2496 - Building AI That Follows Your Company's Values and Your Budget with Synergi AI's J.B. Herrera

J. B. Herrera, founder and CEO of Synergi AI, joins Josh Elledge on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur to talk about aI guided by your values and budget. J. B. Herrera of Synergi AI says most people don't know what AI costs to run, and that a team's values, not the frontier labs, should guide its AI. In this episodeYour values should guide your AI. J. B. says Synergi AI lets a business owner set the guardrails and bright lines instead of leaving them to the frontier labs. Share one context across the team. If every employee runs their own ChatGPT or Claude, J. B. says, everybody's context is different. Know what AI costs to run. J. B. says the labs underwrite their monthly fees, and the real cost shows up when many people use a tool every day. Align, then strategize, then act. Most companies go right to tactics, J. B. says, before they've done the work of aligning and setting strategy. Questions this episode answersWhat does Synergi AI do? J. B. says Synergi AI turns about 35 years of work with small and medium-sized businesses into agents that support different roles in a company. How is this different from loading a project with knowledge files? J. B. says it's much more than that. Why does AI get expensive for small businesses? J. B. says the frontier labs underwrite their monthly fees, so the true cost is hidden. A standout quote“It's your human brilliance augmented by AI, amplified by AI, not the other way around.” J. B. Herrera About J. B. HerreraJ. B. leads Synergi AI, a Sacramento firm that designs values-driven AI for small and mid-sized organizations, and is the designer of the Insight 360 process. His site lists 35+ years of experience at companies like Apple and Arbitron, and he is the author of Collaborative Capitalism. LinksSynergi AI website https://synergiai.ioJ. B. Herrera on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbherrera/Full article and transcript on podverified.com https://podverified.com/post/2496-ai-that-follows-your-values-jb-herrera About The Thoughtful EntrepreneurThe Thoughtful Entrepreneur is a daily podcast where Josh Elledge talks with founders and business leaders about what is working right now. Want to be a guest? Apply at podverified.com/podcast https://podverified.com/podcast. Curious how podcast hosts see you as a guest? Get your free PodVerified Score https://app.podverified.com/start.

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  It's your human brilliance augmented by AI amplified by AI, not the other way around.

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  Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur, the show where I talk with business owners about what's working for them right now. I'm Josh Elledge. My guest is JB Herrera, founder and CEO of Synergy AI. If you're starting to use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera, in your business, this one is practical. JB explains how to make AI follow the way your company runs, how to get your whole team using it the same way, and what AI really costs to run, which surprises most owners. Do you run a business? Do you have a story that other owners could learn from? Hey, I'd love for you to apply to be

• 0:52Speaker 01

  a guest right here for The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. It's simple. You just go to podverified.com, you click on podcast. Now, here's my conversation with JB.

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  JB Herrera, you are the CEO and founder of Synergy AI. You are found on the web at synergiai.io. We have a link to your website. JB, it is so great to have you with this conversation. You and I have been doing a little bit of work back and forth, so I'm pretty intimately involved with or aware of what you do, which I absolutely love. We're going to be sharing some really cool AI ideas. So for our friend listening, pay attention. But JB, it's great to have you.

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  It's wonderful to be here, Josh. Thanks so much. I appreciate it.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Yes. You know, before we get going, talking about your superpower and the work you do in AI, you always love hearing what high-level leaders do for fun outside of work. And so what keeps you busy when you're when you're not working with Higgins and all of your AI entities?

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  Well, actually, we do a lot of dog rescue. And in fact, one of our, one of our dogs had passed earlier this year. And so we spent a lot of time at a, at a place in San Francisco called Muttville for senior dogs. And so we rescued a dog and her name is Gracie and she's sitting right here next to me right now. Love, love it.

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  How, how old do you guess Gracie is and what breed is she?

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  She's seven years old. So we did a DNA test and it came back that she's part terrier, part dachshund, and she's part lovable.

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  I love a DNA test, just like your own, what was that, that I was using that discovered what I, yeah, that's, that's awesome that you could do that for dogs as well. You know, I was watching, there's a really popular Instagrammer and he just, you know, he adopts senior dogs. And so our dog, you know, passed after 13 and a half years, Levi, and it was just so, so painful and hard to go through. We, we're hoping we were going to be a two dog family because we already had Benji, who we were going to adopt. But I got to tell you, adopting a puppy is a lot of work. For anyone who doesn't remember, it's, it's a lot more work than you think it is, especially as

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  you get older. And I tell you, I, you know, there are so many great adult dogs. They're already trained. Yes, they already have a personality and that sort of thing. But there's so much you don't have to go through when you bring in an adult dog. And how long do you keep the adult dogs? And what's, what's the plan? Do you just adopt them for life? Or what do you do?

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  So Gracie, we're adopting for life. She's going to be here. She's going to be, I guess, sister to Guinness. So Guinness is a dog that's relatively small, just about her size. We, they went into a room and spent about five, 10 minutes together just to see how they got together. And it was like they'd been together forever. It was an amazing experience to watch them happen. And now, of course, Gracie's here. Guinness is sleeping on the bed and so is, so is Gracie. And we're kind of like this on the side of the bed, but you know what? Wouldn't have it any other way.

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  Oh, I love it. I love it. Well, thank you for being one of our angels on earth, taking care of our precious angels. So JB, let's talk a bit about what you do with Synergy AI. You're doing some very, very cool stuff. Give us the overview.

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  So Synergy AI really is the result of about 35 years of working with small to medium-sized businesses, where we took a bunch of different processes that were successful, and even the processes that we learned lessons from because they weren't, and turned those into specific elements, agents, that support different roles within a company. Now, the beautiful part about this, and what's, I guess, unique is that we set up these guardrails and bright lines that you, as an individual business owner, control. So you're not leaving that information up to the Frontier Labs and all of these other large companies. So fundamentally, what Synergy AI

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  does is it gives you a platform that you control your AI. You build your own values. And just like you would normally do that for your company, we have those values guide your AI, significantly different than what everybody else is doing.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Is, how is this different than like, for example, like building your own project and loading it with knowledge files? Because this is more than that.

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  Much more than that. So guardrails and bright lines are different than what's setting up your own project. You can do some components of what we're talking about. We call it the soul. So everything that we do is based on philosophical principles. So you can actually see exactly what kinds of principles you're going to make your decisions on. That's different than a project. And the other part that's really different is that for the small to medium-sized business, that context, that soul, that those sets of values are consistent among every member of your team. So if you, for example, had five people in your company, or 10 or 15 people, and each

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  of them had their own version of ChatGPT or Claude, everybody's context is going to be different.

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  What we do is, is share that because that's called institutional knowledge.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Because I think the alternative is now you get into, you know, again, which is fine, but, you know, where you have team accounts and then, yeah.

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  Those are expensive for small business businesses. And the other, the other part of it is really interesting. What most people don't understand is how much it actually costs to do AI. So the Frontier Labs charge a monthly fee, whatever that fee ends up being. But if you actually go underneath the, the covers to see how much it actually costs, you'll see that they're underwriting that fee. They're underwriting.

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  Oh, yeah. Oh, gosh, yeah.

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  Huge way. I mean, we just went through this thing with Fable Five, which just came out last week. They're decreasing Anthropic, and I'm a user of Anthropic and, and OpenAI, but they're decreasing their price to 25% of what they're normally going to charge. Well, that's great for one month. But if you've built a whole set, set of projects and chats and things on Fable Five, now all of a sudden, 30 days from now, guess what? Oops. You've got, you know, a 75% increase in the price of doing your work. Yeah. And most small businesses don't do that. So we kind of take care of all that.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. At the small level, maybe it could be as well, JB, that, you know, our friend that's listening, like they, you know, they have some things that they'd like to be able to do. Yeah. When you start getting into, you know, again, shared context and, you know, you can run up some tokens, man. What would be an example of, I don't know if you've worked with someone where, you know, an example of a project where, yeah, the tokens can absolutely, things can start getting real expensive for you really quick.

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  Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I'll give you two examples. Yeah. The first is a project I'm working on right now. It's a mastermind management system. Okay. So I ran it three ways. I ran it in ChatGPT, I ran it in Anthropic, and I ran it through another platform that we, we designed and developed. What we discovered is that to create the platform for ourselves, because we're managing price, it costs us about $110.

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  Hundred and ten dollars is nothing when you're writing software, but it's greater than the twenty dollars a month that you would have to create something, right, in Anthropic, or in ChatGPT, or in Gemini. And so that that's just one thing. Then you have to use it over and over and over again. And you're not, you're not counting on how much it costs to operate that with multiple people. That's where most, most of the systems fail. And I'll give you the, the primary example is everybody would like to do the things that, that, that OpenAI is doing, that Anthropic is doing, because it's so great. You can do so many different things with it. Yeah, well, Peter Steinberger, who's one of the,

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  I guess, important people who's done open source projects for OpenAI. He's bragging, I guess is right, the right word, about spending one point, one point two million dollars in tokens in a month.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Oh dear.

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  Now, he doesn't have to pay for it because he works for OpenAI. But the reality ends up being when you're trying to do these really, really big, cool things, which we talk, you know, we hear about in the media, small to medium sized businesses don't need to do that. We need to step back, take a breath, and say, hey, let's really figure out what it's going to cost us to do that. And the problem is, the systems aren't designed to teach you that. And so that's why we, we talk about it at Synergy. It's your human brilliance augmented by AI, amplified by AI, not the other way around.

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  And your process, when you work with new clients, you mind, so you've got like an align one twenty, strategy one twenty, execute one twenty. And I think that this is really important because I, I think that there are a lot of, you know, people that are like, yeah, I can build you something in AI. But you, you want to maybe just share a little bit about your, your process with your clients, what, what that looks like? Because again, I think that this is a really valuable best practice. It's a little bit of the Wild West right now. And so I think, JB, a lot of business owners, when, you know, when they're like, well, we don't have the, you know, we don't have the brain power to, you know, build all these systems or whatever. So we'd like a partner, but we also don't want to make mistakes. And, and, and so the way that you engage and work with your clients, I think is, is

• 11:07Speaker 01

  a valuable template. Do you mind sharing what that is? Just especially for someone else who's considering working with someone of like, maybe what red flags or green flags to look for?

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  Yeah, that's great. Thanks, thanks for that question, because it's one of the most important things that you can ask yourself as a small to medium sized business leader. And it doesn't matter the size of the, the business. Remember, I came out of business coaching and mentoring, you know, over a thousand people over my career. So I understand, and so should you, that there are business fundamentals. Like, what do you stand for? Who's your ideal client? What's your product? What's the real value proposition that you're bringing to the table? Most AI companies and even the frontier labs can't understand that. Now, you can kind of build some of that and work around some of the problems, but we built a whole system around that, align one twenty.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  It's assessing your systems, assessing six areas of your business, understanding your branding, understanding what skills do you need to up, upgrade in this new world of AI? And then making sure that everybody on your team is aligned and, and I guess pulling in, in, in the same direction. That's a line. Now, once you have that, then you can start to strategize. Then you can start to figure out, okay, here's my vision for my company, here are the core values that I have. What are the, what are the outcomes and key results? What, what other kinds of performance metrics do I want to set for myself on a department by department basis? Marketing, sales, revenue? So that's on the strategy side, but you only have that once you've figured out what your alignment process is.

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  Then you get to the tactics, and this is where most companies have a, a challenge. They go right to the tactics. So I, I need to do social media posting, or I need to do an email campaign. And they haven't done the hard work, which is really not that hard, but they haven't done the work of aligning themselves and figuring out their strategy. And here's the, big secret, this is like the ultimate secret. That which used to take you months to do, you can now do in, in days, sometimes hours. Now, and I'm not suggesting that the AI does it for you. What I'm suggesting is that you can take your experience and use that in such a way that the things that you would normally have done, that would have taken you months, can

• 13:29Speaker 00

  take you hours or days. That's what we put inside of, inside three sixty. So it's all about your human brilliance, your experience, both positive and negative, and combining it with some of the best thinkers that are out there. We're not leaving chance to the black box that is generally what's going on in, in the frontier labs. If you want to build a flywheel, for example, why don't we just get Jim Collins' information and build that as part of what your design is and how you're building your business? Instead of allowing, or trying to have the AI do it, let's combine it with your experience and that methodology, and we can have AI do that.

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  All right. If I could just make one recommendation to our friend listening, because this has been so transformative to me. I hope, again, to my friend listening, you have friends that know AI really well. And if you could ten X the number of conversations that you have with really smart AI people, it is amazing in just the brainstorming session, what you can come up with. Because I think, JB, I've heard this quite a bit with AI. I think right now, most of us, we're just limited by our imagination at this point. We're just limited.

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  You know, if AI never evolved any further, like what we have already, can be completely transformative in the world. I think right now, we're just waiting to figure out what more people can do with this.

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  Right.

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  And so, JB, I just want to say thank you, because, you know, you and I have had some great brainstorming sessions, and some of the stuff that we're coming up with is just, it's so exciting, because it allows us, what I love is, better technology allows us to be more human to human, right? So we don't have to spend that extra three hours a week with administration stuff, and I get three more hours to spend with the people that I love working with and/or the family members I love.

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  Exactly.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  That's, that's what we can co-create together. JB, our friend that's listening, what would you recommend their next steps be?

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Well, I'd love you to really understand where you stand with AI and, and what your readiness is. So I created a, a free assessment that you can go to my website and take a look at. It's, you know, synergiai.io slash AI dash readiness. And we'll put that in show notes if, if that's okay with you, Josh. And it's, it's a free tool. It's, I'm not selling you anything. This not only will give you, in the six areas that you really need to look at, it'll give you an honest opinion of where you are, and then it'll actually give you some recommendations on the kinds of AI tools and, and projects that you might want to consider.

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  And it'll also give you some pricing for that, a projected price. So I'm trying to give everything that I can to, to your listener. And find out specifically, be smart. The tools are there, you can use them, and there's, there's a tool for you.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I'm, I'm actually looking at this business alignment tool right now. This is really helpful. It's basically just, I mean, it's an AI that's going to step you through a bunch of questions. And then on the backend, you're going to get a lot of clarity, you know, over, you know, maybe some ideas. And again, I, I think that that's, there are likely processes in your company that are costing you so much money. You know, and again, I'm speaking to our friend right now. This is just my experience. There are likely things that your competitors may soon do if they're not doing already. And if they disrupt your market in a way, you know, where it's kind of not great for you, it's, it's hard. It's a lot of pressure, JB, which is why, you know, I kind of put that plug in.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Just go hang out with smart AI friends and just, you know, think about what's possible. It's the best thing I can do, because it is. It could be very overwhelming to feel like, oh my gosh, I'm always behind. Well, that, that's a solvable problem, because there are people that obsess on this stuff every day, so that you don't have to.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  JB Herrera, founder and CEO of Synergy AI, your website, synergiai.io. We've got the links all linked up, including to the business alignment or the AI readiness. You can click on what's right in your, your header there. So JB, great conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Thanks, Josh. I really appreciate it.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're new here, welcome. Every episode, I talk with business owners or leaders about what's working for them right now. You'll find the full article and transcript and lots of other resources for this episode at podverified.com. There's a ton of free stuff for you there. Now, if you run a business and you have a story other owners should learn from, I'd love for you to apply to be a guest on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur at podverified.com. And if you go on podcasts to grow your business, I'd love for you to get your free Pod Verified Score.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  It's like credit karma for podcast guesting, so you can know exactly the caliber of shows you should be aiming for, so you can get your message out to the masses, you can grow your business, you can make the impact you deserve. All of that is free at podverified.com. It shows you how podcast hosts see you, and I would love to support you. Now, I'm Josh Elledge. Thanks for spending time with us.