial and biased, push back a little bit, say, hey, you know, like, if I don't need to use AI in areas, don't force it, blah, blah, blah. And then see what it tells you. And then if you want to learn more, you could just literally ask questions. And I think that's the best way to kind of get started.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  That's your own little online course you created with AI.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's really helpful. I think you pointed to something where I got started, and it's around the processes. Because I think one of the things we don't outsource AI to, we don't use AI for, is our thinking, our creative thinking.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have a big role on that. Decision-making, thinking, yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  But process-driven things, where it's literally like an organization of thoughts, of a workflow, a checklist, something that's pretty, you know, maybe a bit mundane to kind of get the structure around. I think that's been really helpful, and that's the way I got started.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, a good example of this is like, for example, we have a process of hiring new employees, right? And new team members. So we have a structure to how we do this. Every time we hire somebody, we put up a job description. That job description has a structure, has a different parts, different sections, that talks about who we are and what the job entails, what your responsibilities are going to be, you know, what are the things that you should expect to do? What are the qualifications we're looking for? Like, there's a structure. Then on top of that, there's an application form that is created in Google Forms. And then on top of that, you know, we have a bunch of interview questions we ask for this position. We have a test project they do. So every time we hire, we do all these things. Now, why do I have to do this from scratch every single time?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Once I've told AI my whole setup and what happens when I hire, I just then say, okay, now we're hiring for this position. This is what this person is going to do. Again, I'm rambling, I'm just doing a voice note. And I'm just rambling, this is what the person is going to do, there's the responsibilities, there's the things they're going to be responsible for in the job. This is the kind of person we're looking for, da, da, da, da, da. So it's like, basically, I've just blatted out 500 words. It then creates all those things for us. And then you can go ahead and edit them and tweak them so that they make sense and it sounds like you. But you don't need to reinvent the wheel and create a brand-new job description after you've created it once, a brand-new application form, interview questions, all that kind of stuff. So this is very efficient, and there's no real thinking involved.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  All the ideas, all the stuff, all the input I gave AI is just doing all the legwork. It's basically like a really underpaid intern.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the formatting of documents. You've inputted the ideas, you're asking the questions, you're giving, you're interacting with it when, you know, the questions come back and you might say, well, no, this is actually not.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  A question I want to ask.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  I want to ask, exactly. Like, you can't just rock up to the interviews like with these, no, that's not what we do. But it does speed up, you know, processes like formatting documents, which is something that's quite time-consuming.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Which is a good point. The speeding up makes a big difference because a lot of people delay these things. They don't hire a new person on their team because like, there's so much work. I gotta put this job description, I gotta post, I gotta make all these forms, I gotta make all these. And they kind of delay it, and then this kind of shortens or minimizes the pain. And they're like, oh, okay, AI is going to help you do all the legwork. I can then just go in and edit. And editing is much easier than writing, especially when it comes out of your own ideas. Today's episode is supported by iXL Learning. Lessons move quickly this time of year. And iXL aligns with what kids are learning in school so they can practice the same concepts they're covering in class and keep pace with confidence. iXL is an award-winning online learning platform that helps kids truly understand what they're learning,

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• 12:35Speaker 01

  I want to talk a little bit about why we don't use AI to make decisions, to come up with ideas. We don't use AI for those reasons because I believe that this is one of the muscles as an entrepreneur that differentiates you from the competition. Like your taste, your judgment, this is why you're getting paid. This is what, this is the reason why your company is where it's at is because you made some decisions that led you to the current results. If you outsource these decisions to an algorithm that is basically a snapshot of the mediocrity of the world. You know, like this is just like the, the average of what everybody thinks and says and talks to the AI with, you know?

• 13:17Speaker 01

  So you want to kind of make sure that you never outsource that and you don't want to fatigue that muscle of making decisions and you know, you want to, that muscle will atrophy, you don't use it. If you don't make decisions constantly, if you're not using your judgment, if you're not pondering things that you may or may not do, or you know, move, a hire, a purchase, whatever it might be. If you're not using that muscle, it will atrophy.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  And it also strips away the uniqueness and personality of the individuals.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  And I think if you're not exercising your own creativity, interaction, curiosity, asking those questions, then yeah, you stop learning, you stop having your own flavor and take on things because it's being, you know, fed to you from an AI.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  There are plenty of times where Nicole and I were, we've had discussions, we had to make a decision and we're in an impasse. Like we are disagreeing and we had to learn to step away from that decision. We don't have to rush that decision, get a chance to think about it, understand and try to ponder the other person's perspective a little bit, see if we can come to a middle ground. Or maybe it's like, maybe this is a decision we don't need to make right now. Maybe this can be pushed off or we say, hey, I know often this happens to us where it's like, you're a lot more passionate about this concept, about this idea. I'm going to let you take the lead on this decision because the result of this decision means more to you than me. So like the stakes are higher for you, so I'd rather you take on that decision and I'll step back. And sometimes it's the other way around.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, we managed to figure it out. I think if we come back to Manandi's question about hiring an AI expert, maybe the categories or the, the implementation that we've adopted is for things like SOPs.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Because standard operating procedures.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Standard operating procedures.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, standard operating procedures. That's been really helpful to churn those out a lot quicker, but the input has come from us. So examples that we've done is our recording setup. We got Josh, our video producer, to go around, walk through, talk through everything that he does to set up a shoot. That was recorded using Granola and then that all came from him though. He's set up the lights, he's set up the cameras, all of that input, that creativity has come from a human. What we used AI for was literally the transcription and just formatting it into a nice document so that it could be handed to someone else. And I think in this context, I think that's a very benign use.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Similarly, when we come up with a creative concept for a campaign, we're discussing the ideas, we're brainstorming, we're coming up with all the different possible scenes for a shoot. And then when it comes to locking it into a table so that it turns into a storyboard and a shot list, then we can outsource that to AI. So I think those things are really clear examples of very easy and efficient ways and more benign ways. And I say benign just because I do think that when you start to outsource your thinking, I think that's probably a bit more dangerous.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's clear that when it comes to creativity, you don't want to totally let go of the reins because that's your secret sauce. I think a good example of us using AI in our company that has been really efficient and kind of eye-opening for me is we use a tool called Granola, which also happens to be a sponsor of our show. Granola basically listens to your meetings and transcribes notes. And the thing about, you know, people think about this like, okay, that's great. I got a summary of the notes for that meeting, but they don't really think about like the library of meetings that you actually have in the course of a year, two years, a decade of your business. One of the things I did with Granola once is I asked it a question like, hey, look at all my notes in the past,

• 16:58Speaker 01

  whatever, six months, let me know if there's a reoccurring problem that keeps coming up at our meetings. Something that maybe is a roadblock, maybe something that's where I'm the bottleneck. And it told me like, hey, your bottleneck is that you're the one that's doing most of the scripting and you're slowing down the process. And that led to our next hire, which was Molly. So it's hard to be objective when you don't have the memory of a computer. When you don't have the objective memory of what happened in those meetings and what's been said. And your mind will just filter out these things and you, you know, they always say that like memory is faulty, but it's also just filtered by your own experience and your emotions. So I think that's a great example of like AI at its best, like being this like robot objective person

• 17:43Speaker 01

  that you can ask to find out the truth of what's really happening in your business.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so surfacing an insight like that is really useful. I think that's another good example of when it works. And I think maybe where this question is coming from too is, and I think where I've seen sort of the pitfalls of AI. If we're looking at a business that is thinking, okay, I need an AI expert so that I can create these agents to do the work. I'm not, we're not there yet, we're not, that's not how we're using, that's not how I'm using AI.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  And we don't have the, the use for it. Like we don't have like tons of people emailing us, so we need like customer service agents.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. So I can see maybe that's right, that's a good use case, customer service and AI agents for customer support. That makes sense to me. But what I've seen happen too with AI agents and when someone's in AI is this constant context switching. And I feel like there's this unproductiveness that can happen when you've started something in AI. You might have that running and then you start something else, you start another thread. And all of a sudden you're, you know, you're constantly context switching or you're going back to undo the work of what the AI has done, which I find has, can waste a lot of time.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. I think a good rule, this sounds a little bit out there and maybe a little bit controversial, but I think it'd be interesting if somebody's in their first year of their business, they don't use AI. Why? Because you need to do all the tasks yourself so you understand it inside and out, what it takes to shoot an episode in our example, what it takes to close a customer in a sales conversation. What does that sales conversation look like, what kind of questions you're asking? Before you start asking AI, how do I come up with a sales script? You need to create your own and start improving and tweaking it. So it's important for you to do all the work. I think one of the advantages Nicole and I had is that all our businesses are bootstrapped

• 19:37Speaker 01

  so that pretty much every job we hired for, we did ourselves in the beginning. Which leads me to the fact that I hope everybody is subscribed. If they're not subscribed, do it now because we have an upcoming episode that is all about the five mistakes that anybody makes in their first year in business. So if you're new to business, or even if you're not new and you're wanting to avoid the five mistakes. The reason why these five mistakes are so deadly is because they will take you out of business. They'll really be detrimental to your success. It's very hard to be successful if you make these mistakes because a lot of these mistakes are kind of irreversible. So if you want to dig deep into that one, we really did a great job with the research of this episode. So go ahead and hit subscribe because it's coming out really soon. Might be the next episode or this episode after, but hit subscribe so you don't miss it.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  So we shared the example of using granola in the meeting notes and asking granola some questions. What are some other examples of how we implement AI in our business?

• 20:32Speaker 02

  So the things that I've done, very simple things like a branding skill. So creating the branding skill inside of Claude where we've, I've given Claude our brand guidelines, our color palette, all of those things. And essentially, any document that I want to create with, again, our ideas, our input, but I want to just have this document formatted really cleanly in our brand. I've been able to do that using the branding skill. So giving AI a skill around that, that's one way. What else have we done?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  I've done a lot of guest research through AI. Like, I want to dig deep on every interview that this person's done, especially somebody who's like an author, like when we did Seth Godin, when we did Charles Duhigg, that they've done a lot of interviews, TV, radio, all kinds of stuff. And I want to know what are the things they haven't been asked? What are the areas they haven't been discussing on these shows?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  So it's pooled information, like it's pooled all of those interviews for you, but you've been able to connect the dots and say, okay.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can see the gaps. Like, I definitely don't want to talk about that because they've talked about that in every interview. They shared the story a million times, you know, they can, you can learn about that somewhere else. And that's kind of where I get a lot of the questions for the interview, but also where we come up with the concepts of the games that we play with our guests. It's like, what are they interested in? What are some of the kind of like throwaway lines that kind of like, oh, that's kind of interesting? Like, they, you know, that's their favorite movie, or that's their favorite food, or they've never been to this country. And then it kind of, I can use that in some of the ways that we discuss or we play the games.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  So you use it as a bit of a research assistant, but the questions.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  It's much easier than Google.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Okay, right. But it's not coming up with the questions. You're coming up with the questions.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just, I just want to know what they've been asked before, so that I stay away from that. What are the topics they talk about? What are some things that they're interested in? Some like quirky, maybe ideas or, like, we just had that pre-interview with Matt DeVela, and one of the things that it brought out is like, one of his favorite movies is The Rock, which is an action movie that's so, it's kind of like a cheesy action movie, but he thinks it's actually really underrated. So that might come into conversation, you know, something that he normally doesn't talk about, usually talks about how to grow your YouTube channel and how he, you know, is a great documentary filmmaker, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So going back to the question, like, do you need an AI expert? The issue I have with like hiring somebody to come into your company, even if you have

• 23:00Speaker 01

  a large company, like, let's say you have 50, 100 employees, and you're like, hey, come in and look at all my departments and see how you can help these departments get more efficient, get better, be more productive with AI. To me, that sounds like you're shoehorning it. It sounds like you're just forcing the issue where it's like, I gotta find out a way, as the expert, I'd be like, I gotta find a way to help, you know, the sales team to use AI so they're more efficient. I gotta find a way that the support team's got to do that, rather than you as a leader, figure out, you know, what are some areas I want to improve in general? And is, can I use AI to do that?

• 23:34Speaker 02

  I feel like I use AI a lot, but I would feel like I would want to know what's out there. It's almost for my own professional development, rather than come in and fix my business.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I have to say that it depends on the business particularly. Like, if you're in a highly technical business, like when we were running software, a software company, Webinar Ninja, like AI would have tremendously helped us, like, in a big way. Like, AI didn't take off until after we sold. You know, like, it would help us clean bugs faster in our code. It would, it was develop a lot faster because of like copilot tools and all kinds of stuff where you can develop and have like, AI is great for technical things. Like, I've built apps with AI and it's like, it's a game changer. It's like, it's got to 10x your company if you're, you know, in software or in technology, or even in your like 3D modeling things, you're creating physical products. It's pretty good. Like, even people that do a remodel for their house, they use AI to like do all the engineering and the

• 24:30Speaker 01

  architecture. And like, it's, it's just game changing for anything technical. So if your company is heavily reliant on that kind of process, then it's definitely going to help you. But if you're in the content creation, if you're in the soft skills, if you're delivering a service of some sort, if you're a coach, you're, you know, I know Manandi, he's, he has a clinic, a health and beauty clinic as well. So he's dealing with customers one on one. So yes, it's going to help you with some of the admin, but in terms of the delivery of your products and services, maybe not so much.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe I'm seeing it very much from a creative or a creative business, communications also, that's another area of business that, yeah, I wouldn't want AI to touch too much, but definitely from the tech side.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. There are some things, if you have a physical business like Manandi, where like, you could definitely use like an AI callback service where they like, they call you back or they send you a text message to schedule an appointment. These things, if you're, you know, somebody calls you and your business is closed, they don't just get a ringtone. You know, they get somebody, that's somebody, it's AI, basically automated message that kind of says, hey, you know, you, we're not open right now, but how about we schedule an appointment, tell me about your problem, we'll be able to see you, like, how we can help you out. Some of these, these agents now are, sound incredibly lifelike. I've seen some demos online and it's really hard to differentiate sometimes. It's so natural.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  I think the first thing you said very early on at the start was to ask AI. And I think that's probably, rather than defaulting to an expert, to go straight, have that interaction and that conversation with an AI. Like, we like using Claude. Describe your business, describe all the people in your business, describe the processes, describe everyone's roles and responsibilities, maybe describe some of the challenges, and have AI tell you, like, okay, where could AI be useful or beneficial? You know, depending on how much knowledge you have, you know, but I would imagine that if he's got some knowledge already, then that interaction would probably be the first place to start, rather than defaulting to some external consultant.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think you could even start with AI, even not asking anything to do with business. Like, you could just start using it, period. Like, as simple as this, like, you could do this activity this week. I did this. Nicole sent me a text message with a grocery list. I had to get a bunch of groceries. So I just copied that list and told Claude with, you know, hey Claude, I'm in the supermarket right now, and I'm going to tell you as I buy each thing and tell me what I have to get that's left, you know. So basically told me, okay, first three things to get is cucumbers, tomatoes and lemons. So I wanted, I got that. Okay, I got the cucumbers. And I would just literally talk to it with my earphones on, on the voice mode, and just say, I got the lemons, I got the cucumbers, I got tomatoes, what's next? Oh, get milk and bread, da, da, da. So like, I, that way it's in my, I

• 27:15Speaker 01

  don't have to pull out my phone constantly. And it was just a lot more efficient. And it just got me used to like using it for something practical.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  I just remember a cautionary tale, not a cautionary tale. We see a few companies now backpedaling a bit with AI because of the expense. Canva here in Australia, you know, is delaying their IPO because of, you know, they're needing to rebalance the books because AI is costly and expensive. So I think that's just my one little word of like, because we're so new to it, just shoehorning it or just saying like, AI is going to fix all these things in my business, there's going to be a cost to it. And, and I think just to be mindful of that, because we're seeing more and more of that.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it just depends on your business. I think Canva is probably the extreme example. They're, they're creating software and all their engineers are using AI constantly. They're developing their own AI. It's on the other side of the spectrum. If you're like a company like ours, where we have like maybe half a dozen people using the software, they're all paying $20 a month, it's $120 a month, it's not a huge expense, but it is an expense and a wasteful expense if you don't use it.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. Or it's a wasteful expense, or it can be costly if you need to undo things. That's where you want to take steps to make sure that you have a policy in place with your workplace. You know, your team is trained up because I think undoing some things can be really unproductive and costly in that sense.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  So literally, you could just spend a couple of weeks, you getting familiar with the AI, whatever tool you use, getting familiar with how you want to implement it in your business, and you can cascade that, train your team, and start rolling it out. There's no rush. You could just figure it out on your own pace, I would say. Manandi, I hope that helps, and I hope it helps everybody who's listening and wondering how to implement AI in their business, or to hire an expert, or to take a course. You know, just using it is really going to help you a ton, just getting an understanding of how you can actually apply it to your own business. If you've got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and send it over at 100mba dot q. You can submit questions at that page, and we'll answer right here on the show on Q and A Wednesday. If you want to continue learning,

• 29:29Speaker 01

  we have an episode we recently published all about The Four Hour Work Week, the book that kind of started the online business revolution, and how it's been misinterpreted over the years, and how a lot of people think it's like, hard work is for suckers, and you should never be working hard, you should be only working four hours a week. That's not really the premise of the book. We do a deep dive and talk about how Tim Ferriss himself, the author, has to over explain, that's not really what the book is about. And yeah, it's an interesting one. So go ahead and check it out. Just scroll up on whatever app you're using right now, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, we're on them all.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help start, grow and scale your business, subscribe to the podcast. All you got to do is hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. I'll check you in the next episode.

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