An AV and integration-focused podcast broadcast weekly

This week's episode of Automation Unplugged Our guest today is Isar Meitis — founder of MULTIPLAI and host of the Leveraging AI podcast.

About this episode:

From training elite fighter pilots in the Israeli Air Force to guiding CEOs and global enterprises, Isar has built his career around helping leaders win. Today, he focuses on unlocking the power of artificial intelligence to transform businesses through education, strategy, and hands-on consulting.

In this episode, Isar and I discussed:

• Why most leaders are still in the early stages of AI adoption
• Practical ways integrators and small-to-medium businesses can start using AI right now
• How AI will reshape customer service, design, and operations in the near future

SEE ALSO: #327: Chris Sterle on Building Acoustic Design Systems with Culture, Vision, and Content

Transcript

Ron:

Hello. Hello there. Ron Callis with another episode of Automation Unplugged. Coming to you today for this Halloween special. If I was a little better, I'd be wearing an outfit or a costume, but you all know that, , this podcast is brought to you by my day job at One Firefly. So this is my costume every single day, every single day of the year. So I am excited to be here with all of you. , if you're watching on our day of release. As you know, we release new shows every Wednesday, , or maybe you are listening in the future. , thanks for tuning in. I have a very special show today. I actually have, , a friend, an advisor, a consultant, and , I know that everybody is gonna lean in. You're in fact, probably gonna want to watch or rewatch. Re-listen to this episode because we're gonna be dropping lots of knowledge and truth about all things ai. And I know AI can be a bit intimidating for many, myself included. I'm just a few years down that journey, , then some, but I'm still, , regularly in shock and awe of the rate, , and pace of change that's happening with all of, , these technology innovations. So without further ado, I'd love to bring you my guest today. , the one and only es a matis. He is the CEO of multiply. , and multiply is spelled M-U-L-T-I-P-L-A-I, of course. So let's go ahead and bring in Isar and, , let's get this started. Hello, sir.

Isar:

Hello. Hello. So excited to be here.

Ron:

I am, I am pumped to have you on the show, Issa, so thank you. You're a busy man. You are. What does your travel schedule look like just over the next couple of months?

Isar:

I get a headache just thinking about it. , I think I'm gonna be in seven different locations doing workshops or speaking at stages in the next month and a half. So that's a lot of travel. , most of it's US based, but all over the US and one, one trip to Europe. So it's, it's gonna be, , my wife and kids are probably in a, in, in the worst scenario out of all of this, but, , but yeah, it's, it's gonna be, , it's gonna be busy.

Ron:

Well, for those that are not familiar with Multiply, let's, first of all, maybe at a high level, what is multiply as a business and where are you located and how do you, , how do you advise or help people?

Isar:

Yeah, thank you. So, so multiply is, , AI education and consulting agency. That I founded, , just over two and a half years ago. What we provide is, as the name suggests, , a way to multiply your success, multiply your free time, multiply your results by leveraging ai. And the focus on the business is not on the consulting side, but more on the training and education side. , the idea is to go into companies, understand where their gaps are from a knowledge perspective, from a technical perspective, from a tech stack perspective, and help them put all of that together. Help them establish their own AI committees and help them define the right strategy with ai. And then basically set them up for success in the AI era, , while doing the initial training for. Leadership, employees, board, whoever's necessary in order for this to be successful. And I do this both online. So I do workshops and courses online as well as in person, as you hinted, , to in the crazy travel schedule. So that's, , that's what we have been doing across multiple industries. A lot of it, , in your audience industry of, of integrators and the smart home automation, , universe, both with, , integrators as well as some of the, , suppliers of the actual products, , as well.

Ron:

So that is what makes you particularly unique and special as a consultant and advisor is that you understand my people. That you have, you've been to, to the trade shows, you've been to some buying group events, and you actually understand the AV and integration space. And, and like you said, I know you've, you've worked directly with us here at One Firefly. You've also worked with, , some very big brands that people, we won't name names, but people listening or watching the show would know very well. Yes.

Ron:

And, , also some, some top integrators around the country. Um, outside of that, just for perspective here, what are some of the other types of organizations that you've helped in the last couple of years?

Isar:

Yeah, so it varies dramatically. I would say most of them are small to medium sized businesses. , most of them are not small, small, so when I say small is, you know, 10 to $20 million kind of companies. And then the, the sweet spot, probably most of the companies that I work with are between that and 300 million ish. That's probably the core. , there are in the courses when I teach my open courses, there are solopreneurs that join, so they're obviously much smaller. But then on the high end, , there are really large corporations, international known brands, , that do billions or tens of billions of dollars a year. That hired me to do training for their people. And again, I'm not gonna name them, but known brands that everybody around the planet knows. You were telling me

Ron:

some of those names before we started recording, and I was like, they brought you in, not diminishing you, but I'm like, I thought they had this all figured out.

Isar:

I, I thought so too. I was as surprised as anybody else. But it's, , it's incredible to see that the real need on the day-to-day is beyond what most companies know how to handle internally, including large tech brands that are developing AI solutions for others, but still on the day-to-day of their employees, they're either lost or not really advanced. And that was the focus on that particular training that you're talking about right now.

Ron:

So people tuning in should not feel self-conscious if they haven't figured this all out. Is that a fair statement?

Isar:

A hundred percent. So I'll say something that will probably help people relax a little bit, and then we, and then we're gonna scare the shit out of everybody afterwards.

Ron:

Right? We're gonna, we're gonna do the scary part in a bit.

Isar:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, , when I speak on stages, which happens a lot, I always ask the same question in the beginning, and I said, put yourself in one of four buckets. Bucket number one, I'm a total beginner. Like I. Played, which heard of Chachi pt, maybe put a few prompts in, but that's about it. Bucket number two, I started using it for business. Meaning I have a few systems in place. I have a few processes that I'm actually using AI for, but it's not across the business. It's not everything that I do. , and, and it's, and it's very basic. Bucket number three is I've got multiple systems, processes, use cases that are standardized, that have processes that are well documented that multiple people in the company use. And bucket number four is I can teach the course, right? It's, I'm a total expert. I run 90% of what I do with ai. Everything, every issue that I have, I go to AI first to solve. I, that's kinda like bucket number four. People self-identify as bucket number one or two. 85% of every audience I speak to.

Ron:

I think I, we are probably two, maybe 2.5.

Isar:

Yeah. Something like that. And so this is now, yeah, you got a number three in every audience, but the vast majority of people, the vast, vast majority in every audience, in every industry, in any size of audience, 85% are buckets, number one or two, which means it's still very early in the game, despite what you hear is like everybody's ai, ai, ai, ai. And it sounds like everybody's running really, really fast and everybody's already done like round three of their implementation. That is not the case.

Ron:

I listened, , a couple of weeks ago to a podcast, , with Jensen, the CEO of Nvidia. Yeah. And he was being interviewed and he gave a very helpful and educational explanation of why is all this AI stuff happening right now. And, , I'll just add as a side note, I, I watch, I, you know, my son is 16. I know you have kids. , my son is 16 and I'm trying to expose him to this subject matter now while he's in high school. And, , obviously he's gonna very soon imminently go off to college and the world's gonna look very, very different in the very, very near future. Yes.

Ron:

And so he and I will, I know it might sound a bit nerdy, but he and I will watch these AI interviews of all these thought leaders. Um, and we were listening to Jensen, how do you pronounce his last name?

Isar:

Wong.

Ron:

Wong. Jensen Wong. And he was describing, um, the transformer technology and then ultimately their invention of the, the Cuda. I think that's how it's pronounced. Yeah. The interpreter in front of the graphics processor. Yeah. Maybe from your perspective, 'cause you're, you're far more informed than I am. , I'm, I'm a very, I'm a novice. You're the expert. Why is the world suddenly being shot with a fire hose of AI invention right now?

Isar:

Wow. , I think what's happened in the

Ron:

world or from your perspective.

Isar:

So, so I, I think if you go back enough to really why this even became, because the, the concept of artificial intelligence was invented in the fifties.

Ron:

I know it's been around.

Isar:

So the idea was around for a while, machine learning has been around for 30 years or more. , the reason we're now seeing this crazy explosion is three different aspects. One is the maturity of the rest of the technology, right? So, Vic, this couldn't have been possible without the internet as an example. This couldn't have been possible without Cloud comput. This couldn't have been possible without advanced high-end data centers. This couldn't have been possible without significant bandwidth as far as cellular internet and stuff like that. This couldn't have been possible without the invention of the transformer. But that was like, okay, that was eight years ago. What's the big deal? , this couldn't have been possible without some of the breakthroughs in hardware that Nvidia, first and foremost, and then a lot of other companies are, are following. So all of these had to mature for this to be possible. So this is number one. Number two is. Is really the Chachi PT moment, right? So when, when OpenAI, which was a research lab that nobody heard of, that nobody knew that existed, that had a bunch of highly nerdy, stupidly smart researchers that were basically trying to figure out how to create generative ai. So what is generative AI different than just machine learning where you can take your data and train a model on that? Specifically the idea of generative AI is a lot more generalized, right? It's like it can do a lot of stuff and it can generate things like the name suggest that are not necessarily tied to very specific data that you trained machine learning model on. So what is machine learning that we had before? So people are like, oh, we, you know, we started using AI in the end of 2022. I'm like, no, you've been using AI forever. Every time you use your typing thing on your phone and it tells you what, how to spell a word or what's the next word in the sentence, like predictive typing. That's ai. Every time you navigate with ways or Google or something like this, that's ai. Every time you see ads on Google, that's ai. Every time you see Google search results, like all of these things are AI driven and we've, we've used them for a very long time. What suddenly happened is it suddenly became available to anyone either for free or for almost free. You know, 20 bucks a month is free from a business cost perspective, , with a user interface that doesn't require any user manual, which is good and bad, right? Because you're like, I don't know how to use it. But, but it's, it, you suddenly took something that was available only to the biggest companies in the world. Google could do it, Amazon could do it, Netflix could do it. You know, these companies could do it. Us, the common people couldn't, we didn't have the right budgets and power and people and and technology to do that. And we suddenly can do this for almost free in a generalized way. So we don't need to have the experts on every topic. We can use it almost for anything. And as it gets better, it will be everything. So this is the reason, right? It's, it's the combination of the ultimate democratization of a specific kind of technology together with a maturity of all the underlying things that made it possible. Otherwise, none of it could exist.

Ron:

There's this concept of the singularity and this idea that there'll be a point in time where there's, you know, a GI, artificial general intelligence. There's also a SI what does the a SI stand for?

Isar:

Artificial Super Intelligence.

Ron:

Super Intelligence. Yes. , and that's, when does that happen? And what does that mean?

Isar:

Well, when does that happen? Is the multi-trillion dollar question. You know, it's kind of like the, you know, , what's his name? , Peter Austin Powers. No. Austin Powers. When I said a million dollars, like who cares about a million dollars anymore? So this is

Ron:

trillion dollars. The numbers are like

Isar:

in, in, in trillions right now. But Elon Musk's

Ron:

new pay package is now a trillion dollars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Almost a

Isar:

trillion dollars.

Ron:

Yeah. Tesla.

Isar:

Yeah. , nevermind. So, so the what, what is, what is a GI and what is a SI and, and, and by the way, the definitions are very fluid and different people have different definitions. But on a high level, a GI is an AI system that will be as good as the average human at everything. That a human can do. So if you think about it, many of these tools are already better than us across multiple things. Like they definitely do data analysis better than I do. They definitely do research better than I do. They definitely write better than I do. They definitely generate images and videos better than I could. , and I would call myself an average person. , the so, but there's things, it just fails miserably on like very basic things. I like what, how can he do all of that? And it cannot do these basic things. And so there's a lot of things it still doesn't do. So a GI is like, okay, it can do everything that most people can do at or above the level of most people. So that would be a GI, artificial general intelligence, , the, and the reason general is because of everything, right? It's not gonna just write better than me. We're able to do everything else better than me. Artificial super intelligence is the same thing. Only it will do better in everything than any human on the planet. So it will be smarter than the best PhDs in the world. It'll be Einstein or more on any topic. It'll be able to play any game better than any person in the world. You'll be able to invent new, like anything, literally better than us in every single thing. Now the question of when is a really big question and there's a, you're tapped in

Ron:

Rs,

Isar:

you know people, you know. Yeah, yeah. I know people. I follow people, but they don't agree, so, okay. You have people saying two years to a GI and you have people saying within a decade, and the truth is probably somewhere in between. By the way, I think, I think going back to the, the idea of singularity, I think a GI to a SI. Is a stupid question, by the way. I think the whole question is a stupid

Ron:

question. I'm glad I didn't ask that one then.

Isar:

I I, no, no, no. I'll explain why in a minute, but, but it's, it's, I think even a GI is is not relevant and I, again, I I'll explain why, but a GI to a SI, if you think about the fact that you can spin up an army of the best researchers and the best developers on the planet, as many of them as you want, when you have a GI, how long will it take you to get a SI? You now have the power of every smart person on the planet and as many of them as you want. How quickly does that accelerate?

Ron:

Right?

Isar:

It literally goes straight up and like there is no slope anymore. And so that's why I think that question is kind of stupid because I don't think it matters. But the reason I don't think the a GI question matters, people are so obsessed with like, okay, when are we gonna reach a GI? I'm like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because the technology evolves and gets better every day or every week or every month. Doesn't matter, depending on how you measure. And every one of those increments changes the world that we know profoundly.

Ron:

Let's go there. So we're gonna, we'll, we'll go there and then we'll bring it back to the day-to-day life of the integrator. But let's, let's have fun and talk about, , a couple of years in the future. You, you can define the timeframe. A lot of really amazing things happen, right? Like medical discoveries. Yep.

Ron:

Um, science discoveries, new forms of math, new, you know, new things become possible when we deploy these technologies. But what's I, I think it's fair to say, and it's hard for me to wrap my brain around and I listen to a lot of content. I listen to you and I listen to, you know, many thought leaders on the subject. And it's hard to, for the human brain maybe. To fully process what the world looks like on the other side. How do politics work? How does money work? How does society work? So what's your take on that? What is, you know, go as far out as is reasonable? What, what do you think the world looks like?

Isar:

I wish I knew, , that literally sometimes keep me up at night. Like literally I have three kids and you know, I'm an old fart, whatever, you know, in 20 years I don't really care what happens after that. , but the, there are definitely some very significant changes that are going to happen. And like I said, there's people out there, you know, Demi is the CEO of, , Google DeepMind, he planted his flag on we are going to do good for the world. He's been doing this way, became way before he became a part of Google. And they are working very, very hard. You know, those of you have heard of alpha fold and, , alpha fold is, is a tool that allows us to completely chop up and rearrange. Genome, like actual get a no prize for that correct sequence. He want the Nobel Prize for that. , and he's talking about within a few years to be able to replicate in a digital way the actual mechanics of a living cell. So what that means is it means you can test and understand the mechanism of cancer, the mechanism of disease and viruses, the mechanism of what can stop it, which in theory means nobody gets sick ever again with anything. This could happen per him. And he is probably the most knowledgeable person on the planet within a decade.

Ron:

Could you combine that with gene editing?

Isar:

Yeah.

Ron:

And some of the other genomic technology. Yeah. That can not only be theoretical, but it could be applied.

Isar:

Yeah. , he's talking about nuclear fusion, which means as much energy as you want for free without any pollution to anybody on the planet. He's talking about solving global warming. He's like, these are the kind of problems he's solving or he's thinking he's solving for. Right. So on one hand, this is the ultimate, incredible future with abundance of anything. 'cause once, if you think about it, once you have limitless energy and limitless intelligence, which are the combination of these two things that they're developing, then you, then you can do anything. 'cause you

Ron:

need limitless energy to have limitless intelligence. Correct. 'cause you need inference processing. Correct. And that takes power. Yes. And that's, I'm

Isar:

talking, I'm talking beyond the AI I'm talking about. Think about anything you want to do requires energy, anything. Whether it's driving your car to do the thing, building a factory, , shipping things from one, like all of that requires energy. If you have limitless energy, because it doesn't cost a thing, it runs itself. It's a machine that runs itself just like the sun runs itself and doesn't cost us anything. Only we control it and it doesn't generate any pollution. Then from a resource perspective, you, you can do anything you want. 'cause there's no limit to the thing that runs the thing that creates the output that you want to create. And so it, it's, it's a very weird thing to think about, right? Because we never had anything even close to that. So that's one side of the story, right? The kumbaya, you know, world butterflies, butter, butterflies, and unicorns future,

Ron:

right?

Isar:

And we might get there, , but there's the other part and there's the way to get there. And another part, there are several different things that scare the hell out of me. The first one is how many jobs are gonna be lost in the near to medium future? Now, I, I wanna put things in perspective. Jobs are already lost to ai. A lot of people are not admitting that. Some people are starting to admit that. , but in the tech world, it's a blood bath right now and it's a blood bath on two sides of the equation. On one hand, a lot of people getting fired. On the other hand, they're not hiring entry level positions, just not, , entry level positions. In the thick, , world right now is getting close to two, , to double digits unemployment at a younger age. , because what

Ron:

would you do with those entry positions? Because they would do, the AI can do

Isar:

all of these things. Like, why do I need an entry level engineer if AI does it? That's right. Well, how are you gonna get. Mid-tier engineers and then team leaders, and then CTOs, and then system engineers if, if you don't have these entry level positions. So that's one question that nobody has.

Ron:

It's a big societal question mark, isn't it? Like how do you, when this, when that group moves through retirement, where's the new crop of talent coming from? Yeah.

Isar:

So that's question number one. Question number two is the actual unemployment itself. Do you know, I'm gonna ask you two interesting questions on if you listen to my recent podcast, you know that, but if you don't, then you don't. What was the unemployment rate in the recent, , recession in 20, , 2007 when the whole market collapsed?

Ron:

I think it was 9%, something like that. Almost

Isar:

10,

Ron:

almost 10. Nine or 10.

Isar:

What was the unemployment rate? , in the big depression, the 30, 1930s.

Ron:

I'm gonna gu, I, I did not listen to the episode, but I'm gonna make a wild guess and say maybe it was around 30 or 40%.

Isar:

So that's what I thought. It peaked for a very short amount of time at 25, which means the spread between life is good, the economy is running, everything is ticking. People making money of 5% unemployment to the world is collapsing and nothing works. Yeah. Is 15 to 20% unemployment.

Ron:

Right.

Isar:

That's the spread.

Ron:

Mm-hmm.

Isar:

Going back to the A GI question, if you have tools, and like I said, the A GI question doesn't matter. The question is what can these tools do now? What can they do in two years, whether we call it a GI or not, can they do right now 20% of what humans do in the workplace? The answer is a hundred percent yes. Right. Now, if we stop

Ron:

AI development right now in 2025, that's a true statement.

Isar:

Yes. Which means once everybody on the planet, every company in the world figures out, how do you leverage ai effectively, one or two things. One of three things can happen. One, the cake grows, right? There's a bigger cake, so every company can do more. There's more

Ron:

workers. Theoretically, there's more in the country.

Isar:

Everything's good. That's not very likely. The second option is the cake is being cut differently so people figure it out earlier and better grab market share of other people, and these other people go out of business, right? This is very likely. Very likely, yeah. Option number three is that everybody shrinks, or if you want to stay in business, you gotta be more competitive so you're not growing because your competitors are growing faster and they're eating market share. You gotta shrink. So even if you are adding AI capabilities, and let's say you are able to do something with a hundred people, now you can do it with 80 people, you're gonna let go of 30 people because you can't sustain the rest of them, which is also very likely. And so if we get to 25% unemployment, I, I think a lot before that in today's economy, it's a very different economy than, than than back a hundred years ago or 90 years ago. But if we get there, the economy stops. If you get to 10% unemployment in people who make not 30,000 bucks. So again, going back to the Great Depression, the vast majority of unemployment with people at entry jobs, people who are employees at factories, people who are building railroads, people who are doing these kind of things. Right now, the unemployment is gonna be white collar jobs that make a hundred thousand, 200,000, 300,000, half a million dollars a year. When these people are unemployed, there's no money in the market. No money in the market. Economy stops. Economy stops. Everything collapses. And so even at smaller numbers of unemployment, nobody knows what's gonna happen. Now, a lot of people are talking about UBI, universal basic income. That's gonna be the solution. We're gonna put crazy taxes on the AL Labs that are gonna make trillions, and we're gonna distribute it fairly and evenly among the people. , to make it fair, this is the dumbest, most un optional option I've ever heard. And the reason it, it is, is a, every time people try to do this, so communism existed for a while, let's spread the wealth. Like it just doesn't work. So we, we try that in several different places around the world, , forcing it with everything possible and it failed. So we know it doesn't work, but let's say we find a better way more AI is gonna help us figure it out. , and we find a better way to do this. What is basic income? The necessities. Basic to who? There's some people that, for them basic income is $40,000 a year and they can sustain their current life. For some people $300,000 a year and they go bankrupt. So are you, who's gonna decide who gets $300,000 a year and who gets 30? And what's gonna happen in society when some people get $300,000 from the government and some people get 30,000? Like, it just, it's not going to work. Now, what is going to work? I don't have a clue, but it is. You know, it's, it's a, it's a very big question that nobody's answering. So, so you're asking me what keeps me up at night? That's one another thing. And then, and then we'll go into more practical stuff because I think that's gonna be great now that

Ron:

everyone is terrified. Yeah.

Isar:

I

Ron:

can't listen it anymore.

Isar:

The other thing is, is truth. I think the concept of truth is being unraveled and truth is the base for everything, right? So the, the reason we have society is because of trust, right? I trust that you are you, and that you're a good person and you're gonna obey the rules. I trust that the government is gonna use my taxes for the right things. I, this is what it's all built on now. 90, no, I dunno. 90, A large percentage of our communication right now is digital communication. You haven't met most of the representatives you vote for that make decisions for our country. You speak to me right now via digital medium. Like maybe it's me. Maybe it's not like most of what we do, we chat with our kids on, on WhatsApp or whatever, right? Or text messages. Like most of our communication today is digital. There is zero way to know right now what is real and what is not real on digital communication. What does that mean for the future of our communication? I don't know, but right, right now as we speak, you could be speaking to somebody else who's not me, and you will never know in real time in an actual conversation.

Ron:

I think that I, I'm just going to throw a curve ball. I agree with everything you said, and I think this becomes an application of cryptography. Blockchain technology for authentication of source, end-to-end communication. Amen. So I, I think that that becomes a use case. People talk about all this crypto tech and what's the true applications other than Bitcoin, which is digital gold. But now you, the, the technology also nicely and parallel has been created and the applications are looking for a home. And I think in this. Ability to authenticate communication, both, you know, how do you know if that image is real? That video is real, that voice is real, that person is real. Yeah.

Ron:

I think there, I don't know, does that seem reasonable as a, a use case for some of that tech?

Isar:

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think there are definitely gonna be new technologies created to make it possible. You know, there's the surprise, surprise, , one of the companies that, , Sam Ottman started is a scanner, like an orb thing that scans your retina or coin. Yeah. That can tell you that you are you and then you're authenticated. And then so there's, there's gonna be ways around it, but, , but I, I think there's a very scary transition period between we figured it out to, we didn't figure it out. And the technology's already there.

Ron:

I, I've given this example or this story, , in some of the classes I've, I've taught, but, you know, back in the 18 hundreds. 80% of the global workforce was in the food industry. Yeah.

Ron:

And the steam engine was in invest invented the industrial age today, , 2025. About two to 3% of world population is in the food industry. And so if you go back into 1870s, right, the world, you know, if you were a farmer or a field worker, you probably thought the world was ending when you saw that steam engine coming down the field. And there was absolutely a period of disruption in society where all of those workers lost their jobs. And after some period, maybe decades, there was a world of abundance. And all of those new, all of those people ultimately landed somewhere. But the society was absolutely disrupted for a period. And I think what we as humans have a challenge seeing. What does the world look like on the other side of the disruption?

Isar:

I agree with you a hundred percent. And, and I'm gonna say one last scary thing and then let's dive into practical and then we'll do the fun stuff. Yeah. Because otherwise, what is

Ron:

the Halloween episode? I agree. I agree. Yeah. I should

Isar:

have been wearing like a scary something. Yeah, exactly. So there, there are two huge differences between previous revolutions and this one. One is speed, right? Industrial revolution. We're talking about 150 to 200 years. Yes. The steam engine was invented. Yes. They were starting to build them. Yeah. 150 years. Yep.

Isar:

And in, in those days, these are, I don't know, five generations of people, , that, that had time to adjust and acclimate to this new environment. Let's take more recent one, the internet revolution. I, you and I both grew up in a world with no internet. Mm-hmm. Right.

Ron:

I, me and my brother and sister would actually go in the backyard and play in the dirt.

Isar:

I know

Ron:

that was the thing to do.

Isar:

Yes. And so I remember the first night I connected to the internet, it was 1994. Oh, you okay. ,

Isar:

and my, I was living in an apartment in Tel Aviv, and my roommate was a geek like me, and he comes home with this device and I'm like, what? What is this? He's like, this is a modem. We're like, okay, what does it do? He's like, it's gonna connect us to the internet. I'm like, what is it? Yeah. He's like, I don't know, but this is like the cutting edge thing. Yep.

Isar:

And, and we're gonna be in front of everybody else. Yeah. And then we connected the thing and he goes, eh, oh, first of all, you have to know, you have to know how to connect it. Right. There's no, you can Google it. You gotta read the freaking manual.

Ron:

Right, right, right, right. We

Isar:

do the thing and then it connects, and then it runs, and then like two minutes in it, like a thing pops up on our screen and there's a little window with a triangle prompt thing in the corner with a blinking cursor next to it. And that was it. You were connected. What do we, what do we do now? It's like I, I don't know. So that was very underwhelming, right? Yeah. And that was 94. The first time I got an email address was when I went backpacking in South America. That was 99. Sure. That's five years. Five years from the moment I connected to the internet, to the moment I got an email address. Forget about now I have the world in my pocket in my phone, and I can control satellites on the other side of the planet. , it took 15 years for the internet to actually start impacting our lives.

Ron:

Yes.

Isar:

Nobody knew what AI was three years ago. Go. So this is one, one is speed and it's a very, very different speed. The other aspect of it is, the thing we went to in every previous re, re revolution was white collar jobs where we can use our brains instead of our muscles. Physical force.

Ron:

Right.

Isar:

Where do we go from here? Right? When we replace the thing that we went to as we developed the capability to replace the, the physical labor, , where do we evolve to, now, I'm not saying we're not going to figure it out, I'm saying it's very, very different than the previous revolution.

Ron:

So I, I acknowledge that and we are humans and we are resourceful, and we have smart, , energetic, passionate, curious listeners. They're resilient. And watchers. I'm, I'm with you. Yeah.

Ron:

They are with us 36 minutes in and they are leaning forward. So now they wanna know what are use cases right now in their business lives that they should be paying attention to ai. I think we've done enough to alert them that this is coming, whether they like it or not. , as, , you know, the, the former CEO of C four, , Martin used to say, , you can't fight gravity, so this is gravity's gonna win. So this is coming whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. So now, if that's true, what are, and you know, our, you know, our audience, what are use cases across, let's just start with business where this could have an application right now.

Isar:

Yeah, great question. So, so let's think about the process, right? How does a company work? How does an integrator work? Marketing happens, right? So you gotta get awareness somehow so people know that you exist. , this could be a mix of B2B and B2C, right? Because you want to have relationships with designers and builders and, and, and architects and stuff like that. So, so, okay, so this happens. So there's marketing, then you get a potential client. You gotta sell them on your solution. You gotta come up with ideas, you gotta do all of that. Then you have to get what they want. You have to understand their needs. You have to understand what they want to have in life. You gotta understand their budget, and you gotta suggest a solution that makes sense to them that will also be able to be integrated with the designer in the architecture and the GC and so on. , and then you need to actually deliver what you, what you did, which means you need boots on the ground. You need actual people installing the thing, , at a house or a venue or whatever it is, , you're installing. And then hopefully you can turn that into more marketing because you've done a good job and you can run it around. So in each and every one of these steps, AI can be extremely helpful. So let's start with marketing. Mark. AI is really, really good at understanding needs of specific audiences. It's really good at capturing the essence of what is it that they need and turning it into a language or visuals and so on, so you can create significantly more personalized and relevant marketing campaigns that will piggyback on the knowledge that you already have in your company. So people say, okay, what? I have nothing like, I'm not Google. What kind of data do I have? Well, every conversation you had with a client that you recorded is data. Every email that you send back and forth is data. Every brochure that you've created is data. Every project that you have documented is data. Like every one of these things is things that you can use in order to feed a sim. Like people, like, I don't know how to train a model. You don't need to train a model. You can take that information, throw it into a custom GPT and start outs question about it, and, and get better and better results as you teach it. More stuff about your business, about your industry, about your potential clients. So this is on the marketing side. Now they're in the, so this is the knowledge. It's not even the creating the marketing. It's understanding what are the needs of your audience so you can do, excuse me, so you can do better marketing. Then there's the marketing itself. You can create right now an image, highly realistic, full resolution of any house in any scenario, with any devices in it, in minutes. Without photo shoots, without cameras, without lighting, without videographers, without actors, you can create any scenario you want in order to sell the dream, because this is what this industry is selling, right? You're not selling speakers, you're not selling TVs, you're not selling controllers, you're selling a dream. You're selling a life in which I can think of what I want that will happen in my house and will happen. The music will be exactly what I want. The people that I'm entertaining will have more fun than they're having today. The, go ahead. Are you

Ron:

willing to, to agree with me on this point though? I'm gonna counter you just for a slight hair that, and I don't even know that we're gonna disagree, but I'll just make a point. It's better when that integrator takes photos or videos of projects that are truly and uniquely theirs because they own that ip. Yes, and that content can be used on their website or their social media. It's gonna help when it's crawled by Google or AI or the visitor. That is a net net better. Sure. But you, you're describing is the fact or the true statement, AI can also create assets that are powerful, but it's important. Note the dealer doesn't own those assets.

Isar:

Correct. Is

Ron:

that a true statement?

Isar:

A hundred percent. So the anything created with AI as of right now, and this will probably change because otherwise we're out of copyright law. There's

Ron:

not a lot of case stall right? Case? No. Right now the copyright

Isar:

office is saying very clearly if it's created with ai, it's not copyrightable, it's not yours. And your, your, your competitor can literally copy and paste it and there's nothing you can do about it legally. I think that will change because otherwise there's not gonna be any copyright protection for every, for anything because everything is gonna be created with ai. And so that's. One aspect, but, but I do think yes, you can have the stuff that you actually took your actual projects for testimonial perspective, but if you want to create marketing that will appeal to a broader audience, you can make up projects. Don't say that they're real sure, but that would stuff that will connect emotionally with the people you're trying to connect. That will drive them to want to work with you and know about you. And that becomes significantly easier. So that's on the marketing side, and that's true for written video imagery, anything that marketing, , is created. Now you're meeting with a potential client and you're having a conversation with 'em about their, their vision, their dream, what they're trying to do, and so on. By the way, the same thing is true for a designer or an architect or a builder or whoever it is that you're talking to. It's very hard to capture all of that information, right? What you're trying to capture is, is, is a vision in somebody's head, right? Sometimes it's a, it's a feeling inside somebody's heart. Like, how do you. Capture that. So we try to take notes and you try to take as best notes as we can, but that's not perfect. What AI is very good at is transcribing everything that is said, and then you can analyze it through whatever lens you want. So that lens can be just gimme a summary of every requirement that was mentioned in that conversation requirement. But be 1, 2, 3, 4, and then we'll give you a list. It's like, okay, now tell me which words they've used in order to describe this thing and it knows how to do that as well. Now write me a proposal that takes into account all the things that I can sell. Here they are here on the left, here's a list of all the things I know how to sell. And I want you to combine it with the words and the feelings and the way the client was describing their wishes, their dreams, , and their requirements. And now you get a proposal that is perfectly custom. To the actual way the customer was describing. Forget about what he wants. Like the, the language that they were speaking is now spoken back to them. But with behind the scenes, here is the control panel. Here's the kind of wiring, here's the amount of speakers, here's the type of blinds, here's like all the stuff that this industry knows how to sell very well. This dramatically increases the chances that they're actually gonna hire you because like, yeah, this is exactly what I went, what I meant. So I don't write my proposals in the last year or so. I've written zero proposals and I have more work than I can handle. I'm literally turning work down all the time.

Ron:

Raise your rates.

Isar:

, I know I'm ra and that's why raising my rates. That's why raising my rates. Thank you for that tip. , and so the reality is except for one firefly, keep those the six except for one firefly. Okay? Of course. , and so the. The, um, your ability to win business because you're speaking their exact language is, is incredible. So this is, this is the, the, the sales side of things, right? So now you want more business, now you actually gotta design and build the thing. So in there, one thing that these tools still do not do well is anything that has to do with floor plans and actual technical drawings. When I say don't do well, they fail miserably. They're horrible at it. And so do I think that's gonna get solved? A hundred percent. Am I surprised it hasn't been solved yet? A hundred percent. Like when I started working, , with, with your audience two years ago, I thought that within a year it will be, yeah, we, you better tell what you want and it will generate, , the technical plans and the wire plans and like all that kind. It's not there yet, but it's coming. And there's a few interesting beginnings in that. , but. Can you get a bill of materials from a single prompt if you fed it the right information? Yes. Is it gonna be perfect? No. Is it gonna be 95% there? Yes. So then you'll spend 20 minutes doing the other 5%, but you don't spend three days doing it. Can, you can

Ron:

keep, keep, keep walking me through the integrator's life. What, what are other roles and functions in their day to day where there's applications?

Isar:

So, so, yeah. So, so this is more on, on the, on the design side, right? Then the, then there's the procurement side, like where are you gonna buy this from, how much inventory you have in your warehouse right now. So everything that has to do with research and data analysis, these tools are really, really good at. So if you wanna research what is being sold for how much in different places, different locations in different models, and compare stuff that will take your team days or weeks to do. If you feed it the right information and prompt it correctly, the AI will do in 45 minutes to an hour. Now again, is this gonna be the best and final? No. But it's gonna save you four or five days of research. Mm-hmm. That now you're starting from that point versus starting with zero. Then the next point is, okay, now we want the job. We have the drawings, we've done some it manually, some it AI helps us. We need to actually go and build this. Like we need boots on the ground. We need people to do this. Do I think robots can do this? The answer is not yet. When they will be able to do this. I don't have a freaking clue. , I don't think it's that far in the future. I would say five to eight years is kinda like my guess. , however, a big problem is hiring the right people. A big problem is training those people. A big problem is dealing with real time issues in the field. So let's cover these three. You can build a custom GPT that will search for people online. There's multiple tools that can do this today, and you will find the right credentials. People have done the right jobs in the right zip codes, , that have the right capabilities that have shared this and that information about themselves across multiple channels, and they can find those people for you. It can write better job descriptions than you can. It can write interview questions that will help you verify that these people don't only have the skills, but also have the right, , the right mindset and the right culture to be a good fit for your company. Mm-hmm.

Isar:

Think of what I'm saying. You can build a custom GPT. I have several clients already doing it who have a custom GPT who writes interview questions to verify culture fit for a company. And in addition to writing the questions, it gives you examples of good and bad answers, like what cues you wanna look for in the answer. In order to know whether that person is bullshitting you or whether he understands the culture or whether he's a he or she's a good fit or not. So you can find better people faster than you can today. Then training AI is incredible at training because it can come up with its own scenarios. It can provide you q and a questions. It can show you different things in different sequences based on how well you are progressing versus everybody gotta watch these 47 hours of videos in order to learn how to do this, and then tackling things in the field. These tools today, the thing I have in my pocket right now, hence my phone has chat GPT on it. I can build a custom GPT that can have the camera open and on the backend of the data has the wiring diagram of a control four control panel and how it connects behind the scenes in the wall. And you have 17 different wires coming in. How do you connect them? I don't know. You need somebody to teach somebody how to do this, or you open the camera, you give it the wiring diagram and you put the camera next to it and say, okay, walk me through this. And it will. Now we are there right now. Is it perfect? No. Is it faster than, oh, I gotta go back. I gotta go back to the office. What,

Ron:

what percentage of integrators, and I'm asking a broad question, you're gonna give a broad, generic answer, but what percentage of integrators do you think are doing what you just described? Zero Deploying custom GPTs to help in field installation or solve problems? Probably

Isar:

zero.

Ron:

Probably zero or

Isar:

very, very, very close to that. But yet, if you're

Ron:

listening and if you push forward and figure out how to do this, which each star just said is doable right now. You have an opportunity to start to leapfrog in front of your competitors a hundred percent. Where are those new technicians in the market gonna work at that tech forward integration firm, or at the one that's still doing it the way that everyone's still, everyone did it. Yeah.

Ron:

There's a lot of opportunity to stand out and be different for these businesses that are willing to be step into their step out of their comfort zone and acknowledge they're gonna go somewhere they really don't like to be, which is into the land of being uncomfortable and not knowing the immediate answer, but getting their hands dirty and inventing. And then ultimately, now you've gained new skills and new abilities as a business. A hundred percent. It's a, a powerful place. All right, we'll close this out. So, , at least in terms of the integrator, what about on the, , the service and maintenance side of the business?

Isar:

So over there are a few things that are very interesting. The first one is the upscale upgrade opportunity, right? You can very easily take your entire database of every installation that you've done and tell it, Hey, if people have this system, they should upgrade to this. If people have that system, they should upgrade to that. If people have this, they should probably do this. Have them craft an email and or voice and or video of you explaining why this is a good idea and have it send it to all the different potential people. Some will bite that's free money on the table that you're not, that you're not bringing right now into the company. So that's one aspect. The other aspect is one of the industries that is probably now growing the fastest is customer service, , with ai. So these tools are getting really, really good at doing customer service and providing answers via text, email, and voice. To any question that you can imagine. So these tools exist today. They're a little more complicated to set up, but they exist, which means you can support as many clients as you want for the same flat fee of running that software, , 24 7 365 in any language that you want. And so that's another aspect of the service side that these, , tools are enabling in a very effective way.

Ron:

So this show is coming out right here before Halloween. So this is our Halloween episode, but the timing's also great. , based on what you just said, audience, at this point in time, it means our new Concierge IQ service at one Firefly will be out. So I'll just leave you with that's, you wanna dig into that? Actually, Issa, you helped us get that thing off the ground when we were doing the r and d there about a year and a half ago. , it's releasing, , right now f Fantastic. So, , that's gonna be a great customer service help to integrators across the country with ai. Quick, quick question for you, ISAR. Um, you mentioned, , robots are not likely to take the job of the installer, at least in the next five to eight years. , what about providing robots to the end customer? Where do you see the integrator playing into that ecosystem?

Isar:

A hundred percent. So I, I've taught multiple courses to HTSA, , members. And since the first course that was two years ago, I said, that's a huge opportunity that's coming, right? So these home-based support robots, call them, whatever you want to call them, is already a thing. Like they're, they're companies who are selling them. Probably the one that is the most relevant from a cost perspective is a company in China called Unit three. And Unit three has several different robots. They're the ones that do everything first. They're other, the ones that did the first F forward flip back, flip side flip, , ninjitsu moves, , you know, all these kind of things. It's all their robots that are doing it first. But they have a very capable platform and they have two main robots right now. One is like a full-size human and the other one is like a kid. It's like four foot tall. , it's called G one. So the big one is called H one. I assume H for human, I don't know. But G one is like the little brother and G one is being sold right now for about $19,000. That's a four foot tall robot that can walk in your house and do a lot of stuff. And so is it ready for prime time yet? Can you have it serving drinks at your next event, at your new renovated house? I don't know, but I'm guessing in a year or two it will be. Now the, I I, I think the, the amount of things you'll be able to do safely and consistently is gonna be significant. And I think for somebody who's willing to spend, throw whatever number you want out there, you know, 500,000 to $5 million on renovating their house, investing 10, 20, $30,000 in a cool robot that does stuff around the house. And that is fully integrated into your system and that becomes, for lack of a better term, your butler. But that is also. Completely connected to the internet, knows the answer about everything, knows the answer about anything in your personal life that you'll give it access to, so it becomes your personal assistant as well, and that can do the laundry and can clear the yard from the toys of your kids and can serve drinks at your next event. And that costs you 30 to $40,000. I see that selling like cupcakes in your industry,

Ron:

I, I just saw it. The robot is the interface. The robot might be in the room. Yeah. Hundred percent. It's tapped into the system. It'll raise the shades, lower the lights, set the alarm

Isar:

a

Ron:

hundred percent. It knows your system. Diagnostics. You could ask it about this, that, or the other, and then it could physically go over and make you a cocktail. Yes. How is our industry not gonna be the, the, at least a industry, a primary industry that takes that to market?

Isar:

I, I agree with you a hundred percent. I, again, I said that two years ago and I still strongly believe that, that your industry is the gateway. For wealthy people to get their first dibs on these kind of new, new, new type of toys.

Ron:

There are a dozen plus robot companies. Are there, is there another one or two brands that people tuned in should check out in addition to the the Chinese unit tree brand you just mentioned? Yeah, so, so there's

Isar:

a bunch, right? So figure is a big name in the US obviously Optimus from Tesla is a big one in the us , there's a, there's more than a few Chinese, , companies. The, the, the reason I mentioned unit tree specifically is that the robots are very capable and at a very reasonable price point, right? So do I see people with way too much money investing $150,000 in buying a robot? Maybe, but I think it's a lot more likely that they will wait a year or two and spend $20,000 or 15,000 or $10,000, whatever the case may be. , Tesla is talking about manufacturing 5,000 of these by the end of the year. Now that's Elon Musk. He said a lot of things about timelines and they never happen. But let's say they're wrong by a year and let's say they make $5,000 by the end of this 5,000 units by the end of next year, they will definitely blow that out of the water. , going back to your 900 and something billion dollar package that he is, part of it is selling I think 10 million. Optimal. Yeah. He

Ron:

had

Isar:

to

Ron:

commit to a quota

Isar:

of Yeah, like 10 million robots. Think about what the price per unit is when you're generating 10 million of them and not 5,000. Just like everything else, it becomes a commodity that anybody can buy. And so do I see a future where every, assuming we all have money, somehow, going back to the discussion we had before, but assuming the average household has some kind of a free income to, to use, I don't see a household that doesn't have. A bunch of robots, , doing stuff. You know, one is just in charge of maintenance, the other one is in charge of, , the kids. The third one is in charge of the backyard. Like, it may not be the same exact robot because it may be different tooling and different stuff, but it, but yeah, if it's, you know, if it's $5,000, just, just think about the average household. And again, I'm not talking about people who don't have money. I'm talking about people who have money. The, the, the people that your industry serves, they don't mow their own yard. They don't wash the floors in their own, they don't, they, they, they pay people to do that. They pay a lot of people to do a lot of these things. And if you combine that on an annual basis, that's way more than $5,000, which is a $5,000 one-time investment to have a robot that can do a lot of these things. Mm-hmm. And you have a cool toy to show off your friends. And so it's the literally like the perfect setup for, for your industry.

Ron:

When do you think you'll have one in your house?

Isar:

So, so my biggest fear is my kids and my dog. Right? If I, if it was me and my wife in the house, I would've had one already, right? I'm serious at, you know, at at less than $20,000 as something I'm willing to roll the dice on to see how this thing works and be ahead of everybody else. No brainer. I do have three kids and a dog. And is that a justified fear that something might go wrong? I don't know, but it's, it's the 0.01% chance that something will go wrong is unacceptable. From my perspective.

Ron:

I, that's a clue into the demographics though, of where these things might go first. They might go first in the homes where there aren't kids and dogs, or maybe dogs, but maybe not kids.

Isar:

Yeah. And so if, if you think about, okay, what might, what might go wrong? Okay, this thing may catch fire and then the whole house goes on fire. Okay? But that's true for. Every device I have at the house. Right. It is like, that's not necessarily much difference. I have a freaking test card charge

Ron:

your ev in the garage and it can catch. Yeah. So it's

Isar:

like there's, there's, okay, this is not much different than anything else we have in the house. So that's not a big fear. , it will stumble and fall on stuff and it's made out of metal and these things will break. And some of these things might be really expensive because that audience may have really expensive things in their house. Well, usually the really expensive things are insured and they might break or get stolen or, or catch fire, either, like otherwise either way. Like does that increase the risk? You have

Ron:

to get robot insurance for your home. Yes. You might robot get robot insurance

Isar:

for your home. , which going back to new jobs like, oh, I'm a robot insurer. I'm like, what do you do? Exactly.

Ron:

I'm a robot insurance agent.

Isar:

, and so yes, there can things go wrong. Yeah. I, I think the, the value. Like the ROI versus the risk equation is gonna be very, very easy to decide within, like I said, probably the next couple of years on a home use kind of, , robot. Going back to your previous question on the different companies, most of these companies, the vast majority of them aim for the industrial universe as their initial markets. So they're all talking about, , robots for the home later on. , but most of them are aiming for, okay, there's, right now, as as we speak, right now, there are 450,000 manufacturing jobs open in the US that are not fulfilled. 450,000. Let's say you sell a robot for $50,000, that's a pretty freaking big market to go after, and that's just the US alone. And so the opportunity there is huge, and I think that's where they're gonna go first. There's a lot less risk the. Job that you need to do is very clearly defined. It's not okay. Be in my house and help me out. It's like a, that's a very different thing. So, so I, I, I definitely see that this is happening before the home robots are happening, but I definitely see on a small scale the home robots, robots as, as something that could be very relevant to your industry.

Ron:

Love it. Isar. Let's rapid fire here. I got two topics and I know time is finite. We're already at the hour, but I just, I wanna knock through it quick. Name, resources that people tuned in that, , well, specifically let's go tools first. What are AI tools that people, , listening or watching should be checking out for application in their personal life or their business? What is it and why? Maybe give us three to five that are just super top of mind.

Isar:

So I, I, I'm gonna throw you a curve ball because I know you told me to prepare for that question. And I, and I, and I just thought about it, that it's the wrong question to ask. , and, and I will answer it. I'm not gonna avoid it. Okay. But I think you've gotta start with the use case aspect of things, okay? You've gotta understand what are the use cases that you have, and we, we named more than a few in this episode. And then you gotta go back from there and say, okay, which tool, which tools do this the best way? So that's the question. That's the more

Ron:

precise version of the question and answer I was giving the very pg generic version. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I'll accept however you want to answer it.

Isar:

No, no. But, but I'm saying, . I think having access to the top models today, , and you, you can pick one, you don't need all of them. I, I have licenses to all of them because there's pros and cons in each one, but I think if you stick to Gemini or Chachi pt, , you'll be fine. These, these are my two top contenders right now, unless you're doing a lot of code writing, and then you'll probably need, , you know, Claude as well in the mix. , but, but for most stuff, Chachi, PT and or Gemini will do an amazing work for everything we talked about before. , you can do that as far as the, and a subset of that is custom gpt. Custom gpt are a way to create repetitive. Processes. Right? They are

Ron:

superpower folks, if you haven't started deploying custom GPT in your life, learn how to do it tomorrow. And, , a hundred percent you'll,

Isar:

you'll thank ESR and me a hundred percent superpower. So custom GPT or gems in Gemini, which is the parallel in the Gemini world, , is that the next, , one that is very helpful for your industry is creating images with, , the new Gemini model called Nano Banana. , you won't find nano banana in Gemini. It just called image Generation, which Gemini 2.5 flash image or some weird name like that. But the nickname is Nano Banana because that's how they released it. Kinda like pre-released it before they told everybody it's Google. , the benefit of that is that it can generate accurate images and it can keep consistency across multiple generations of something. So if you have an image of a house and you wanna put, , 84 inch flat screen TV on the wall of a specific model. You can do that. If you want to remove a wall and change the thing and put a control panel on the wall, you can do that while everything else stays exactly the same. That was not doable before unless you are really, really good at Photoshop. , and it took hours to do. And now in a single problem, sometimes two, sometimes three, you can do that. It keeps consistency of objects. So if you're trying to sell a device, which you are all trying to sell devices, some of them are better hidden than others, but if you're trying to sell a device, it will keep consistency of the view of the device from different angles, from different directions in different illustrations, in somebody's hand, on a wall in the pool, like you name it, it can do that. So the combination of the ability to keep consistency of objects together with the ability to keep consistency of a house and people allows you to create very targeted graphics for whatever need you have. Whether it's for a brochure, whether it's for your marketing material, whether it's for a very customized project that you wanna sell to somebody, , you can do that very easily. The other second step of that is video generation models. The two leading right now are VO three from Google again. , and you can take the image that you have created on nano banana again, Gemini 2.5, flash, and create a video out of it. So you can take the house, the actual house that you took a picture of, change stuff in the house with Gemini, and then have people, , serving drinks and having a party in the backyard next to their fancy new pool and the lighting that they control and the fireplace that they control and so on. And you can show that in a video without ever having to put people in the house ever again. , and you can show the after video when the pictures are the before pictures. So this is incredible. Another great tool to do that is runway. It's another good tool that knows how to create, , high end videos based on images and there's a bunch of others. So this is another thing. , the last one that I will say is probably Hagen. Hagen is a great tool to generate, , avatar kind of videos. And this can be used for anything from marketing to training people how to use the products that you just bought to internal training and onboarding, , and stuff like that. So there's, there's multiple, , ways to use that tool. So these would be probably my top three to four tools.

Ron:

All right. Last rapid fire, then we're gonna get you, get you on your way, which is resources. Now everyone should be, if they haven't already, they should be subscribing to your podcast. , actually, you know what, let me put that on the screen here. So your podcast, ISAR is leveraging AI with Es r Mais. Yep. What, what, what should they expect if they tune into your podcast?

Isar:

So there's two episodes per week. , episode number one comes out every Tuesday. Well, no, there's no one, I guess it's every week. So, , every Tuesday there's an episode that is very practical and tactical that I either myself or I host the best practitioners on the planet and we share how to do a business use case. So what are the tools? What are the prompts? What are the processes? Everything that comes with, , that will show you how to do the thing. And that goes from marketing to sales, to customer service, to operations, to anything that you can imagine. Every week is something else. , building agents, , and so on. So this is every Tuesday and every Saturday we release an episode. That is what happened in the AI news this week. , and then we just cover what happens. And so a lot happens every single week. So that keeps you. Top of mind of what's happening, what progress, what happens from an industry perspective, from a technology perspective, from a government perspective, regulation, perspective m and a, , et cetera, et cetera.

Ron:

Where else would you say to watch or listen or read, just, , what's top of mind for you? What's valuable?

Isar:

, so I, I follow a lot of people on x, I cannot probably give you a full list. , when it comes, X is one of the

Ron:

best real time places to follow subjects like, yeah. And so

Isar:

the people I follow there the most are the heads of the different labs. So the, all the people who run in different positions on the main lab, so in open AI and, and philanthropic and Gemini and Google and et cetera, , I, I follow them because they release what they share, what they think, and so on, on x several times a day. So that's a great place to start. Could you go to

Ron:

chat, GPT and ask it? Who would be the top, , influencer? Oh, a hundred percent influencers, yeah. On AI to follow on X. Who should

Isar:

you follow on X? And they will probably tell you.

Ron:

Yeah.

Isar:

, the, the next thing is, , podcasts. So I listen to many different podcasts on ai, , in addition to mine, , some that I listen to regularly. And let me open my Spotify and I'll let you know.

Ron:

I mean, in addition to Automation Unplugged Of course,

Isar:

of course, of course. And to leveraging ai. So I listen to the AI Daily Brief. , that's a show that is again, kind of like a really small version of my show. So they do daily. , conversation about a topic, so not use cases, but a conversation about a topic and daily news. There is the artificial intelligence show, , that is great for news and analysis of what's happening in the AI world as well. There is AI explored, which is more for marketing, like it's very marketing focused, but they're talking about different use cases of AI and marketing. , Lex Friedman is a great podcast overall. , Lex is a scientist himself and he has a very successful podcast where he interviews anything he finds interesting, which is a huge variety of tools, , of things of from history to psychology, to science to whatever. But because he has access, , he interviews. All the leaders of the biggest labs and people like that. So every time he does one of those interviews, it's , it's something you don't wanna miss because these are usually like an hour and a half, two hours kind of interview with the smartest people in AI in the world. So he's another one I'm listening to, , regularly. So there's, there's a bunch of podcasts, , and I on YouTube, I don't follow anybody's specific, but that's definitely one of my go-tos when I'm looking to learn how to do stuff. So there are a lot of very capable people that are sharing exactly how to do something with ai. And you watch one or two of these videos and you can replicate almost anything you see out there.

Ron:

I, I would give, , not necessarily, , only ai, but on YouTube I follow two people I follow, , Peter DTIs and his moonshots podcast. Yeah.

Ron:

, they're always talking AI every, , episode. It's awesome. I now watch it every Saturday with my son and, , Matt Wolf. Yeah, , his, , he, his new format is, he does a bit of a rundown of the news. Sounds like similar to your, your podcast, but Matt is

Isar:

awesome. I actually know different than Peter. I actually know Matt in person. I met him multiple times.

Ron:

Yeah. Matt. Yeah, he's, he's great. Um, Esau, it has been awesome. I appreciate you staying over. We're, we're running a few minutes over, but, , man, I could, I literally could talk to you for hours. , so we, I feel we only scratched the surface, but thank you so much for being generous with your time and sharing with our audience. , I have some, , points of contact here. , , can we share your, , what methods would you like to share with the audience in terms of how they can get in touch with Yeah. You know, the easiest way

Isar:

to get ahold of me is either email or LinkedIn. I obviously will see both. So my email is my first name, ISAR, ISAR at Multiply, which as Ron said in the beginning, is spelled with AI in the end. So MU. L-T-I-P-L-A-I instead of y in the end, just AI in the end.ai. So it's essar at multipli ai and on LinkedIn, I'm the only es r mateis on the planet, or at least the only Essar, Mateis on the planet with a LinkedIn profile, , which is good enough for that perspective. So if you find me, if you found Isar Metis on LinkedIn, you found me. , and then the third, if you just want to consume the content, , you know, go to the podcast of leveraging AI or go to my website. If you're looking for the courses, , the, the website is multiply.ai. And you can find the courses that we teach, the workshops that we do, speaking gigs. If you're looking for that or any other thing that you wanna connect with me for,

Ron:

when will, , folks tuned in, when will they likely next be able to, , sign up for one of your training cohorts where you have people from around the world that, , can sign up and kind of bulk price the training?

Isar:

Yeah, great question. So, so we, when we do the open to the public courses, it's usually about once a quarter. , and so the next one when this comes out, which like you said, is end of October, is probably either December, but less likely, more likely mid-January. , but they'll be able to already sign up. So, you know what I'll do? I'll, I'll, I'll one up. You on that. , I'll create a promo code for $100 off. So if people use the promo code one firefly, which is easy to remember, , one word, all uppercase, one firefly, then you'll be, get a, we'll be able to get a hundred dollars off, off the price of the course. , you can find the course. I'll, I'll send you the link when this goes out. They'll be able to find it through your show notes, but also just go again to multiply AI and be able to find the course as well. But in addition, we have a self-paced version of the course. So the course that I teach, , on Zoom, , there's an offline version of it where you can go and walk your own pace. It's basically the same exact course, just chopped off into lesson plans of five to eight minutes each. And you can take it at your own, , spare time. And that is available always. It's there on our website as well. So if, if you don't wanna wait through January and you're like, oh my God, I gotta do this right now, then that's a great way to do it as well.

Ron:

I love it. Isar, , you are a wealth of knowledge and experience. Thank you for joining me on this episode of Automation Unplugged.

Isar:

Thank you so much. This was a great pleasure and a great appreciate conversation. I appreciate you as a person and as a partner and as a, and as a podcast host now as well. This was fantastic.

Ron:

Awesome. Thanks so much.

 

---

Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

---

Resources and links from the interview:

• • Isar Meitis LinkedIn Profile Page

• • Multiplai.ai LinkedIn Profile Page

• • About Multiplai.ai