"AI is not going to be built by Big Tech or Silicon Valley, it's going to be built by people like us." — Eugina Jordan

Why This Matters: Small businesses drown in disconnected tools — QuickBooks here, HubSpot there, Gmail somewhere else — and waste hours toggling between tabs instead of growing. Eugina Jordan built a patented platform to end that chaos and put real-time business intelligence into the hands of non-technical founders.

The Story: After 24 years in telecom — where she created a new market category called Open RAN and rose to Chief Marketing Officer — Eugina Jordan became an empty nester and decided she had one more startup in her. She co-founded YOUnifiedAI with her former colleague, combining enterprise-grade integration patterns with a conversational AI layer so small business owners can simply ask their business how it's doing. The platform, built on five patented integration patterns, launches at Startup Grind this spring.

Your Readiness Roadmap:

• How to stop drowning in tabs by unifying your business tools into a single conversational interface

• How to assess your own AI readiness by starting with curiosity rather than credentials

• How to build a company in three months by leveraging AI tools and trusted relationships

• How to hire for the AI era by prioritizing curiosity over technical checklists

• How to turn telecom-grade thinking into small business advantage by abstracting complexity the way carriers unify 2G through 5G

Inside the Conversation:

• [00:00] Open — The AI adoption gap and why now is the second-best time to start

• [00:10] The content overload problem and why human connection beats artifacts

• [00:17] Multiple businesses, one orchestration layer — the future of solopreneurship

• [00:28] Meet Eugina Jordan — from telecom veteran to AI startup CEO

• [00:33] How YOUnifiedAI unifies disconnected business tools with patented tech

• [00:39] Eugina's AI journey — from predictive AI in telecom to generative AI startup

• [00:45] Launching at Startup Grind, pitching at Venture Summit, and listening to users

• [00:49] Eugina's TEDx talk — technology giving ordinary people superpowers

• [00:57] AI Readiness = being curious, not being afraid, and just starting

The Toolkit:

• YOUnifiedAI — Eugina's patented platform unifying business tools for SMBs

• Eugina Jordan on LinkedIn

• Claude Code — terminal-based AI development environment

• Google Gemini / NotebookLM — AI workspace and research tools

• The AI Salon — community of 4,000+ exploring AI

• She Leads AI — women's AI education and community

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrT7MsGbUKA

Connect with the AI Readiness Project:

• The AI Salon

• She Leads AI

• Wednesday LIVE — 3pm PT / 6pm ET

At the AI Readiness Project, we believe that in this remarkable age, AI isn't the main character you are. While the tech is racing ahead, it's the humans who learn to harness AI mindfully that will win. Each week, we meet remarkable people doing just that. Join Kyle Shannon, tech leader and AI instigator and Anne Murphy fundraiser and AI consultant as they lead the conversation about staying grounded, growing smarter and leading with what makes us human.

There we go. Dancing away. Fantastic.

You know what's fun if you get to make your rounds on AI podcasts is that all of us have these fun jaunty little spin jingles in the beginning. It's like, it's really fun.

You gotta have a little jingle. I gotta say, listen, I am not a fashion critic or maven, but you have got color coordination. You've got the red stitching here with the green sweater, with the red hair. Everything is working.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

I'm not saying sometimes your colors are sometimes... it's like from the eighties had a mistake, but this is tight. This is 2002 solid hip hop.

Well, we didn't get to dwell on it too much, but when we were making fun graphics around Festivus with the big hair and stuff, that actually was how my hair was. I had eighties hair. Full on like where my head and with some of my pictures wider than tall because of the wings.

How you been? What you doing? What you been up to?

I've been good. I go through these phases of like, I've got it all figured out. Then I have nothing figured out. Then I come up with some new framework to explain it.

I talk last week about how marketing is changing. You can't talk about the thing. You have to talk about you as a one of one in the universe. And the seven economies and the great repurpose. So I've just got all this stuff swimming around and I'm giving talks on it.

I think right now, this window right here, like this few months going into summer, if you never did anything with generative AI before and you're like, is it too late to start? You will be so fine if you start right now. You actually might be ahead if you start right now, working beneath the layer of the chat bots a little bit. Learning how AI and your brain work together. If you start right now, you will not have missed out on much.

I think now's a remarkable time. I also do believe if you don't start now, things are accelerating so fast that the ability to even just understand what's possible is gonna be harder and harder. The thing that I just see more and more is that everyone's job is about to change dramatically. They're either gonna lose their job and have to start a new thing, or they're gonna keep their job and their job is just gonna be a completely different thing.

At the end of the day, my measure of like, did I do the thing or not, is often did I turn something into a file or a folder and send it to somebody.

Our job is to make files.

Our job is to make files. So like here you are, you're like, the grandeur, the things that we can do and the problems that we can solve. On the other hand, you're like, man, there are some days where I wrap it up and I'm like, what I accomplished today. I made a whole bunch of files and I forgot to ship half of them.

I'm still struck by this stat that 83% of the 8.2 billion people on Earth have never used AI, and 16% have only used the free subscription. So that's 99% essentially don't know what's here, not what's coming, what's here.

I just sort of lost my mind and I told people to stop producing crap. Stop sending me 24 page analysis of blog posts that you read. What I realized is none of this stuff matters anymore if there's not a connection, a deep human connection to the person that sent it.

So there's Anne Murphy, the person. And I have Empowered Fundraiser Consulting. Then we have She Leads AI. But now because we've added Moxie, this third brand, it was the addition of the third brand that allows me to go back to just being Anne.

I really do think we're entering this world where we're gonna have multiple entities, multiple businesses. But if you say, hey, I'm Anne Murphy, and you talk to someone and you say, I'm really passionate about this, that, and the other. It's like you earn the right to talk about the business by earning the trust or creating the human connection first.

Sitting there like in a terminal and being able to orchestrate all of that work happening around you is pretty powerful and a very different way of doing things that I don't think is going to actually come naturally to very many people.

One of the things that has been really cool is seeing how I can build continuity around these brands, these entities, these systems, these flows. But the biggest unlock for me so far is being so stubborn that I will not go out into another tool. I will only work with Claude Code. Claude Code is doing it or it's not happening. That's my new rule.

I went to Claude Code last night and I took a pile of our XML that made up one of our videos and I said, here's the API documentation from this third party vendor, use FFmpeg to basically replicate that and make me a video rendering engine. And this morning I woke up and there was a rendered video out of our XML. I went from having a full on dependency to basically an hour of my time.

Just take as much information as you have on a technology that sounds pretty dope, that might have something to do with yours, and just shove it all into Claude Code and find out how close Claude can get to just making it for you. You'll be very surprised.

If you have not joined the AI Salon, please do so. Go to the salon AI, join the community. The AI Salon is a community of about 4,000 people that are optimistic and exploring and trying to figure out this AI stuff.

She Leads AI. One of the really cool things about us is that we gather every single Saturday for two hours, and we talk about the kind of stuff that we typically don't talk about in lots of other settings. We also have an in-person conference. We have cohorts where we do AI education and we certify AI educators.

Welcome Eugina. Why don't you introduce yourself, tell us who you are. Tell us what you're excited about. Tell us about Unified AI, and then let's jump in.

Congrats. Your platform's doing amazingly. Especially giving credits to women in AI because I saw a cohort of people innovating in AI and there was one woman out of 25.

All my career, I been the only woman in the room. I spent 24 years in telecom. Created a new market category there called Open RAN, basically disaggregating the cell site. Worked with predictive AI. Finished my career as chief marketing officer and then I felt there was one more startup left in me.

I started YOUnifiedAI because what I identified is small to medium sized businesses, we all have a lot of different tools. QuickBooks, HubSpot, Gmail. This doesn't talk to that one. So we build a platform that actually, and it's all patented, we have five patented patterns that makes those tools talk to one another, and it's built for non-technical people.

You come and you talk to the platform. Launching in three weeks.

Your platform is so important for this to allow people to be able to just do their jobs, do their work, not this other stuff of hooking everything up and hoping it works.

How many tabs do we have open right now? Because it's all your tools. And sometimes my husband is a small business owner. He has so many tabs open and all he wants to know is how much money he generated. And he has to look through like 10 different tabs.

A good friend of mine said, I think that the future of AI looks like this. Our current world is so complicated that a lot of our jobs are interacting with these overly complicated systems. AI's gonna bury all that complication and we're just gonna have this simplified AI layer. Which is essentially what you've built.

When I came up with this idea, I was told that this cannot be built. So that was a motivation as well. It's a combination of different types of innovations. Me and my co-founder, we come from telecom, so we are bringing in enterprise software. Real time insights, agnostic. To our system they're agnostic because they are running either financial workflows, operational workflows, marketing workflows.

It's all tailored to a particular user because your needs might be different than my needs. We have two adorable chatbots. One is called Uni and the second one is Fi. One chats and the other one works.

Each single user has their unique experience based on the apps they use and their needs.

You said that you had a moment where you thought, I think I have one more startup in me. What did that mean to you?

My son is turning 22. He actually helped me last year build a prototype because I told him, I gave you life.

I went with, I gave you college tuition and your food money. And your beer money. And I still get nothing.

We became empty nesters three years ago and I realized, it's my time now. I can do whatever I wanna do. So I reinvented myself.

What's been your journey with AI? Had you been following AI? Were you ready and waiting for generative AI to show up?

We used generative AI in telecom because it generated reports. When ChatGPT was released, obviously I started using it, playing with it. The note I wrote is you still need to know what you're doing. The reason Kyle you were able to create the video editing platform is because you know what you're doing.

As a former CEO, I generated incredible assets for my company for the launch because I know how to do it. I use NotebookLM. So that's where it's a combination of generative AI and a human that knows what they are doing.

It's a human that has to be curious enough to follow what's going on with AI, but also adaptable enough not to get too locked into the thing that you built.

This morning I told myself the next people I'm gonna hire, I'm only gonna hire curious people.

It's curious people. Are you curious, vulnerable? Are you a doer?

The curiosity is even more important to me in these last couple of weeks because as we've been bringing people on, everybody's gotta use Claude Code. If you're not using Claude Code, you're on your own.

We're about to launch in three weeks. We went through beta last November and December. It was founded a year ago. We built a prototype. We pitched at MIT. Then we just went into building our MVP. We got selected to be at Startup Grind. That's where we're launching. And we're also pitching at Venture Summit.

It's all about listening to users and understanding what they need because I'm not building for myself. I wanna be helpful to my future users.

Let's talk about your TEDx talk.

The TEDx talk is about any type of technology giving ordinary people superpowers. I talk about a story when I was growing up in communist Russia and I was in college and I had to make some money. At the end of that office was something I never seen before in my life. It was a computer. Because I took that as a challenge and I learned how to use it, that's how my journey started in technology.

AI is not gonna be built by Big Tech or Silicon Valley, it's gonna be built by people like us, people that are on this podcast. The people are listening to us because we are using AI, this wonderful new technology for real regular things.

How do the two things interface? How do we get to have the impact that we wanna have when these 800 pound gorillas are here in our lives?

By building what we wanna build. They give us technology and we are making it our own. We're creating companies. Just like with the computer 50 years ago, so many ordinary people became and built generational wealth because they built businesses on computers. Same with the internet.

Be curious about the people around you. Trust that lots of the brilliant minds around you have not really been asked to bring their zone of genius to the fore before.

What does AI readiness mean to you?

AI readiness is being curious. There's so many new tools coming on the market every single day. What you don't know today, if you start today in three months you will have a good understanding, good foundation. AI readiness is being curious, not being afraid to start, and just simply starting. Who is stopping you.

I am so excited for your launch in three weeks. I can't wait.

Congratulations. I can't wait to see what comes next. Let's stay in touch.

Thank you very much for having me. This was, it's seven o'clock my time and I'm so energized.

Thank you so much. This was awesome.