The B2B Podcast Index
Index
All categories
MarketingSalesSaaSFinanceHROpsLeadershipCustomer SuccessAI & DataProductStartups & FoundersRevOpsEngineering & DevTools
MethodologySubmit
Best of:MarketingSalesSaaSFinanceHROpsLeadershipCustomer SuccessAI & DataProductStartups & FoundersRevOpsEngineering & DevTools
An independent project byFame
SearchBest episodesGuestsInsightsMethodologySubmit a podcast
Index/Startups & Founders/Your Business Hour
Your Business Hour artwork

171 - How AI can help business owners scale smarter

Your Business Hour · 2026-05-19 · 43 min

0:00--:--

Key moments - from our scoring

Substance score

51 / 100

Five dimensions, 20 points each

Insight Density11 / 20
Originality9 / 20
Guest Caliber13 / 20
Specificity & Evidence8 / 20
Conversational Craft10 / 20

Ritam, founder of Studio Graphene - a 100+ person digital product studio founded in 2014 - draws on his background in management consulting at Accenture and Bank of America Merrill Lynch to explain how AI represents a fundamental shift for both startups and legacy businesses. Rather than simply automating existing processes, he advocates for rethinking business models entirely through an AI-native lens. He distinguishes between deterministic technology (like Uber's traditional booking system) and probabilistic AI, which enables multimodal interactions - voice, vision, and text - at unprecedented speed and efficiency. The key insight for B2B operators: instead of fearing displacement, businesses should become their own disruptors by imagining a scary competitor starting today with full AI access, then building that future-ready version themselves. Ritam emphasizes that AI is a superpower for those who adopt it - the real competitive threat isn't AI itself, but competitors who use it effectively. For legacy businesses especially, this creates an opportunity to leverage existing customer relationships and brand equity while reinventing service delivery through AI capabilities.

Key takeaways

  • →AI adoption is a choice between displacement and disruption - the person or business using AI will outcompete those who don't, not AI itself taking jobs.
  • →Reimagine your entire business model around AI capabilities like voice, vision, and multimodal interfaces rather than simply automating existing tasks.
  • →Legacy businesses have a specific advantage: they can use AI to 10x output from existing teams while retaining customer relationships and brand equity that new competitors lack.
  • →The most practical first step is to start experimenting with available AI tools and set clear security guardrails, rather than waiting for the perfect solution.
  • →Studio Graphene works with businesses to transition from traditional operations to AI-native models by identifying what a scary new competitor would look like and building that vision internally.

Guests

Ritam (founder and director of Studio Graphene)

Topics in this episode

ClaudeChatGPTMinimum Viable Product (MVP)AI-native business modelsMarketplace platformsStudio GrapheneProbabilistic versus deterministic technologyMultimodal AI interfaces (voice, vision, text)Legacy business digital transformationB2B and B2C product development

Questions this episode answers

How can business owners get started with AI without waiting for the perfect technology to emerge?

Start experimenting with existing AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude while setting security guardrails around sensitive information; the key is to begin rethinking processes around AI capabilities rather than waiting for new developments.

What's the difference between using AI for automation versus building an AI-native business?

Automation focuses on making existing tasks faster, while AI-native means fundamentally reimagining how you deliver products and services using AI's multimodal capabilities like voice, vision, and natural language.

Why should legacy businesses be less afraid of AI disruption than startups?

Legacy businesses have existing customers, brand equity, and market knowledge that new competitors lack; they can use AI to 10x their output and serve customers in completely new ways while retaining these competitive advantages.

How does Studio Graphene help businesses transition to AI?

Rather than coaching on tool adoption, Studio Graphene helps clients reimagine their entire business - asking them to describe a scary new competitor built today with AI, then building that vision internally for them.

What's the key insight about AI job displacement and business disruption?

AI won't take your job or business; the person or business using AI will, meaning the real competitive threat comes from those who adopt it, not from the technology itself.

What our scoring noted

Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.

Insight Density

11 / 20

The episode contains some practical frameworks (e.g., the 'scary competitor' thought experiment, AI-driven development, probabilistic vs. deterministic technology) but relies heavily on abstraction and repetition. The guest circles back to 'just start' and 'embrace AI' multiple times without drilling into concrete implementation details. While the distinction between LLMs (text) and computational AI for accounting is valuable, much content consists of motivational statements rather than actionable density.

AI will not take your job. The person using AI will take your job.
I think the key is get started, start using the tools that are out there, and set guardrails for yourself.

Originality

9 / 20

The core ideas are largely recycled: the Netflix vs. Blockbuster analogy, the industrial revolution parallel, and the 'use AI as a thought partner' concept are well-worn. The 'scary competitor' framework is somewhat fresh for a general business audience, but the overall perspective - that businesses should embrace AI or be disrupted - is mainstream. Limited contrarian thinking or first-principles analysis.

AI will not take over your business. It's the business who uses the AI that will take over your business.
if you can choose not to lean into it, or you can choose to lean into it

Guest Caliber

13 / 20

Ritam is the founder of a 100+ person digital product studio with relevant hands-on experience building AI-native products since 2014, and he has management consulting background at reputable firms. However, he is more a builder than a deep AI researcher or strategist, and his insights on AI's future are largely speculative rather than evidence-based. Solid practitioner caliber but not exceptional.

Ritam is the founder and director of Studio Graphene, a London based digital product studio he founded in twenty fourteen after a career as a management consultant at Etcent and Bank of America. Merrill Lynch
We built over three hundred products for customers, some of them have been more successful than others

Specificity & Evidence

8 / 20

The episode lacks concrete data, named client examples, metrics, and timelines. The only numbers mentioned are Studio Graphene's founding year (2014), employee count (100+), and product count (300+), but no outcomes or financial data. The 'Uber' and 'taxi service' examples are hypothetical, not real case studies. The driverless car safety statistic is mentioned vaguely ('far, far, far higher') without numbers.

we've built over three hundred products for customers, some of them have been more successful than others
they have proven that the chance of causing an injury by a human is far, far, far higher then the driverless cars

Conversational Craft

10 / 20

The host asks reasonable opening questions but rarely pushes back or challenges claims. When Ritam makes vague statements (e.g., 'AI driven development doesn't save as much time as people think'), the host doesn't probe for specifics. There is one moment where the accountant co-host raises a real objection about AI hallucinations in tax advice, which Ritam addresses, but this is brief. Overall, the conversation is pleasant but lacks sharp follow-ups and productive tension.

you sometimes want to bang your head against a brick wall because you're like, what you put in is what you're going to get out. So you're put in garbage, you get out garbage
So we've decided we're going to do it and say we took us through like how you would work.

Conversation analysis

Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.

Most-used words

build19customers17technology15based13businesses13three12started12product9products9question9start9call9services8hundred8digital8help8

Episode notes

Ritam Gandhi is the founder and director of Studio Graphene, a digital product studio that partners with growth stage businesses to design and build AI-native digital products. In today’s world AI is in every business, no matter how big or small it is. Ritam embraces this and explains how each business can use AI to help it grow and some tips on how you can include AI in your business. Ritam explains to us how a business owners gets started and what it does in order to build AI-native digital products. Find out more at Your Business Hour podcast is hosted by the founders of Champ Consultants, Chantal and Matthew Baker. They are both accountants and bring a wealth of knowledge, experience, and business tips to their chat. They interview guests who tell their business stories, as well as consider the latest topics in business and finance. New podcasts are released weekly on a Tuesday and you can

Full transcript

43 min

Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.

Champ Consultants is an award winning independent firm of highly experienced, qualified accountants and tax advisors based in Caterham, providing a fully comprehensive range of accountancy and tax services. If you would like simple but creative answers to your tax problems, called Champ Consultants your business partner on one double eighty three three four nine three hundred. Good morning and welcome to your business hour with me Chantale and I'm joined by Ritam. Good morning, Ritam morning, Chanta, good morning.

So let's find out a little about Ritam so. Ritam is the founder and director of Studio Graphene, a London based digital product studio he founded in twenty fourteen after a career as a management consultant at Etcent and Bank of America. Merrill Lynch Studiographine is one hundred plus person team with studios in London, Daily, Lisbon and Geneva, partnering with growth stage businesses to design and build AI native digital products. Ritam is passionate about making digital innovation accessible, practical and commercially viable, and has a strong focus on how AI can help business owners scale smarter.

So we're going to discuss a bit more about AI and also possibly how did well, we're going to ask you the question, Ritam, let's just go in for it. How did this all start? And how did you start studiography and what's your background? So going back sort of the start of my career, I worked as a management consultant, as you mentioned, for Centure, and I was largely working with very big investment banks, and so I was used to working with large enterprise, which was interesting because they were very smart people doing big projects, but it was very bureaucratic and very slow.

And I did that for ten years, and I realized that over those ten years, whenever there was an idea where technology would make the world a better place or deliver value for an individual, people were people use one of three excuses. They were either scared of undertaking innovative technology project, they were worried that would cost too much, or they were worried that would take too long. So people were worried that that kind of innovation was scary, expensive and slow, and I really wanted to work to disprove that.

And that's really where I realized that I wanted to be independent and effectively be a startup that helped other startups realized that digital innovation doesn't need to be scary, expensive or slow. So that's the kind of back story and I and when I realized I wanted to do that, I'd worked for the same boss for ten years in effect of course different clients during that period. And I was grateful because I was helped to kind of transition out of out of my role gradually and set up my business gradually.

So it was a really nice transition. And I got a lot of support and mentorship as I did that, and off we went. We set up off our studio in London in twenty fourteen and we started building. We started talking to startups and founders who had an idea and we helped them build their first sort of minimum viable product.

And so explain to us a sort of products that you actually build because talk to me like a complete idiot. No worries. So there are generally two types of demographics that individuals or founders will want to build a product for. It will be for an individual, so you'll typically call that B two C, or it will be for another business and you'll call that B to B.

So those are two types of end customers that we help build products for and the product will have some kind of digital interface and it will provide functionality to a user. And in my mind, I always say the key is that it has to provide some sort of utility or value to your user. So as an example, we built a lot of marketplaces where let's say from an e commerce perspective, you might be a provider of certain products within a store, but there might be multiple stores that are connected to that marketplace, and there's an end consumer who wants a choice of those products.

We built a lot of mobile apps at the time when we started, because mobile apps were still quite popular and generally there was always some kind of utility that a mobile app was able to provide. Either because of your geolocation, was able to track you and give you unique bits of information based on where you were, and yeah, songe range of startups everything from hospitality helping restaurants engage with their customers, to financial services, a range of industries, but essentially loads of startup ideas that we worked on initially.

And is it still startup businesses that you could dominantly work on now or it's completely varied? I would say completely varied. I think the scale of the businesses has changed, so we tend to not work. Previously, maybe the vast majority of our world was what I describe a zero to one.

So you have an idea, Let's say you want to provide you want to build a taxi service that transports people from various airports around the countries to their home, and you want to provide an app for that. That's the sort of customer we'd have. It was an idea stage and what I describe a zero to one. So to get you to the first version where you can validate your idea and users are using it, I'd say, now maybe you know, earlier was maybe eighty percent of our work and now it's probably only twenty percent of our work.

And the reason is as we've grown and scaled, we've been able to work with other scaling businesses, and quite often what I find exciting is a business that's actually twenty years old and hasn't innovated and works in more of an analog form, and how we help them build a digital product to get more value from the legacy they've built, the brand, they've built, the customers, the oil customers that they have. So we are we're finding it equally exciting to work with legacy businesses as we did working with new businesses.

And I suppose nowadays if legacy businesses effectively we have to innovate anyway, otherwise we're not going to be growing. It's very true. And I think what I find exciting is every twenty years or so there's a big wave of technology change or technological change. We had the Internet, we had mobile and smartphones, and now we have AI.

And I think it creates an opportunity, particularly for ambitious sort of SMEs or mid sized businesses to move fast, to adapt, perhaps faster than large enterprise and use their use their sort of market knowledge and the fact that they established as a benefit, but really of eight in terms of leveraging technology to what I describe is create an unfair advantage over their competitors. So you've run the business now since twenty fourteen, so twelve years or so. Is there anything you wish you knew when you started that business that you might know now?

Yeah? Do you know what? I've never asked that question and someone said to me, no, it's quite interesting. I always I always say that when you start a business from scratch, all your weaknesses, I expose, so I think I was.

I wouldn't say I was arrogant, but I definitely thought before I started the business that I was good at a lot more things than it turned out. But you have to be good at everything, and you know your weakness. If you're not good at sales, then you don't get new business. If you're not good at finance, you don't manage your money well.

If you're not going at delivery, your customers aren't happy. So you have to be good at everything because initially it's just you. And I think the main lesson I learned is you need to be self aware of where you're weak and look for complementary individuals to complement your weaknesses with their strengths. And I would do that.

I've ended up doing it now and I have a really strong management team and a really strong team in general, and I know my weaknesses and I know who can compliment those weaknesses with their strengths. But it's taken a long time to get there, and I would have tried to get there sooner. I think that probably one of the biggest mistakes I made was that I liked the variance of being blank canvas and starting from scratch, and so we worked across industries, worked across client types.

So we worked with startups through the enterprise, and we worked across as I said, banks and financial services, through the hospitality and education, and so we're quite for a small business. We're quite broad in our target cohort of customers, and I think I do doing that. I think if I had to start again, I would be more specialized around the specific industry perhaps where we can really establish ourselves or a particular type of customer. So I would have been more focused on the customer that I was targeting and established ourselves as a specialist provider for them.

So that's one thing I would also do differently. And the last with that one with the niche in a business. Do you not find sometimes when we're a startup business, and I did exactly the same. When we're a startup business, we need money because without especially if we've given up a job that was well paid and this is now our bread and butter and we need to live.

We almost like are scared to niche into one industry or to one type of client because it would take us longer to get established. And therefore we almost like take everything until we're a bit more established to then decide to niche. It's a It's a great point, and I think in part, I think adding to that, I also didn't know what so I came. I spent ten years working with banks, and I was a bit bored of banks, so I wanted to do something.

The natural tendency would have been to focus and continue in the services space, but I was bored of working in that space, and I think that was a slightly poor judgment call on my part. But you're absolutely right. You want any business. I remember the beginning of the when we started, we had a landline and every time I would ring, we would get really excited because we thought it was a new opportunity and it would turn out to be a recruiter trying to sell their services or something.

Yeah, so you are absolutely desperate for business. And I think that's probably one of the other lessons I learned is sales is everything, you know. I came from a delivery background, so I was very good at building products for customers and facilitating that, and I thought that's all I needed. But that was.

Coop, which had the customers. YEA, I lose you for a second, but yeah, I think I think that was that was another early mistake, which is I didn't realize the importance of sales, and I thought, I'll just build this really good the value proposition and capability for customers and and and customers will come. And then they didn't, and and as I was running out of money, I realized that I had to go find them. And so I think that was another very early lesson that if you can't sell, nothing else matters.

Yeah, And I think it doesn't come natural to us as human beings either, does it, Because it's it's not unless you're a specific type of person. And also, when you're selling your own business, you also have to sell yourself because people have to like you as a person in order to want to do business with you, especially if they're in trusting their money with you, they're in trusting everything with you. They need to like you as well. Not just I like your product, but at the end of the day, you might be able to get that product from somewhere else.

It's you that I need to do the business with. And as human beings, I find that sometimes we're not brilliant at selling ourselves, and we struggle sometimes of knowing how to sell ourself. But without that we obviously we can't grow a business. Absolutely, So they say people buy from people, especially in services businesses, more so than others.

And I still, you know, nearly twelve years on, still struggle to put myself out there. But I think I have learned painfully that that is the only way. So, you know, I was at an event yesterday the day before and I and I'm very conscious of it. And I think one of the things I'm trying to do is because I know it doesn't come naturally to me and I and I don't do it.

I've tried to put routines in place to to to sort of almost force myself to do it. And and and I think with sales, more than anything else, it's it's it's metrics driven. So you can set goals like I'm going to make one proactive call every morning, I'm going to post on LinkedIn next number of times a week, And I think it forces you to be honest with yourself if you have those routines in place. But I think the positive of that, you know, of of not being a proactive salesperson and and not not sort of always reaching out to people because I'm trying to sell something to them.

Is you also build great relationships and people trust you, and as long as you don't let them down, they will refer you, and you know there will be word of mouth. So it is there is a combination. I think you have to be good at, you know, putting yourself out there really, but it also build that trust don't let people down. We've had the same customers give us business over the last ten years and I always say and the end that that your trust is really easy to break, but very hard to build.

Definitely. So what would you say is the most rewarding aspect of what you do? I think it's so one of the most exciting. You know, we we are, we are the vast majority of our team has been around for a really long time, and the first designer we ever hired, the first engineer we are ever hired, is with the business and I think seeing those relationships develop and seeing them develop and grow is a really nice feeling.

So that's really rewarding. And I think the second thing is the impact. So we've built over three hundred products for customers, some of them have been more successful than others, but seeing seeing the impact, seeing you know, millions of people use them, and so I think that the actual impact feels, especially in a small business for the scale, feels feels really good. And what about challenging aspects?

Then I think I personally find the people element that the most challenging. I do take everything to heart, so if someone's unhappy, I sort of making my life's mission to try and please them, both internally with the team more so than even clients, but also with clients. And so I do find the people element really hard, and I think during COVID, I realize how much harder it is when you can't be there face to face and have a conversation. That's challenging.

So I find that difficult. And I find the volatility associated with various sort of business macroeconomic things that are outside your control. I find that really hard. Like you might have a good few months and then you have a bad few months, and then you're back to where you started.

So I find the volati. I wish the world was a little bit more static in that sense. So generally in the business, we've talked about the AI products and the generation that you actually do. So how do you find that this helps business owners to scale because that's one of the things I said that one of the things I said was that you're passionate about making digital innovation accessible, practical, and commercially viable and has a strong focus on how AI can help business owners scale smarter.

So what does that actually mean? So what does it mean by to scale smarter? So I think at the moment, AI is a bit of a superpower for anyone using it, and it has it's all nuances that you have to be aware of. So traditionally, let's say you wanted to build your your sort of business was going back to the taxi service example, you know, and you built Uber.

Let's see that as a technology is what is what one describes as deterministic technology. It's it's it's very binary. So you book an uber and it gets accepted, and it's a flaw that will be the same every single time for every single user. AI is based on a probabilistic technology, which is which is why people talk about the fact that AI hallucinates and you know, there are certain elements where you can't use it, but it on the flip side, it is infinitely more efficient in terms of what it lets you do because of the way the technology works because of the assumption.

So you know that you can write a full blog article using chat, Gibt or claude. You can you know, you can get it to just do things that would take you a lot longer now at ten ex the speed. But I think the question, the most important question I ask any business that's been around twenty thirty years, is imagine there is a competitor of yours that starts today, and now they have access to this new techno logical wave, which is AI. What would you know describe describe that competitor that's starting today that you find scary, that gives you a sleepless night because they're so good and they're leveraging AI so well, and and that they have that kind of second mover advantage where they are starting from scratch, so they can use you know, AI allows you to use machine vision, it allows you to use voice, it allows you to use all these other things rather than writing things down.

So they have access to all of this new technology, and now they're going to compete with it with you by building whatever they're going to build serve the same customers from scratch, describe them, and quite often this sort of business owner really understands the market, will describe it and it sounds amazing, and it sounds scary, and then I say brilliant. But they don't have your customers, they don't have your legacy, they don't have your brand. So why don't you build this scary competitor that you're describing and we'll build it for you.

And that's effectively what we're trying to help businesses with is don't be disrupted, be your own disruptor, and build this future ready version off your business. And so from an aar because obviously AI is some two letters that are in the news probably every single day, and lots of people are frightened of AI taking away their jobs, reducing their businesses, making the business non existent in the future, rather than using AI to actually enhance to grow their business for the better.

So how do you convince clients that AI is not a bad thing, but it's actually a good thing. Because I find that talking to people, people are like, oh, yeah, but in five years time, I'm not going to be able to do that job because AI will have taken it over. I might as well just not bother. Yeah.

I think that the statement I reuse, which is. It's a I've come up with a but it's it's used often is. AI will not take your job. The person using AI will take your job.

And I think it's the same for the business owners. AI will not take over your business. It's the business who uses the I that will take over your business. And I think with any transition, you know, we have the Internet, we had the Industrial Revolution.

If you can choose not to lean into it, or you can choose to lean into it. So you know the Internet, you had Netflix lean into it versus Blockbuster Video or not. And you know now we use Netflix. We don't go and rent DVDs and videos from a kind of physical outlet.

Industrial Revolution, you know, you could remain a farmer that used physical tools, or you could go by a tractor. And I think it's the same thing with AI is and it is true you will be able to do a lot more with a lot less. You know, one hundred percent company can probably achieve the same output with ten people. But you could then choose to go from one hundred people to ten people, or you could choose to use your hundred people to ten x your output and just do more.

And I think that's a choice people have. So you know, the positive is is going to create so much productivity that it's going to help society. Any kind of productivity gain I think is positive for society. So generally, people who feel that it's going to replace them are taking the wrong approach.

I think they need to think about how they can use it as a superpower. But you know, both both both types of people exist, and I hope most people lean more towards using it as a superpower. Definitely is a superpower, that's what it definitely is. Champ Consultants is an award winning independent firm of highly experienced qualified accountants and tax advisors based in providing a fully comprehensive range of accountancy and tax services.

If you would like simple but creative answers to your tax problems, called Champ Consultants your business partner on one double eight three three four nine three hundred and. Welcome back to your business hour with me Chantal and riturn So written before we had our quick break, we talked about how individuals can be scared of AI or embrace AI within their business sort of thing. So we've decided that we're going to be one of those businesses that's going to scale. But we're going to embrace AI within our business.

How do we get started and what does what do I have to do? I think at a practical level, the best way to get started is start. And I think why I say that and why it sounds like a bit of a silly statement when I say it, is that we we are living in a world where AI is moving at a huge pace, and I've I've realized that if you keep waiting because you're saying something new is going to come along, it's you're never You're never going to really progress. So even as ourselves and you know they they they say, like, you know, being AI native means effectively rethinking your processes around AI.

So previously used to think about automations. Okay I have to do this task, how do I automate it? But right now I think, okay, there's a new technology. How do I rethink how I would do stuff based on this technology?

So yeah, I think the key is get started, start using the tools that are out there, and set guardrails for yourself. You know, it is true that you know you should be careful if you're giving it information related to your bank's login details, et cetera. So set guardrails around security and be really careful there, but get started and rethink can re imagine how you can run your business with AI rather than just trying to automate bits of it. So we've decided we're going to do it and say we took us through like how you would work.

So we've decided we're going to do that. And so how does it? How do I work with you? How does it work?

What's the process? So the the we I feel like with with AI, there are two sides to it. One is just using it as a tool to make yourself more efficient. We are not specialists there and that is not what we are.

You know, we're not. We're not coaching businesses on how to use AI tools and adopt them, and there are coaches who do that. Part of the reason we've not looked in that that space is because we feel like a lot of that is just practice. You know, you are using a tool Applaud, Tragigt and whatever within your specialism.

There are new AI tools coming up. What we exist to do is to re imagine your entire business, leveraging AI to serve your customers. So I will make up an example right now, But let's just go back to the sort of uber taxi example, right, How does how does your business complete? How does how does that service or application completely change now that AI exists?

Cannot be that people can just order an uber and through voice because one of the things AI has done is allowed you to use multimodality as they call it. So voice really works well today, and transcribing voice using AI works really well. Doesn't mean that people can do it through vision by just you know, showing where they are. You know there are there are loads of it's just reimagining how does how does your product or service serve your customers now with AI?

And that's that's what we serve to exist. So it's a question, very massive question. Earlier we ask customers, imagine if you could start again from scratch, given now yea I exist, how do we help you transition what you have, which is a legacy business, to what one would call us an EI native business. And so if you had to share with us some tips on what we should do in order to apart from obviously thinking about this competitor and everything else, which is a wonderful tip because that is how we're going to be able to do what we're going to find what we want.

What other tips would you be able to share with us for our business owners? Yeah, I think the tips from an II perspective, Yeah, yeah. I think the one thing actually I haven't mentioned, which I think is really important is right now, I speak to a lot of business owners who themselves as individuals are trying tools, trying to think imaginatively around how they can use AI. I think one of the errors I've made myself, and I think a lot of business owners makeers you need everyone to go on that journey with you, and so you need to think, you know, if it's just you as one individual doing that, but the rest of your business is not, that's your progress is limited.

So one of the things we say is try and get everyone on that journey with you. And the way we've done it is two things. One is we're constantly talking about it and we're constantly experienced sharing. You know, we're using this tool or we've reimagined this process using AI, but we tried something else, which is right now.

What holds people back is fear of failure. And we've started giving out effectively and AI Failures Award are rewarding people for making mistakes and learning, and I think that's really important. Is too because it's such a new technology and it's it's different to previous technologies, and that it isn't the traditional binary zeros in ones technology. You know, as we talk about hallucinations like there are, there are nuances to it which make it slightly different to previous technologies that people I used to.

So, for example, previous technologies, you know, if you log in, you log in, it's just it's binaries you don't need to check, whereas with AI. One of the things I think that's changing for us is we're all becoming reviewers. So you can get chug ept to write your blog, but you're going to review it, You're gonna tweak it, you can to change it and publish it. And I think it's that mindset of taking accountability and reviewing but letting AI do the work for you.

And I think changing that way of working is really really important for this for the next ten years. But I also think let's talk AI then, because I also think I'm an accountant by trade and that is my my full time job. I'm an accountant and tax consultant and I probably don't get a single week without at least maybe three or four emails from potential clients or clients who have gone on to chat gipt, asked it a question and said, I want to do this for tax, give me the questions I need to ask my accountant or I want to do this for tax?

Can I do it? And then they email you the answer and they go is this right? And you sometimes want to bang your head against a brick wall because you're like, what you put in is what you're going to get out. So you're put in garbage, you get out garbage if you don't.

If you if you use like chat, GPT, Claude and whatever else, if you're putting in five percent or ten, you ask it the question, but you haven't given it your entire history. How can it give you the answer that you want? And sometimes I think that from a business, a small business owner's point of view, we worry about how our clients are going to use AI technology and rely on it very badly. Basically, they're not going to do that review and check scenario that you've.

Said correct, and which is why I think people are mistaking it for replacing the specialists. When it's not. And I think it's a thought partner, etc. But it's not.

Yeah, it's why I always find that right now, the vast majority of the I is based on or that we use in our day to day lives, is based on large language models, which are particularly well suited to text. But as an example for accountants and finance, actually AI is not yet having them. Fact that one, people are mistaken to think that it does because a lot of accounting and finance functions are based on maths and computational things, and AI is not very good at that because computation is yours and one.

So it's also understanding what it's good at and what it's not good at. So it's probably not very good at making your tax calculation because that's really based on computation, which is not what AI is right for. And I think a lot of people are and I always say this, everyone's using the I to save costs, so they'll be like, oh, I just use rather than ask, And I think that's the wrong use case. I think the right use case is two, make your life better, make your business better, So don't reduce like you know, the efficiency and productivity will just happen and get passed down.

But how can I make AI make my life better? Like? Can it plan help me plan my day? For me?

One of the my favorite use cases for AI is use AI as a thought partner, you know, so ask pul a chat GBT saying, I'm trying to come up with some ideas for my tagline for this particular presentation. Can you give me a few options? Here's one? Can you give me a few others?

That's a great use case because then you review them and so on and and ironically doing that might take you more time than just using the tagline you had on your mind. But I think more and more to use it to give you other powers that you didn't have, versus just everyone jumping to how can I save a penny here or there? That's not the right use case in my opinion. So I've never really thought of it as using AI as being used as almost like your sounding board effectively, isn't it really?

And especially if you are a small business owner or a new startup, a completely new startup, you might not have a team behind you that you can ask those sounding board questions too. Can you correct exactly exactly? And I think sometimes again just speaking transparently, like sometimes you don't want to say certain things to an individual, or it's almost like your secret thought partner as well. So and yeah, it's a great, great sounding board.

So you yourself, do you personally use So how have you used AI in your business? So apart from developing AI for others, how have you used it in your own business? So I'd say there are two distinct sides of our business. One is the side of our business that is, let's call it the delivery side, so specialists.

So we'll design an interface for a client, we'll develop it encoding, using using Our engineers will build it, and then we have product managers who manage a sort of project, manage and manage what we're building. You know, you might have read this, but on the engineer on software development side of things, AI is really transformed things. And so on that side we use it extremely heavily. You know, we follow something called AI driven development, which is traditionally you would you know, you would ask me to build an app and a developer would write code to build a app.

Now we get AI to write it and we review it. It doesn't save us as much time as people would think. But it's it's a it's a way in which we can actually make better quality products. And so we are using it very heavily on on on actually building software.

The area which we weren't using it, I feel as heavily on is what I describe as I ancillary functions or support functions within the business, so finance, marketing, et cetera. And we're now going through a phase where we're really heavily using it within those coorte functions or starting to. And the way we're doing it is I think for us, Claude co work in particular has been a really big change in tool. So the previous sort of chat AI capabilities that we all use, like chat EPD and Claude, those were just you know, ask a question, get an answer, whereas now things like cloud cowork are allowed.

They basically follow tasks instructions, so you can ask cowork to go do a task and it does it for you. And so that's what's becoming quite popular without sort of various support functions within the business. Wow, and where do you think AI would be in the future. Where do you see AI in the future.

I think in truth, no one knows. There are a couple of areas that I believe there will be a huge amount of change, which which I don't think people are thinking about sufficiently. But one of the ones is physical AI. We've all been used to kind of the fact that now we can speak to chat Gibt.

But I think the big thing that's coming in the next few years is physical AI, so tribalist cars, things like that, And I say, so, I think that's a big I think that's a bigger change than sort of digital AI. I e on our computers, and I think that we are going to see a huge amount of productivity gains. So I think we're going to see this sort of they call it Jevin's paradox, right, like you can do things more easily and faster, So actually do people actually do more of them? And so I think we're just going to solve an infinite number of problems.

So I think physical AI and suddenly in a few years we're going to see all these things that you used to know as that we fixed. Now that's my hopeful glass glass half. Full view of And I think that's quite realistic because if you think of the future and what people talk about, they do talk about driverless cars and driverless vehicles and whatever else. It's just going to be.

In my opinion, I don't know how comfortable I'm going to be. And you wanted to get into the driverless super It's going to be that part of it, isn't it From a human point of view? What if some kid runs across the road, how do I want to put my foot on the brake if it's suddenly not there? Yeah, I think it's so.

The underlying technology behind there is applied statistics, and I think it's based on probabilities. And I don't think it is based on probabilities, but statistics is also you know, if you trust statistics, then you start to see the data and decide if one thing's better than the other. So, as an example, on driverless cars, they have proven that the chance of causing an injury by a human is far, far, far higher then the driverless cars. And they've done that just by mapping the number of miles driven per injury in a driverless car versus number of miles driven per injury by a human.

And the human side is humans make mistakes, and right now we're going through a phase where we're noticing that in certain instances, EI makes few mistakes than humans. Yeah, still makes mistakes, just not as many in certain use cases. Which is why you should check come with you what the AI tells you sometimes when you're using it, because just like humans, it makes mistakes. So someone on my team said, I'm not using AI to go faster, I'm using AI to be better, and I think that's what we want to try and do is actually improve the quality.

So before we come to our end, if anybody's listening and wants to get hold of you, where's the best place to find you in order to find out more about what you do and how they can work with you potentially? Yep, you can reach us via our website, which is Studio Graphene, which is spelled g r A p h e n E dot com all one word. You can reach out to me at rhythm r I t A M at studiographine dot com. Or I'm also on LinkedIn, which is just my first name and last name.

If you search for me on LinkedIn, you can find me there too. Brilliant, Thank you very much. So, have you got any other final tips that you want to share with us before we come to the end of our show? I think my my my final tip would be for the world we're living in right now, there's so much change, is just do it.

If you have an idea or a thought I want to try something, I think it's this is the best time that I can think of for you to just do it and give it a go. So yeah, so definitely do a Nike, shall we say, just go do it? Like you? So thank you very much, return for listening for joy well for talking to us.

And if you're not sure on Retam's name, it's our it Am and his surname is ga N d R. If you're listening to this on podcast, then that will all be on the podcast notes anyway. So this show is on podcasts, so if you're listening on podcast, thank you. If you're not sure where to get all our podcasts from, you can get them from wherever you get your podcasts from.

And that is your business hour, wherever you get your podcasts from. And we are also on Instagram and on Facebook, and it's your business hour on Instagram and on Facebook. So that's it from me this week. Thank you very much, thank you for listening to us, and hopefully we'll catch up with you very soon, thank you very much.

Champ Consultants is an award winning independent firm of highly experienced, qualified accountants and tax advisors based in Cateram, providing a fully comprehensive range of accountancy and tax services.

Related episodes across the Index

Other episodes covering the same guests and topics, from across The B2B Podcast Index.

  • #291 Why Most AI Projects Fail to Deliver ROI, Sinohe Terrero, CFO and COO, EnvoyGrowCFO Show · on Claude91 / 100
  • Why a $1.2B exit felt like his biggest failure, and the customer-obsession thesis behind AgencyThe GTMnow Podcast · on Claude86 / 100
  • Is Your Business Invisible to AI Search? (And How to Fix It) ft. Ray YoungRevenue Science · on Claude85 / 100
  • Episode 018: Season 2, the $75 Consult and the Frankenstein StackAI Tools for Practicing Lawyers · on Claude84 / 100
  • Agentic Engineering for Testers: How to Automate Your Way to the Top with Amit RawatTestGuild Automation Podcast · on Claude82 / 100
  • PwC's Chief People Officer on Training 80,000 People for the AI Era With Human Skills at the CenterFuture Ready Leadership With Jacob Morgan · on Claude81 / 100

More from Your Business Hour

All episodes →
  • 174 - How to work as a founder51 / 100
  • 173 - How to have a difficult conversation80 / 100
  • 172 - Fundraising for St Piers School and College in Lingfield57 / 100
  • 170 - Importance of collaborations and how to do them65 / 100
  • 169 - An essential listen for all SMEs in Surrey53 / 100
Explore the best B2B Startups & Founders podcasts →
All Your Business Hour episodes →