Why is your operations problem really a leadership problem?
You can fix a broken process and still have the same problem next quarter. Jon Bassford, an operations and leadership consultant, makes the case on The Artificial Intelligence Podcast that the fix is to diagnose the whole organization, not just the symptom. His point is that leadership, culture, and operations are comingled. You cannot fix a cultural problem without touching leadership, and you cannot fix an operational problem without touching leadership and culture. If you fix just one area, you are fixing a symptom. By looking at all three, you fix the symptom and the core issues behind it.
Bassford's view is that the intersection of leadership, culture, and operations is where sustainable growth happens. He describes it as everything from management style down to the smallest systems. That means your diagnosis has to include how people communicate, how they make decisions, and how they handle change, not just where a process breaks.
Why do ideas from outside get heard when yours don't?
Because teams pigeonhole people. Bassford's point is that we put people in boxes. We hire someone to maintain operations, not to be a strategic thinker at the level the CEO is thinking. When an outsider brings the same idea, we value the fresh perspective more. He saw this firsthand: "Someone brought the exact same idea from outside and also it was the best and greatest idea ever." It is not intentional, but it is common. The same dynamic can work for you. Help leaders vet ideas and make decisions. Do not just hand them more options. An outside voice can get a hearing that an inside voice cannot, so use that.
How do you bring AI into a team that fears it?
You communicate properly and lead people through change. Bassford's point is that the problem is not the tool. The problem is the rhetoric around the tool. If you are a CEO posting about AI changing the world or championing layoffs, you give your team a specific message about how you see AI. That clouds whatever you say later. Instead, frame AI as a tool that reduces administrative labor so people can focus on strategy and execution. Compare it to accounting software syncing with payroll or a CRM syncing with other systems. Introduce it gradually. Start in meetings. Build comfort. Inspire people to use it as a tool. And do not let the team sink into negativity about it. Bassford's line is direct: "AI is not going to replace your job. Your job is going to be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI."
What to do before you change your operations or deploy AI
Start with your accounting. Bassford looks at accounting first because it tells him so much about leadership and culture. When a CEO sees a bill four or five times before it is paid, that shows how the organization functions and flows. The smallest system reveals the biggest patterns.
Diagnose leadership, culture, and operations together. Do not fix one area in isolation. If you fix just one, you are fixing a symptom. Look for the threads that tie an operations problem to leadership and culture.
Build a curious culture. This requires a collaboration agreement between management and staff. It allows feedback, thinking, solutions, ideas, problem solving, and pointing out issues in real time. One practical step: start having one-on-one conversations with people on a regular basis, not about how they are doing their job, but about what they are seeing in the organization and what they would do to improve operations.
Help your team vet ideas and make decisions. Do not just hand them more options. Start with them bringing ideas to you. Help them vet those ideas. Point out flaws you see in their logic or thinking. Then leave it up to them to make the decision and report back to you before they do it. This empowers your team without driving the organization off a cliff.
Use AI with due diligence. Bassford uses AI for the first 75 to 85 percent of a task. The remaining time is his due diligence. He still does the last five to ten percent himself. He may use two different AI platforms to check each other. You have to create safety mechanisms to catch issues when they occur. That final read-through is crucial.
Introduce AI gradually and communicate properly. Any change in adopting AI is a change in your business. You have to lead people through change. Talk about AI as a tool in meetings. Slowly start introducing it. Inspire people to use it. Do not let the team sink into negativity.
The risk is not AI replacing you. The risk is someone who knows how to use AI doing the job faster, easier, and more efficiently. So start playing with it. Learn how it works. Learn how it can help you.
Original show notes
Most business problems are misdiagnosed. Jonathan Green talks with operations and leadership consultant Jon Bassford about how to actually diagnose your organization — from management style to culture to broken systems — why the same idea gets ignored from the inside but embraced from an outside voice, and how to bring AI into a company without triggering fear or negativity.
Key Takeaways: • Diagnose the whole organization — management style, operations, culture — not just the symptoms • The same idea is dismissed internally but embraced from an outside consultant; use that dynamic • Help leaders vet ideas and make decisions — don't just hand them more options • Introduce AI into the organization gradually (start in meetings, build comfort) • Don't let the team sink into negativity about AI — lead them through it
Notable Quotes: "It's everything from our management style down to the smallest systems." — Jon Bassford "Someone brought the exact same idea from outside — and suddenly it landed." — Jon Bassford
Connect with Jon Bassford: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonbassford Website: https://think-lateral.com Personal: https://johnbassford.com
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Auto-generated transcript, 5,893 words. Timestamps link to the moment in the episode.
Learn how to diagnose your organizations with today's amazing special guest, Jon Bassford. Now, Jon, I'm really excited to have you here because I think it's really important to kind of see where business is going in the future as well as kind of where artificial intelligence kind of integrates. A lot of people are very trepidatious about the future. CEOs all the way down to entry level people are worried that AI is going to take their job. So when you kind of approach a company for AI transformation.
Have you noticed that there's this new underlying tone that people are worried that the transformation means they're all going to get replaced with robots? And how do you kind of approach that? Yeah, I mean, I think that's that's kind of been a common theme across the board. And, you know, first thing I always say is like, look, you know, the thing that make the headlines, right, people get people respond to headlines, you know, when IBM slashes 10,000 jobs or, you know, some big tech companies slash
2000 jobs, you know, you're talking about companies that are the cutting edge of technology to begin with and are creating proprietary AI software to do X, Y and Z. For one, that is not your basic business, right? Your small business is not gonna be able to do that. Your commercial grade AI products are not replacing jobs in that kind of magnitude, right? So that's one aspect I always point out to them that there's two different worlds there when it comes
to AI and how we utilize it. And then the second piece is for the actual adoption, AI is a tool. And just like any tool, If you don't have the operational structure, they have the operational foundation to be able to use that tool properly, it's not going to change anything at all. And so I really focus with them on making sure that their interoperations, their leadership, their mindset, their culture are poised for innovation, growth and change across the board,
not just specifically for AI is what I really focus on. And then also, of course, we look at how we can bring AI into that fold. Like you brought up company culture there because I think a lot of Businesses don't have a sense of what company culture means some businesses it means ping-pong tables some think it means taco Tuesday and some think it means Like casual Friday my feeling of the measurement of like leadership or a business is what happens
no one's looking. So if the boss gets sick, does everyone keep working? Does the machine keep running? To me, that's the measurement of company culture, but I'm interested in your perspective as a real expert. Yeah, I mean, that's a great example to do 100%. You know, how I define that is, you know, the spoken unspoken rules, traditions, et cetera, that dictate what we do on a daily basis. So your example is absolutely accurate, right? Like that's kind of, you know,
helps showcase how strong that culture is. But it's everything from our management style down to, you know, again, how the staff does react. You know, one of the things that I talk about in helping improve ~ culture is creating a curious culture which allows for your feedback, thinking, solutions, ideas, problem solving, pointing out issues, real time. And that create that that that requires kind of a collaboration agreement, both between the management and the staff, right? So that those are the things that I
really look at to see, does it have a positive culture versus, know, like you said, the ping pongs, hoodies and fruit cart tables? Yeah, it seems like we sometimes get excited by the accessories of life or the flashy parts. And I think what's really fascinating to me about what you do is that you really look at implementation, organization, kind of the back end. Like I always... say that the most important week in my business is like operations week where
I go back through and look for everything that's broken. does someone and for me that's a lot of like where does someone get lost in the email system or where's a piece of content I made not getting posted because those are the most boring things but systems are the most important because really the core infrastructure. It doesn't matter how good a video is I make for YouTube it doesn't get posted. It doesn't matter how good all the other social media content
are repurposing is which this happens to everyone right and it doesn't get posted to the other platform. So we don't have a good scheduling system. like, this is something I'm working a lot on my business right now, but all these little pieces or something I dealt with last year when I was working at a startup and we had someone in charge of acquisition, like marketing and someone in charge of new customers. But what happened is everyone who signed up got a free trial
and the marketing person's like, well, they signed up, I'm not in charge. And the salesperson's like, well, they haven't bought anything. So I'm not in charge. And these little things dropped through the, that was a really interesting, that was my first big spreads of corporate culture where both people was like, well, that's not that's outside my territory. shouldn't touch that. Right. Yeah. mean, this, that's the danger of creating silos, right? And, creating, you know, I'm all for creating organizations and creating cultures where,
where silos and hierarchy gets broken down, you know, talking about, you know, the little things being missed, you know, and everything, you know, I can tell you a lot about leadership culture and operations, especially in startups, but this goes across the board in how you function in accounting. You know, when there's a CEO who has to see a bill come in, come in the email, go through the system, get ready to pay approval. They see a bill four or five different times before .
that's actually paid or when it until it's paid. You know, those type of things show me a lot about the organization and how things function and flow by once simple little thing of looking at the accounting. And that's that's a lot of times where I where I start with when I work with a company is I take a look at their accounting first because it tells me so much. about the leadership and the culture of the organization. One of the problems with smaller startups
and with solo partnerships or things that start with someone's idea is that people don't record their systems. This is something that since I came from bootstrapping structures that well, know how I do everything and it's very hard to explain it to someone without missing any steps when you're explaining how you write a blog post or how you write a proposal or what to do when a customer calls. And these systems are so critical because they're what allow you to
go on vacation or to expand when you bring on a new employee. If they don't have a set of here's what you're expected to do and here's the measurement of success. How do know if they're doing a good job? And that's very stressful for someone. So that's kind of from the bottom up. One thing I'm really interested in is now that we're trying to go through kind of this almost like next revolution, right? We had the industrial revolution, then we had the technology evolution,
and now we're kind of looking at the AI evolution or transformation or revolution. And are you Noticing that it's dramatically affecting how you work with companies like do you use AI as part of your process when your audio company does allow you to look at more data faster and then make quicker decisions or do find that still more art than science? I mean, I use it as a tool as we talked earlier. It's definitely a tool that allows me to read and analyze much quicker.
You know, I have a process I follow, but instead of me going through dozens of pages of analysis, you know, this it cuts down the learning curve, the time for me to analyze. So it's much more of part of my internal process. than my external process, it's absolutely something. And I use AI in every aspect of my life, right? you know, looking at SEC documents from stocks I'm in to help me build a SaaS product I'm launching right now to help me with my marketing.
You know, I use it across the board. Again, you have to be the final say in everything and make sure you're using an independent mind. AI is not batting a thousand. It gets a lot of things wrong. I joke all the time with AI about how can't even get the day right most of the time. I think it's Sunday when it's Monday and vice versa. But like, you know, it's a great tool. If you know how to use it properly,
know how to work with it and through it. But you always got to be that that final say and making sure what it's putting out as plausible and right. Now, one of things that you do that I think is really fascinating is you connect operations with leadership and culture. Why is it that a company can't fix its operations without also looking at how people communicate, how they make decisions, and how they handle or adapt to change? So, know, one thing I always say when looking at
operations and culture, know, unless you're the lead singer of a one person band, you have to bring your team along with you. And if you want to create an efficient, effective operations of founder, CEO, manager should not and cannot see every little detail happening in the business and the organization, right? If they are, they're doing it wrong, right? So you have to rely on your team. And the only way to to have your team be a part of solution is to build a good culture.
So it takes the leadership for one, letting of control, letting go of fear, letting go of a lot of different things that allows them to trust their team, empower their team that then allows the team to be that part of analyzing, reviewing, pointing out problems, bringing solutions to improving the operations for all work together. For me, it's all about kind of looking at that diagram of leadership, culture, operations, and right in middle where they intersect. That's where sustainable growth really happens.
So when a company is struggling, how much of the problem is process and how much of it's usually more leadership behavior? It sometimes it depends a little bit on where I find the the organization, you if it's more established and just kind of needing a refresh. But but usually it's a combination, right? It really is. And the more and more I work with clients and I dive into the curious leadership stuff to, you know, from that wrote the book on.
You literally I cannot fix a cultural problem without touching something. in the leadership. I can't fix an operational problem without touching in the leadership and the culture. They really, really are comingled in such a way that if there is a problem with your operations, there's a problem likely in the other two. Right. And so the key is finding those threads. Yes, we have an operations problem, but it's also tied to these issues. And so that's right. Why I really focus on
all three of those areas is because If you fix just one area, you're fixing a symptom. By looking at all three areas, you're allowed to fix the symptom as well as the core issues behind them. Why do outside advisors get listened to when sometimes they're saying the same thing as people on the inside have been saying for months? You know, that's kind of what inspired me to be one of the consultant. I was bringing working for an organization.
I was bringing ideas to the CEO and he kept, you know, just not not listening to him or just not accepting the ideas. And someone brought the exact same idea from outside and also it was the best and greatest idea ever. Yeah, I think partly just because, you know, our teams, our team and we trust them to do a specific job. I think I think part of it is we put people in boxes, right? Like I hired you to do this.
I hired you to, maintain the operations and do this. You're, you're not who I hired to be a strategic thinker at the level I'm thinking over here. And so I tapped into this other person and they had this great idea. I think it's just, just kind of mind blocks, right? Like we, we, we, pigeonhole people, we put them in boxes. I don't think it's intentional. I don't think the, the, the, the CEO and founder I worked for didn't think
I had good ideas. I've made a lot of good changes there. But I just think we tend to pigeonhole people. But when we, someone from outside the organization who we think has a fresher perspective and point of view, we tend to value that a little more. You talked about curious leadership and I think that's really important. What do you think is the difference or what does the curious leader, I guess, do differently compared to a leader who's just trying to be decisive?
Sure. for me, know, curious leadership, what it helps tackle or overcome is fear, comfort and habits, you know, which are all, I think it's important to point out that are all very innate human characteristics. We would not have survived as a human race without those three pieces of who humans are as individuals and beings, which means leaders take on those same characteristics. And much as they helped us survive and grow as a civilization, as a as human beings when it comes to innovation,
growth and change for the enemy. So if you want to, you know, stay the status quo and just keep doing what you always done by all means, you know, stay in that type of mode. But if you want to innovate, grow and change, you have to adopt curiosity because curiosity is what allows us to shift how we think, how we work and how we connect. And each piece of that is, how we think is moving from a fixed mindset to grow my growth mindset. Challenging the
status quo, looking beyond our current situations, limitations. our operations, you know, are we doing things on a regular basis to constantly improve that as I keep talking about the how we connect is the culture piece and how we bring our team along with us to be part of that journey of innovation and growth and change. One of the challenges that I run into myself and I know this habit other people is the illusion of curiosity from a leadership.
So I work with a CEO as a consultant who would say, everyone give me your opinions before I make this decision or. And I asked the team, said, how many times have you stopped him from making a decision you think is bad or convinced to make a decision that he didn't want to do originally? said, never. He's never. So I was like, why are we having these meetings? And I even said to him, I said, why do you ask everyone's opinion when you never take it?
And he got really offended. And I was like, but it's like, it's fine. I also often don't want it. Like once I've made a decision, I very rarely, right. Once you've locked in. I know I'm just as guilty of this, but It can become very tricky for an employee when you say, ~ I want to hear your opinion. You never have before. this a trap? How do you kind of navigate that where people know that they can actually give opinions and there's not the risk of
repercussions or some type of punishment or even losing your job because you suddenly aren't rowing in the same direction as the team. Like I certainly have felt that pressure for jobs. Like if I say what I actually feel, I'm out the door. Yeah, well, I want to throw additional thing on top that first before I get to the answer your question directly. I was in a mastermind recently and someone was talking about how. You know they're there at the mastermind across the country and her team
of 40 people kept or blowing her up left and right because they have a problem they want her to solve and everyone's kind of given their advice. I finally raised my hand. I said hey, you know if you weren't here at this mastermind and you were working at your at home because majority of her team is remote. and they brought you a problem, would you solve it for them? She said, of course I would. Well, then why do you
expect them not to come to you now? If you always solve their problems, why would they ever change coming to you for a solution, whether you're sitting at your desk or sitting in a mastermind? And I bring that up to say, you know, a lot of leaders will get upset when their team isn't solving problems or pointing out solutions and that sort of thing. But it really comes down to the culture they built. So if you are constantly just playing lip
service to caring about your team's opinions and viewpoints, you're eventually going to erode that, right? They're eventually not going to give you their opinions. They're going to water them down. In today's culture, in today's generation of especially young people and professions, the biggest thing is they want to see that they're valued in the organization. They don't feel valued. Their perspective doesn't matter. Their opinions don't matter. And you constantly show that to them. They're going to stop showing up, not just giving the opinion, but showing
up to work. They're going to find someone else who will value their opinion and value their efforts. And so, you know, it's a hard thing to get through CEOs a lot of times because they're constantly, you know, like they have to manage, have to lead and have to dictate and ideas have to come from them. And that's part of my, biggest thing that I have to break through is breaking through on the CEO. letting them let go of that control,
let going of that ego that they have to control everything. And one of the biggest things they can do is just start having one-on-one conversation with people on a regular basis, not about how they're doing their job, but what they're seeing in the organization, what they would do to improve their operations. One of the challenges that I face is I want to create a culture where people their own problems. And then when they solve it bad, you're tempted to like shout at them.
But if you do that, and especially if you say something like, you should have just asked me, then you and I catch myself doing this because then you create the culture you of where they don't do anything self-sufficiently. And so it has to be I would rather you try and fail and then I'll help you adjust. Now, if you make the same mistake twice, that's a different thing. creating the, cause a lot of people have self, once you set up a thing where they can
self solve and they have a little bit of authority because like you said, you create yourself, you become the bottleneck and suddenly you're trapped in your own business. You've painted yourself into a corner. You never have time off because people are afraid to make decisions without you. And I think this is what happens to leaders, which is that They say they want everyone to make self decisions, but only if they're going to make the right decisions on their own.
Yeah, I used to have a leader CEO that I worked for who used to say, don't want to know that you're thinking about something. I want you to be thinking like me, which is a completely different thing to kind of talk about when it comes to culture because you're just eroding everything about that individual. let's look at two types of failure. One being incompetence. Let's put that to the side because if someone tries something and they just screwed it up. because they weren't thinking about it
versus someone who tried something, it just didn't work out. They had a theory, they had a hypothesis, they did things intelligently, it just wasn't end up being the right thing to do. Those are two very different scenarios. One is a bigger conversation about who they are as a professional and whether or not they fit in that role and responsibility. The other one, if you want to innovate, grow and change, you want to empower your team. you have to learn to accept failure to some degree.
And the goal for me is that always try to have as many failures behind the scenes and not externally. Like that's one big key. And, you know, and start small. Like if you've never inspired your team to make their own decisions and do things on their own, start with having them bring ideas to you, help them vet those ideas, let them make a decision. But, know, by also by pointing out some flaws you may see in their logic or thinking,
but leave it up to them to make the decision and report back to you what they before they do it. Those are some steps that you can get to so you can empower your team, show that you care, give them value in their perspective, but make sure that you're not driving the entire organization off a cliff. So this kind of helps you to circle back to AI because I kind of think of AI as a new employee and that there's two
kind of ways people deploy it, which is customer facing and internal. And the bigger mistake I see is when you put AI in charge of creating your content, writing your emails, managing your social media posts, handling customer service, all the customer facing areas. Cause then when you have a mistake, it is customer facing. saw an author this week who just got caught. Their book had the section from the AI goes, okay, I'll rewrite the chapter for you. And they forgot to cut that out.
Classy mistake. Like the dead giveaway. And we're seeing a lot of this, let's test it with the riskiest part of the business, right? The most public decision making. How do you kind of see this implementation following the exact same mistake you were just talking about, which is like, let's keep it internal so that when we make mistakes, no one sees it. Yeah, you know, again, how I use AI is doing the first lot of times the first
75 to 85 % in the remaining time has got to be your due diligence. You looking over it. You know, I think one tool that I've I've I've used a little bit here and there is is using two different AI platforms. If I have one created, I had the other one Bennett, right? And then still I'm still doing the last five or 10%, even if I go that direction. But you got to create, you know, anything we do in our business.
We have to create safety mechanisms to make sure that we're catching issues they occur and using AI is no different. So doing that final read through, doing the due diligence we need to do on what AI is doing is absolutely crucial to make sure that we're not making those external mistakes. So when do you think AI shifted for you from being a useful productivity tool to something that shifted it can actually help you build meaningful and useful business assets?
Uh, yeah, I think, you know, part of it is my use has grown with, with AI. Uh, you know, when I first started using AI, I don't know, probably not to like a year and a half, two years ago, you know, having it try to create one pagers for me based upon my feedback and it, creating, um, you know, outlines of things. It just wasn't there, but now like I literally have, you know, said AI, um, take, take my, my, my keynotes I just delivered.
the organization I did a keynote for once a free giveaway to their audience, create me a one pager. again, there's some back and forth. I don't just say create it, I blindly send it to the team, but like that would never have happened two years ago, at least in the way I want it done. Clean, organized, designed well. It would have been a very sloppy document. So I've increased my use of AI. when it comes to the output of things as AI has grown.
So one of the things that I think is causing a lot of challenge in the current market with a lot of businesses is the constant messaging from AI companies, which is you can replace your employees with AI. This sets the stage where employees have an anti AI motivation because it's like this guy's coming for my job. This is my enemy. I'm going to sabotage. I would sabotage it too, by the way, like absolutely. I'm going to whatever take my job.
How can a company input AI or start to bring AI into their workforce in a way that doesn't create a negative culture that doesn't create a culture of sabotage that kind of lets people know we're bringing a new tool for you and We've seen this before, right? And when the internet came out, when more computer tools came out in the 90s, a lot of people thought, this computer is going to replace me. And so we've had this transition before for those of us in the workforce
30 years ago that remember it and we're seeing it again. And I think the problem is not the tool. think the problem is the rhetoric around the tools more than anything else. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think it comes down to communication. know, any type of change in adopting AI is a change in your business and your organization. And you have to lead people through change. You have to communicate it properly. If you're out there, you're a CEO and you're constantly talking about
how AI is going to change the world or crypto is going to change the world. And you're posting on your social media and LinkedIn about these type of things. um, champion layoffs for, you know, through AI and that sort of thing, you're going to give a very specific message about how you see AI. So you bring that to your team. That's going to cloud no matter what you say. So to me, it's, it's important about how we talk about it,
right? How in being responsible and how we talk about it, that, that AI is still just a tool again, big tech companies, it might be a bigger, deeper tool that can replace some jobs. Most of Small businesses are using AI in a way that is just going to help enhance your That this is a tool just like accounting software is now sync with your with your payroll to reduce administration. How your CRM syncs with your you know, whatever and it just reduces some
administrative labor so we can we can focus on strategy and execution more than administrative tasks. That's still what AI is. And so you have to talk that talk that through with them and talk about that way in meetings and slowly start introducing it. inspiring them to use it as a tool. Do you think that the transition is going to be as big as some people think it is where like 90 % of people are going to be out of work and robots
are taking everyone's job and then it's kind of become a wasteland? Yeah, again, I mean, I see AI mess up so much when I try to use it ~ on a daily basis that like I have a hard time believing we're anywhere near that. I honestly don't believe we're we're. We're at that point in my lifetime, I could be wrong. I know some people are saying, you know, AI, because of AI, AI is growing so quickly, it is advancing much more quickly than other technologies.
So I don't know the real answer to that. I guess for me, it's like, I don't know. I don't know what's gonna come to the pipeline. It's not worth worrying about, right? If this is true, if this is gonna happen, there's nothing I can do about it, right? There literally is nothing I can do about AI taking over the world. But I do believe that there have always been these things that are gonna change the world and change society and change economy and change business.
And we've always adapted and there's always been things are going to destroy the earth and destroy civilization. And we've always found ways to adapt. And I have to believe that that's going to be the same with AI, that it's not going to be some kind of devastating catastrophic event, but something that we're going to learn to survive and work through and work on. And it becomes part of our society. Yes, but we'll find different ways to adapt. I think you're right. think that
We're just overestimating how big a deal it is. Like when I was a child in the eighties, if you wanted to call someone, you had to remember their phone number, call it from your kitchen phone. Hope your parents didn't pick up the other phone and listen in and then hope that when you called the other person was home. Or if you wanted to meet someone at the mall, you would go to the mall and just wait for them to show up.
like technology in my life, it was changed so significantly to now you're like texting in real time. How far away are you? Are you three minutes? Okay. I'll see if I can wait three minutes on my own. And it's like changed so much from like waiting two hours for your friends to show up, like such a difference in culture. So I feel like technology has been changing very quickly my entire life. Like when I talked to my kids about how
excited I was to get a pager in high they're like, what's a pager? And I say, your parents would send you a message with their phone number and then you would go and find a pay phone and call, what's a pay phone? Okay, so a pay phone is something you put money into call someone to like, what are coins? So you just take so many different things. And I feel like that we, in the moment we're, caught up in this feeling of negativity.
And that's why I think it's important to say, no, it's been happening faster whole lives and it's just a continuation. And there are still jobs, more jobs than ever. And I think that's really positive. I think this has been really, really helpful. If you could just share your kind of final thoughts and then of course, where people can find you who go, need transformation. Maybe you can share a little about the SAS building because that's very exciting and we'll just wind it down.
So this was amazing. Yeah, so again, use the eye as a tool. Stop stop the fear, marring, and worry that it's going to replace you replace employees, but just learn to use it. I am a big believer of a lot of statements are going on right now that that. AI is not going to replace your job. Your job is going to be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI right? Like that's the difference is is that someone can do their job.
quicker, easier, more efficient, more effective because they're using AI than you. That's more of a risk of losing your job in majority of the business marketplace than being replaced by AI. Yeah, you mentioned the SaaS product. I've had a SaaS product I've wanted to build for a couple of years now and just haven't had the money to hire developers. I've done a couple of deep dives with some developers and got the budgets and just didn't have the money. then two different people encouraged me to
to start it with, with, with a cloud code. you know, they're like, Jon, the same way you talk to AI about your marketing and everything else you use it for is exact same way you start with coding. And within four or five days, I had a fully functioning app web app that syncs QuickBooks online. I've now spent the next three weeks fine tuning and that type of stuff. And you're working on the user experience and just going through it a thousand times to make it better.
But I was amazed what I was able to build. in just a few days and how fully functioning it was. Again, I've been working on this thing in my head for probably three or four years. So it was all baked in there, but it was quite amazing. So again, just find ways to use AI. Just start playing with it, right? The best thing I can say is just start playing with it and learning how it works and learning how it can help you.
people are struggling with their leadership, their operations, their culture. The two websites I'll give you to reach out are my consulting site is ~ consulting companies lateral solutions and our website is think-lateral.com and my personal brand site is johnbassford.com. Jon without an H and then a bass like a fish and a Ford like a car. Best way to reach me. Amazing. I'll make sure to put the links below the video and in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here for an amazing episode
of the artificial intelligence podcast. Thank you for having me.
