Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to Monument Matters, a podcast produced by the Monument Builders of North America for all things memorialization.
Each episode is an extension of our monthly magazine, MB News. Monument Matters invites everyone to listen and share. You'll find all of the episodes on Apple, Spotify and YouTube.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: I'm your host Mike Johns, CM AICA from the Johns Carabelli Company Semorano Monuments and Flowers in Cleveland, Ohio. I'm also a past president of the Monument Builders of North America.
I'd like to introduce today's guest, Mike Lannan. Our topic today is one that is changing every industry, including ours artificial Intelligence. As I said, our guest Mike Lannan, a digital strategist and founder of Eternity, who's not the real Eternity, but the company Eternity, who's been helping monument builders use AI in practical, hands on ways to we'll talk about how AI is already showing up in design, sales and customer service, and a preview to the AI Education session that Mike will present at Emby University in Fort Worth this February. Welcome Mike. Glad to have you this morning.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Thank you Mike. Happy to be here.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: So you share in your MB News article that AI didn't first impress you through a fancy demo, but on an ordinary Tuesday when it helped you get through an overwhelming to do list.
So for many of us in the monument industry, that aha moment hasn't happened yet. So would you share what it felt like when you realized AI could actually make your workday easier?
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I'd be happy to. So I remember it pretty clearly because it was shortly after Thanksgiving back in November of 2022, which I think is earlier than a good majority of the folks that that I talk to, some that haven't even really used the technology that much yet. And when my first tool that I started using was ChatGPT when that came out and what I found at first was that it was just this open text box that you could kind of have a communication with. And at first blush I was like, well what do I do with this? There wasn't really an instruction manual. No one had really used it yet. And interestingly enough, some folks don't realize this, that the chatgpt that we kind of use now was sort of accidentally released. It was supposed to be an internal kind of demo project with the technicians. And I just thought I'd pop it out there to see if anybody would use it. And I think it was something like 5 million people used it in the first week or something ridiculous. So I I've always kind of had a a learning style that's that's different than most, which I think made me kind of uniquely able to use this technology.
And I at first just kind of pretended, as weird as it sounds, that it was not a piece of technology, that it was another person on the other end. And as, again, as weird as that sounds, I recommend that imagination use if you will, because you'll get better outputs out of it. So I started giving it things like full on briefs, like as if I was giving it to like an intern or a first time employee. Giving them lots of background information about my company, who our target audience was, our pain points, our marketing goals. I just started feeding it pretty much everything for better or for worse. And I found how quickly, even though it's not real and it's not sentient, it was very good at assimilating that. So I would give it issues, give it problems, anything from creating proposals to sales emails. I would pop in what I thought was a good job with my human brain. And then with all the knowledge and background that I gave it, I would basically, in more words than one, say make this better, you know, make this reach this goal or reach this target audience.
And it was incredibly good even back then.
So I'll probably pause there for a second but just to kind of say that uh, even though it seems intimidating at first, especially most of these systems are like a giant text box and you don't know where to, where to start. My kind of one piece of advice is treat it like a first time employee on the first day. It's not going to be perfect. Like would an employee on the first day, like make zero mistakes? No. If you gave it no background information or if you give that person no background information about your company and just said, hey, make me a blog to attract new, you know, new audiences to our website. You would get something pretty generic and probably made up. And the same thing will happen if you do that with AI.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: So your article points out that some monument shops are already experimenting with AI in four main areas.
Design, marketing, customer service and operations.
So which of these areas do you think offers the biggest payoff right now for a small monument company starting to use AI?
[00:05:07] Speaker A: So I think what I found in industries that are typically a bit more like artisan creative hands on, that the desire to use AI has been, I think understandably, especially in the design aspect of things, there's been some resistance again, understandably, either through like a fear of it taking a job or like removing that kind of that human touch in an industry that's so important to have that human touch.
So I think I've seen more adopting of less creative things so far. So think more sales, emails, drafting email responses, reviewing sales data or sales forecasting things of that nature. Website content, social media content, all the things that typically a good majority of businesses don't love doing but that are part of their kind of day to day. If they stop responding to emails, if they stop doing sales and stop doing social media, they're not going to get a lot of business. So regardless of industry, even focusing on those aspects gives more time to have in person human face to face meetings, more time to work on design.
But there are some just amazing and fascinating tools that are available now for graphic design where it doesn't necessarily need to be something that's like replacing someone that's working on that, that draft or sketch for an engraving. It can really kind of like expand and magnify their own creativity. So they could sketch up an idea on paper, take a photo of it, upload it into AI software and have that be vectorized, making it. So it kind of skips that, that step of that's not the most creative use there. It's like that the kind of the, the logistical part. So all that to say you can use it for whatever you're most comfortable with and reducing those, those time sucks. If you will save 5 minutes here on this particular task every single time you do it. Save 25 minutes here on that task every single time you do it with using AI. And then at the end of the month you might have an extra five hours left or more to do two or three more sales meetings or meet together with a family and have that more in person conversations that have always hopping on zoom or defaulting just to email.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: It's another tool in the toolbox. It's not meant to replace a person or a tool, but to enhance. So a lot of people, like we just said, a lot of people worry that AI is complicated or that it's expensive or it might replace staff.
So you argue that the opposite is true. How do you talk someone through those concerns?
[00:07:57] Speaker A: Yeah, and they're very understandable concerns because if you look at the news or read any news just about every other week you're hearing large companies, I won't name any of them, but very large corporations letting go of 4510000 employees at a time and replacing them with, with AI, AI, automation. I'm not naive that that's going to happen in some really large industries. That's not my mantra. I think it should be used as a way to Give every single one of your employees superpowers. So if there's a kind of leading from the, from the top mentality of, especially if you start bringing AI into your company, that from the get go, we are not using this to replace you. We are using this to get rid of all the things that you do not like doing. If you don't want to embrace this for, you know, creativity, do not use those tools.
Aren't a great writer. This, this can kind of fill in the gaps for those particular skills that you might not necessarily love or want to learn how to get better at, but you need to do so. That's sort of like my kind of top level recommendation there on sort of the behavioral kind of adaptation of this because the technology itself is not that complicated to use. I know it's easy for me to say that because I have drank every last drop of AI Kool Aid and use it every single day, but you just have to start tinkering with it again. It's like any other tool. And most of the pieces of software, they're all going to be a monthly subscription.
Literally everything is a subscription now. But many of them start at like 15, 20 bucks a month. So if you look at it in a way of that 15 or 20 buck a month software for this employee might save them an extra hour per day. Like, why would you not want to pay for that? That seems like almost just crazy not to want to embrace that again. As long as it's sort of communicated as a, we're not using this to replace you.
This is not to replace creativity or humanity, but to get rid of all of the grunt work that you don't like doing. And while I don't agree that it should be used to replace and let go of staff and in an economy right now that's just a little bit kind of upside down, I'll leave it at that.
There's not a lot of hiring of new people going on in every single industry. So it can be a way to grow your business without growing your headcount. Because you can turn one employee into able to do like one and a half times or two times their output, but not the same amount of labor.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Okay, interesting.
So I'm going to take you just a little sideways for a second and ask for those who remember, like me, the HAL9001, how is this not that?
[00:10:47] Speaker A: I think the reason that it's not that yet is because we have the ability to what's called align. This technology alignment is an industry used and basically just getting this technology to do the best possible things that it can do and not the evil, bad things that you can potentially imagine that this technology could do. For that to happen, likely going to need to have some sort of government regulation on this to protect certain industries so jobs can't get replaced. And maybe we shouldn't be rushing to give every single military drone access to AI technology.
If you have watched a single Terminator movie and we've seen how that's wound up.
So again, this technology is not there yet. It's, it's not pure evil. It's not completely off the rails. We have somewhat the ability to kind of unplug, if you will, some of this technology right now. But if we don't regulate it, it already has proven inside simulations, closed loop simulations, where it was told that it would kind of be unplugged, that it created fake emails to blackmail employees that bad things were happening to their partners. And it was all fake and kind of in a closed loop, but it basically lied to get to its end result. So at this moment it is not sentient or live or aware, but it's really good at assimilating the good and the bad. So hopefully we keep a focus on the good because there's a lot of good for humanity from not only the monument industry, but healthcare and science and all those things.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Let's take this back to monument industry and how it relates. Okay, so one of my favorite lines from your article is AI isn't here to replace what makes us human. It's here to remove the repetitive noise.
So what do you consider to be that repetitive noise?
And how do you see the monument builders maintaining personal service while embracing automation?
[00:12:50] Speaker A: Yeah, so I touched bases on this a little bit, but all the things that are just kind of part of running a business, sales revenue forecasting, social media post content, replying to the same kind of frequently asked questions over and over and over again aren't the best use of human creativity and ingenuity. What we're really good at is working with other humans and helping them through, you know, in this industry, like very, a very difficult time. So if you can put things in your sales funnel that automatically can draft up a response to those very like repetitive questions that can reduce that time again of having to do that same thing over and over and over again. With social media post content, it can seem just like a rat race of always having to post something to, to be on there. AI is really good at coming up with new ideas. If you feed it a bunch of examples of things that you have previously written, previously posted. It's very good at assimilating and being creative.
So putting a focus on those things that you don't like doing will just free up more time to be able to meet with people in person, to have that more personal connection with those folks and not feel so rushed because you got to get back to the office and respond to all those emails or do social posts or whatever that might be.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: Sure. So you close the article with a challenge. Pick one tool, one workflow and see if it saves 30 minutes this week. That's a refreshingly simple advice.
So if a money builder is listening right now and ready to try, what's a good first step and what common mistakes can they try to avoid?
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think one of the most common mistakes, and I was guilty of this, and still guilty a little bit, is there's a lot of hype and a lot of noise. You can, you cannot get away wherever you're at from there being some advertisement for an AI tool or like now with AI and we're raising our pricing, but now the AI is inside it. It's like it's everywhere. So it can be tempting to want to try every single one of those things because they can be time saving. But my number one recommendation is pick one. Like the, the, the task that you dislike the most but is the most, like repetitive and kind of time consuming. Figure out what that task is and that will help you have an understanding of like, is it, is it more of the creative side, Is it more the analytical side? It might just be focusing on ChatGPT because it's really good at content and strategy and thinking now, which is kind of wild. If it is leaning a little bit more towards design. Google has an amazing new product with the craziest name, but it is called Nano Banana. And as crazy as that name is, it's almost like a Photoshop killer. Drag in an existing photo and just type in a prompt and say remove a particular item or replace this inside there and it is perfect. I, I don't, I'm not like overhyping this at all. If you've used other tools before, like ChatGPT and you ask it to make a change for an image, it gives you something completely different and nowhere like you wanted. Nano Banana is really great for making quick changes. Say there was a photographer going out into a site and taking photos of a completed monument, but there were like construction things around in the background or people you can just literally type in. Remove the people, remove the construction noise. And everything else is preserved.
So again, it doesn't really get rid of that creativity in that particular task. It's just sort of a mundane thing that normally would have taken maybe 10, 15 minutes in Photoshop trying to scrub all that out of there. So pick one tool, pick the thing that you don't like doing, and then once you have that kind of nailed down, move on to the next thing. And then you'll, you'll have more time for the stuff that you like doing.
[00:16:55] Speaker B: Fascinating. Another interesting topic taken on by Monument Matters. So I'd like to thank you, Mike, for taking time out of your schedule to join us and talk a bit about the upcoming article. To join us and hear what we're talking about.
And if you found it interesting, please share the link with a friend. All of these episodes are available on Apple, Spotify and YouTube for MBNA. I'm Michael Johns. I want to thank you all for taking time out of your day to listen. If you found this worthwhile, please take a minute and share the link with a friend. We would definitely love to hear from you. So if you have any thoughts on today's podcast or ideas for Future Podcasts or MB News articles, please drop a note to infoondementbuilders.org with that. I'm going to go give my tongue a rest.
I want to thank you all for joining us. Have a great day. Mike again, thanks for joining us.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: Thank you.
