AI is a tool to use to communicate better to our customers and take some repetitive tasks off our hands. But it is a tool, not the replacement of humans.

Today we are joined with AI expert Mat Koenig as he explains a few ways AI can be used responsibly in your business.

AI can be used as a customized chat bot on your website to answer questions and book calls all the way to answering your phone calls and responding to texts and emails.

However, like all good things, it takes effort, intentionality, and diligence to make it work effectively.

Whether you are new to the AI discussion or are a current user, this conversation is filled with useful information for you to weigh out to see if using AI is the right fit for you. And if it is, how you will use it.

In This Episode:

Learn the three basic guidelines necessary for training your business AI model. 

1. Role – What role will your AI play?
2. Goal – What is the goal you want your AI to accomplish?
3. Context – What are the boundaries your AI needs to remain in?

And don’t forget to tell your AI not to make up information. You will need to tell it what to do if it does not have the answer. If you don’t, your AI might “hallucinate” and make up an answer just to complete it’s program.

Redeem Your Business Today by the Following:

How can we honor God in our business?

Do good business. Operate with integrity. Lead with integrity and excellence to show you honor God in your business.

One challenge from today.

Start using AI to get familiar with it. Like everything else, there is a learning curve. Take the time to learn how to train your AI model. Hire Mat if you want to go faster.

More About Mat Koenig

Check out Mat’s website and learn more about how AI can free you up from repetitive tasks so you can invest more in your core business.

Non-Church Version www.rockstarinfo.com

The Church Version www.managemychurch.org 

More About David Schmidt

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Website redeemingbusinesstoday.com

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Mentioned in this episode:

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David:

[0:00] So, my friends, if you follow business development, you may have noticed an increase in popularity of AI. Well, it doesn't necessarily make it good or bad, but we're going to talk about AI today and what it is and how we can use it responsibly in our business. And I brought Matt Koenig today on, who has been involved in this automotive space for a while now, been in automotive for about 30 years and now with AI a number of years. Um he's also recently been led to plant a church and so in the midst of that he's a dual worker kind of like Paul was as a tent maker so hey matt welcome to redeeming business today and great to have you on the show

Mat:

[0:37] Thanks so much David it's great to be on the show with you man I'm excited to talk about uh ai business and everything else today brother.

David:

[0:44] Oh yeah um well so Mat this is a Christian podcast and i like to challenge our listeners before we get started what is one way you believe that we can honor God in our business that other people may not know about?

Mat:

[0:59] Ooh, I don't know that it's not, uh, that it's going to be something other people don't know about, but I think the best way that we can honor God in our business is to do good business. Um, I see a lot of, a lot of folks, a lot of us that are Christians that like to lead by saying, Hey, I'm a Christian business. And it's like, uh, there's nothing that makes a business Christian. Uh, I, I would prefer to lead with, um, with the fact that I'm somebody who's going to operate in integrity. And if they ask why we do what we do, it's because we follow Jesus in his example. So, yeah, I just think if we do business well and we, we really take care of our customers well, then we're, we're showing the example that Christ taught us.

David:

[1:39] Very good. It's acting out what you're saying. Yes, very much. Very much so. Very good.

David:

[1:47] Matt, take a few minutes to tell our audience your journey and how God has moved you away from the automotive world and now into more specifically AI and what you're doing there.

Mat:

Mat:

[3:22] And some shoes that were dress shoes that were too big. And I show up on Monday and I realized I'm interviewing for a job selling cars. And I was like, oh no, I don't know how to sell it. And like, oh, so thankfully they made a hiring mistake. Um, and I realized back then they would just hire, they would hire a handful of people. They would do the spaghetti method, right? You hire five, throw it against the wall, see who's stuck. I didn't stick. I lasted two months and got fired. But then, uh, my son had been born. I was like, oh goodness, like nothing pays as well. Like I didn't do good, but even doing bad, I made more money than I would have made working, you know, for five bucks an hour at a drive-thru. So another dealer made a hiring mistake and hired me. Um, and I didn't get any training and they were like, Oh, we don't expire people before Christmas. So you're here till the end of the year. Just don't come back after new year. So as you can imagine now, at that point, I just turned 19. I'm driving home crying, right? I'm like, I've got a baby to support, uh, or broke and, uh, and I'm fired again. And so thankfully another dealership, they put me through eight hours of interviews in two days. And they hired me to be a salesperson. They actually trained me well with integrity. Here's how you take care of a customer. Here's how you serve them. Here's how you follow up. So that's where I really got my start in the industry.

Mat:

[4:42] Fast forward time, I had an automotive group who believed enough in me to train me to be in a leadership role. So they spent tens of thousands of dollars to teach me how to be a professional sales trainer, professional sales management leadership. And so I got to work with that automotive group for a number of years. I got recruited by their biggest competitor later, uh, which was an absolute blessing. Um, and then fast forward time, um, I mean, I had kids and didn't want to live in the dealership world. So I ended up going to work for some automotive vendors, cars.com was my first step out of the dealership. Yeah. And when they first came out, um, nobody knew about them in Michigan where I was. So I sold their product to automotive dealers and we were able to really grow that market well. And then I became their national sales training manager for years. And from there, if you've ever went to Edmunds.com to look up a car's value or shop for a car, I actually launched the program for Edmunds.com to allow people to shop for cars on their site from automotive dealers.

Mat:

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[6:34] And then as we just saw things evolving, we were putting on events, conferences. And then a few years back when everybody started getting all excited about ChatGPT, we started looking into artificial intelligence and saying, How can this be useful? And what are the dangers of it? And I'll tell you, I'm one of the first people that'll say this. When it first came out, everyone jumped on the bandwagon to sell it. And I went, bad idea. It's not ready to trust your clients to yet. And this was a couple of years ago, two and a half, three years ago. I said, automation is good to handle monotonous tasks or repetitive tasks, but golly, do not. I'm like, don't, don't trust your livelihood to a machine yet. Like it's going to do you wrong. And knock on wood, we were right. And early on, it was a lot of companies made a bad choice to go the AI route. And thankfully, I'm an Apple person through and through. My wife will tell you, an iPad, iPhone, we're on a Mac mini now.

Mat:

[7:36] The webcam is another iPhone. So I'm an Apple guy through and through. And I love the way that they take their time to do things well so when it came to artificial intelligence i said i'm going to follow the apple model and the tesla model and we're not going to rush anything and there could be a hundred competitors that are faster to market but what we're going to do is learn from their failures as we craft things that are smoother and uh by the grace of god we've been pretty fortunate um he is he's blessed us with some really cool customers and uh and and we've been growing steadily. Uh, so yeah, that, that's how I got, came from automotive day. I, it was, um, I guess I skipped one piece, which is I also still do training with automotive dealers.

Mat:

[8:20] Um, I do sales meetings 40 to 50 a month. And one of the things that I noticed, and this is what really sparked things with AI was we were running into the same issues over and over. My salespeople struggle to respond to email leads or messages through Facebook or through our website. Uh, and dealers were saying, my salespeople struggle on setting appointments over the phone. And I said, well, those are two problems that in the last 30 years, no one has solved.

Mat:

[8:47] How can we solve these two problems? And so our foray into AI began with, how do we help them communicate better with leads that come through via text, via email, via form? And then once we got that pretty nailed, we said, okay now how can we help them on the phone side and yeah so that's how we got from from where i began which was a bad hiring decision uh to where we are yeah.

David:

[9:12] Yep i understand i mean god god works and always wonder sometimes how he works and yeah he it's fine it's just how it is um yeah so so ai um In a nutshell, if you're trying to explain AI to somebody who just came to this century, what is it? What does it do for you?

Mat:

[9:38] Well, it can do a lot of things. So what I would say is this. Artificial intelligence is basically taking a computer and allowing it to do some of the repetitive tasks for you and giving it some bandwidth of allowance of what you'll allow it to do without you. So a great example is this. Artificial intelligence is like hiring a new employee and giving them training on certain issues you want them to handle. The difference between that and hiring a human employee is you can trust the artificial intelligence to follow the training 99% of the time. And I won't say a hundred because AI is evolving. And I could tell you a funny story about how it happened to us where we gave it a little too much trust. But yeah, so AI, if somebody were new, I would say, hey, think of it like your robot, like hiring a robot to do the job of people. And it's consistent. That's really what it is.

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