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On this episode of the ‪@WhatWorked‬ podcast, Tyler Rachal and Mike Wu sit down with Jamaur Bronner, Co-Founder at The Foregrounds, an executive AI learning community. Are you interested in AI's business applications? Listen to this episode to learn where to get started.

We covered a ton of great topics:

• Jamaur's experience in consulting, startups, and EdTech and how they influence The Foregrounds
• How executives can fit learning about AI in their busy schedules
• Experimenting with different tools to avoid the pitfalls of LLMs

For a summary of this episode, check out the AudioNotes.

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Transcript edited for clarity:

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Mike Wu

Hey guys, I want to tell you guys about a story from 10 years ago. Summer 2024 now. This was summer 2014. And it has to do with Game of Thrones, even though I've never really watched the series. So summer of 2014, I think we're two or three seasons into Game of Thrones, but I had not watched it. And so I told myself I was going to catch up on Game of Thrones. And so I sat in my living room and I crushed like four hour-long episodes in a row and I got burnt out, couldn't remember anyone's name, any of the storylines, and I just gave up and I felt helpless and I didn’t know what to do. And the reason why I was doing this is because I was behind and everyone was getting together, do you remember this, on Sundays for watch parties? Everything on social media was all Game of Thrones memes, and I didn't not know what's going on. Even to today, there's all these spin-offs and people reference Game of Thrones. I just don't know what happened. So I got left behind. I've got that feeling again, but this time it's not Game of Thrones. It's AI, it's artificial intelligence.

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Tyler Rachal

Bum bum bum. Yeah.

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Mike Wu

I feel like I'm getting left behind. This is Game of Thrones version two for me, and I don't want to make the same mistake twice. So I'm very excited to have Jamaur Bronner on the podcast. Welcome Jamar. Thanks for doing this. Jamar is the co-founder of The Foregrounds, which is executive education around artificial intelligence. So you guys have expert-led cohort-based courses, a private membership community, and then a batch of tools and resources that are at your members' disposal. You guys are building something really cool, and Jamaur, we're really excited to have you on here to talk all things AI and to help non-technical execs like me…

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Tyler Rachal

And me.

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Mike Wu

…and Tyler, try to figure out AI.

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Tyler Rachal

We know nothing.

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Jamaur Bronner

Tyler, Mike, thanks for having me. This will be fun.

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Tyler Rachal

absolutely. And I was going to stick with the Game of Thrones theme there. And I was going to say, I think AI kind of already had their red wedding of sorts with the whole Sam Altman and all that controversy. That definitely felt like he was…

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Jamaur Bronner

Is that when he was describing Her? Like when he had that controversy? Or when they kicked him out?

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Tyler Rachal

When they kicked him out, he walked into a slaughter during that board meeting and that was effectively, that was the red wedding of sorts.

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Mike Wu

This is what I'm talking about. Ihave no idea what you guys are talking about.

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Jamaur Bronner

So short story is Sam is the CEO of OpenAI. He got booted from his own company by the board, but then they realized that everyone was mad at that decision because it was behind closed doors. So Microsoft was getting into it, team members were quitting, and they had to do a whole bunch of damage control. And then they ended up bringing him back on, and then he kicked the board out. So I guess he got the last laugh.

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Tyler Rachal

And that right there, Jamaur, that was as effective as I felt like chat GPT could be. You rattled that thing off fast and you were super succinct.

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Jamaur Bronner

Oh, I just have it running right next to me all the time, so it's giving me notes.

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Mike Wu

It's like talking in your ear.

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Jamaur Bronner

Exactly

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Tyler Rachal

I'm wondering if you don't have Neuralink, like early access to Neuralink yet, do you? Because that was impressive. I would be much more long-winded and I would forget like 90% of the facts and the names and everything like that. So well done. But yeah, welcome Jamaur.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, thanks for being here and would love it if you could just kick things off a little bit with a little bit of background on you. Lead us into The Foregrounds and just tell us about what you're working on.

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, again, thanks for having me. Quick story on myself. I've been doing startup type stuff for the past six years. But earlier than that, I actually studied neuroscience at Duke, thinking I was going to go pre-med, pre-PhD, but did a hard pivot and went into business instead. I got my MBA at Berkeley. And after getting my MBA, I actually worked with Mike at BCG. So that's how we know each other. I've been a big fan of his entrepreneurial journey. And I while at BCG, was doing a lot of tech strategy or design projects. That led me to Singapore.

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While in Singapore, I was working with the sovereign wealth fund, back in 2018, doing some tech strategy work. And, I just loved the region. I was in Southeast Asia in Singapore, met my partner, like two weeks into the work there independent of BCG, but we happened to meet and we're still together six years later. She used to work for a company called the General Assembly, which is in ed tech. And she was managing the region there. She was a VP of APAC. And so through her, I was meeting a bunch of founders and VCs in the region, made a lot of really good friends there. And I was like, you know what? I like Southeast Asia. Obviously my personal life's going really well. I want to stick around here. The consulting life, as Mike knows as well, kind of wears on you over time. And I was ready to move to greener pastures or at least different pastures and go into the startup world. 

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So I ended up connecting with an old B school classmate of mine and joined his startup, which was Y Combinator-backed. It was essentially like the Stripe of Southeast Asia called Xendit. And I was a product lead there. I managed, eventually, about one billion dollars in transaction volume for the company. I joined as employee 70. It's now a thousand plus employees. So it's one of those true startup success stories, which is great to be a part of that ride. But I left late 2019, early 2020 because I wanted to start my own thing. I was really interested in that org design space and doing some of the stuff that I was advising clients on at BCG.

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But it was the beginning of the pandemic. I was still kind of ideating, like validating the demand. I ended up shuttering it before I brought it to market, but learned a lot of really interesting things along the way. I think during that time, I also built the muscle for just tinkering and kind of solving problems on my own, working with low code tools, sometimes no code tools. And that kind of set the stage for ultimately like what we're building out now. But back in 2022, my partner and I left Singapore and we both were doing some independent consulting. I was doing independent product strategy and digital marketing consulting. And she was doing go-to-market consulting, which is her background. And we just discovered that we had shared interests. So she is actually my co-founder for what we're building now with The Foregrounds.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, so partners, when you said partners, yeah, you just clarified

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, I meant business and life partner, exactly.

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Tyler Rachal

All the above.

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Mike Wu

But life partners, business and life partners, it bleeds together. There must be synergies in combining those two roles into one. 

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Jamaur Bronner

So it's funny because she hates when I go into consulting speak. BCG really nails it into us, to talk in certain ways. So she would probably bristle if you said that we had synergies, but yeah, we have synergies.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, that's like my wife is a consultant at Deloitte and oftentimes, we both work from home and I will overhear her conversations. And I'm just like, I couldn't talk to any of your coworkers. You guys just speak in this language and it's like what I would envision if we were to make a commercial about business. That's what the commercial would sound like. You know, it's real business speak. 

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Jamaur Bronner

For anyone who wants a laugh at consultants, there's this sketch, like a parody. It's probably 10- 15 years old, it's called The Red Balloon. But if you go on YouTube, it has millions of views. It's about exactly what you just described, Tyler, of what would a consulting meeting look like that's just all jargon heavy, folks are kind of talking past each other, they want to take a step back and really get the requirements down. And it's just, it's pretty funny. You should definitely check that out.

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Tyler Rachal

Without a doubt, and I know you can relate to this  and I know Mike's the same way because it creeps into his personal life, but Mike obviously has a way of thinking and my wife is the same way. And I find her being like, we need to meet this weekend to talk, we need to have a personal strategy session or something like that. And she shares a spreadsheet beforehand and I'm like, what is this? It's all too

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Jamaur Bronner

I love spreadsheets

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Tyler Rachal

That's it.

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Jamaur Bronner

I love matrixes. She and I are doing like the digital nomad life right now. We've been to Mexico, we've been to Europe. We make our decision on where to go next off of a spreadsheet. We do like kind of this weighted analysis sort of thing

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Tyler Rachal

I believe it. Yep. And for me, this is all bringing up childhood trauma, because my dad  went to HBS, like Mike, and he has that brain as well. And I'm not kidding you, he used to send me and my siblings memos as we were children. It would say like, be like regarding, my love.

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Jamaur Bronner

Yes. Love you, best regards.

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Tyler Rachal

He's like let me lay out the reasons why you need to do your chores and like blah, blah, blah. And in which priority. And by the way, I'm your father and I love you. It was like something else. 

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I wanted to touch on something. So you just gave a really great concise background. I'm curious as you, you went from being in a big corporate environment, right? Being a consultant and just always working with large corporations. Then it feels like you, you almost kind of took a baby step. You went and joined a high growth startup, right? And when I say baby step, it felt like you were just inching towards being an entrepreneur. Did you always know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur? Or when did you make that decision?

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Jamaur Bronner

Tyler, it's such a good question and I would love to pose this to Mike as well, I think. So I want to answer your question, but also kind of go in a tangent as well, because if you want to be an entrepreneur, going into and getting your MBA may not make the most sense as the first step or going into management consulting may not make the most sense as a second step. If you know that doing startups is in your blood and you want to be an entrepreneur, right? 

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Tyler Rachal

Sure.

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Jamaur Bronner

I didn't know that with certainty, right? So basically what I was doing was building optionality, I guess, in my career journey, right? Where it's like if I fail at startups, at least I have BCG. If I fail at going and being an early employee of the startup, at least there's other paths. And so I think for me being able to have that optionality really built the confidence, I think I needed to be successful as an entrepreneur. But that being said, I don't think everyone has to go that path. And I'm super impressed by the folks who have been selling candy in their school when they were like six years old and just stayed doing the entrepreneurial grind ever since. But that wasn't me.

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Tyler Rachal

No, I totally relate to that. I know Mike is the same way, we often talk about how it's one of the things that bonds us together is we're both relatively risk averse as far as entrepreneurs go. And I've never felt like I could relate to those people that over lever, like I started my company with credit cards, I racked up $50,000 in credit card debt. That scares the hell out of me. And I don't think I could, just personally don't think I could ever do it. And the path that I believe you're taking, and it's definitely the one that we've taken, I think is much more realistic for a lot of  people. It's like the slow creep into being an entrepreneur, right? You kind of have to build that muscle. You mentioned doing a startup and then ultimately shuttering it. I am always curious.  What were the lessons that you got from that? Mike and I always talk about getting reps in, right, you got a rep in with that. What muscles did you build through that?

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, that's a great question. That was the other part of my tangent that I forgot to mention before, where you talked about was I made to be an entrepreneur? I'd say probably not. I think it is a muscle that you can learn. If you aren't someone who just always had a set entrepreneurial mindset. I think I have always been kind of intrapreneurial, but not necessarily entrepreneurial, right? I've worked at companies and have developed processes and stuff that are still in use to this day. 

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But I think when you go and join a large company, whether it's a BCG management consulting type firm or if you're in industry and you're a middle manager and then you're like, okay, I'm ready to go do a startup. And I've talked to a lot of folks because I've advised these types of entrepreneurs. They have oftentimes head in the clouds, great ideas, but it's a PowerPoint deck or it's an Excel model. And that's cool. That's great. That might help you get your seed funding or your pre-seed angel funding or whatever. It's not going to work. It's one of those like Mike Tyson, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Entrepreneurship is constantly getting punched in the mouth. And so, if you're not willing to get punched in the face, it's going to be a rough ride. 

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I think that that's the biggest learning for me is that as a first -time entrepreneur, I had that kind of rosy glasses of like, yeah, I'm going to take what I did at BCG, I'm going to make it specific to Southeast Asia, and then like, you know, get an offshore development team to build the product. And then all I have to do is sales and meet in front of folks. I'll get my seed funding, I'll build out the team after that. It didn't work out that way. I had the pandemic working against me, but I also just had a tough time really conceptualizing what it was I wanted to build and who my target customer was. And part of that was just like not getting in front of enough customers because I was in the PowerPoint deck or I was in an Excel model. So I think that was my biggest learning.

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Tyler Rachal

That's all too relatable. I will often reference that. So many people are like the mad scientists in the basement. And you have a literal echo chamber of just having your own thoughts. You're constantly thinking about what is the problem? Who is my customer? And you never do that little thing, which is like talking to people.

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Jamaur Bronner

Talk to them.

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Tyler Rachal

Yes. And I love that you use the Mike Tyson quote, cause I use that all the time, being an entrepreneur. I don't know if this resonates with you, but I oftentimes think about how I've been punched in the face so many times. I'm strangely accustomed to it. Whatever that is where boxers get punch drunk. It makes me feel like I'm in the fight and I just want reactions. 

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Neutral is what sucks getting punched in the face. It's like, yeah, you told me my service sucks. That's awesome because you just told me how to fix it. It's way worse when you're not talking to anybody and you just are in this vacuum. So I don't know, does that resonate with you too?

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Jamaur Bronner

Definitely resonates. I think for me, I actively seek it out. I want the feedback. I want folks that, I don't know if I can say it on your podcast, but shit on an idea or on the concept or whatever. Because it means that you're getting closer and closer to finding what is valuable. What the customer wants and, it goes back to what Mike and I learned in consulting, anytime someone's willing to give you feedback, that's a gift, right? That's additional information that allows you to fine tune your next approach. So I'm totally with you, Tyler. That's how I view every interaction, you kind of check yourself because you don't want to be a glutton for it, right? You don't want to always go the hardest way possible, if there's an easier path, but absolutely. I think building that resilience is really important.

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Tyler Rachal

No, totally. We try not to get too addicted to the pain. Mike, you wanted to ask a question.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, Jamar, on this point about feedback, Tyler and I always like learning about the ideas before the idea. So before The Foregrounds, you mentioned there were a couple different things you were working on, different businesses. There was one in particular that is relevant to Hireframe in the sense that it was in the world of work and had to do with fractional experts. And then I remember you in a past conversation, you hit on like some of the insights that you learned from that experience that led to The Foregrounds, directly around AI.

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah. And that's why I love what you guys are building because it wasn't the same, but it's definitely in the same parallel or ecosystem. The background from that was Aziza and I had done our own share of fractional executive work because we knew so many founders and VCs in Southeast Asia, as well as in the US. So folks were pulling us in for specialized projects. And oftentimes these were a dozen hours or so. So it wasn't anything that was like a huge demand on our time, but they're like we don't have a product organization yet, what are some fundamentals that we can be utilizing or scaffolding that we can put in place so that our junior PMs have more certainty or we have a bit more of a process in place because right now we're kind of running around without really any focus or any direction. So I was getting pulled into projects like that, Aziza was, and when we decided that we wanted to work on something together, we were like this seems to be a trend because we know a lot of folks who have additional capacity. And there's this term being thrown around lately called a portfolio career. So rather than like thinking of your career as going up ladders and eventually being a senior executive, maybe you want to be a senior executive, but you also want to invest in startups or you also want to advise companies or you want to find ways of leveraging the experience that you have in ways outside of the company that you're directly employed with. 

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And so when we had that early insight, we're like, okay, well, right now there's not really a platform for something like that. It's not the same thing as like a Toptal or Fiverr or Upwork because it's executives who are working at the executive level at these companies. So we pegged it as a marketplace for fractional executives, folks who had four to five hours a week, up to 20 hours a month essentially in capacity, who would help lay the foundation for companies or help them build the strategy that took them to the next level. Like one time we worked with a partnerships exec who was helping to think through what does the partnership model for this B2B2C company need to look like? Making some intros, helping them think through how to set the right criteria in place for partnership, all that type of stuff. 

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And it was good. We had paid pilots, we were running pretty full steam ahead for about three, four months. And it was a space that we were familiar with, being fractional execs ourselves. But we decided to pause that business because we didn't really see a path to actually scaling it. It didn't feel like it had the unit economics that were really impressive to us. We didn't see a way to really use tech for leveraging that matchmaking piece or the scoping out piece, which was really the bulk of the challenge there. And so we decided to pause that business, but we were still getting inbound requests. We were having folks who were like, do you have a marketer? Do you have a fractional CFO?

And then more and more when we were on hold, we were on like a two month break, we got three or four inbound requests at the same time of we want a marketer, but we're really interested in like AI and automation because we're trying to find like ways of making our lean team more productive or we want a CFO, but we're also trying to like automate some of the accounting and some of the aspects of our books. Do you happen to have anyone who can kind of dual hat in that way? And we're like, well, we don't because we're putting business on pause, but that's really interesting, the fact that folks are looking for this type of matrix knowledge of functional experts plus like tech domain expertise. And that's a light bulb moment. If there's not a large supply of those types of individuals, maybe it's just a matter of us creating those types of individuals. Using EdTech as a way of equipping these senior leaders with the capacity, knowledge, insights and awareness to be effective in deploying AI for their own organization.

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Tyler Rachal

No, totally. And we relate to this a ton at the marketplace thing is really interesting. We experimented with that as well. And, it's hard, right?

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, two-sided marketplaces are tough.

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Tyler Rachal

I'm sure you probably felt this too, was like the executives that had the spare bandwidth, how committed are they?

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, and the startups too, right? When you're working with mid growth stage startups or even earlier, especially earlier, where it's like you might need this person today, a week could pass and you're like I don't need that person. I need a slightly different scope. And so we were constantly changing scope and it was rough.

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Tyler Rachal

We get it. We can relate. We tried to do something similar in the customer experience space. Customer experience was this huge growing buzzword and we thought that we had identified something in terms of companies were making it a big focus. But then at the same time, there were a lot of customer experience executives who would love to be making some additional income. They also wanted just an opportunity to work on more strategic things than just the day to day grind of customer support tickets. So same thing, and we learned a lot from that experience. So I can totally relate to all of that and also understand why you're here today. 

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By the way, I know you can relate to this as an entrepreneur. It's just something unique about like, quote unquote, shuttering a business. And then you get these like inbounds months later, and it's just enough where Mike and I would go through this, where we'd get these inbounds and I'd be like, see man, like we were onto something.

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Mike Wu

Let's bring it back.

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Jamaur Bronner

Mm-hmm. Or you see other companies pop up with the same business model and you're like, huh, they just raised VC funding. Did we just not stay with it long enough? You start to second guess it.

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Tyler Rachal

Yes, yes. But, and anytime we would flirt with it, all it took was like one repetition of working with a customer. We were like, yeah, this is the 97 reasons why this model doesn't work. I hate this business. I should have just shut down that domain. So I totally get all of that.

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Jamaur Bronner

Exactly, yeah

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Mike Wu

Jamaur, tell us, there's kind of three components to The Foregrounds, right? There's the cohort expert-led courses, there is the private membership group, which sounds really interesting, and then there's like the tools that you guys are building. Can you take us into each of those three buckets and tell us more about one?

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Jamaur Bronner

So the first one, I'd say the core that we're building right now is the courses. With Aziza coming from the General Assembly world. General Assembly is this global EdTech company that trains digital marketers, software developers, et cetera, data scientists. And their model is cohort-based courses. So they'll have an instructor, I've actually taught a couple of GA courses in the past for product. So it's someone who comes from industry who knows and who has the battle scars and best practices and all that type of stuff who can say this is why you build a product roadmap in this way because I've tried it a different way and it didn't work out so well and I can share those stories. And so we want to make sure that it's very tangible in terms of what we're equipping these executives and leaders with where it's like, yes, we want to stay strategic, right? We know that they're not the ones that are going to be in the code base or building a chatbot or running automation workflows, but they should know generally what the technology is capable of. They should be able to set a strategic direction. And I think to be able to drive that, you need to have folks who come from industry who've led the types of projects that they ultimately want to implement and can learn from the folks who've done it successfully. 

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So that's the cohort courses and the first cohorts are starting in January of next year and the first two are going to be AI for marketing leaders and AI for finance leaders. We chose that because we had a lot of inbound demand for those specific functions and we're seeing a lot of really exciting tools that are coming in to be really

useful for those organizations.

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Mike Wu

What's the why for the execs? What I know about you, at BCG, we work with executives, those are our clients, right? So maybe that's the thread there. But I like how focused you guys are on ExecEd. I feel like there's a lot of stuff out there, on YouTube for example, how-tos with AI, how to piece together some things and create something pretty crafty. But yeah, the focus on ExecEd resonates with me and Tyler, obviously, as probably like part of your ICP

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, this is like a slow pitch to you guys as well, of course.

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Mike Wu

Hey, I'm being sold right now. I'm all about it.

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Tyler Rachal

Well, that's weird. Mike, DocuSign just landed in our inbox. That's really awkward. We'll review it, Jamaur, and we'll get back to you with redlines. On that note, would you say, Jamaur, that a lot of what's driving these executives in terms of, like Mike said, the why, is it largely fear-based? Like, they're concerned…

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Mike Wu

Like me, like I'm afraid of being left behind.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, it's like I'm the NBA vet and like, these young up and comers are coming up and they're going to take my spot. What's driving them?

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's a couple different things that we've heard from our prospective customers and the folks who have signed on as wait lists for our initial cohort. One is you're right. This fear of missing out, like that Game of Thrones story that Mike told in the beginning where there's something really exciting here. Everybody's talking about it. It's filling up my Twitter thread, et cetera. But I don't know anything about it. So there is that, that fear of it seems important. A lot of people are talking about it. I don't know enough about it. There's that. 

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I think sometimes it's internally-led, where it's the CEO or some senior manager saying we need to start investing resources within AI. And if you're someone, you're the marketing lead, or you're the ops lead, and you are charged with figuring out how to deploy AI within your organization, but you actually don't know anything about it, you're at a disadvantage. So we have folks who are saying someone's asking me to get smart on this, and I'm not smart yet. Or they're looking around, they're like, something's happening here that's feeling different than before.

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And the analogy I often use is, as bullish as I am on AI, I'm also realistic, right? You're not replacing your whole company with bots or with an AI team tomorrow, right? I think we're in that dial up modem era of the internet. That's where we are with AI. So by that, I mean it's useful. There's a lot of useful things you can do with it. A lot of really mind blowing things that you can do with it, but it's not pretty. You might have to have some workarounds or you might have to test and experiment with and iterate over time.

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That being said, I think the winners are the ones who are doing that and not the ones that are like this internet thing, I don't think it's for me. I think our business is better off with the yellow pages, right? There were companies like that in the nineties, in the 2024, 2020s era. There's companies like that with AI. I think like it's going to eventually they're going to have to pay their dues for being slow to adopt.

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Tyler Rachal

In preparing for this podcast, there's a great term and I'm, I'm going to allow you to share it, cause I'm also forgetting it, but it was really well put. You described perfectly something that I was trying to figure out with with AI, which is there's so much to distract you. I feel like the natural tendency is to say, like, as someone who is an executive, and tries to think about how to use AI in my own business, I basically experiment with these tools and I find myself doing things, but I'm like, what is the real application in my business and does this even matter? Why am I trying to solve something that only occupies about 1% of my daily week's work with AI? And you had this awesome term for kind of almost like a framework that you would teach executives for how to understand what the problems are and where the real applications are. Would you mind sharing?

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, for sure. So the term that we try to use at The Foregrounds is building strategic intuition around AI. So that means, like Mike said, there's a lot of great YouTube university content on how to build a chatbot or how to work with automation tools. But I think oftentimes executives or senior managers aren't the ones that are kind of doing that frontline work. So being able to have strategic intuition and say, okay, this is what's important right now, or this is where we should probably start to invest at least experimental budget because we see how good this is today and extrapolate that out three five years, we can see that there's going to be a step change in terms of how we do business. Whether that's in ops, being able to better coordinate different parts of the organization or transfer data to different parts of the organization. Whether it's in marketing, either writing the initial draft of copy or using generative AI for images. 

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There's a lot of applications and one of the case studies that we share on The Foregrounds for the marketing course that we're launching is there was a company in Stockholm, Sweden called Klarna. They're a 5,000 employee company. They were in the Wall Street Journal  two, three months ago because they said that they've saved over one and a half million dollars in a quarter just due to deploying AI within their marketing organization. So they were using outside contractors. They were able to stop using them, leverage their team internally along with AI to get more output. And I think that's really compelling, they had another survey internally that said that nine out of 10 of their employees, again a 4,000, 5,000 employee organization, use AI on a daily basis.

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And we're a lean startup, we're only a few team members right now, but I use it on a daily basis. I'm talking to Claude 3 .5 for a variety of reasons. It's basically like my intern or my chief of staff, that's in every business process that we're doing on a daily basis. So I think back in the day, folks might live in their email, and the email becomes that central command post. More and more, I'm finding my time, chatGPT or Claude being the central command point, and then I'm doing the business stuff outside of that.

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Tyler Rachal

Wow, and I think you just described probably a perfect use case for what drives an executive, right? That Wall Street Journal story about Klarna, you know that gets forwarded to some other company CEO and they're like oh man, my board member just forwarded me this. And it's that story with just a bunch of question marks. Something like that. And they're like, I better join.

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah. Like one and a half million in a quarter? We should be doing something.

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Tyler Rachal

Totally and The Foregrounds, if I'm understanding this correctly, because I love learning about different business models. Am I understanding this correctly in the sense that there's the cohort-based courses and then it sounds like you're also trying to get basically a private, I hate to make it this simple, but private Slacks are like very in right now. Is it that idea that I'm learning, but then also maybe I can talk to somebody from Klarna and knowledge share.

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Jamaur Bronner

Exactly, exactly. And thanks for bringing that back up, Tyler. Like the three components that we talked about earlier, the cohort-based courses, the membership community, as well as the tools and resources that members get access to.  Speaking to the membership piece, it's exactly how you describe Tyler, where we have a firm belief that learning AI doesn't mean you take a course and then you're done with it, right? It's too rapid of a space that's evolving. There's just too much going on that even if you learn something over the six weeks in our January to February cohort, you're still going to want to stay up to date. And we feel like the best way to do that is to bring in guest speakers who can discuss what's the latest and greatest, to have this Slack group like you mentioned, or some sort of community forum where folks can ask questions about problems that they're facing in the moment. And so we're in the process of building that out, that like you said, it's something that feels almost like an alumni network or an alumni community where folks can come back to The Foregrounds, continue to learn and continue to improve and share wins too, hopefully. The idea is that people are learning with the intent to deploy within their organization and we want to know when they're successful and how we can make them even more successful after that.

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Mike Wu

What's the third piece?

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Jamaur Bronner

The third piece is tools and resources. So we've started to build out specialized tools for this specific audience of senior executives. And you can already see them on The Foregrounds site. So foregrounds.ai. We have a job board because some folks are looking to soft pivot or at least want to start seeing what's out there at the executive level for folks who have functional domain expertise, as well as either AI driven companies or companies that are looking for someone who has AI subject matter expertise.

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So we have the job board, we're going to have a list of companies that are our top 100 AI companies’ tools by use case. So if you're a marketer, here's the set of tools that you should be thinking about deploying or at least testing just to know what is the sphere of AI tools available and how do you use them? How do we recommend getting the most out of them? So that's just three just starting out. We have a funding database of AI companies in case you're looking for partners or you're looking to go to one of these high-flying companies like Anthropic / OpenAI that has I think four or five hundred different funding events that we track. So we're doing a lot despite the lean team. And I'm not maintaining this actively, Aziza is not maintaining it, the rest of our team isn't. That's all through automation by itself so we're kind of dogfooding you know what we're preaching as well.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, that's super cool.

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Mike Wu

One thing I'm struggling with is getting started. So even though you've shared a lot of great resources with me, as someone who's bandwidth constrained and also just like pulled in multiple directions, I don't know where to start. So if you were to give advice to say an executive that has eight hours this month or two hours on Friday mornings, that's like a little bit of quiet time they have. What would you recommend they do just to get started, get their feet wet, dabble in this if they're not lucky enough to be part of something like The Foregrounds?

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah. I was going to use it as my opportunity for a pitch. That is what we're creating The Foregrounds for, those folks who have a very small amount of time and they want high impact learning. That's exactly what we're creating. But you raise a good point, Mike. Most people, if you have family, if you're busy, you're a senior executive, so you're probably just looking to get the most efficiency. When we're more junior in an organization, we have more time for learning. But when you're senior, you have constant demands on your time. And so I totally get that.

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If I were to take a step back and say like, I'm an executive, I have eight hours a month. I think the first thing I would think about is one, just not getting overwhelmed by the task ahead of you, right? You don't have to be an AI expert. You don't have to be technical. You don't have to go code anything. So first, just be realistic with yourself. Second, start with like the business problem that you want to tackle. And that doesn't have to be a huge, we have to grow revenue by two X or we have to find operational improvements of 30, 40%. Right. It could be something tactical like we have a bunch of customer support emails that are taking two days to respond to. And we would like that to be one day, right? Like we want to cut down on our response time. Whatever that basic business question is that you have, know, spend an hour or so just trying to qualify and quantify that the business problem that you have.

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Once you have that problem in mind, I spend like two hours just researching what's already out there. What are AI solutions that folks are using to address that problem? You can check YouTube. There might be a tool out there that's already solving that specific issue that you have. I often use Perplexity, which is like the up and coming challenger to Google for conversational search because that's really helpful because I can literally just like speak to it or type to it and say like, I'm trying to figure out how to shorten my response time for customer service requests, what AI tools are out there. And then it will use generative AI search to give you its answer as well as specific sources that you could then do the follow up. So I'd spend a couple of hours just tracking down the various sources.

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And then I'd say, we're at what, three hours? I'd spend three hours, so almost half of the time, in a really experimental mode. I’d get into an experimental mindset of trying these tools. A lot of the tools either are free, ChatGPT has a free program, or a lot of them, they're focused on customer acquisition right now. So they have free trials or they have, you know, ways where you don't have to actually put your credit card down, right? In order to get the, you know, utility out of the tool to figure out if it's right for you. So three hours of just experimenting with these different tools, applying what you had started to learn in the two hours of initial research. I'd say that's the biggest body of work and time commitment. And that's what we're trying to teach with The Foregrounds as well. Everyone's coming in with, or at least by the time that things really get up to speed and up and running after the first couple of weeks, they're going to have a business problem. And that becomes kind of like their capstone project where by the end of the course, they're actually going to be able to present and show how they took that problem, they diagnosed it and diced it into achievable steps. And then from there, they have a roadmap in the future after the class ends of like how they would implement

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So I'd say that's about six hours. I think it's really important, again, it's one of the ethos of The Foregrounds, is learning from folks who are in your space or who are doing the work that you want to be doing, or achieving the outcomes that you want to achieve. So I'd spend an hour, hour and a half looking within my network, whether that's on LinkedIn or just doing cold outreach to folks who have posted on Twitter or on LinkedIn about an AI solution that they've developed for that problem that you mentioned earlier. There's so much, folks are very active on talking about AI right now, so you'll have no shortage to reach out to those types of individuals. And I would just use it as an opportunity to do a virtual coffee chat. If anyone reaches out to me, I always take these at least a couple of times a month where folks are just like, I want to pick your brain on like, you've worked with small businesses, you've worked with large organizations on AI implementation. Can you help me answer these questions? So there's definitely folks like that, spend an hour, hour and a half lining up those calls.

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If you're having trouble like within your network finding those types of individuals, reach out to AI  solution providers. There's AI consultants, there's other folks out there who are again actively seeking customers. So you'll be able to ask those pointed questions on just what implementation would look like if you went with that sort of firm? What would the cost be? What are some realistic outcomes or case studies that they have? All those sorts of things are going to help you form up an opinion on how to take it to the next step. 

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And then that last 30 minutes or so that you have would just be consolidating all of that. Thinking about the synthesis of what you learned, what paths led to dead ends, what paths led to this is interesting, let me explore it later, what a prototype of this idea might look like or who within the organization could carry it forward. So that's eight hours, that's a lot, but at the same time, that's a super productive eight hours. Like you said, that's two hours every Friday for the full month. And by that eighth hour, you're gonna be like, wow, I know a lot more than I did before.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, that's got me thinking, Tyler, is your brain spinning on stuff atHIreframe that we could start tinkering with?

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, without a doubt. yeah. The one that's top of mind for me, I know you mentioned you're going to focus on marketing and finance first, and I don't know if you would consider this one, I know with the marketing, you mentioned generative images, but for Mike and myself, we're talking a lot about top of funnel. That was a big learning for us from last year as a business was we have to get really great at building an awesome top of funnel. 

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And so two things come to mind as far as AI that I think for opportunities. One, I just saw an announcement today, a guy that I knew from my past life working with big tech companies, one of the co-founders of Flexport, was announcing one of his portfolio companies just raised a big round and they are doing AI for SEO. And so that inbound marketing approach, I'm very excited because, Jamaur, I would love to hear your thoughts on this. When I think of AI, and I think the very cursory knowledge that I have of it, and my own firsthand experience testing stuff out, I think today's AI is really great at a couple things. And a couple other things I think are very aspirational and will, I'm sure, improve a lot. But when I think of those things that they're really, it's really great at, it's stuff like summarizing information succinctly and quickly. I think that's an incredible part of that. 

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So when I look at an application like understanding SEO. SEO is like you're trying to understand the ocean, right? It's just there's so much out there. The Google algorithm, whatever it is, is not made public to anybody and everyone's always trying to adjust and adapt. And that's one application that I was like, I bet that's a great use of AI. And I don't know what your thoughts are and the ones that are really great and then the ones that maybe aren't so great. They're not so great. One thing that I hate and I hear a lot of groans about is that, Mike you mentioned, would be relevant to Hireframe. We love outbound prospecting. We've always been an outbound prospecting company that landscape changes all the time. I'm very tempted to follow the crowd and try to figure out ways to use AI for that. But I'm very hesitant because I receive these emails and they are garbage trash.

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It's written by a robot. It's like, hello, Tyler, I noticed that you live in Los Angeles and you have a staffing company and I'm a robot and you like USC cause you went there. And I'm like, a first day SDR could write something better. You know, so I don't know what your thoughts are there.

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Mike Wu

You're either describing that really well, Tyler, or you're completely insulting a fresh SDR that just sent you that email.

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Tyler Rachal

Hey, Steve at Rippling, I promise I don't hate you, but you gotta stop using those bots, dog. I'm just kidding. Sort of.

Jamaur Bronner

Yeah. Sort of. Yeah, I get those all the time. So totally know what you mean. I'd say you touched on a lot of good points there, Tyler. There are certain things that I wouldn't even go so far as to say it's underperforming. What you describe with SDR outbound work, there are ways of doing even that well.I've seen companies that can make really compelling - you have to take a second to like maybe if you squint. It's also like generative ai images right where you squint a little bit and you're like yeah there's something going on with like the hand or the badge you know has weird characters.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah. Totally.

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Jamaur Bronner

But if you looked at generative AI images two years ago, it looked like it was drawn with Microsoft Paint.Two years later, they're realistic enough. 

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Mike Wu

Now they're awesome.

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Jamaur Bronner

 I've seen live action, people making an Elon Musk, like I could join this call, look like Elon Musk. And I would be talking and it'd be of his facial motions and stuff. So it's like the things that seem a bit farther out now, like the outbound. One, they may not be that far out for a while, right? Give it six months, give it 10 months. The other side of that is you have to just be really intentional about how you're going to design the test case for those and then iterate off of it, right? I think there's a lot of laziness, not to be too negative, but like sometimes our folks are lazy with rolling out AI. They expect it to be like I'm going to input this thing. I'm going to click enter, and then it's just going to totally manage all outbound. I don't have to worry about it. 

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If you approach it in that way and you're not iterating, you're not changing the prompt, you're not adjusting based on what the output looks like, then you're going to have those situations where you're just scattershotting it. You're hoping that you're sending it out to 10,000 people and two people out of those 10,000 are not going to see it as a bot and they're going to reply. I don't know, like that's not how I want to do business. And I think that that's an important thing to keep in mind, your brand is still important. How you roll these things out and cautiously in an experimental fashion is important. And then iterating based on it. When new models come out or when you get output that's not up to your standards, making sure that it's tweaked in a way that either it then becomes useful or you shelve it for a few months until something better comes along.

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The other piece of it around SEO. We also know of a number of companies that are doing A -B testing of website design, right? So it's like being able to do what, you know, back in the day, Optimizely is like an A-B testing platform. Now they're incorporating AI so that you're constantly A-B testing, right? So that you're able to take like, this hero image, this copy is leading to a lower bounce rate or greater engagement on the site.

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And if you're able to do that where it's like, it's not an engineer, it's not, you know, the marketing team that has to actively manage the website anymore that unlocks a productivity where that time can be spent doing other things, doing higher value, more creative things. So yeah, I think that there's a number of ways across the marketing stack that folks are finding AI utility. And then the ones that aren't quite there yet. It's either a matter of maybe you need to try a different method or you need to give it a little time.

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Mike Wu

We're talking about how fast these things are moving, how quickly the AI is improving for sales. It's not quite there yet, but my question is will it get there? And if so, when, and is Hireframe doomed? Cause we're a staffing company. What's, what's your take on that?

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah. Should we be scared?

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Jamaur Bronner

I think we're all gonna be like in The Matrix or something. We're just all gonna be wearing VR glasses at home. The bots are gonna take care of the business. We're just gonna rake in money. I think that's what the future is. Business owners are gonna be the only

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Tyler Rachal

That sounds cool. I dig it, I'm into that.

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, everyone's gonna have their own business all run by bots and all we do is collect a paycheck. No, I think absolutely Hireframe and companies that are focused on giving companies the internal resources that they need, like with workforce documentation, I think that they're here to stay for the foreseeable future. I think where things might change is the same way there's value unlocks with other types of technology. Like when we went to mobile, it kind of changed some of our day-to-day cadences. When Slack became a thing and we moved off of email, it changed some of our cadences where we found leverage, right? We found ways of being more productive and more efficient and effective in the work that we do, but we weren't like reliant, we weren't subservient to it, right? And I think a lot of the misconceptions around AI is like it's going to create a subservient like nature to the AI, the AI is going to make all the business decisions or the AI is going to force mass layoffs where it's like I used to have this job, but now AI is doing my job and I have to go find another job. I don't think that that's going to be the case. And actually the CEO of Nvidia at a conference a couple of weeks ago said something similar where he was like a lot of people say that AI is going to take your job, I can firmly say AI is not going to take your job. Now, someone who knows how to use AI will take your job. 

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And I think that's the important thing to remember is that it's such a value unlock for productivity and for getting the most out of a business day out of your eight hours, nine, 10 hours that you have in a day, that if you're not using AI and someone else is, whether that's your competitor, whether that's your colleague on your team, they're just more productive than you and nine times out of 10. So I think that's the important thing to remember.

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Mike Wu

Alright, we're here to stay, Tyler. Co -signed by Jamaur and Uncle Jensen at Nvidia.

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Tyler Rachal

My wife is somewhere in shouting distance. Honey, we're gonna be well, I don't know. Hopefully, okay. So hopefully she can hear that. You used a great metaphor about you know, the early days of the internet and I think just on that point you just made it just makes me think back to the days where I mean, I obviously wasn't a part of this but I I imagine that within the office when the internet was coming around right there was probably your old school executives they were like use a computer to like do a thing. I can just pick up the phone and call Steve in accounting or Bob or whatever it is. And there are people that probably adopted the personal computer and email and all those things. And they saw them, you know, their career skyrocket. So it's probably going to be the same thing. 

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You mentioned this and I love the connection. It makes all sense in the world with your co-founder, life partner, General Assembly. I think about General Assembly, the classic customer profile for General Assembly is like the barista from like Dumbo, New York, who's like I really want to become an engineer. So they take classes at General Assembly. You mentioned people doing kind of like a soft pivot into this space. Do you foresee this becoming the way people felt about social media and the way they felt about customer experience, it becoming someone's entire role? Do you see that being a role at every company where there is a chief AI officer, or is this just one of those things where everybody needs to know how to use AI and apply it to their job?

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, that's a good question. I think both can be true, right? Like depending on the size of organization that you have and the resources that you have to investigate these types of things. should there be someone who has a chief, like is the CTO the chief AI officer as well, or is there a chief AI officer role? We've seen some companies start to build out that model. And it makes a lot of sense when you have 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 employees where it's like, yeah, we need that level of coordination around the technology that we use. Just like we need that level of coordination around like the apps that we're using and all these other internal tools. It's just a new tool that has a lot of opportunity within it, but it also has a lot of risk if folks are going wayward and kind of doing their own thing. So setting like a strategy and a foundation for how that organization grows makes a ton of sense.

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Now on the other side where it's like should every person have some knowledge of AI? That's obviously kind of what we built our business around and what we strongly believe because if you're in marketing or you're in finance or you're in legal or you're in ops, the way in which you use AI in each of those situations is going to be different. You have different use cases and if you're reliant on some C level executive or just someone else that's outside of your core organization, your core business unit, to give you advice on how to use it, something's probably being left on the table. Something's like we actually didn't know this use case existed because it's impossible for one person or one dedicated team that's matrixed across different parts of the organization to know everything. So I think for us, we want to build those foundations where actual functional business heads can then spread the knowledge to junior members of the team and the team more broadly, and then facilitate those cross-functional interactions across the organization as well.

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Tyler Rachal

That makes a ton of sense. It's almost like you bucket it into your just like management training. When people become a manager, it just becomes table stakes for being a leader at a company. I have a very specific question for you. When I think about Hireframe or just myself, and maybe I'm representative of a lot of people out there that are curious about AI, I've always had a lot of hesitation around, implementing AI into my business because we're still, even though Hireframe has been around for now, call it five years, we're still in the early innings. We're still considered very much a new startup when you think about other companies. And one thing that we don't have a ton of is historical data. And when I think of great applications of AI, I think that having that data is a pretty core piece. But maybe, prove me wrong, it's like that meme, I'm sitting at the table or whatever it is. What are your thoughts on that? Do you need that to be successful with AI or do you not?

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Jamaur Bronner

It helps a lot to build it for your specific brand or your own use case. I actually meant to mention this when you were talking about SDRs; AI, LLMs, foundational LLMs have gotten very good at like, like you said, kind of pattern matching, understanding nuances. So let's say you had that SDR that's giving that very robotic sounding response, but you have prior examples of high converting SDR outreach, right? Where it's like this email actually led to the response. So then you feed that in as like the sample that the AI should be using as it's creating the customized personalized outreach. So then that's going to improve that personalized outreach, yeah, you'll still get maybe some wayward phrase or something. And that's why it could be a draft and some human still has to evaluate it before they click send and it goes out to someone. But those types of things where, like you said, it comes down to data, it comes down to having a firm grasp of your internal processes and seeing where you can train AI to give it the outcome that you want that's a fit for your business. 

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So I think when you have a lot of it, it obviously introduces new challenges, right? Because a lot of enterprise companies are concerned about the privacy of their data and making sure that things are locked down, which are valid concerns. Open AI onwards have very strict kind of guidance around how to do that from their enterprise plans that can live on private cloud or private servers to not sharing things in the cloud or whatnot. There's different tools out there that can help solve for the IP or privacy aspect of it. But I think more broadly is like, you can also blind certain things, where you're not sharing a customer detail, you're obviously not sending, sharing like personally identifiable information if you're using ChatGPT or any other ones. Those types of things are kind of table stakes, but I think that's just basic internet or like technology etiquette. If you're doing something that's going to be open to everyone, probably be mindful of how you're sharing that information.

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Tyler Rachal

That was great. This is like we're doing a consulting call almost right here. I didn't even think about that because when I do think of data, I think of databases. And I think of these old school companies where they have these large databases, whether that's like their CRM or whatever it might be.

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, where that has millions of records, right?

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, but the interesting for us is that we have the value of the same domain, the same email address for five years, and we've had essentially Slack for the entirety of our business. And so there's a lot of data that's sitting in there that I would imagine if we were to give access to an AI company, we'd be able to do some really wonderful things.

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Jamaur Bronner

And that's actually a good point, Tyler, if you don't mind me asking, are you guys at Hireframe doing anything with AI right now or using that data, whether it's within Slack or elsewhere to  help the team in some way?

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, and you read my mind. That was going to be my follow up, I was going to say you had some really great questions for us. And so that could be question number one and fire away. So today we're using it, I think the way a lot of companies are. It's probably more so like personal use than like widespread enterprise use. So I use it probably once a day. And like I said, the thing that I like AI for two reasons.

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Jamaur Bronner

And what are you using? ChatGPT, Claude, what do you use?

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Tyler Rachal

So I use chat GPT. I would love to check out other stuff. I've checked out, Google already changed the name of it, but it was called Gemini, right? So I've, I played around with that, but I stopped using it because it was like you are using this from a corporate account. You need to use the personal or something anyway. But chat GPT, I pay for that. I pay for the subscription or whatever it is. I use it for two things that I really like about it. It's great at summarizing things very succinctly. So we're in the recruiting and staffing business. and a lot of what we do is we try to identify great candidates and, something that I'll tell you that is prime for AI is resumes. Resumes is oftentimes a wealth of information that's very hard to distill into useful information, if that makes sense. It's like a lot of word vomit, if you will. And I think AI is really great at kind of taking all that and condensing it into the things that are most important. 

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Jamaur Bronner

Especially if you can give it some sort of criteria, right? Where you're like, I'm hiring for this role. Check that against this resume and let me know what pops out.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah. And the formatting of it also is nice as well, because things like I'll feed AI or feed Chat GPT several resumes and I'll ask them to give me a summary and a breakdown of each, of each person and compare them. And the attributes that I'm asking for oftentimes are things like their number of years of experience. That should be simple, but Applicant A is hiding that in their about me section and then applicant B clearly writes out each number of years or whatever it is and etc etc. So it's it's it's just nice it takes that information and it distills it down for me very quickly.

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The other thing that I'll say and this probably sucks for the companies out there that are doing this as their core business, I use Chat GPT all the time for contracts. For me, Chat GPT that's my primary paralegal. They're great. They cost very little for a startup, you know, and I find that it's quite effective if you know how to give it the right prompts.

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Jamaur Bronner

For sure. Yeah. And that's the key, right? Knowing how to give it the right prompts and tweaking it over time. I know people who have their favorite sets of prompts. I have a notepad of different prompts that I use pretty frequently. I also use this tool called Poe, which was created by the founder of Quora. It's kind of like, I call it a cable subscription of LLMs, where you get access to all LLMs. So if you want to use ChatGPT for this one scenario, 

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Tyler Rachal

It's the bundle.

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Jamaur Bronner

Exactly, it's a bundle of LLMs. So ChatGPT, Gemini, and they're really good at when a new model comes out, it's on there like the same day. That's how I started using Claude, I didn't have a Claude subscription, but I saw that they released it on Poe. And so then I started using it on Poe and like that's become my go-to. So within Poe, I've built certain bots that are already pre-prompted for certain things, whether it's a sales call.  I feed my notes from the sales call and it helps me think through like okay, next time bring this up sooner in the conversation or these are the actions I have to follow up on. So it's almost like I have certain assistants for each business case, whether it's sales, whether it's marketing, whether it's just like general work that I work on. So that's been super helpful. Yeah.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah. But your point about the meeting notes is awesome. And obviously right now we're on, we're on Riverside.

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, which has AI features.

Tyler Rachal

Without a doubt what I will say, and maybe this is a live case example, so you can give me some direct executive feedback as to how my brain is working is that when I actually think about the meaningful applications of AI in our business, where I always just go back to where's the fat? Where's the juice that’s worth the squeeze, right? And what are the things that either we do a lot of, or it is absolutely critical and core to our business. And what I think about mostly is because we are a recruiting company, I think about things like engagement with applicants. That's something that is just hard. The single thing that we cannot scale as aggressively as our business scales is recruiters. Recruiters are super valuable, that's the most resource constrained part about Hireframe is our number of recruiters. If we get a bunch of reqs in, we can only add them as quickly as possible. And then our good recruiters are gonna be miles above the brand new ones. And so a lot of times I think about these things, like when an applicant is wondering what the status of their application is, it's meaningful to get back to them within the hour versus days later. And I think that those types of things are great applications for AI. And so if I were to investigate things like that, that's where I would probably look to first.

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Jamaur Bronner

For sure. And I think you raise a really good point also, Tyler, where what we're building is AI focused, but we also say it's AI and automation. And a lot of times when we talk to business executives, they say AI, but they're thinking automation and there are AI automation tools, but also automation is taking those redundant processes that can be optimized in certain ways and finding the efficiency. that technology handles that entirely, right? It doesn't necessarily have to have an AI implication and something that you just described there where it's like, okay, we need to be getting faster to applicants, our response time needs to improve. Maybe that means that our responses are actually within Slack. 

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So we have an automation workflow where we have a channel specific to inbound from this domain, like recruiting@hireframe.com or something, right? Anytime someone sends something there, it goes to Slack. That way the team member, it's like a shared inbox where someone responds on Slack and then it sends it that email directly to someone, right? So it's thinking about things in that way as well, where if you can think beyond the interface that you're working in and you can think of just like kind of a system and where does the system need to work more efficiently? Like that's automation in a nutshell.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, absolutely. And you identified, this is something I call back to from my BPO, my call center days. Whenever we would look at working with a company, when it comes to call centers, call centers, it's all about AHT, average handle time. That is like the crux of their business because that's where their costs are. And if you can take someone's average handle time per ticket from, let's just say hypothetically, it's a very complex. software so when tickets come in it's pretty complex to solve average handle time for a ticket might be like call it 15 minutes, right? You take that 15 minute handle time and if you can divide that or even lower it from 15 minutes down to 10 the cost savings is very very significant you're literally getting call it a 30% operating expenses savings.

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And to your point when we would look to those, this is pre-AI. we weren't using any technology. We would do things the old school way. We would literally sit behind an agent. We'd watch them click through things and we just be like, Hey, I couldn't help but notice there for that ticket, you went into this system, then you came back to this one and then you went back into this other one and you copied and paste. Would it help you if this information was in a little window on the other system? And they're like, my goodness. Yes. So it's kind of to your point. It's not this huge, crazy, robot kind of world. It's actually much simpler. Can we meet people in the places where they already are and bubble things up to them and there in itself is big improvements.

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah. And I think what you described, that works today too, right? One of the things we advise these executive leaders to do is something like a business process audit. Look at what the frontline employees are doing. Look at what their day to day, where they are clicking certain things, where they're spending the most time and kind of time block these different parts of their day. When you find one that's like, this is a lot of time that we're spending each day and we're doing the same thing each day. That might be an opportunity for AI automation to play some role. It might not eliminate that work entirely, but if it shaves 20-30 % off of that person's time, that means they have 20-30 % to do something else.

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Tyler Rachal

Without a doubt, time blocking exercises. my goodness. They're the best, but also I'm always so in fear of doing that. Cause I'm like, what am I wasting my time on? It's going to be scary.

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Mike Wu

All right. Speaking of time, Jamaur, thank you so much. You've, you've given us so much of your time and even more knowledge and valuable practical advice here. I want to bring it back to The Foregrounds a little bit as a conclusion. What, what can we look out for when it comes to The Foregrounds in the coming days, weeks, months?

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, for sure. Thanks for asking. And thank you guys for giving me the platform to talk about this stuff. I am always happy to talk to anyone about all things AI and automation. As far as finding me, you can find me on Twitter, JamBronner is my handle there. I'm on LinkedIn, so feel free, anyone who watches this to reach out. As far as The Foregrounds, one cool thing that happened actually, I told you guys about it over email, I built my own app. So I built a full stack web app, it took about a weekend and that shows how powerful these LLMs are. I'm not a coder. I was a former product manager, so I'm somewhat technical, but by no means. If I was looking at a blank terminal or blank IDE, which is where you actually write code, I wouldn't know what I was doing. But the app is fully functional. We have beta users already. It's essentially, to your point Tyler, what LLMs are really good at is synthesizing information. We were finding that we were using a lot of time synthesizing podcasts before we were reaching out to these types of executives that we either want on our curriculum advisory board or as potential instructors, but we need to know a bit more about them before we reach out. And I just decided to turn that into a product.

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So folks can check it out. It's called Get Audio Notes. Go to getaudionotes.com, It's live. And that's one tool that people can just see the value of AI. I wasn't a coder, I built that. It's using AI in the backend. The other piece is we have heard from a lot of folks that like there's so much content, but not a lot of stuff relevant to business leaders. So The Foregrounds will

actually be launching a podcast, only about 15 minutes long each week, starting in September. The working title is Synthesis by The Foregrounds, where we'll talk through some of those things that we talked about on the call, whether it's customer segmentation and marketing and how AI and automation can help there or outbound sales, thinking about your different business processes, thinking about operations. We want to kind of give folks a taste test of what the courses are like by kind of sharing our knowledge.

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Mike Wu

Can't wait for that.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, very cool. And hopefully you can have us, I don't know what scenario we'd be guests on, but we could be on it.We're like your before and after..

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, we'll find a way.

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Mike Wu

We can be your example of we can take anybody and get them proficient at AI. You can create a reality TV series of we took the dumbest executive we could find and then we put them through our program and now do the before and after.

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Jamaur Bronner

I love that.

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Tyler Rachal

I was gonna say like in an infomercial, how they have the clips of the people and it's in black and white to begin with. And they're like fumbling like a big jar of something or whatever it is, that can be us. We can be banging at our computers.

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Jamaur Bronner

And then at the end you're like juggling it

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, at the end we're just talking with robots. We're speaking their language. Whatever you want, we're here for it.

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Jamaur Bronner

For sure, I appreciate that guys. And I think you sell yourself short. We've had dozens of conversations with business leaders and the fact that you already know that AI is important. The fact that you're already experimenting with different tools already shows that you're leaps and bounds ahead of a lot of folks. The typical SMB, typical startup that's like not fully tech startups, they're not touching AI yet. And that's like the change that we want to bring about is like helping to educate folks. But the fact that you guys are already conversing around it and that you already have ideas for how to play with it, I think that's going to be huge for your business. I'm excited to watch.

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Tyler Rachal

Well, you're gassing us up. We'll get into the inbox right now. We'll review that contract. We will sign it. 

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Jamaur Bronner

Okay, sign that contract. I'm buttering you up.

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Tyler Rachal

You're buttering us up, and it worked. I was going to say, just to kind of end things, we will use your tool. You said, it is Get Audio Notes?

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Jamaur Bronner

Yeah, go to getaudionotes.com.

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Tyler Rachal

When we do our What Worked episodes, we always post it onto the Hireframe blog, and we typically have a summary. So how about that for this one, we'll just use Get Audio Notes and we'll use your tool. We'll have a link to it, so if anybody wants to check that out when you're reading about this. But thank you so much, Jamaur. I feel smarter than I really am. So thank you. It worked. 

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Jamaur Bronner

Thank you guys, this has been fun.

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