#368: Jason Barth on Turning AI From Cheap Hacks Into Real Company Standards
In this week's episode of AU, guest Jason Barth of The Premier Group joins Ron to discuss why AI felt like a pile of cheap hacks for a year, and what finally made it meaningful.
This week's episode of Automation Unplugged features Today we're bringing you an AI Insights episode with Jason Barth, CEO and lead designer of The Premier Group, a custom integration firm in the Indianapolis area that designs and installs residential and commercial technology.
Jason is a returning guest. He was last with us in May of 2020 on episode 121, and he has spent the past year and a half going all in on AI. In that time he has built and trademarked an entirely new internal operating system he calls Premier X, and he has brought in an outside implementation firm to train his leadership team as AI architects.
In this episode, Jason and I discussed:
- Why AI felt like a pile of cheap hacks for a year, and what finally made it meaningful
- Building the foundation first: a common language document, a company taxonomy, and an org chart his AI tools can actually use
- How Premier structures its Claude workspaces around the project life cycle, from marketing through customer service
- The install-to-service handoff that now produces a personalized client letter and full warranty documentation in about 30 seconds
Whether you have been putting AI off or you're already deep in it and looking for a model that scales past you to your whole team, Jason lays out how he got his company aligned and what he would tell you to do first. So settle in and enjoy my conversation with Jason Barth. Let's get started!
Transcript
Ron:
Hello, hello there. Ron Callis here with another episode of Automation Unplugged, and today we're bringing you an AI Insights episode. Our special guest today is actually a returning guest. He was last on the show way back in, oh my goodness, May of 2020. He was on episode number 121, and this is Jason Barth. He's the CEO and lead designer of Premier Group, and he's got some really fun, exciting things. He has jumped down the AI rabbit hole with both feet. He's Alice in Wonderland, and he's doing all sorts of fun things. Now, that said, he's not gonna show us all of his tricks. He's gonna show us one or two things that might be of value to you out there. So I know you're gonna want to lean forward, you're gonna want to tune in. He is going to do some screen sharing, so if you can, try to get to the YouTube version if you're out there maybe on your morning drive listening to the show. We're gonna do our best to use our words and try to describe if we're showing things on screen, but ultimately you can always visit Automation Unplugged on YouTube and watch the video version of the show. So let's go ahead and bring Jason in. Jason, how are you, sir?
Jason:
Hey. Good, Ron. Excellent intro there. Good to see you. You're clearly very comfortable in your little podcast studio here.
Ron:
Yeah, thank you. Good to see you again. You know what? What is this? I don't know. I'd have to bring Allison in to keep me honest, but yeah, we're in the 350s, maybe 360s in terms of show quantity. But you were last on, you and Jamie were on, and it feels like yesterday to be honest. Can you believe it was six years ago?
Jason:
It does, and I had my fancy microphone, my AKG.
Ron:
You did. Gold. The gold microphone.
Jason:
The gold microphone. There was a lot of comments on that in the posts.
Ron:
I was ooh-ing and aah-ing over your microphone. I think it was actually after that, that I stepped my game up. I moved into the Shure SM7B mic and made some other updates after I saw what you were throwing down.
Jason:
All right, I don't have that today. Well, that's it. This is more raw, right?
Ron:
So where are you coming to us from?
Jason:
I'm sitting in my office here. I actually just pushed my camera back so that we look more the same size, because I felt really huge.
Ron:
Yes. I felt like you were small and I was...
Jason:
Now we're the same size.
Ron:
I love it.
Jason:
I'll make sure my head's slightly larger than yours, you know, as it should be.
Ron:
As it should be. Yeah.
Ron:
So Jason, tell the audience, tell us about your journey with AI. What has it been like for you at Premier?
Jason:
Yeah. So when AI, when the whole term started being used everywhere, and I lose track of time, but it's probably about a year and a half ago, I was like, "Man, I'm not sure I want to live in the world that everybody's talking about." And the whole concept of AI and the hypothetical made me quite honestly want to go lay in front of a bus. And you know, I don't have kids, but I started thinking about all of my employees' kids, and the world. And kids born today, they're never not going to know AI.
Ron:
Yeah.
Jason:
They're gonna live in a completely connected world. They're not gonna know what it was like to not have AI. So at the end of the day, you get over it, and you say, "Hey, we gotta adapt," as we do in our industry. We're a lot of small businesses, and we're supposed to be nimble. And we're supposed to be able to turn the ship quickly. So I started digging in, and it was complicated and difficult, and I took a few classes through HTSA, some things that were provided to us. And the big disconnect, or the large disconnect, was that I felt like it was a bunch of cheap hacks. Like proof this email, organize my calendar. It just didn't feel meaningful enough. You almost felt like you're spending as much time reviewing everything with AI as you spent doing it anyway. And then the argument was, "Well, yeah, but this is gonna make the dumb people smarter." I'm like, "Well, but how does that help me?" I think I'm pretty smart. Led an organization for 26 years. We've had good success. How is this more meaningful? And it really kind of clicked maybe about six months ago. It took about a year of digging into this to really figure out what it meant to add meaningful AI into the business, to make us better, make us faster, better communication, better documentation, basically our entire workflow. And so at that point, I branded a new operating system for Premier. I kind of stole the old Sam Runco. Sam used to be great. He'd come up with something for projectors, and he would trademark it. He'd give it some fancy name like PISCES, proprietary interlaced, you know, whatever.
Ron:
Right, right, right.
Jason:
And it just made it more official. So I called it Premier X and put a little trademark after it. So Premier X is our new way of thinking. It's our new operating system. I got total buy-in from the whole company because all we have to do is think, "Is this the old way we would do it with Premier, or does this fit our new operating system, Premier X?" And then I also trademarked our Premier intelligence system, which is the intelligence inside of our new way of operating. So that's what I got clarity around, the vision for how to implement AI in our business, and we kind of started to move forward in a more productive way.
Ron:
At a high level, what platform, over the last year and a half, were you using? ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, or other?
Jason:
Yeah. So it started out with a lot of research. You don't want to start down a wrong path. At this point, we're on Claude Team, so Claude for the whole company. I personally use ChatGPT for high-level strategy. We use Claude for building the systems, for the AI architecture. And then we're on a Microsoft platform, so all the field technicians, everybody's on Copilot with Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft SharePoint. Microsoft is our source of truth. That's where all the information resides. So in theory, we could switch platforms tomorrow, and all we've got to do is link our source of truth, which is our Microsoft SharePoint drives. We just remap the drives to a new platform. So there was a lot of thought put into the setup. And I'm gonna tell you, the last three months has been a whirlwind of advancements in AI. Things I couldn't do three months ago that I can do today are borderline shocking. Slightly overwhelming, but it's just what comes at you. You just roll with it. It's getting better so fast it's unbelievable.
Ron:
When did you land on team-wide Anthropic, or Claude Team, versus other options?
Jason:
So I was on Claude personal, and then I quickly uncovered that, hey, listen, this isn't gonna be scalable or replicable among the whole team. And I'm gonna jump to kind of a later point, but we signed up with a group out of Minnesota, near Minneapolis. An AI... I wouldn't call them a consulting firm. I'd really call them an implementation firm. It's about 30 folks. They operate as almost 200 people because they have virtual assistants and employees. So their organizational chart has their 30 real employees, and about 150 virtual employees or agents or whatever we wanna call them. I still haven't... What word do you like? I'm still stuck on the word.
Ron:
Agents is the term du jour, you know? I think that AI team members is maybe a more soft way to approach it.
Jason:
Yeah. So let's go with that for the purposes of this conversation. Because I'm still nailing all this down.
Jason:
So I've got a document called Our Common Language, where it's all our definitions for everything we do.
Ron:
Okay.
Jason:
So that there's no confusion. I'm a big stickler, because I will often see two employees having a conversation about something and they're arguing, but they actually agree. I'm overhearing, and I know that they agree, but they're using different words. They're referring to something in two different ways and creating confusion where there shouldn't be. So I'm a big stickler. I've got a whole document I've created, and every time we hit a word or the way we refer to something, it gets titled and it gets uploaded.
Ron:
A brilliant way to reduce friction within a business.
Jason:
Yes. And this has become incredibly important with AI. Our SharePoint folder structure, I needed to define that very early. Our taxonomy, which is a new word I learned, which is how we refer to what we do, all of our disciplines: security alarm systems, security camera surveillance, security access control, security life safety. So our taxonomy of all of our disciplines, our common language, our organization chart, all of our team members, what they do if they're cross-functional. We defined that we have 12 teams. Everybody has their primary team, but they might also work 20% on a secondary team. So they've got their primary hat, but they might have a secondary hat. So we had to cross-reference all that so that when we're utilizing our AI, it knows who to assign stuff to, it knows where stuff goes, and if you don't know where to save something, it'll tell you where to save it. We've got a couple hundred folders in our SharePoint drive in terms of how everything's organized. And it started with Claude, and that aligns to SharePoint, that aligns to OneNote. Knowing who we are and what we do, how to task things out through Planner, et cetera. It's really amazing. I'm having fun with it.
Ron:
Well, let's jump into your very specific... Here's what I know. I know you, and I know some of the things you're doing, and I know that I could interview you for five hours and still only scratch the surface. But this is an AI Insights episode, so we're gonna try to dig into an insight. What's a problem within the business, a problem or opportunity, however you want to view it, and what was that problem? How did you tackle it with AI? And what's the result?
Jason:
Right. So we just kind of described it. As you grow your business, and it's not just me and a project manager and three installers, now there's 38 of us at this location. You run great risk of, hey, this Premier project was really excellent, this Premier project over here was okay. You could end up with a different standard, and that's always scared me. To grow and lose control. And so the problem was, how do we maintain really disciplined standards?
Ron:
Right.
Jason:
Because every project's so different, every client's different, every need is different. It's a very challenging industry. And so I really got hooked on how do I replicate myself, if I was gonna say it that way. And so using AI, I'm able to build all the documentation standards for literally everything we do better than I could have ever imagined or dreamed, in a much more organized way. So when I said on the back end our team is using Copilot, well, Copilot searches our whole database of information we've built. So if somebody wants to know how to do something, or what is our standard, or how to program something, or how to service something, in theory, by asking Copilot, they immediately get an answer that's company consistent. It's a company standard. It's like, this is how we deploy this product or this situation or whatever. And that's just gonna get infinitely powerful. Our core collective knowledge base is just gonna grow exponentially so fast now that we've got the core built, because everything has a place to go and it's all searchable and it's all building on itself. It's shocking to me what we're able to do now over three months ago or six months ago.
Ron:
What can you show us as it relates to, for those that are able to get in front of a computer and see...
Jason:
Yeah, I'd be happy to share. So I want to reiterate, I don't know what I don't know. And so I've actually hired this company out of Minneapolis, and we start with them tomorrow.
Ron:
Okay.
Jason:
And it's a 12-week program. So we've paid them for a very specific deliverable over 12 weeks. Not unlike how we build systems with you. Like, we go through a website redevelopment. We say, "Okay, here's what it is. Here's what we're gonna do." And the first two weeks are...
Ron:
Phases, tight deliverables, tight timelines.
Jason:
Yep. So we're two weeks in. Each of the six major divisions of our business, we spend two weeks on each one. At the end of 12 weeks, we should have a well-oiled AI machine. My entire leadership team, and possibly beyond that, several other key people, they will be AI architects, meaning anytime you go to do something, you have to think differently. You have to think, "Can I build an agent to perform this function for me better and faster?"
Ron:
Mm-hmm.
Jason:
It was interesting. We were down at HTSA, the spring conference, and Matt, my business partner, met a guy who built an agent that programs Lutron. And I'm thinking about business processes and all that, and he's like, "Oh, yeah. I can do 300 Lutron projects in a year, no problem." I'm like, "But some of these are one, two, three weeks of programming or more." "Yeah, yeah, I got it." He's like, "I built an agent that programs the systems to my direction."
Ron:
Wow.
Jason:
Well, it's interesting, because I built a 120-page... I still call it a prompt, but with Claude now, you're not constantly prompting. It's a 120-page document that can architect a million dollar system in 15 minutes.
Ron:
Wow.
Jason:
As if I was doing it myself. So when I say replicate yourself, that's what you do. As an AI architect, you're taking something that you do, you're taking your knowledge, your experience. Our goal is the human becomes more important, not less important. I'm not trying to replace anybody.
Ron:
Mm-hmm.
Jason:
What I'm trying to do is have tighter standards and a better outcome for our clients that's better documented, better communicated, clearer for everybody, from the initial scope of work all the way through to the service team. But you really have to think very differently about everything you do.
Ron:
Before you share your screen, I'm just curious, what's the response from your team been? It's gotta be, for some, a bit shocking.
Jason:
A few are a little overwhelmed, and a handful are really excited. A small handful. We had an AI committee we started a year and a half ago to research all this, but we didn't get very far. We didn't get to the meat of this, which I think has really changed with the technology, and then once I kind of connected the dots, we were off and running. And I would say the most important thing for any business out there listening is your owner or your visionary or whoever that person is at your company has to be in this, has to be leading the charge, has to embrace it. If you're Ari at Sonance, who I know you know and have seen him work...
Ron:
Oh, yeah.
Jason:
...working his magic, we're doing everything he's doing for our finance department. We're doing it for marketing. We're doing it for install. We're doing it on the service team.
Ron:
Oh, yeah.
Jason:
It's every division of our business, and I'll show you when I share my screen here in a minute.
Ron:
Yeah.
Jason:
So the owner's gotta be in it, and get help. If I were to try to continue to do this myself, I think it'd take me 18 to 24 months, and I need this yesterday. I see where we're supposed to land, and it's like, how can I get there yesterday? Ron, you also know me, so you understand that.
Ron:
Right, that's it. Once you make your decision, you let me know
Jason:
So this firm, I think in 12 weeks I'm gonna have a whole team trained of AI architects that think differently about our business, and then we're really off and running, because now it doesn't rely on me anymore.
Ron:
That's amazing. I'm curious, how did you settle on the group that you did hire for that consulting effort?
Jason:
So I've been in the know. We talk about things and it shows up on your Instagram. So I get bombarded with lighting design, high-end architecture, and AI is, like, my entire Instagram.
Ron:
That's your Instagram feed.
Jason:
Yeah, and there's a lot of junk. And listen, we're all pretty savvy at this point about our industry, and we know that, like your business, you cater to a very specific niche, and you've been very successful because you're not just vomiting work for anybody who would call you. You guys are very focused.
Ron:
Mm-hmm.
Jason:
And so I was like, well, how do I find a firm that's focused? Well, they're not focused on our industry yet. We're not gonna find that. So I needed somebody who aligned with the business practices. You can just go hire somebody who knows AI, and they're gonna come into our business, and you're gonna get a guy for 50 grand, and they're gonna figure out how to implement some cheap hacks, some tricks. I call them AI tricks, wizardry. That's not what I want. So this is a business that has a full model about transforming your entire business and all of your people and everything you do.
Ron:
Mm.
Jason:
It's a very comprehensive program, again, start to finish, and they've been doing it for about two and a half years. The last year has been really transformative. I've watched them grow in what they're doing, and I just said, "You know what? The time is right. I need to do this." So I've hired their help. We're gonna go through 12 weeks, and it's gonna be transformative. I know it is.
Ron:
Off to the races.
Jason:
Yeah. Their track record is amazing, and I can see it happening for our business.
Ron:
What are you gonna show us?
Jason:
So I'm gonna show you my Claude dashboard. As I said, I was on Claude personal, and we had just created a Team account for the company when I set up our workspace. So are you gonna bring that up, or do I need to bring it up?
Ron:
Yeah, I am. On your side, go over to that screen, because I don't want to... Otherwise I'll be mirroring us.
Jason:
Yep.
Ron:
There we go. All right, I'm gonna put it on the screen now.
Jason:
All right.
Ron:
All right. Guide us through. What do we see?
Jason:
Yeah. So I've sorted alphabetically here. And it's another cheap hack, when you use a software system where you want it alphabetical but you number it. So our first workspace in Claude is our marketing workspace, and we refer to that as positioning our company.
Ron:
Mm-hmm.
Jason:
And then we've got business development, which is connecting. Connecting with prospects and opportunities, et cetera. And then you move to sales. So we've got helping customers or prospects explore, and obviously sales' job is to convert, or to close. So then we do design work, so we're defining the scope of work that we've defined and the budget that we've defined. Then we're developing it with engineering, then we're planning the work. We're installing, so we're delivering. Then we've got to transition to customer service, and then kind of the admin categories: finance, HR, IT, and admin workspace. And then I highly recommend a vision workspace and a leadership team workspace. And this is where all work gets organized, executed, built, et cetera. So whether you think this aligns with your business or not, you're gonna have your life cycle for your teams that you've got divided up, and then you're gonna have a leadership and a vision workspace. This vision workspace is exclusively mine. Nobody else sees that.
Ron:
And right now we're in your projects in Claude.
Jason:
Correct.
Ron:
Do all of your team members, or is it appropriate team members are in the appropriate project when you click on one?
Jason:
You're correct. So then I share out. I can share with my team. Like Jamie and Shelby are in the marketing workspace, and there's a few team members in each one. The largest team is the installation workspace. There's like 20 people in that space. So you don't have to know everything about everything. You largely work in your space. Tyler is my lead design assistant.
Ron:
Mm-hmm.
Jason:
But he also then helps move the project from design to engineering. But CD is our lead engineer, so he exclusively works here. He doesn't work anywhere else. He just works in engineering. But Tyler's probably 80% design, 20% engineering.
Ron:
Mm-hmm.
Jason:
Matt, my business partner, is the head of operations, so he's in the project management workspace with two project managers, Jeff and Tay, and Josh, actually three. So you kind of get the idea. Julia's my customer service manager. She only works in this workspace. She doesn't need to see any other workspaces.
Ron:
What's an example in one of those workspaces of one thing a member of your team would do, or how they would use this project?
Jason:
So when I talk about building an end-to-end platform, something that we had a challenge with was handing the project off from installation to service.
Ron:
Mm-hmm.
Jason:
What does that look like? And so we were able to build out a quality assurance program where there's a technician who's on the customer service team, and he goes out and does a quality control check. Push every button on everything, operate everything, familiarize yourself, and then he does the client orientation. So he does all of our dedicated training. So think of it as the Apple Genius Bar or something like that, except we come to you. And so we built all of those handoff documents between install and service using this platform. And then to take it one step further, what Nate does is he'll actually load the D-Tools project into the customer service workspace, and we have a skill that builds a thank you letter to the client that's specific to their project. It's a one page, very personal... It's like you just bought a Mercedes, or a Bentley, a Rolls Royce. We're handing over the keys. It's a really nice single page letter printed on linen paper with our logo and all that, but it's really personal and specific to their project. And then it prints out all of the warranty information for every single product alphabetically from their entire project.
Jason:
And then it prints out all of the maintenance and cleaning information for their entire system. It generates that document typically in 20 or 30 seconds, whether it's five pages or 100 pages. Nobody does that work. It's automatic on every single project.
Ron:
That's so... Just, I'll restate what I believe I hear you saying.
Ron:
So the members of your team are in that customer service workspace. They would launch a new chat, and in that chat they might, in this scenario, load the D-Tools project details, and then activate the skill that you've created, which is this customer letter skill, which pulls the information from the D-Tools project. And then running the skill knows it's accessing knowledge, so it knows how to gain access to all the warranty information tied to all the products in that project, and its output is an artifact, or a document, a letter if you will, which is the letter ready for a member of your team to sign, and then all of the warranty information, customer service information, all the details you just described.
Jason:
Correct. And it's super clean and it's formatted to our standard. We built all our Word doc templates that it adheres to. So just something like that, that literally if we did that for every project could take hours and hours per project, is now automatically generated, and it looks more beautiful than anybody could type it up. It's standardized, so I know exactly what each customer's gonna get.
Jason:
I know what it's gonna look like, I know what it's gonna say. And over time we could continue to tweak that and make it better. But that's just one really simple example of something that we can now do that we either didn't do before, or only did for large projects, but then it was extremely time-consuming. And it's so impressive, the documentation we're able to turn out.
Ron:
Yeah, I think that's a good example. There's the idea, there's this maybe controversy, even, of whether AI takes people's jobs. And I'll just present a school of thought. You tell me your response. In that scenario you just gave, you just improved the quality of the customer experience. So you now are better because you're using that AI tool. So it's not that that AI necessarily took the work or the job of someone on your team. It's that you weren't 100% of the time deploying that level of detail to every project, but now you can deliver that level of detail to every project. So net, net, you're a better company, and at the end of the day, if you were gonna do it manually, you've now saved all of that time.
Jason:
Enormous amounts of hours. You could almost hire a full-time person to just write up all the information we describe for every project we finish.
Jason:
And now Nate can just say, "Hey, here's the next project up. I'm going out to do the quality control check." Microsoft Planner has already imported all his checklists based on what disciplines are in that project, which it pulled from D-Tools. And the written scope of work that we generated way back at the beginning of the project. So now we're connected to the end of the project, making sure that we delivered what we said we were gonna deliver. And then he can walk out there with all the supporting documents, which are really impressive to the client. It's really organized.
Jason:
That binder that we all want to create, it's just hard. And now it's totally consistent. It's generated to a Premier standard, not whatever employee did it on that day of the week with whatever grammatical skills they may or may not have.
Ron:
I think that's amazing. Jason, would you be willing to come back on after you've gone through this 12-week sprint, and share with us maybe at least how you feel about it and what some of the impacts in your business have been?
Jason:
For sure. For sure. I expect the impact to be huge, but it would be great to actually report on what the impact is. I'm either gonna look really frazzled and 10 years older, or I'm gonna be jumping up and down like crazy.
Ron:
Yeah. Amen. Any words of advice or counsel to your peers out there listening or watching to you and I right now, and they still feel maybe super intimidated, or they're behind? What would you give them as advice on maybe a next step to take?
Jason:
Everybody says this, you're probably not behind yet. But you need to start tomorrow, because in three or six months you're gonna be really far behind companies like ours that are aggressively pursuing everything we can.
Jason:
If you're the owner, if you're not learning this and you're not embracing it and you're not deep in it, and it's not probably your number one priority, unless you have other major issues at your business, it probably should be your number one priority. Because there's nothing that I've done in 26 years that's gonna pay the dividends that this is gonna pay, in quality, reliability, clarity, calm. I've embraced a new word, calm. We wanna bring calm to every project.
Jason:
AI is actually bringing me calm, because if I forget something, or I don't know it, or I've lost where I'm at, I just ask Claude.
Jason:
"Claude, what am I supposed to be doing right now? I've totally lost my train of thought. We were working on this project. We got sidetracked. We're trying to come back. Where did we leave off?" Oh my God, it just spells it out for me. And I refuse to type anymore. I hate typing. I have conversations with all of my AI tools. Use the mic, don't type. Have conversations. It'll often prompt you and say, "Hey, would you like me to create the finished Word doc, or do you want me to just put this here in the chat so you can review it?" And I'll put it in the chat and I'll hit record again and I will read through what we just generated, and in real time I will read through and make corrections or clarifications and then hit end recording, and it will generate V2, V1.1, V1.2. When I put a V2 on something, that means it's done and ready to be published for my team. So everything stays in a V1. If they see a V2, it's done. And we have working folders, but everything that's published is V2 or later.
Ron:
Love it.
Jason:
So get organized. Just get super organized.
Ron:
Amazing. Proud of you. Not surprised. A bit amazed. Thank you for sharing so openly.
Jason:
Sure.
Ron:
Those that want to get in touch with you, where can we send them?
Jason:
You could send them to our beautiful website that you guys have built for us and managed over the years. That's the easiest way to get into contact, I think. From there you can call or text, or there's a form to fill out, whether you just want some info, sales, service, et cetera.
Ron:
All right. For those that are listening, it's at Premier, P-R-E-M-I-E-R, hyphen, Group, G-R-O-U-P dot com. And your... I believe this is your office line. You want to correct me? Is that the right number?
Jason:
Yeah, that's our office number you're scrolling across there.
Ron:
That's amazing. Awesome. So 317-580-1032. Give Jason a call if you wanna just say hello or, like, "Holy cow, man, that's impressive." Jason, thank you for joining us on this episode of Automation Unplugged. We're gonna follow up in three months and check in and see how you're doing.
Jason:
Well, I'll be happy to do it. I'm gonna shamelessly plug your company. You guys have been amazing for, God, 15 plus years now at least. We are going through another web design, another evolution, primarily around navigation. And I think this time around your team's even better than they've ever been, and I'm gonna assume it's because you guys are also using AI tools. My perception is they're more organized than they've ever been. Even Mackenzie has referred specifically to the ability to research. I'd love to learn what you guys are doing with AI, but it's fairly evident to me that you guys have stepped your game up continually.
Ron:
I think when humans use AI, they are the best version of themself. They're superhuman, if you will, just because of the brainstorming, the analysis, the processing. It's nothing short of magical when you use these tools. Like you, I know just in that project, have used AI to develop your brand voice and to really dial into your ideal customer. And when you're able to communicate that to us as an agency, and then we're able to do human plus AI post-processing analysis and then construct that based on our knowledge of web and marketing and branding, you get a really cool product on the outside of that.
Jason:
Yeah. We're trusting you to tell our story, but we've gotta tell you our story. And I've got a couple hundred documents I've created that are stored in my Claude base now. But it does start with your org chart, your taxonomy, your common language, like all the stuff that you just kind of need to circle back and get on paper, so to speak, virtually.
Ron:
So true.
Jason:
So that Claude now knows our voice. I get emails from everybody every day and I'm like, "AI wrote this. I don't think they even looked at it." You can tell. It's not personal. Our industry is deeply personal. Our connections are deeply personal. I think you said it best, the goal is to make us as humans the best human version of ourselves.
Ron:
Yes.
Jason:
I wanna serve my clients really great. I don't wanna forget anything. I didn't even go into... I could go for hours on this. But everything I do is recorded. I know you've been recording for a long time, but client meetings, job sites, the Meta glasses I wear at job sites, the Plaud, not Claude, the Plaud recording device for meetings. Everything gets summarized, actioned, tasked, decisions made. Again, you write a skill that says, "How to give this back to me," and where to put it all so nothing gets overlooked. And I used it. Last week I could not for the life of me remember, from a meeting two months ago, what the client had selected for their drapery fabric. And it's like, is this in an email? Did the designer send it to me? Did the builder shoot it over? Is it in Procore? Is it in our database somewhere? I can't find it. And I went to Copilot and I asked, and sure enough, it was in a Teams session with the client where they made the decision, and I didn't write it down. Literally it found a two-hour Teams meeting. It found, one hour and 15 minutes in, here's the clip where you asked them and they made the decision and you guys checked it off the list. I was like, "Oh, this is so great."
Ron:
That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. Jason, thank you for joining me, my friend. We'll do it again very soon.
Jason:
All right. Sounds great.
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.
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/jabarth/