Episode 86 - Exploring AI in the Construction Industry: Insights from CBUSA's AI Panel
Episode #86 | CBUSA AI Panel | Exploring AI in the Construction Industry
In this episode of "The Curious Builder," host Mark Williams chats with Katie Kath, Morgan Molitor, and Jon Walker about the growing role of AI in the housing and construction industries. They dive into practical uses of AI for improving brand consistency, managing communication, and enhancing productivity, while also addressing concerns about data privacy and the trust needed when incorporating new technology. The lively discussion underscores the transformative potential of AI despite the learning curve, advocating for collaborative learning and thoughtful integration.
Listen to the full episode:
About CBUSA AI Panel
Katie Kath
Partner & Creative Director, Jkath Design Build + Reinvent
Katie Kath is the partner and creative director of Jkath Design Build + Reinvent, a premier design-build firm in the Midwest. With a degree in business, Katie first made her mark by owning a successful restaurant in Minneapolis. After selling her restaurant, she joined her husband at Jkath to pursue her passion for interior design.
Under Katie's leadership, Jkath Design Build + Reinvent has gained acclaim for its custom interiors and cabinetry, expanding its services nationally and celebrating over 10 years in business. The firm’s tagline, Live In the Details©, highlights their dedication to high-end renovations and new construction.
Morgan Molitor
Co-founder and creative director at Construction2style
Morgan is the other half of Construction2style, alongside her husband Jamie. For 10 years, they’ve been tearing houses apart and creating new dream spaces not only for their clients but for themselves; starting off as a DIY home improvement blog in 2012, they quickly transitioned into a full-service interior residential design + build company in 2015. They started c2s from the ground up. With now over 1.7M + monthly website impressions and 150,000+ social media followers,
Morgan shows their readers how to implement various marketing strategies and produce multiple streams of revenue in the construction industry.
Jon Walker
Chief Technology Officer of Buildertrend
Jon Walker is the Chief Technology Officer at Buildertrend, the leading software for residential construction management. With a ruthless commitment to prioritization and iteration, obsessive customer focus and a “win together” attitude, his team is releasing more value faster to the customers who rely on the Buildertrend to run more successful construction businesses.
A true entrepreneur at heart, Jon co-founded AppFolio, where he also served as Chief Technology Officer prior to joining Buildertrend. With 30+ years working in SaaS, Jon’s done it all – from architecture and design to software testing and college instruction.
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Audio - The Curious Builder Podcast (CBUSA AI Panel) final
Tue, Oct 29, 2024 2:00PM • 59:05
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
AI adoption, construction industry, chat GPT, Jasper AI, project management, communication strategy, brand voice, content creation, client engagement, team collaboration, scheduling tools, data analysis, CRM systems, video transcription, future predictions
SPEAKERS
Mark D. Williams, Katie Kath, Jon Walker, Morgan Molitor
Morgan Molitor 00:00
For me, the hardest thing is, like, managing people. I'm very impatient. I'm like, let's go. I don't want to sit there and talk about your feelings. I have three kids at home. Like I have enough feelings to deal with, so I'm constantly just like, a lot of that takes away from that. I don't need to sit and have these conversations about, you know, why did this take you so long? Why didn't you get this done, x, y and z, where I can see, because data is being pulled from these tools, how long it's taking them, if there's an issue, then I can address it. But to say, you know, this should only take this amount of time, and here's why, and then we can schedule it that way.
Mark D. Williams 00:41
Welcome to curious builder Podcast. I'm Mark Williams, your host today. I'm joined by Morgan, Katie and John, before we get into intros, just a few little short notes. One is you already been told this is gonna be recorded. Podcast we're recording right now. We're live at CV USA in Minneapolis, to a crowd of probably 280 300 for those listening and not here. We are going to be recording this through another platform called fathom. It's an AI tech after it's going to consolidate everything we're talking about. It'll give you speaking notes, and it'll be emailed to all of you after this, just to show you something you can do. Many of you probably use, I use something called otter when I do my Zoom calls or my Google calls, that does the same thing. And so we wanted to obviously show you something very quickly of how AI could be useful right away. So why don't we start a little with introductions. I'll let each person introduce themselves, and then we'll kind of get into it. Okay, you want me to start? Go ahead.
Katie Kath 01:36
Okay. I'm Katie Kath, and as mentioned, I'm the partner and creative director behind J Kath, design, build and reinvent. My husband is the founder, but I am in present day the everything else. So I run the company. We have a team of 10, and we specialize locally, here in Minneapolis and high end renovations. We do a lot of old homes. Our niche is here in the city St Paul, Minneapolis urban homes, doing additions, taking 100 plus year old homes apart all the way down to the studs and figuring out how to make it feel brand new again. We have in house design studio as well, and the roots of our company started with a custom cabinetry shop. So we still own a shop, and we have a retail collection that we distribute cabinetry nationwide.
Morgan Molitor 02:21
I'm Morgan Molitor, design build of construction, of style, alongside my husband here in the Twin Cities as well. Kaylee Katie is a colleague and competitor here, but we're like, best friends and lean on each other. So I'm excited about this conversation, because we talk about AI all the time. I also run a media company called the Ian lion media. We have a nonprofit called resilience to reform gives a voice to those who deserve a second chance. And then also, I run contractor coalition with Brad Levitt here from aft construction and Nick Schiffer from NS builders, which is a contractor conference that's hosted nationally two times a year. And then I also host a conference called build her retreat, which is focused on female contractors, where we go to Costa Rica once a year to retreat and elevate and show up, just like the wonderful men in this room.
03:14
Okay?
Jon Walker 03:14
I want to go to Costa Rica.
Morgan Molitor 03:17
Mark's already tried.
Jon Walker 03:20
I'm John Walker. I'm the CTO of buildertrend. I'm relatively new to the industry. I've been in technology for a long time. I've been the CTO of four companies now. Two are acquired. The last one was a property management software company. It's public, called AppFolio. It's supposed to do about seven, $30 million in revenue now this year. And yeah, I left that about a year and three months ago to join buildertrend, and I knew there's a lot that applies from the property management industry to the construction industry, but I knew almost zero about construction before that, and so I have about a year and three months of learning. And so I'm the rookie up here, I guess, perfect. So
Mark D. Williams 03:57
quick audience involvement, and I'm going to leave you your hands are going to keep standing. Actually, I'll have you stand for this. Why don't you stand? If you've ever used AI at all in business, if you use it once a week, stay standing. If you use it more than three times a week, stay standing. If you use it every day, stay standing. So for those not here, there's about eight, nine people out of 300 that use it every day. You guys can be seated. One of the things that I wanted to challenge this group with a little bit is, and I don't actually agree with this stereotype, by the way, but a lot of people would look at the construction industry and think that we're dinosaurs, that we're not tech savvy, that we are not innovating. And I would challenge, really the public at large to realize that even if that was the case when a revolutionary. Technology comes along like AI, John and I talked about this. So John approves with this message, is the group that is the furthest behind compared to its peers, will close the gap the biggest. And what I mean by that is, let's say your target, or Best Buy, or a big, you know, a commercial company, you know, they have staffs of hundreds of people. I don't know how big all of you are as building companies. Maybe there's some bigger, maybe there's some smaller. But the point is, is, with AI, your punching power went up exponentially. And I'm going to show you this slide here Next, if we can put this slide up of adoption. And so what we had here is, let's see if we can get this slide up. There we go. So most of us obviously know Netflix, it reached a million users in three and a half years. Twitter, two years, Dropbox, seven months, Instagram, two and a half months. Look at chat, G, P, t5, days. It took five days to get a million users like that is shocking, and keep in mind that was two years ago, so the speed at which this is happening is beyond anyone up here's comprehension. We're only here talking about our experiences. One thing that I do want our guests to comment on is, I love specificity. You know, in terms of, like, I'd like to know exactly how we use some of these things. And we're going to get into that in a little bit. We're also going to talk a little bit about strategy. One thing that I'm really fascinated about with John up here is most of us are super users, or trying to adopt AI into our businesses, but John actually has to create it, and asked has to predict what we're gonna use. I'm really interested at some of John's answers. Along those lines, we'll get rid of the Q and A we can go back to the video, then I don't have to use this thing. So I guess, why don't we start with you, John, with that question. I mean, you know, AI is often referred as this, like thing that we all know what it is. It's artificial intelligence, but that's about as far as most of us know about it, right? Like, how does it differ from other technologies, and how is builder trend, using it to help us as builders. Well,
Jon Walker 07:03
you know, I think AI is, it is pretty simple. What it is, it's an attempt to mimic what we as humans are very good at. And it actually has been around for a long, long time. It was in the 80s people started realizing, well, humans have all this expertise. How can we create systems that mimic that expertise? And there's a whole period where there's a ton of investment in the 80s in it a big investment, and they never quite got over the hump. And so there's this whole period that they referred to as the AI winter that was basically between the 80s. And basically when this idea of a neural network came around, and neural network is it somewhat mimics the brain in terms of how it's an idea of mimicking our synapses a little bit. And really, what's become, really moved the whole industry forward, is this idea that these neural networks can train themselves and get very complex, like the brain is very complex. We don't even understand how it works. And that's one of the challenges of AI today, that it's hard to actually understand and have transparency about it works. There's an idea of general AI, which is or general artificial intelligence, which is like, could it do everything a human does? And it's interesting because chat GBT has become so popular, and I think a number of people in this room know about it, and there's an argument whether that's general AI or not. Really, what it does is language. But so much of what we do as humans is language and speaking that there's an argument that can be made that general AI is here with chatgpt, but that's not all. AI is good at AI is very good at computer vision. It's good that there's a lot of areas that it can be applied. And it's all around these ideas, around neural networks. There's a lot of other techniques. But I don't know if I got your whole question. No.
Mark D. Williams 08:39
I mean, it did, and maybe just to dive in, since we're here on this is from a strategy standpoint. We're going to hear from Morgan and Katie in a minute about how they use specific programs for their business, and how we as builders can can adopt those to help us level up our businesses. But from your seat, you're you're creating what we're using. A lot of us use builder trend, and you know, there's a lot of things that we want maybe talk a little bit about. Bit about, how do you choose what integrations to actually input into builder trend? And also, how long does that take? You know, I know it goes up on a board somewhere. You have a lot of engineers working on this, but from from the idea to actually rolling it out, maybe give us some as users, give us some perspective. Because, you know, of us, all of us would like it ASAP. I know it doesn't happen that quick. Can you speak a little bit to that?
Jon Walker 09:29
Yeah, I mean, I can tell you that in every industry, it's starting to have big impact. And I was in the property management industry, which could be, could be viewed as a little bit of a laggard. Technology wise, at least Information Technology wise, I actually agree with you that construction is not really a technology laggard. If you think about building materials and tools and how the industries move forward, it's actually kind of a technology adopter in terms of IT technology it's been a little bit of laggard. Property Management is like that too, and I can tell you i. Left at folio about a year and half ago. And five years ago, we were doing nothing with AI. We had a couple people that like were tinkering with it. I built a whole AI team there, and when I left, it was probably about we had about 600 people in product and engineering working on products there, and 75 of those were just purely dedicated to AI when I left, and I had built that whole team from nothing, the real approach we were taking there, and that we're taking a builder. Trend is there's two things to successful AI adoption. I think one is, you've got to have a problem that AI solves really well. You've got to have something that people are willing to adopt, you know, so a problem that you're solving for the customer and that they're willing to adopt. I remember when we were first doing some of AI, a lot of what we were thinking about was kind of replacing some of the very rote communication tasks that property managers had. And one of the things that was that was a real problem people had, you know, answering tenant questions about new rentals. I'm sure you have tons of those kind of rote tasks in terms of answering questions and but one of the things that we had a challenge with was when we talked about replacing some of those people pictured a phone tree, and I actually just had this frustration yesterday, I was trying to talk to FedEx, and I spent like 30 minutes on the phone going through their phone tree, and I couldn't talk to anyone there. And so that was a real challenge we had, where it was a technology, where people had a problem but weren't quite ready to adopt, or didn't even understand what it would mean to adopt. And I think that's how we think about it at builder trend. And I think we'll look at each of the rote tasks, and what that does, you can kind of look at that as like, oh, that's scary. Might replace jobs. What I think it does is it enables us to use the real creativity and kind of focus on the core of our business and the real value we add and get rid of some of the mundane that just just really drags us down.
Mark D. Williams 11:53
This episode is brought to you by Pella Northland, for 20 years, I've been using Pella windows, and I couldn't be happier to call them as a business partner, a trade partner, and someone that really supports us in our quality builds. You know, we use wood windows and doors on every single one of our homes. And 98% of every home that I've ever built has been a Pella window. I've gotten to know their team here, locally, as well as nationally, and the way that they support us as a craftsman as well as they support our homeowners with their lifelong guarantee. It's actually been a game changer for me. So when people ask me who I use, I recommend Pella. If you want to hear more about Pella story, you can listen to episode one, Ryan interview Peter and Ed from pela Northland about their journey into the Pella ownership. Just because I really want to know the answer to this, I'm going to keep drill until I get an answer. What when I'm trying
Jon Walker 12:39
to answer your question,
Mark D. Williams 12:42
yes, I that you're not doing your job. I want more when you come up with, like we were talking backstage about, like, daily logs in builder trend, right? You know some, you know, our project manager is in there. Katie brought this up. You know, you're entering in. You know, this is what you did this week. This is our look ahead. I know that idea is in builder trend to work on how long, and I'm not gonna hold you to this, the rest of the world might. How long would it take to actually implement that?
Jon Walker 13:09
I mean, the technology is moving super fast. You've kind of seen this like, literally, chat GPT was introduced just a couple years ago, and so it's moving very fast. And chat GPT belongs this whole notion of generative AI, which is all about language and daily logs, is about language and pictures, obviously too dedicated effort to that kind of stuff you can it's getting faster and faster all the time, but you're looking at something you can roll out in six months. Maybe. Yeah,
Mark D. Williams 13:37
perfect. Can we get a round of applause? I got an answer. Yes. I
Jon Walker 13:42
I never promised dates on anything. And I know you all identify with me, because I'm building a house right now, and I don't get much date promises there.
Mark D. Williams 13:54
Well played. Well played. Touche, sir. Touche, that was well played. When your house is finished, we expect that done. I'm not sure who your builder is. I hope he's here. Katie, why don't we shift over to you? What advice would you give to us as business owners that are hesitant to adopt AI,
Katie Kath 14:15
yeah. I mean, it's a little bit of what John already shared, and I think it's identifying your problem. So for us, you know, for Well, for me, really, I have a team of 10, and I still have yet to figure out how to replace myself the communication piece, 90 500% of what I do every day as client, engagement, communication, problem solving. I'm sure everyone in the room can resonate with that. And the communication piece is just always so overwhelming. There's not enough of it. We're not clear enough. We're too clear. I've had a client recently complain that we communicate too much,
Mark D. Williams 14:48
really, yes, I have never heard that. And
Katie Kath 14:50
and then it's not even just the day to day. It's the strategy of marketing, content creation, email campaigns. So regardless of how much. That we are outsourcing. Either it's out, you know, through a third party, or even internally with our team. It still needs to have another set of eyes, and it always rolls up to me, and mostly because that's the way I want it. It's my name, it's my brand. I want things to have a certain cadence to it, a certain voice. And so AI is a really great way to figure out what a small problem might be and it might just be a communication strategy, and to figure out what your brand voice is that can be used. And there are some tools we'll get into where you can include including chat GPT. But I am actually not a chat GPT user. I actually just went on to the website for the first time the other day, so I've adapted other tools. So I think it's, again, identifying your problem, small problems. I even heard somebody recently take their entire team and they all needed to get on LinkedIn, and they needed a consistent bio for each person on LinkedIn. Well, they had aI write those across the whole team. And what a great way to get your brand out publicly in a large mass really quickly. And I know there's a lot of AI tools built into LinkedIn once you're on it, but once you start using it, you'll start seeing more prompts to dig into AI and to continue with a lot of other tools, to continue to use it, but and then also, I think the other point I want to make is surround yourself with the community, just like we're here today locally, of builders, renovators, partners that are using AI, that may have used other tools or adapting things at work, that are willing to show you how it works. Maybe hop on a zoom, do a webinar, maybe get some of your brand partners to dive in a little bit with you, take on a little bit of that, you know, the accountability or leverage those relationships. Morgan mentioned, we work a ton together. The three of us are all local, so we're in a few different groups where we have a space to talk about it. But I was in a group of 20 women owned businesses here locally, not in this industry, but their businesses are probably starting at 10 million. Some go up to, you know, up to 100 million. And some of the most successful women business owners in the room said, but I just don't understand, what is AI? What is it? And they didn't. She didn't have a safe space to ask that what she thought was a really dumb question, so we just opened up our computers and we showed her. We said, well, here it is. Here's how you use it. And she's like, Oh my gosh, this is Google. This is a new version of just going into a search engine, typing in information, having it spit out content. But nobody ever taught her that, right? We just went to AI, we just went to chatgpt. We just jumped to the tools that we're using, but never really explained to people what the heck you're trying to do and why. So again, surround yourself by a room of people that you can ask your dumb questions to and start getting answers, your questions answered,
Morgan Molitor 17:29
and going off that too. It's asking the partners that you have right now and the brands that anyone the tools that you use, the brands that you use, that you put into homes. That's what I've started doing, and challenging our team to start having those conversations with every single one of them, asking, how are you starting to utilize AI, what are you looking into? And with that list, I'm like start taking note. People that are talking about it, people that have integrations already, start testing them out for them, giving them feedback. I think the really cool thing too is that we're all learning together. And Katie and I were just chatting on my drive in and and we were talking about that, where she had brought up she was like my husband and I started our company in 2012 when I started documenting what we were doing to this first investment property that we are renovating to sell and and we were talking about like that was early on with SEO and content creation, and no one knew what they were doing. And so I kind of started with content creation with brands like figuring it out. So I think right now in the housing industry, especially like we have such a cool opportunity right now to learn about AI with all the key players when it comes to building homes, building tools, building these brands that are being put into our clients homes, and learning you know how they're going to do it, how we can do it, how we can together bring the industry up.
Mark D. Williams 18:56
As you were thinking about adopting AI into your business and making a strategic decision. Did you ever think about hiring someone? I know it's such a new field, so I don't even know if there's people out there that's, you know, that you have to imagine there's going to be, very quickly, people that specialize in AI adoption, that you could hire someone. And we all run pretty small companies outside of John. And I imagine some of us out here is, you think it's somewhat similar, like, I know there's a lot of people out here that, you know, maybe they feel like, let's call Instagram for an example. And they're like, You know what, I need someone to run my account. I mean, you have me online. You actually do this for companies where people will hire your company and they help manage their social media content. Have you ever thought about hiring, you know, and people out here as well as maybe, you know, I think one of the barriers to entry to AI is how much of this do I have to figure out myself? How much time am I actually time blocking or setting aside to really devote to myself education? And the answer is, we all should be spending some time on it, because it's going to affect all of us in many ways. But have you ever considered hiring someone to like literally be that integrator for AI, for your companies, or not? I. I
Morgan Molitor 20:00
have not because I have not found anyone yet that probably knows I
Katie Kath 20:04
was just thinking the same thing.
Morgan Molitor 20:06
I have trust issues more.
Katie Kath 20:09
I have so much control on what the messaging is that goes out, which I could probably be in therapy about this is therapy, but it's worked so well for us that we we, you know, I think that's what's working for us. I don't know we have a funnel. We have never dried up in leads. We've never had to. And I think a lot of that goes down our communication and the brand strategy that we've adopted early on. But what I did was I took the work, which I maybe started to say in the last answer, and I didn't finish, I took the work that was already on my on my to do's, and I had to figure out a way to simplify and bring in help. And I have tried again, because it's the budget, right? We don't have a huge tech budget, we don't have a huge marketing budget, so we do a lot of things in house. And I have tried so hard to outsource something things. And I know that Morgan, you have a company that helps people with that, so I'm not contradicting trouble like this within that, but it's bringing in that outside help and then looking at the work and saying, that's not a saying, That's not our voice. It's just you don't get it. That's not who we are. We can't use that content. But with the AI tools, we have trained that voice so well that it's like, me on, like, on, like, 10 cups of coffee. It's so good.
Jon Walker 21:17
One important message that you're kind of getting to you're saying, like, we haven't really gotten AI experts, but I think it's part of it is it's much more accessible than people think. And I think there was a show of hands, who's using it every day? You're actually all using it every day. Now, if you're Google searching, it's in there. And I was kind of talking backstage. I switched when chatgpt came out. You probably noticed this, but Google search results are pretty bad nowadays. There's a lot of paid content and a lot of Robo generated content. So whenever I was searching for something, I was kind of sifting through, I got good at it like my mind got good at like, Oh, here's the thing I'm looking for, seven down. But I switched away from it to chat GBT. And at the time, Chad GBT had like, a 2021, version of the internet. So you couldn't ask it things like, what's the movie that's playing this weekend? But it was working for about 80% of my searches, much better than Google. I've actually switched back to Google because Google was integrated. They called it Bard now Gemini. You can tell we're still in the dork name stage of AI. We shouldn't forget Google. Actually, the name Google is from this number, the gigantic number, Googleplex and technologies kind of go through this, like dork computer science name phase, and then they become a little more mainstream. And sometimes we even forget the genesis of
Morgan Molitor 22:29
those, and they hire a brand new expert.
Jon Walker 22:32
I guess my point is, it's really accessible. And I talked to three builders, literally in the last two weeks that said they were doing they were using chatgpt to do all their oh gosh, the standard operating procedures. They were using chatgpt to generate the standard operating procedures. And one of them was telling me that his people challenged him on it and said, like, why are you doing this? It can't be right. And he said, look at him and tell me what's wrong with him. And he basically took the challenge, and he was not modifying them. Basically, he probably was pretty good at getting queries in there, like, after a little bit of work, but just, you know, he was just, he's a regular, regular person, just using him to do standard operating procedures. I also heard him doing them for, he was doing them for hiring and job postings. That's another one I've heard just in the last two weeks. I've heard a couple builders say that we
Mark D. Williams 23:20
just did that last week. Actually, I need to do a better job of interviewing people so that when we are ready to hire, you know, as a small company, it's not something I probably spend enough time. And so I just had, well, I don't actually do it my person that helps me write a lot of my blogs and chat GPD, heavy user. I said, Can you please write me a job description? Like, two seconds later, it's like, I was like, wow, that's really good, the way to go. So I think a lot of it is, and I'm concerned about my voice as well, right? We all have, Morgan has trained us to be very brand conscious, and so it's like, okay, I want to make sure that what I'm presenting all of you out there as you're building companies, if you're being intentional about what your messaging is, your website, how it looks, it's no different than the quality you put in your homes. You want it to be you. You want that to be a differentiator. And so if AI is changing that, I can see why people are hesitant. But to me, it's such a great first draft, and then you can color it in, you know how you wish,
Morgan Molitor 24:14
and if you're using it every day. So for us, and even our team, I'm like, I want to be replaced. I'm working on that every single day. Me and my husband are working on our exit strategy every single day. And then I'm telling our team, you should be working on your exit strategy every single day. And so I'm like, have chat GPT four pay for the version. It is well worth it because it integrates with so many other tools. But I'm like, have that. I have it up all day long. I encourage our team to have it up all day long. And what you were saying with like processes, I'm constantly like, this is our employee handbook. This is our Bible. This is everything we do within our company. Every single thing you do every day should be living in this, and then it should be in our live see to us Bible, because that. Do is, like sellable assets for later. So on top of like daily operations, which I think, if anything, it makes your company better. It helps it stay on brand, especially when new people are starting at your company, or interns are starting, everything is dialed in there. And then this bot gets to know your brand on a whole nother level, so that anytime you're using it for communication or brand. It knows every single thing beyond just the way you talk. It's about colors. It's how these people have to represent themselves and show up, from how they're talking person to person, to the energy that they're giving to homeowners when they walk into a room.
Katie Kath 25:36
I would add as well, we have a really young team. Not everybody. My husband's not young. I'm just kidding. He's 52 we like to give him a good time. Our team is pretty young, and the confidence in writing emails is one of the hardest things I have to manage every day. And giving them the kind of managing meetings, right? Yeah, it's like, you know, we have a team meeting, we'll have a set of deliverables, and then my team has to go execute emails to homeowners, and you know, it's a big deal. They're spending hundreds of 1000s of dollars on a project, and we can't write an email with Ian. We have to use our punctuation. You know, we try not to use the word like try not to have an exclamation mark at the end of all your sentences. And I give that feedback, and they buckle up and they just want me to write the email, and they're just terrified to send that communication out, but to your point of having that tool open on your desktop, just like you have your email, you should have your chat, GPT or Jasper, whatever tool you're using, and your team can go and say, just play with it. Just draft an email. Put your prompt it, tell it your problem. Help me write an email that's telling a homeowner that we're over budget by X amount and y, et cetera. And again, you wouldn't probably copy and paste that content into an email, but it helps them understand how to craft a professional email. And it seems so basic, but have you ever had somebody sent an email that got you in a lot of trouble, right? And then we do
Mark D. Williams 26:56
Morgan, you had mentioned a little bit about your back office operations. What are some AI tools specifically that you use, and maybe give us an example of how you're using them and how your team is using it. You know, maybe we'll talk about the back operations first, and then maybe about client facing second, if there's an illustration of that.
Morgan Molitor 27:14
Okay, so chat, GPT four, do the paid version, the free one, I think is just pretty basic. I mean, do the free to get started and 101, to get going. But once you invest in the free one, it has so many other I come like plug ins, even though they're not plugins, but tools that it integrates with. And so the big one, I guess this is internally and externally. So it's Dolly, D, A, L, L, E, it integrates with chat GPT four, we can talk to and a lot of times too. So how I'm using it daily is with chat G P t4 app on my phone, even on my way down here on the hour drive, like I'm talking because that's when I get my best thoughts, is like when I actually have time to think in the car. So I'm talking to my phone constantly. I'm talking to Chachi PT four to take notes, to relay back things to team meetings. That's when my creativity comes to me, my inspiration. So a lot of times I start thinking about maybe a client project and something I even see as I'm driving I can talk to it, and it basically can curate a mood board for me. It can do renderings for me. A lot of times, like our team, we can't get on the same page, even when it's like us the designer, you know, my husband, the contractor, the architect, the homeowner. Like we have all these all of us in the room, like have all these different key players in place that we have to get on the same page to potentially present to the client. And so even with that, like a lot of Dolly and chat GPT four I use for just like, instead of having, my rule is like, never. We're never having meetings about meetings and meetings about client meetings. And when we have to figure something out, I'm like, let's figure it out via email and we can get this done. So I always go back to time as money too. And so that just helps streamline a lot of things, even getting people subcontractors, out to job sites to maybe show like an application on a wall, to show a homeowner, to show maybe how the tile is going to be laid for the tile installer, Dolly and chatgpt do all that for us. So I never have to go to a job site. Another one too. Is just like showing selections in these I try to encourage our team to cut back on showroom visits, cut back on getting samples out to our clients, because I again, time is money. We run a lean and clean ship, and so I'm always like, the more you can be at your desk and get work done, or be on the job site and get work done, the better and utilize these tools to get the job done. Another thing I would say within that chatgpt Four is, like, a lot of trend and data analysis, I think, to the housing industry, like you were saying, is like, we're so far behind yet, I think we should be the most, biggest thought leaders out there, like we are building every single building that people are. Ian every day, and we're behind. So I think there's just such a barrier that we have to like progress and move faster. And so this is pulling data, like you said. This has been around for a very long time, and this is pulling data for us when it comes to not just like designs and homes, but what homeowners are looking for, what they want to spend, the latest tools, the latest, you know, staffing, on how to run our companies, pricing, all of that. And so I think just like looking at chat, GPT four within that, there's trends, there's data, we have it all synced and integrated with our website, which shows us where the traffic's coming from. Our social media tools. I use it for scheduling. I use sprout. Sprout has an AI integration. Love that tool that also helps me with any content that I'm putting on social media.
Mark D. Williams 30:59
This episode is brought to you by adaptive. For over two years now, I've been using adaptive. It's an incredible game changer. It's AI technology based. It helps you with Bill Pay and as a builder, there's very few things that Angular subs more than not being paid on time. Well, those days are gone. Not only do you know exactly where you are, but you can pay people through your ACH channels, making draws extremely quick with one click of a button, which used to take hours, my office staff is now able to generate a draw to the bank or to the client in literally seconds. The thing that I appreciate the most about adaptive is their ability to keep changing. We've given them three or four feedbacks on things that we need as builders, and within just a few months those they're rolling those things out. This is saving us hours per week and days per month in terms of our efficiency. If you're looking to upgrade your business, I'd highly recommend adaptive. You can reach out to them@adaptive.com or listen to the curious builder podcast episode 15 or episode 80, where we dive into their origin story. Lake society magazine is Minneapolis, Premier target market, boutique lifestyle and design publication. It embodies the unique lifestyles and design of the Minneapolis city lakes neighborhoods from Lake of the isles to Lake Harriet. It showcases the best in local design projects by both premier builders, architects and interior designers in this area. Lake society magazine has the look and feel of a national publication with glossy covers, high end finishes. It's mailed directly to upper brackets, single family homeowners in the city lakes area, and it's the perfect local coffee table top publication. Subscriptions can also be available through the website, Lake society magazine.com additionally, publisher and founder, Karen Steckel, has over 27 years in a local magazine publishing industry, and has a passion for high end photography and quality graphics. Her commitment to quality visual simplicity and beauty are strongly reflected in her beautiful lake society magazine. I think all of us, as you know, owners of companies. I mean, it feel like for me, scheduling is just a lot of scheduling that goes on you. I mean, you schedule, about scheduling, it just becomes a lot. How are you using AI to help you with scheduling? So,
Morgan Molitor 33:05
and we're just talking about this too. So speaking for Katie, too. So both Katie and I use a lot for internal we use monday.com which has been a game changer, changer for our company. And then I integrate a lot of chat, GPT and jasper.ai a lot of things too. I'm like, how, like, who needs to be again? Our bot knows our company, it knows our team. It knows what they do in the team, in our company. And so I'm always like, talking to it like, who should be doing this? How much time should they be taking? How much should we be budgeting for this? And so I'm able to use chat, GPT and Monday then to build out kind of a drip. Right? When this is done, it's going to them. This is the only time it should be taking. And I'm not sitting there for weeks trying to determine, oh, how much or even asking them. I think the biggest thing that we have too within this industry is like, or for me, the hardest thing is like, managing people. I'm very impatient. I'm like, let's go. I don't want to sit there and talk about your feelings. I have three kids at home like I have enough feelings to deal with, so I'm constantly just like a lot of that takes away from that. I don't need to sit and have these conversations about, you know, why did this take you so long? Why didn't you get this done? X, Y and Z, where I can see, because data is being pulled from these tools, how long it's taking them. If there's an issue, then I can address it. But to say, you know, this should only take this amount of time, and here's why, and then we can schedule it that way, and if red flags keep getting brought up, then we can figure that out. And then builder trend is going to incorporate all that into its tool.
Mark D. Williams 34:37
It only takes six months my
Jon Walker 34:39
house is built. As soon as my house is
Mark D. Williams 34:45
built. Katie, for you, what role has AI played for you with your CRM systems and following up leads things like that? Yeah,
Katie Kath 34:53
so we adopted jasper.ai that's our favorite tool we use, probably use it daily, if not several days throughout. The Week, and have been able to just put in specific URLs to our website. So I started just to experiment with our blog, where we have a different voice and might be really casual, friendly, approachable, we might have more of an educational blog, a tutorial, or when our blog does lean a little bit more into, you know, complications and renovating 100 year old home, we're trying to hit some, some targeted niche markets. And so with it's free. So again, if you're just getting started, you get one voice for free. If you want to upgrade, I'm still on, actually the one voice, the free version, because it's, what does that mean? One Voice, one voice. I just put in one URL link, so I'm just telling it one voice. But when I plug Jay Kath for her brand voice, yeah, and I'm actually, I found a blog that I feel like has a really good balance of my voice that we're using. So I'm not using just my home page. I'm directing it to a specific blog with content. But I could have four or five or more different voices, and it could be a blog I could upload our employee handbook, so it would obviously be much more formal writing. And then when I do a prompt, ask it to do something, I can pick, choose my voice. Wow, I'm just choosing my one voice. I don't need the five voices. Again, we're not spinning out that much content. And then within that, once it gives me what I'm asking for, I can always modify it, right? But we are. So we're using that for all of our content creation. Anytime somebody comes to our website, they fill out our apply to partner with us form, they get added to our email list. So whether or not they want to hire us or not, or they liked our response to the inquiry, they're automatically going to get our email communication until they unsubscribe. So all of that is pulling on the voice that we've trained Jasper to use with our seat. So that's, you know, helpful with our CRM. It's not a specific tool we're using, but just how we're doing that.
Mark D. Williams 36:43
Are you making are you making it? Not opt in. So anytime someone fills it out, they have to give you the website there. I'm sorry. Their email, yeah, they're
Katie Kath 36:51
Yeah, they're like that. They go, yeah, they're
Mark D. Williams 36:54
adding, make a note for Mark Williams, you took time
Katie Kath 36:57
out of our day to get in our inbox. You're going on the list. And
Morgan Molitor 37:00
also think about like from the ad spend, right? For you guys who spend, you know, I work with builders that spend 10s of 1000s of dollars on ad spend, on retargeting people that are coming to their site, this will now do it for free, yeah,
Katie Kath 37:13
and then we'll anytime we leave, so without getting into our process, but that our process is very tailored, and it took us probably about 18 months to develop our inquiry, our gem lead process. But once we get in, the whole goal of that was to minimize our trips out to people's homes a little bit different than a new construction. You might not even have land right where we have homes. And anyhow, Ian, and I know a lot of you do that as well. So when we do get to the home, then we go back to Jasper AI, when we come back to the office, and then we're putting in, basically the prompts of what happened on the job site, putting in the notes that we took, and then it's spitting out a scope of work for us. So then we take that and we put that into the pitch, the proposal for not our renovation agreement, but our next phase in the process, which is our design agreement, which allows them to hire our team to do the scope, development, budgeting, and then basically the set of tools that come with that. So Jasper AI is a great one. And then we also, I'll just mention another one. We use loom, which I'm sure a lot of you have heard of. It's been around for a while, and this is a little bit more internal, but this helps, again, with our team as they're communicating with our clients, and we record videos, we use it in a few different ways. But one is, we're just creating a video library internally. So it might be, my gosh, our team has given so many demonstrations of how to put door hardware on and how to match it with your the hand, you know. And so like, Oh my gosh. We have to start recording this now. So anytime new employees come in. So we have a video library. It's really informal. We're just using a gimbal, or we can record right through loom, and we're putting it all in there, but then loom will transcribe everything you've said, and so if you're doing it for external client interfacing. So it might be that we're presenting a budget update, we might be anything that would have been like a heavy email we're starting to evaluate, Is this too heavy to be sending an email? Should we be on the phone? Should we be in person? Or another option might be, can we actually record a video of us explaining to the homeowner what this email is and then loom? Well, you can record your screen. You can have your head talking if you want. You can opt to turn the camera off so it doesn't actually show you, but it has your voice. And then when you're done with recording, again, this is free, up to a five minute video. Anything over five minutes, I think, right, you have to be on the paid version. We're still on the free so we'll just like, might send like, three five minute videos, and then you can change the speed. It will eliminate all your ums and ahs and what ifs and filler words, and then it'll also create a transcript of what you said in the AI will pull the transcript out, so then again, for our younger team members, they can find a cleaner version to pick and choose. What of this transcript I then want to put in the body of my email and then attach these videos. A lot of that's early for design decision, et cetera, and I love more. Ian's approach, but one thing we do differently is we're using AI to get our team out of the office. So we want to be in more showrooms. We want to be on job sites, and we want to be in our client homes. We want to spend less time doing this all day. Again, my team loves to just sit behind a computer, which is great. There's so much work to be done, but I need them to get in their cars and go do that, hands on, face to face. What
Mark D. Williams 40:23
are your clients saying? What are they and this could go to any of the three of you, but maybe we'll start with you. Katie, what are your clients saying about these loom videos? Other than the one that says, Please stop communicating, it's too much, which is ironic. That's the first time I've ever heard a client say we had
Katie Kath 40:36
a phone call. So she gave me feedback on her communication. Oh, no.
Mark D. Williams 40:40
What are they saying about the loom videos? Or what are they what resonates with your clients the best? You know it's
Katie Kath 40:46
interesting. So we can see when they watch them, and we can see who watched them. So if we send it to a few people, it'll show us when they logged in and watched the video. I think what's interesting is it could take them a long time to watch sometimes people don't actually watch them for a while, which also helps me answer questions like why they're not, why it does take homeowners a while to respond to emails. It's probably they just didn't have the time. But I would say, generally speaking, it's usually within the same day all the videos are being watched. And I think it's just getting the answers we need a lot quicker. I mean, nobody has really said, Wow, those videos are so cool. Where'd you think of that? And I think, too, there's a certain generation that loom is like old news, right? I think a lot of people are using loom, yeah,
Morgan Molitor 41:26
yeah. And I love loom for all the things, but not even via email, but just texting. So I encourage our team too. I'm like, send a loom more than even emails if you can, because then I'm like, it's 20 seconds of just showing up. So again, getting them off of being so much in person, I feel like we haven't lost that touch, because they're still and I'm always like, turn your camera on. I don't care what you look like. Again, just show up who you are. I'm like, turn that camera on. Send them a thing. Because no matter what kind of mood they might be in or whatever, like, I just think that helps, like, reset the tone.
Mark D. Williams 42:00
I had a builder I interviewed on a podcast recently, and he actually has in their conference room one of those 360 cameras, and they record every conversation that they have with every client. And he implemented it for different reasons. His was to make sure that you never got into a he said, she said, situation, or even if their team was meeting with the client, and it would also recap it for people that weren't there. So as your team grows, you could obviously have it emailed to you. You could file it in there. And unfortunately, the dark side of the business sometimes is we do have to protect ourselves. One of the frustrating things that I find in business is like, John and I will have a conversation about building his home. Six months later, something will come up, and he'll say, Hey, Mark, you promised me this. And I'm like, did I? Because if I did, I'll honor it. But like it now becomes back to your comment about people being in the office. It's like you had this conversation. Then you have to go back to the office. You have to write everything that you talked about, send it to the client, say per discussion. This is what we discussed. I mean, imagine how much time you would save, even obviously, remotely, you can have a little microphone, or your phone will obviously do this. You can record the entire conversation, let the client know, and then send them a copy of the notes. It's not like, it's nefarious or anything like, if anything, they'll perceive you as being, like, Uber tech savvy and very competent. And again, that's one of the things that will raise this industry up quite quickly. Is like, wow, look at how they're adopting it. So otter,
Morgan Molitor 43:16
which you do this is like, my favorite thing, tool to use, too. And again, encouraging our team to use it. So now too, I am like reminding myself, like, even though you get invited to a meeting doesn't need mean you need to accept it, you know? So that's my favorite thing to do now, is like, deny, deny, deny all these medians. But my otter shows up to the medians, and I'm again, saving so much time mental energy, because I'm not on these zoom calls. I'm not in person doing them, but my otter is there. So my otter is documenting everything, and then I immediately get an email. This is in person too. So if our team is going to these meetings, I'm not going because, again, I want less than two people at every meeting, because I just see $100 an hour going out the window if there's, you know, just standing there, chit chatting, whatever. But so the otter goes to the meetings. The otter is on the Zoom meetings, and then I get an email recap, and so does everyone else that was invited to this meeting, whether they went or not. And then at the end of it, it recaps, right at the bottom, Morgan's to do, Jamie's to do, whomever is to do, or their next steps, their deliverables. Not one person has to document anything. Not one person has to say, Oh, I'll get back to you on this. It's all right there. And then I know exactly what I need to do, and I just saved the entire company 1000s of dollars. John,
Mark D. Williams 44:32
a question from you on your side of things, sometimes people are afraid of something that they don't understand as a normal human reaction. What risks are there with data being out there that's being captured by all this information? Is there a dark side, like, you know, even this morning, like I was looking on Instagram, I was gonna send out a video, and it said, your entire photo library has, you know, has exceeded six months of access for and I was like, whoa, okay. It's like, I think of all the pictures I have my kids on there, things like that. And I. A pretty open person. I'm not very private. But I was like, okay, deny. And anyway, the point was is, like, we're talking about people's finances. There's a lot of financial data on our computers. If a client came to us and said, I'm uncomfortable with the amount of information that you're gathering, how would we as builders answer that? And have you seen any kickback as you're developing these systems.
Jon Walker 45:20
I mean, I think it's obviously a conversation, right? I was just talking about this. It reminds me of the early days of search. If you remember when Google came around, one of the things, first thing that happened, everyone said, Oh, Google shouldn't be making all this money off of our content. And like a lot of the newspapers, sued, and there's actually a bunch of the newspapers, a lot of them private equity owned, just filed a lawsuit, actually, against chatgpt to try to get their content off. Now we kind of know how the search went. It was like, oh, it's really valuable to get your content on there. You want it to be searchable. You want it to be findable. And so I think there's a balance there. There's obviously a problem that's being recognized because a lot of the big providers of things like chatgpt or chatgpt, like technologies are starting to offer solutions where your data is kind of isolated, and there's there's actually whole models that are just based around, like, isolated data and things like that. And so I think there's some caution to have. I think we tend to over value some of that, and even internally, to build a trend, we have a lot of discussion there. There's some amazing tools that actually help you program, and you can be, like, almost 50% more efficient using these tools. One was called autopilot. And so you talk a lot about, if you're, by the way, you're a tough boss. I don't know if I want to go on a vacation with you anymore. That structure, so, but we have a lot of discussion like, How valuable is our code, you know, like, how much of it should we be putting there? How much should we worry about it? And so I think it's a conversation. I have actually had the discussion that, and I've had this for a long time in technology. Software is very, very complex now. It takes big teams to build it. I could actually probably take all our source code and give it to someone, and it wouldn't be very valuable. They would need a large portion of our team to actually make it into a business that's similar to buildertrend. And so I think we over emphasize that a little bit, but it's definitely something to be thoughtful about. And obviously the industry is thinking about
Mark D. Williams 47:15
it, maybe as a final question here before we open it up for Q and A, and I'll let each one of you respond to this in the next five to 10 years? What do you think? What do you see on the horizon? And maybe I'll have John you answer this first, since you're probably more aware of what's being developed, or I hope you are, what do you see coming down the road, if you had to guess five to 10 years from now, whether you want to hedge it like, what will we as builders be using? Or what sort of implementations do you think are out there, or is it so new in the game that it could be too many things and it's almost impossible to
Jon Walker 47:49
predict? I definitely think that technology is going to transform every industry, and AI is just one of those big, generational changing technologies. I think it is really hard to predict. I think actually there's a whole shift in the labor market that's happening right now where it's hard to hire, and part of that is a reaction to what jobs are valuable anymore, what's going to be automated. I actually believe that we're going to adapt around that, and there's going to be lots of value in human capital. Still, I think that that's actually causing part of the labor market we see right now, and it's the unpredictability. And certainly, if the labor markets across the whole globe can't predict this stuff, I don't think that I can go that far into it, but I definitely know you can look at it rote tasks, those are going to be done by AI, and it's all right, they're already being done. What you're starting to see now is actually, I'm talking a little bit later about this, but I'll give away one of them, Salesforce, just announced last week that they're going to a new licensing model. And I know a lot of people in here think about Salesforce or use something similar to it on the CRM side, they're going to new licensing model. Instead of charging for the software, they're charging $2 an hour for AI people that work for you on Salesforce. And so I don't know if that model says, like, it's worth about a fourth of minimum wage, and so that's the kind of tasks they can do, or if it says this is so effective, and they literally say, AI can do these certain tasks. And we've built these AI people, and we had a lot of success with that. At my last company, actually, property managers would outsource to call centers, some of their calls, and we actually replaced a good portion of the leasing calls that came in with AI generated content and call answers, actual real voices. We'd switch to text. We'd go to text. AI is really good at text. You're starting to see where it's really good at verbal communication. And I think what's interesting now is like people are looking at it at scale, you know, like, how do we automate a sales team and take some of those tasks away and do the verbal communication there? I think that you'll start to see that more individualized in the construction industry. I talk to so many people who are like, well, I learned the craft from a master builder, or I have a lot of the value in my. Company is all this construction knowledge I've gained over time. And even Katie was talking about how she's training AI to be her in a certain have her voice. I think we'll see a lot more of that where it's like you've got personal AI how I'll tell you. Yesterday, I sat on the bus for 15 minutes next to Phil Randolph, and he talked about the lumber industry, and I felt like I got a PhD in lumber. I wish I had an AI. Phil Randolph and Alyssa was telling stories. Alyssa, who's been up here a lot, she tells a story of how Phil trained her on materials by taking into her home depot and kind of going aisle by aisle and treating then when I heard that story, I said, Maybe I should move next to Phil for a couple months. I could learn so much that would be pretty amazing. I'm mows lawn, whatever he wants me to do. I think there's going to be an AI Phil, and Phil will still be really valuable, but there will be an AI Phil that can train me to go to Home Depot. I love that. And plug for his timber talk later today, I was just blown away. It was a it was an amazing experience for me to pick that kind of brain.
Morgan Molitor 51:05
I love that one. I would just say going off that too, like Courtney and I were talking about yesterday in our brand presentation. But people want emotion again. So what I think is really interesting and fun and exciting about our industry is that I think with AI, it's gonna help us bring back the emotion. It's going to help us stay create, creative in our in our job, and help automate all the things that we shouldn't be doing, and get that time back, get that mental energy back, get that clarity back in the industry. And like you said, like five to 10 years? Who the heck knows? Because I was on an AI panel in January at K biz, and it's like night and day from where that was to just now. And so I just think it's really exciting in that kind of way. And I think it's just going to speed our industry up, also to make us industry experts as professionals, and not just, you know, laborers and all this other stuff, and for homeowners to see our industry as something a little bit different, like it is, and get our voice out there more so
Katie Kath 52:09
yeah, I think that was the hardest question of all of them, was, where will it be in five to 10 years? That's hard one for me to answer, and maybe we're only just a year or so away from it, but it's a little bit of what John said. I hope that within the tools I'm using, even just the day to day ones, email, Outlook, Wordpress, my website, that I don't have to go to a third party, a chatgpt or a jasper to find my information, I want to just have it start populating within my everyday tools and the voice that I'm using. So oops, so I'm continuing to replace myself, either that it's I'm relying on AI, or as I'm bringing in new team members, there's a way that I'm documenting that transition so people can take over the communication piece of what we're doing.
Jon Walker 52:51
Also, sorry, I was gonna say one more thing, just to encourage you to kind of get a sense of where it's going. I'm a big book reader, and not all of you are, maybe, but there's a great book by Reid Hoffman, who's the founder of LinkedIn. It's called impromptu, and he basically wrote the book with AI, and he talks about with chatgpt specifically, and he talks about the prompts he uses, and it gives you a real sense of what it can do today. And the real interesting part of the book is, and he didn't take the construction industry, I wish he would have, but he goes into the field with certain experts and has them use chatgpt to try to do their work. And so he works with a film producer or a script writer, and it's really interesting. You can kind of see how effective it is. And the script writer starts out, and he's having it write these scripts, and the dialogue's kind of stale or it's not very good, but he gets to it, and he says, Hey, create a plot twist here. And AI creates this plot twist chatgpt does. And, OK, that's an OK one, but don't do these obvious plot twists. And so basically, in about 15 minutes, he experiments and comes up with a very novel plot twist that he probably would have had to spend hours writing multiple scripts, basically, hundreds of scripts to get to. And so he still it was all his creativity. He had to recognize which plot twist was interesting, which plot twist not to use. He probably would have had to rewrite a lot of the dialog because it was a little bit stale, but it was an empowering thing for him, and he kind of saw the vision. And he also talks to a musician, and he says, What if there was an AI version of Bob Dylan out, you know? And that's kind of scary, right? Like, is Bob Dylan? Dylan valuable now? And the musician had the same reaction, that's scary. And then he said, Well, what if Bob Dylan had an AI that was just like him, and instead of writing songs, he could write 1000 songs and pick the one that really hits home for him, how much of an amplifier that creativity would be. That's a great book. Impromptu really gets you a sense of where things are going, and kind of shows how it's still going to enable us to be really creative and add value, but use AI to kind of up level our productivity.
Mark D. Williams 54:59
Thank you for all your input. How much time do we have for Q and A? Five minutes. All right, so let's open up for Q and A for any of our guests. If anyone has a questions, we will get you a microphone, and we'd ask you just to wait till you have the microphone to speak your question so we can get it recorded. So anyone that has a question, please stand up and frequent flyer over here. This gentleman, he likes his questions. You are a curious builder, my friend, I like you.
55:29
Good morning. Thank you. This is, I don't know that much about this, so it's very I got ton of notes, and I appreciate it. But Elon Musk, who I think should be electroshock for his own good, suggests that AI someday is going to take over the world, and we're this is a very dangerous thing, and it keeps them up at night. Is there any truth to that? Anybody concerned that they're going to take over all the airplanes and we're not gonna be able
Katie Kath 55:53
to get home? I don't probably have the most sophisticated answer to Elon Musk, but I am a firm believer that we're creating jobs. And while we are I talk about eliminating my role, but we're creating content that allows us to back up to what's our strategy. So now our team can think deliberately about, do we want to send out that weekly email? Do we want up that cadence to two or three a week? Do we so? And we're taking our again, our scope of work and our proposal statements are putting together where we've juiced them up. So I think we're just taking all of this AI content. It's much like if you have 1000 songs and you can pick one, we're still doing the work, and it'll still require, in my opinion, the human lens, creativity. And it's really just freeing up time where we can, I can take our budget and I can hire, we've been able to add more people to our team to go in the field and do the work that we need to get done.
Mark D. Williams 56:41
I would also add any tool, whether it's a gun, a car, whatever. I mean, they're going to be created. How we use them is really up to us. We have a totally different panel that's going to have to answer some of those questions ethically, but some of it has arrived, like, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, like it's here, and you might as well use it to harness your business and help you to buy back your time. One thing we didn't talk about, Morgan has built her retreat. We have something called boot camp and Sonic camp. If you could actually, well, we want to be more productive and we want to make more money. A big part of it too is if this can buy back our time, so you can read a book, so you can go for a run, so you can exercise, so you could spend more time with your family. Like, what is that worth? We could do a whole hour long podcast just on on that worth, and it's a great question. I think we'll see what humans do with it like anything else. I mean, I don't think it's any different than any other tool. Personally.
Morgan Molitor 57:32
I don't believe it.
Jon Walker 57:33
We only have so much time, but real quick this, I have a slightly different answer to that. I do think there's some real dangers to it. I actually think we will legislate around it. And you could say, well, that's scary. Has government ever solved problems like this before? And I always point to there's very, very complex systems that we have regulation around. And one of the best ones that you point to is the financial markets. And the SEC does an amazing job regulating that. They catch people that are small time people doing trades that are dishonest, and it's an incredibly complex computerized system, and we've created a body that regulates it and does a pretty good job of it. I think that's the direction it'll go at some point for the very dangerous parts of AI and Elon Musk isn't the only one who thinks that. There's a lot of people that think that we're going
Mark D. Williams 58:20
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