The PARTNERNOMICS® Show - Chris Daigle: Episode 69, Founder & CEO of ChiefAIOfficer.com

Speaker A: Welcome back to another episode of the Partonomic Show. On this episode, I was joined by Chris Nagel, and Chris is the founder and CEO of ChiefAI officer dot com. Uh, really cool business. Really interesting. Obviously, AI is absolutely huge in and only growing. And so Chris saw a pretty cool opportunity to step in and to provide a training course. He offers a training course as well as a certification. But the idea is just to help educate folks on what AI is, how it can help organizations grow, but to provide an industry certification, kind of those best practices, those success practices, those industry standards for AI and AI use inside of organizations. But it has a solid career. Um, lots of lessons learned along the way that he shares in this episode. But I really enjoyed the opportunity to chat with Chris again and to get to understand his business more. Hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Here we go.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Partner Nomics show, where industry thought leaders discuss the hottest topics in partnerships, ecosystems, and innovation.

Speaker A: Welcome back to another episode of the Partner Nomics Show. Uh, man, we got a good one for you here. Obviously, AI, you cannot turn, uh, on the TV or jump on LinkedIn without seeing AI at least 50% of the time, it doesn't seem. But, uh, we're lucky enough to have one of the experts in this space to chat with us about this, Chris Daigle. Chris, how are you doing, sir? It's great, uh, to see you again. How are things going today?

Speaker C: It's going great, man. Um, busy time in the AI space, let's put it that way.

Speaker A: Oh, man. And it's not slowing down, is it? I didn't think it could get faster, but it is.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's exciting. New stuff's happening every single week. And, uh, it really is. It's tough to keep up for a professional who's immersed in it, much less anybody who's just, know, casually trying to use it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So Chris is the founder and CEO of Chief AIOfficer.com and, uh, we, we'll dig into his business and kind of learn more specifically about, you know, what he's doing. Uh, really cool. An amazing resource, uh, the first, the only one that, that I've heard of that's, uh, you know, kind of offering the services that he is. So excited to share that with the, uh, with the audience here. But before we dive into that, uh, Chris, I love to just kind of, you know, when we have guests on, just chat about what was your first foray into business? Uh, whenever you, you know, coming out of high school, college, whenever you're kind of tackling this big world. What was the initial start?

Speaker C: It was actually way before that, man. So, um, I guess, you know, my position is, uh, I believe I was born an entrepreneur. It's just innate within me, right? And I didn't even know what the word meant, and I'd never even heard the word until, you know, much later. Much a much later date than I realized. That's what I was like. I was just. I was that guy. So my first business experience was arbitrage, uh, candy bars and things like that in fifth grade. And, um, it just made sense, right? You know, identified a gap demand in the marketplace. There was a gap. Um, and I filled that gap with, uh, out of my locker. And, um, kind of had the bug, I guess. And then I continued to be entrepreneurial, shall we say, uh, until, I guess, my first job. You know, in high school. I started working early. I was a waiter in a restaurant. And that's entrepreneurial, right? You're kind of in charge of your time and, uh, how much money you make based on your, you know, your skills and your rapport building and all that kind of stuff. Which, for me, that. That kind of. Again, it came naturally. It was just a gift that I was given, uh, this time around. And, you know, my waiting tables led me to, um. I had a bartender at one of my restaurants. I was in Jackson, Mississippi. And he came with this. This picture book full of all these pictures, like the beach and catamarans and bikinis. And I was like, dude, where is that? He's like, oh, I used to work in the Virgin Islands. I was like, man, that's amazing. I'd, uh, love to do that. He's like, you don't even need a passport. And I think within one month of him telling me that, sight unseen, I packed up and moved to the Virgin Islands. And he found the job waiting tables. It happened to be at one of the best restaurants in the Caribbean at the time.

Speaker A: So not a vacation, but, like, you move there, move there, dude.

Speaker C: You know, it was crazy because I'm from the South. We have hurricanes. And a Category 5 hurricane had hit, um, in October of the previous year. And six months later, I moved. And I was thinking, man, like, they got this cleaned up by now, and it was still a wreck. Um, so I showed up. This was Hurricane Marilyn for anybody that's, uh, from, uh, St. Thomas or down Island. And, um, got a job at the restaurant. And it happened to be at a time when cigars were making a really big, uh. They kind of, like, made A splash in the US this must have been, I don't know, the mid to late 90s and you know, um, Caribbean. They. That's where a lot of tobacco. Dominican Republic. And that was my next kind of big arbitrage play. I was flying over to the Dominican Republic, making connections directly at the factories and then shipping cigars to New York and really all over the US because they couldn't keep up with demand. Um, same thing. I enjoyed the, uh, the, the easy money, let's call it of. To me it was easy because it was just. It was doing the deal. Um, and I moved. I met a girl down there. Uh, she was from, uh, San Francisco. And this was, you know, 1998. Let's say technology was really starting to hit the scene as far as, uh, the, the first.com kind um, of boom that was happening. And I said, man, look, let's move back to California. I'll spend a year, uh, learning this computer stuff and I'll be rich. Um, we moved back. I spent 11 months waiting tables and then, uh, found like, um, really it was just. It was kind of like a sweatshop, man. But it was, um, they were teaching people SAP, which at the time was a big, ah, erp. There was huge contracts, not enough demand to fill it. And I guess my first real job was working for. At the time it was Anderson Consulting, but now it's Accenture. So I learned SAP. I said, don't worry, you're not going to travel. A week later, I was in London for a year. Um, worked my tail off more than I ever had. Didn't, um, know nearly as much as, uh, they sold me for, uh, to the client, which I think is pretty typical in big for consulting. Um, but, you know, just that entrepreneur. There was a couple of things that, that happened in that process. Um, I learned this concept of fio. Figure it out, right? And that's now one of the core values in really any company that I've started since it's. We expect people to fio. And if you're listening to this and you're, you know, you're wanting to strike out on your own as a solopreneur or you're wanting to launch a business, FIO is like, that's got to be the name of the game. There is nobody coming to help you. Um, and if you're, if you're able to do it enough, it just becomes a habit, it becomes a discipline for you. And, and that just becomes how you operate, which is a key tenet of success. And Entrepreneurship, um, and just kind of proved to myself that, you know, I, I had the stick to itiveness to, um, show. I mean, dude, I worked so many hours, but I kept showing up, uh, as, you know, nervous as I was about the expectations on my role and all that type of stuff. And as an entrepreneur or a founder or somebody running a business, like, just keep showing up, um, one more day. Just keep telling yourself, one more day. I can do it. One more day. One more day and things will start to happen. I can tell you that the path to success is, uh, certainly not a straight line for most. Definitely not a straight line for me. And what happened was, I think at the time I was like 28 years old. And because it was such a hot topic, I got poached by a boutique firm. They doubled my salary. Six months later, poached by another boutique firm, doubled my salary again. So I found myself, you know, at, you know, under 30, making a lot of money for somebody who had been waiting tables and kind of goofing around for most of his life. And, you, uh, know, I remember I was sitting in a hotel room, a suite in Jacksonville, Florida, working for, uh, a big client, a billion dollar client there, and it hit me, man. I was like, got everything that I want, that I thought I wanted, right? I'm making fantastic money. I travel around the world, respect, uh, of my clients. And I realized, like, I'm not happy. Like, this sucks, right? And that was a big lesson for me that, um, the, the money alone is cliche. And tried as it is, you've heard it since a kid, money won't make you happy. But until you have that experience, um, you don't believe it. And then you have the experience, you're like, damn it, they're right. And I remember I was sitting in the hotel room and an infomercial came on for a guy named Carlton Sheets. And he used to do these television infomercials about buying and selling real estate. And at the time, my, my home base was New Orleans. I said, man, like, I want to make the same money, but I don't want to have to travel. I want a little more freedom in my life. Picked up the phone from the hotel room, dialed the number, bought the course, um, and just immersed in the subject of, ah, creative real estate, deal structure, sourcing, negotiations, all that kind of stuff. And at the time, I just happened to be lucky. It was, um, early 2000s, so real estate was a hot, hot market back then. And I think within the next two years, I bought and sold about 50 properties. As a, um, really just a guy that got between the deal, I would source the deal. I had, uh, buyers of inventory. They didn't have the frameworks and structures I. And I FIO'd once again. And I remember, you know, I just show up at the table with the contract. I would assign the contract, meaning I never closed on the house. Somebody would pay me cash to take my position in the deal. I was out. Right. And that was.

Speaker A: So it's not even flipping, doing, uh, renovations or any of that stuff. It's purely just, uh, arbitrage.

Speaker C: Again, flipping paper is what it was. Right. Um, and, uh, you know, that, that introduced me at that time. We created a tool that was helping us. It was, um. The foreclosure market was heating up and in order to negotiate a short sale with the bank, which, if you don't know what that is, it's. It's got a listed price of X, but you offer less than X. The banks call that a short sale. The mortgage companies. And one of the requirements for any short sale package, and to get it accepted, you had to submit a whole bunch of them for a whole bunch of houses. And we were creating these documents that were called an estimated HUD one or an estimated net sheet. It's essentially, this is what the transaction is going to look like. It's like a receipt of what the deal would look like at the closing with all these fields. And I remember we were paying our attorney, I think 75 bucks a pop at the time and slow turnaround. And it was kind of like a high, uh, velocity environment. I said, man, how do we do this? I had a friend at the time, he's like, oh, well, we should probably build a tool that will just let us fill these out on our own. And we, at the time it was called Elance. We used, uh, an offshore or a freelancer marketplace. Found a team in India and they built us a. Basically just like a wizard. It had some fields. You'd enter the information and it would populate that estimated net sheet. I don't know, we spent 400 bucks getting that built. But, uh, in the process I was like, uh. I went to a training and they had a speaker on the concept of digital marketing. And I didn't know much about what that was, but I said, man, that sounds interesting. So I kind of dove into digital marketing and I realized this tool that we've built, it was called EasyHud.com. this tool that we built, like there's other foreclosure investors out There that are paying 75 bucks a pop that would like to be able to just crank these out on the fly. And so I launched a website called easyhub huh.com. it was a membership site. I remember it was, it was Mardi Gras 2002. Launched the site. I didn't know anything about like, you know, a build up or true launch or anything. I just put it online, I went out to some parades, came back and I was charging $20 a month for the subscription and I had my first 20 bucks and I was like, what? This is amazing. Um, next day Mardi Gras still going on, went out, came back, there were two more sales and they just continued to come in. And I ended up building a, uh, pretty significant residual income off of what at the time I guess was a basic SaaS. And so that really got me interested in this concept of digital marketing and building these tools and selling online and that sort of stuff. And so I don't know if anybody knows what the Colby index is, but if you're in the EOS world, you probably have taken a Colby in the uh, strategic coach environment. Um, my Colby indicates I'm a high fact finder, so I like to immerse in a subject, but I'm also high quick start. Once I kind of understand the, the terrain, I hit it right. So as part of my high fact finding efforts, I started going to a lot of digital marketing events. And back then, man, there were, you'd go, and there might be a hundred people there. And again, my natural ability at rapport building and that sort of thing, I would meet people. What are you up to? And uh, just good timing. Turns out a lot of those people I met, like they stuck with it and their careers. If I said some of the names of people I met way back then, you'd know them. Right. Um, so I was able to build this network of what would, what would soon become a lot of high achievers in the digital marketing space. And I remember I sold Easy HUD to another real estate investor there in New Orleans. I was kind of bored. Um, I got involved in, uh, doing a lot of direct mail marketing. Sent millions of postcards, uh, learned from uh, a buddy of mine who was kind of like the king of that, but got tired of that. And um, I reached out to a friend of mine. Uh, he owned a company called digital marketer.com. it wasn't digital Marketer back then, it was just, they just marketed online. And he knew I had a lot of relationships. I'd met him at one of those events and I came on board to do um, business development. But it ended up being a lot of affiliate marketing. Again, didn't know much about it FIO'd, but realized that this is kind of arbitrage. We, you know, we price it at X, we pay X plus or whatever. And um, ended up being really, really good at that. And that um, caught the eye of kind of a scion company in the direct response environment called Agora. And they've been in, based in Baltimore for 40 years plus. They're uh, primarily in the financial publishing space. So they were providing um, analysis and insights from experts, uh, and equities and options and precious metals and all that sort of thing. But they would package the information from these experts and they would sell it out to other investors. So I got hired by Agora and um, to do business development, do that sort of thing, and ended up working with them off and on for about a decade. Put together hundreds of millions of dollars worth of deals there. Um, you know, great experience. It was a part of Baltimore where you'd want to be. It was um, Mount Vernon was the area. It was beautiful and we worked in these historic buildings and. But it kind of elevated my, you know, you think, oh, wow, I'm making a lot of money. Until you get around people who are making a lot of money and then you realize just kind of levels you up. And because of the work I was doing there, I got on the radar of um, uh, a large private equity firm in Beverly Hills. Uh, they just cold called me, reached out, said, hey man, we like what you're doing. Uh, can you help us? So ended up moving from the D.C. area to uh, West Hollywood, working in Beverly Hills for a few years. Um, amazing experience, brilliant people. Uh, probably some of the smartest people that I've ever met were running that. The guy who was running that, that firm at the time, the co founder was, he was 29 at the time and he was just brilliant. Like Elon brilliant. Right. Um, then, you know, uh, right before COVID hit, said we're going to go. My, my wife's from New Mexico, said let's go out there and move to Mexico, spend some time with her family. Um, then Covid hit and just kind of, you know, it was, what am I going to do now? I'm not going to be able to travel as much and that sort of thing. So I started doing what I call growth architecture consulting. I had spent a lot of time in the Eos world and with scaling up and a lot of the frameworks that some of your listeners may know about. Just how to remove dysfunction from a business, how to identify clear goals, how to align the teams. So I started doing that as a, as a consultant for some of the companies that I'd worked with in the past. And it was going fine, but it wasn't terribly exciting. I got hired as a CEO of one of those financial, um, publishing companies and we were doing about 80 million bucks a year. Um, hated it. Love the people, kind people. Just, um, I just hadn't found my groove. Right. And then I remember In November of 2022, almost three years ago now, as the recording of this episode, chat GPT 3.5 had come out. And instantly being that entrepreneur, I knew that it was going to be a huge opportunity for someone else. I didn't understand Generative AI. I'm not a technical guy, um, and I was like, you know, maybe, maybe something will come along. And a couple months later I was in a business meeting with a guy who was just unimpressive with his intellectual prowess, let's say, was using chat GPT 3.5 to do some incredible stuff. And so wait a minute, this guy can do it. Let me take a look at this. And like most people, the first time they use it, you go home and we've been trained like if we want information online, we Google it.

Speaker A: Right, right, exactly.

Speaker C: I kind of used it like Google. And I was like, eh, um, and then, you know, I kept using it, which I hope most of the listeners are, are going through this path as well and realized, okay, this, this is an asset. And immediately I thought, okay, I can use this in my growth architecture practice. The very next thought out of my head was there's no leverage there. Why don't I combine what I've been doing to. Because every business I've been inside, they're dysfunctional. And I don't care if you're in the Fortune 10, all the way down to the dog groomer in your local town, every business is dysfunctional. And I said, why don't we take those. That growth architecture framework that had been very successful for all the companies I'd work with and, and teach people that combined with generative AI so that they can truly be somebody who goes into a company and creates a, uh, like a hyper growth environment, but they're going to be supported by AI. I didn't really think about uh, necessarily introducing AI into the client operations. It was more to support that individual. Then I remember seeing a video from Peter Diamandis. Uh, he was being interviewed by Tom Bilyeu on the Impact Theory podcast. And like within the first 120 seconds of the thing, Tom Bilyeu said, as somebody who is, you know, eager to get involved in AI, but doesn't know where to start, what would you tell them? And Peter said, for every company that I'm advising, that I invest in, that I own, I'm telling them they should have something called a chief AI officer. And he said, it's not somebody who's going to come in there and fine tune a large language model. It's not a data scientist from mit. It's somebody who understands business and is paying attention to the landscape of generative AI. What's happening, what tools are working, how are people using them and is able to blend that or translate that generative AI, um, understanding into a business environment. I said, that's what I'm doing. That day I bought the domain chief aiofficer.com it was a premium domain, but I'm sure I got it for a lot less than it'd be worth today and started the process of, okay, great, I've got this domain. This is what I want to do. I don't know everything about AI. Let me find faculty. So I sourced, um, talent from Sloan, which is MIT's business school. I sourced an ex CIO from Microsoft. I got MBAs, PMPs, and I put together a, uh, curriculum for a certification. We simultaneously launched the International association of Chief AI Officers. And I started working on a book that's still available today called the Chief AI Officer Blueprint. Um, and didn't really, you know, I thought, man, I'll be in and out of this business in 12 months, be rich as hell. And, you know, there's my AI play. Uh, well, it's now 36 months in. Um, and you know, what I realized was that being early and this is advice for anybody, regardless of what your industry is, being early is painful and it sucks until it doesn't. So if you are involved in an endeavor, um, and the reason that it hasn't really caught traction is because you're early. Don't give up. Um, but man, when I saw, you know, chat GPT, I thought in 2023, I thought I was late. And then I thought for sure, 2024, it was, we were, we, we, we launched the certification. We ended up certifying about four or five hundred people that year. Um, but it wasn't that huge, you know, explosion of business that I was expecting. Learned tons of lessons. One of those, and this goes for everybody listening. And you may have heard it before, but one of my friends had had a, uh, high position at um, Automattic, at the company that has WordPress, right? And he told me, chris, first time founders focus on product. Which was me, right, focusing on product. He said, second time founders focus on distribution. I was like, ah, uh, so I started that kind of uh, got me more interested in, you know, I'm great at business development. I understand the concept. Let me start focusing products. Great, great feedback. People that are getting certified, it's transforming their lives. They're going into businesses, they're making a big impact. Um, and then I started focusing on distribution. Now there's a lot of lessons learned here that I'm about to share and it, it certainly helped. Um, but uh, accidentally we had kind of turned into a company that was marketing to the B2C environment, business to consumer. They were professionals that were enrolling in our certification. They were, you know, capable, but it was still a, an individual who was buying our certification, enrolling in it. And their goal was to kind of leave their career and be the AI person for their network or their industry or even some of their old clients or their old uh, employers. And if you're in, if you're thinking about business, first off, B2C certainly, uh, it's easy to generate a lot of transactions. With those transactions comes a demand on infrastructure that is completely different than a B2B environment. There was a lot of hand holding necessary for a lot of our people who had gone through our Chief AI Officer certification. They weren't entrepreneurs, they didn't, they didn't know about marketing and had never done a sales call or a sales conversation. And there were all of these impediments to their, that had nothing to do with learning AI or learning our framework, but it was impediments to their success. And we realized that that's a heavy lift that had taken me at that point 20 plus years to feel like, okay, I'm a capable business person, I can't. Capable entrepreneur, like starter, um, I can't take that on. Like I'm not going to do that for folks. And we ended up speaking at uh, the EOS National Conference earlier, uh, in 2025 in April, and huge hit. We were like one. They had 40 breakouts. We were one of the first ones. The room held 150. We had 220 in the room, standing room. Um, we did a demonstration of some very deep strategic analysis for growth on just a random company that we picked out of the audience. Um, very similar to what McKinsey might do for a company. And you know, we picked an, uh, we picked somebody out of the audience. And my, my chief AI officer at our company is brilliant, brilliant marketer, fantastic user of creative and clever user of generative AI, But I never know what he's going to do. He loves being on stage, and I never know what he's going to come up with, Right? And so he said, I'm going to do the, the analysis for a company. I said, that's great idea. He picked a company out of the audience and they were Assad Farmer from Florida. And I was like, oh, man, this is, this is like, this will be interesting, right? And so at the time, I think we were using O3Pro and deep research to do these reports. And if you've ever run a deep research on, um, a generative AI large language model, you, uh, know, it's not something that happens instantly. So the guy said, I'd like to, um, you know, I'd like to grow my business. Okay, well, what does grow your business look like? I'd like to increase it 20% in the next year. And my chief AI officer with the big balls that he has said, why don't we see if we can triple your business in a year? I was like, oh, here we go. So he put in the prompt, he did the thing, and while it was searching, while I was doing deep research in the background, he went on to kind of share some of the key concepts that went, we talk about, to help people make that bridge from, oh, I know how to use AI to oh my gosh, I really know how to use AI. Right. It was a huge hit. So deep research completes. We start going through, showed him how to triple his business. And 8. It was 18 months, not 12. It was amazing feedback from the audience. And he just kind of threw this out. He said, hey, we've got a booth, if you're interested in us doing this for you. Swing by the booth. We ended up doing that 74 times over the next two and a half days.

Speaker A: Wow, that's amazing.

Speaker C: They all loved it, right? And, um, what we kept hearing, we were like, oh, and we offer a Chief AI Officer certification. And if you're familiar with EOs, they have this concept of a visionary, which is usually the CEO, the person you don't want messing around with operations. And they have this concept of an integrator, which is your operator of the business, right? So it was. The visionaries were coming over saying, hey, do that for my business. Do that for my business, when we tell them about the Chief AI Officer certification, they'd say, no, no, just can't you do it for us? And we heard that we didn't have to hear that too many times where we were like, ding, that's the angle we want, right? They're going to pay higher ticket. The, the contrast between B2C and B2B are a few things. One, certainly fewer transactions, but higher ticket. You just don't need as many yeses to have a good month in the B2B world. Secondly, a B2C buyer, they want results. Now a B2B buyer is more mature in their anticipation, uh, of that uh, achievement of gratification. Right? So they're measuring things on a quarter, 90 day cycle or a month or a year, whatever it was. So for us that was like a huge relief. Instantly we decided to make the pivot into we're reintroducing our chief AI officer certification, uh, actually in two weeks. But we, we really said this. B2B is where the impact is going to be. B2B is where the uh, we're going to enjoy working with the clients more. Love all of our Chief AI officers and a lot of them need their hands held. Um, and if you're listening to this, you know who you are. So, um, those were some, some big lessons that, that kind of have uh, informed the direction that we're taking. Chief AI Officer. But it's been, I can tell you the growth that has come from this. Again, um, let's put it this way. I had more money when I started this business than I do today. I bootstrapped this business. I have one investor as a friend of mine, um, I thought I'd be in and out in 12 months. And what ended up happening was again, I was early. But so many lessons have come from the experience of the hardship of the struggle. I thought I had gone through hard times in business before, but nothing like what it was like to show up every day and just do the thing, just make the sausage. Right? Just every day, every day, every day, every day, every day. And uh, I can tell you certainly the money's coming. We've got some big deals in place. It's the B2B has really worked out and I, I, I, I would rather make money from this endeavor than not. But if this would have been a bust, I can tell you that the lessons that I learned from being really put to the crucible, uh, uh, absolutely priceless. So if you're going through this right now, I want you to think about this concept like, that is where skill is made. Not in the classroom, not in the, you know, working for someone else. But when you burn the boat and you show up and it sucks and it's hard and it's not fair and there's nobody to help you and you can't see tomorrow because it's too, today is just too busy. Don't look at that like, like it sucks. As I say in the Marine Corps, embrace the suck. Right? Understand that, that, that struggle, that, that you get yourself through that and you have a level, uh, of self respect and just appreciation for yourself. And not an egoic thing by any stretch, but you have an appreciation for what you're capable of. Uh, that will be, that will serve you for the rest of your life in all areas. You will know that you have what it takes to not give up, to do the thing to. Now, I don't, I'm not suggesting you, you pursue a business that just doesn't have an economic viability, but if you're certain of your thing, man, just don't give up. I guess that leads us kind of to where we are today on this podcast.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, you certainly can't. If you, if you stop the first time it gets challenging or really challenging, you're not going to make it very far in any business. Right. I mean, none of them are, uh, you know, just an easy script, uh, to go nail. So, Chris, how can, you know, so if we have some folks that are out there, um, they're, they're interested in becoming certified, kind of learning more about this, obviously this, you know, over the last, uh, five plus years, certainly since COVID a lot of folks are wanting to get out of the corporate world that they were in for 20 years, wanting to kind of do their own thing as a fractional, you know, AI is obviously huge and only getting bigger. Um, how can people connect with you and your company, uh, to learn about the certification and to put this certification in their toolbox?

Speaker C: Sure. So, um, you can find us@chiefaiofficer.com. um, I'm on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn handle is Dr. Daigle. I'm not a doctor. They just. I'm a fixer of businesses. I got that nickname, Dr. Daigle, spelled out, but my name is Chris Daigle. If you search, you'll find me. I've got, uh, we're sharing lessons learned and perspective on AI in the business. But one of the things that I think, for anybody listening, if that's a pursuit that you want to do, One. Go for it. This is a fantastic time. There's this. People say, oh, AI is like the Wild West. And I tell them it's not like the Wild west at all. In the Wild West, I open the saloon doors and there was people, horses, carriages. You know, it's more like the frontier. Like, if you see somebody out there, you're surprised, Right? Like, this is not oversaturated. I mean, I live in a bubble. It seems like there's a lot. But I would imagine if I wasn't in AI, I'd be like, oh, yeah, I've heard, you know, uh, I use it. And this is an interesting thing. If you think you're like, we talk to executives all the time and they say, oh, I use it all the time. What do you do? I'm always interested. Like, I want to learn use cases.

Speaker A: I mean, do you use it or do you like, really use it? Yeah, because there's a difference, right?

Speaker C: There's a difference. And for them, they'd say, oh, I use it every day. I use it to write emails and summarize documents. Fantastic use of the technology. However, it's capable of a bit more. Um. So, you know, I would say I don't have a technical background. Right, a technical background. We kind of see two paths of AI. There's, um, analytical AI, which would be more of the, hey, I'm a machine learning expert, I'm a data scientist, I've got a PhD. Great, awesome. The world needs some of those. But we look at AI, generative AI in particular in a business, we call it operational or applied AI. And all you have to do to be successful at that is to understand business and you don't have to know the whole business. Maybe you've got a career in hr, maybe you've been in sales, but as long as you understand a domain and the pain points in that particular area of the business or industry or whatever, these tools are designed to be easy to learn. The tool isn't the problem, your experience isn't the problem. The, the, the missing piece is a concept that we call thinking in AI. And it's where you've just got enough reps using the tools and something happens. You get an output or you have an idea and you're like, oh, I wonder if it can do this? And you type it in and you hit enter and it does that thing instantly. There's this moment where the matrix unfolds. You're like, oh, my gosh, that means I could, I could do this. Oh, I could do. Oh, Maybe I could. And it just, like it becomes the most. For me at least it became one of the most exciting experiences as far as business goes, for sure, that I had where I just realized that I now have a superpower. So if you want to, you know, to make a career in AI, um, unless you're a technical individual, I wouldn't focus on the analytical side. You don't need to know how the large language models work. You don't need to understand what reinforcement learning or any rag, any of that stuff. You just need to know how to look at a business, how to extract some pain points that they've got. And then honestly, well, what tool do I use? Guess what? Go to the models. Hey, here's the problem. What tool should I use? Well, you know, I don't know what to ask. Go to the models. Hey, what should I be asking? I don't know what to write. You start to realize that there's, there's this old paradigm of learning. And for me to be an expert prior to access to generative AI, there was an expectation that a, hopefully I had an interest in the subject, that I would, uh, you know, graduate in high school, go to college, maybe get an advanced degree, go and get a mentor or internship or something. And after X number of years, I'd find myself in a situation where my expertise was, you know, uh, in demand. And they would look at me and they'd say, chris, what about this? And I would be expected to recall that information. Right. Not the case anymore. If you can think in AI, I can put you in any. I've never worked in marine. I've never built an island. What? Our chief AI Officer advises a marine construction company in Saudi Arabia. He's not a marine construction expert by any stretch, but they pay him handsomely so that he can sit in the room and when something comes up, they know that he's just over there typing. He's just over there asking questions. Maybe he doesn't say anything, but when he does, it's impactful. Like, for instance, he realized that they were talking about a $450 million project for the Saudi government. You don't want to blow it on a Saudi government project. Um, high stakes. And he, they were talking about the deal and he said, uh, actually, you're going to need another split barge. He didn't even know what a split barge was. But he had been ingesting this information into the, you know, the thread that he was working on and realized that if they didn't have that extra split barge to move the silt. Um, they were going to not make their, their deadline and they were going to have an 80 million dollar penalty. So what I'm telling you is, and again, he's not in construction. If you understand how to use these tools, the expectation that you've got a career in that industry is no longer necessary because that information is available if you know how to extract it. If you know how to say, well, what question should I be asking? And if you don't know what question to ask, just say, hey, what, hey, Chat GPT. What question should I be asking? If you can do that, imposter syndrome goes out the window. You don't need to worry about walking into the boardroom or walking into the prospect meeting and hoping because you have, as long as you're thinking in AI and you know how to like, you have the ability to have all of the information that you need right there at your fingertips. So I would say that it's a viable, certainly viable pursuit. Chief AI officers are making, you know, 200 to $700,000 per year. That's if you have a job. If you're fractional and you're, um, you know, doing client work, you can bill out at $300,000 an hour. Who knows, right? That's what we're seeing in the marketplace at least. So I would say don't let the lack of technical experience, honestly, don't even let the lack of domain experience hold you back. Get your reps, get your, your 10,000 hours, right? Your equivalent. But in the AI world, it's, you know, a thousand six months or whatever, understand the tools, uh, follow the people on, on X or Twitter, right? Like really become that person. And you will be leading the conversation. When you find yourself in an environment, even like big business, and they start talking about AI, if you're that person, they're going to look to you and say, what should we do? Is this right? How can we do it right? And you're going to be able to go, hold on. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, enter. Here's what we do, right? And they're not gonna, they're not gonna be like, well, you know, I, I had this concern. Well, they're gonna expect me to know answers. I'm on with clients all the time. And they'll say, well, what about this? And I'll share my screen and go to perplexity, or go to ChatGPT and I'll type it. Okay, what was your question again? Here's the answer, right? I don't even pretend that I need to know all the information. As a matter of fact, that's almost a waste of cognitive effort unless it's a, uh, pursuit that, you know, you have a personal interest in. But for commercial, uh, application, you knowing all the answers, you just don't need to do it. And that's what makes this so unique. Anybody really, in a matter of, I mean, our cohorts are eight weeks long. By the end of that, they really are maybe not an expert at AI, but they're expert level users of AI. And that's the difference. That's the distinction of today's opportunity environment.

Speaker A: And it's, it's amazing just how much stronger and more accurate the systems are getting themselves. A buddy and I were just talking a couple weeks ago about, uh, Chad GPT 5 and 51 and just what a big leap that was. And as we know, this is moving exponential. So what is the next, uh, you know, big version going to be? It's absolutely fascinating. It's um, somebody that loves technology. Uh, man, what a, what an exciting. Just like Elon Musk says, right? He's like, I wouldn't want to be born any other time. This is, we, you know, we're in a, we're in a really fun, really exciting time. But Chris, thanks for carving out some time to chat with us. Congratulations with all the success that you're having and uh, man, there's, there's a huge need for what you're doing. So please keep it up.

Speaker C: You got it, man. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody.

Speaker B: Thanks for joining us for this week's episode of the Partner Nomics show. Don't forget to subscribe to get the newest episodes@thepartnernomicsshow.com.