Ep. 211: How Small Businesses Can Use AI to Save Time and Boost Revenue with Sami Hero

“AI is moving at light speed, but it’s not here to replace people. It’s here to augment our expertise and make us more efficient.” – Sami Hero

In this episode of the Online Business Launchpad podcast, Sami Hero, a seasoned expert in AI and technology, unpacks how small businesses can leverage AI without getting lost in the complexity. From streamlining customer service to creating targeted marketing campaigns, Sami shares practical advice for business owners on using AI to solve real problems and improve efficiency. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or a growing team, Sami’s insights will help you harness AI to work smarter, not harder.

With a career spanning from developer to executive, Sami Hero has decades of experience driving growth with sales, marketing, and AI-driven technology. Now a partner at True Global Ventures, Sami guides startups and businesses on how to apply AI to scale effectively and make data-driven decisions.

WE ALSO TALKED ABOUT

• How Sami’s early career in semantic search and AI laid the groundwork for his expertise.
• Tips on using accessible tools like Pictory.ai and Synthesia to create video content and enhance your marketing without breaking the bank.
• AI’s impact on accessibility, enabling visually impaired users to engage with online content more seamlessly.
• Why starting with a specific use case is the best way to approach AI for small business needs.
• The challenges of AI “hallucinations” (generating incorrect information) and how to manage biases in data.
• Building a cohesive, cost-effective tech stack without overwhelming your team.
• How AI can improve customer service and streamline internal operations, allowing small teams to achieve more.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Pictory:  https://pictory.ai  – Quickly turn articles or blog posts into engaging videos.
• Synthesia:  https://synthesia.io  – An AI tool for generating videos with digital avatars.
• Lex Page:  https://lex.page  – A writing tool for generating drafts and AI-assisted editing.
• Napkin:  https://napkin.ai  – Quickly transform ideas into presentations.
• Cassidy:  https://cassidy.ai  – For building complex, AI-driven workflows.
• AWS Rekognition – https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/  – Amazon’s image recognition service for identifying objects and enhancing accessibility.

Invitation: Get regular access to tips, techniques, and advice from myself and other experts about growing your business. 

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Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

Transcript

Online Business Launchpad Podcast

Episode 211:  How Small Businesses Can Use AI to Save Time and Boost Revenue with Sami Hero

Trudy Rankin: [00:00:00] Are you wondering how AI can make a difference in your business without getting caught up in the hype or trying to guess what it could do? What if the right tools and strategies could help you cut down on time, boost your marketing, and maybe even improve your decision making, all with a little help from AI?

In today’s episode, I’m talking with Sami Hero, a seasoned marketing and tech expert with a deep understanding of AI’s real world applications. Now, Sami brings his experience in sales, technology, and venture capital to break down how small business owners can use AI to gain real advantages, whether that’s by making marketing easier, streamlining operations, or helping with complex data analysis.

Sami’s unique blend of tech expertise and practical business sense Makes him the perfect guest to guide us through AI’s complexities and show us what’s possible right now for small business owners. He’s here to share concrete steps along with his insights into AI’s evolving role in business. Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast.

I’m Trudy Rankin, and I [00:01:00] bring you stories, tips, and advice from online entrepreneurs who have overcome problems and challenges to get to success, because if they’ve done it, so can you. I’ve been running my own online business for over nine years now, and I’ve become passionate about it. About helping business owners like you successfully tackle the bumps in the road that could stop you from hitting the goals that matter to you.

I’ve used my experience and the experience of others to help hundreds of people grow the online side of their business. My mission is simple. I want to help you solve the challenges you face as an online business owner, so you can have more time and money for yourself and your family and more choices in how you live your life.

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m your host, Trudy Rankin, and today I have Sami Hero with me here, and we’re obviously doing it by Zoom, but I wanted him to come on the podcast and talk a little bit about, A, his experience in quite a lot of business building in a very big way, and also to talk [00:02:00] about his thoughts on generative AI and how AI can affect your business, either as a small business owner, or in how you use it to save time, or in how you use it to help you with your marketing, because AI is something that it’s moving so fast that a lot of people are having trouble keeping up with what it can do and how you could be using it.

And so I thought I would just ask Sami to come in and talk with us. Thank you so much for being here, Sami. 

Sami Hero: Yeah, absolutely. Lovely to be with you today. 

Trudy Rankin: Okay, do you want to just maybe just tell the listeners just a little bit about yourself, some of your background, some of your past experiences? 

Sami Hero: Yeah, I’ve got I’ve got too much history, so to speak, to unpack here, but but essentially I’ve been in sales and marketing and technology since let’s call it forever since like nineties and late eighties.

And originally I was a developer, so I used to write code before I semi accidentally became a marketing and salesperson. The first contact I had with the concepts of AI was probably in the early 2000, 2001. In around 2000, I [00:03:00] moved to Canada to work for a company called Hummingbird, that was later acquired by Open Text, and they were one of the early pioneers on semantic search and knowledge systems, and those, Essentially those algorithms and concepts those days created the foundation of today’s vector databases and and technologies like Bayesian algorithms that I used in the JNI platforms.

And over, over time, these things have evolved. And of course, in the last two years, they’ve really burgeoned. And I would say when OpenAI released the chat GPT, it became a consumer ready. In so many ways that people started to realize it’s Oh my God, what can we do with this? But but AI and machine learning algorithms and predictive algorithms particularly have been around.

But as we have more and more capacity almost for free from AWS and Amazon and or Amazon AWS, as well as Google and Microsoft Azure. So we can do more and it’s and of course it helps that NVIDIA came up with with a second use for the video game chips, so yeah, now we’re [00:04:00] moving in in light speed, practically.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. And every time, almost every time I open my emails, there’s another new thing that’s come out and another person saying, Hey, did you know you could do this cool thing with it? So can you just talk a little bit about what you do today and, who do you help out? 

Sami Hero: Yeah. So since since a little while, I actually got the opportunity to work for a venture capitalist fund called True Global Ventures as a general partner in residence.

And that is probably one of the coolest jobs you could have because I get to help their portfolio companies and our own operations figuring out how to better leverage AI, whether it’s predictive algorithms or generative AI. approach in their, in the portfolio companies, internal marketing and sales operations, but also in their own platforms, building proof of concepts and helping them think through the different large language models and the capabilities and thinking through the the art of the possible, so to speak.

Trudy Rankin: That’s interesting. So do [00:05:00] you, obviously there’s the generative AI, but then there’s the whole algorithm side of things where you’re using, predictive stuff, where you basically focusing more on data analysis or crunching using the AI to help look for patterns or what is it specifically there?

Sami Hero: Yeah, so I have background in both and so let’s, and I like to separate them into essentially predictive and descriptive or prescriptive approach. To me, the predictive approach is is that, is the machine learning algorithm deep learning models where we can optimize things like pricing for different kinds of customer segments or product segments and predicting the most likely next product to be purchased or.

Whether a retail chain is going to have a product on the shelf or not on any given moment in time things like that. And then we have the more, the descriptive or prescriptive models, which are the gen AI kind of models where we can we can better understand for instance, we have one portfolio company who has, [00:06:00] who’s producing posters online.

And so people buy posters and they essentially support the artists who put their assets online and then they sell them. And and the use case there is to to expand the the attributes and around the art. So we can use a large language model to describe the art better, describe the the color scheme, the objects that the artist doesn’t necessarily think about.

And the artist doesn’t necessarily think about all the different color separations that might be in, in the image, but the AI will will push it out and then that helps somebody select art into their wall. They could take a picture of their room and essentially say, give me some proposals on what I could put here.

Trudy Rankin: That is really interesting, partly because I just interviewed another person earlier this morning, who’s a disability expert in terms of, trying to get people to set up their websites and the things they create so that they’re accessible for people who have to use tools to help them, see what, see in quotes what’s on, on, on the web.[00:07:00] 

And they were basically saying that, the, that ability of AI to look at an image and really deconstruct what’s there and describe it in a text based way. It has been one of the bigger wins for the disability community in, in, in the last little while. And I hadn’t thought about it like that.

That’s interesting. But it’s being used for everyone that, that ability to, I’ll call it deconstructing and then reconstructing the language to describe what’s in the art. That’s really interesting. 

Sami Hero: Yeah, and it’s the AI does a lot better work than the screen reader for the people with disabilities.

Usually people you were using JAWS or some other screen reader type of thing, and you would have to hover and it would explain what’s behind there. But if you use one of the large language models AWS has this thing called Rekognize with a K in the middle. It’s it will essentially tell you, Where the objects are and what they are and the general layering as well.

If something looks like it’s it’s in front of the other one. Yeah and it’s super fast. These things are super fast and [00:08:00] relatively inexpensive to process. So it’s becoming so much more available now for these different use cases. 

Trudy Rankin: Interesting. Now do you typically, as a, if you’re working, I guess with a VC type company, are you working with bigger organizations?

Are you working with smaller organizations to help them build up these use cases for how they can use AI to? Actually be more profitable, basically. 

Sami Hero: Yeah prior to joining TGD, I was essentially working in a consulting organization and we were building these things. So it could be very large organization with a smaller use case.

It could be something around, for instance, recommending certain products or supplements or something. It could be a healthcare environment where we would essentially listen to incoming calls, transcribe them, and give some guidance on the operators on what to say next time, assessing the how concerned the person was who was calling in, what the next steps, ideal next steps would be or just replacing some HR and IT people, or [00:09:00] not replacing necessarily, but augmenting the existing organization so that People could ask complex compliance questions from the bot instead of calling the HR person to ask, can I do this type of thing?

Typically what we were trying to do with AI today is to to augment the efficacy of people who are hard to hire, because it’s there are roles today like data engineers and others who are really hard to find. So if we can get, use AI to make those existing people more effective and, get more out, that would be the ideal scenario.

Not so much get rid of people like Klarna and some other major corporations have done, because I think that’s pretty depressing. 

Trudy Rankin: Certainly it depends a little bit on whether your glass is half full or your glass is half empty, about a lot of people, about what they think about whether AI is going to eat their job for lunch or, take away their job.

But that’s interesting. So basically your focus is on using AI to augment expertise. rather than using it to replace [00:10:00] expertise. Do you see that it like that continuing on into the future? Or do you see that eventually, potentially AI could become the go to expert for a lot of different areas of expertise?

Sami Hero: It will it will continue to get smarter when you think about today, the different models that exist the Clod Anthropic Clod, Sonnet 3. 5 is incredibly smart in even legal text. It’s it’s just incredible as a platform. And at the same time, the the OpenAI has now the new reasoning engine, the oh one and things like that where I had just recently asked a very complex question about distribution of profit in an organization who was to be very transparent.

And it was a very complex question that I was speculating with somebody else. And and he gave really good recommendation and reasoning on why he did it, which is which is fantastic. But I think it’s it’s the best, they are best used as a tool to help us become faster and get rid of I have a little bit of the.[00:11:00] 

The Empty Page Syndrome, when I started writing things. So I use something called Lex. page to to give me ideas on I have an idea of what I want to write about. But I want the first draft to be generated for me and then I take it and then I start working on it and editing it and.

Asking AI along the way is be critical. Tell me what that, what I’ve wrote, how good it is or how it could be improved. But I keep control of the outcome. And I wouldn’t completely rely on on a purely AI generated content. 

Trudy Rankin: Yes. Yeah. You do that at your peril at this stage, I’ve discovered.

Sami Hero: There’s a funny story, actually, I’ll tell you. I met recently a lawyer in London, and and we started talking about JNAI, and she got really mad, and I was like, what’s going on? And she said that she spent a couple of hours of billable, a couple of billable hours, literally, looking for a statute on employment law in the UK, that she had run into some blogs in two of other law firms websites that looked slightly different, but very similar.

So she [00:12:00] thought that there must be something new that she’s missed. And she went to the usual Westlaw and Lexis, which are the definitive tools to search. And she couldn’t find anything around it. And it turned out that those two marketing teams had asked similar questions from Judge GPT.

And it gave very similar hallucination for both of them, but not quite the same. And but it was completely hallucinated situation. And she was just mad. She was like, why didn’t they check it, check their work afterwards? But this still happens. Hallucination still happens. And you can’t, it’s very hard to avoid it.

But but you need to be very careful. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, because, yeah that’s one of the, that’s one of the unfortunately painful sides of AI at the moment. Although I assume that over time, hallucinations will decrease. They may not go away completely, but they should theoretically decrease. 

Sami Hero: Yeah, it depends a little bit on the on the dataset that has been used to train the models because there is no secret deep intelligence in the system.

It is really a highly [00:13:00] sophisticated statistical model. So if you if you get some, if the dataset is somewhat conflicting and of course we know that the content in the world today is not black and white, true or false. And because there are so many kind of, half truths, half false things floating around and some, whatever, fake news, so to speak, all of that stuff gets gets digested by these models.

And so it depends on who is who is putting it together. And then our biases or the developer’s biases and the people who curate this learning content also fall into it. I’ll give you another example that happened a while back. We during the pandemic I was working for this company called Happy or Not, and we have this customer experience terminals that they also have in Australia and New Zealand, and because people didn’t want to touch them.

We decided that you can use your fingers. To show whether it’s like two is the second green green face and we use the camera, our AI model that, that tracked it, the initial [00:14:00] model was not trained with with the diverse skin colors, skin tones. So it mostly worked with the Western, white people to be perfectly honest, and it and slightly Brown, but when when he had like African origin or something like that, he failed miserably.

So we had to actually go back to another model, which was properly trained with with enough content. So these things still happen with limitations or biases or whatever you want to call it. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, no, I that’s an interesting case because, and that is a lot, one of the reasons why a lot of people are still worried about it because, as you said, the biases are built in.

If the setting up of the language models or the large language models isn’t done with that thinking in the background or in the back of your mind. It is really easy to end up skewing the results, which is a little bit of a worry. And so for somebody who’s a small business owner, who is aware of AI, but doesn’t necessarily have a lot of time to go out there and research it and figure out [00:15:00] how they could or should be using it.

But they’ve decided they’re going to somehow, they’re going to somehow try. Where, what would the, what would be, some of the things that they would need to be paying attention to right up front as they started doing their own research or trying to learn about how they could use AI? 

Sami Hero: Yeah, I would almost turn it around a little bit to the use case perspective.

Is that, what would you want to use it for? What is your problem today? And let’s say somebody, if you’re a small business owner, and let’s say that that you want to be more involved in like on LinkedIn, for instance, or you, or if you need to do some online advertisement, advertising, and you need some bunch of different creative to to test, for instance there’s a great platform called at creative.ai that, that very quickly can give you ideas on what kind of ads you can use and you can test obviously their efficacy and things like that. So I wouldn’t necessarily go into the rabbit hole of, let me learn about AI, generally speaking, [00:16:00] but I would target it as where do I struggle?

Where do I have a challenge in my business today? And there is also a way of Just leveraging, and probably ChatGPT is the easiest way today to leverage it is that you could literally throw in some of your existing content and ask ChatGPT to be critical and comment on it, or maybe throw in your your P& L and your balance sheet and ask questions about how do you think my business is going?

And of course the one thing that is always good to keep in mind is that the. The large language models and the tools we have today tend to be very positive about things. So if you want proper critique, you actually need to prompt them to be critical. Literally saying, don’t be nice, be critical.

Because otherwise there will be like non answers on this. If you want to write blogs, I would say that I love this tool called Lex. page. Mostly because it’s really meant for kind of writing drafts and writers. And I can swap the large language [00:17:00] models behind the tool.

So if I’m writing more technical things, I can ask it to use let’s say the Sonnet 3. 5. If I’m writing something more creative, I can use another model. So depending on the on the situation, I can swap a little bit on the supporting AI. Okay. So yeah, so I would probably recommend on just looking at this specific use case you want to address and then pick one or two tools.

If you want to use, make quick videos, for instance, there’s this tool called Picture. AI which is fantastic because you can drop a blog post or an article and it will pick up the essentials out of that article and propose creative elements and create a video for you. And you can do either a two minute video or one minute video out of this story.

And it does closed captioning, voiceovers, everything super well. There are really nice different tools, but it’s easy to go in also into the ocean of tools, there are, because there are hundreds and, thousands of tools popping up every day right now. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s interesting. I hadn’t, I’ve heard of the ad creative one, but I hadn’t heard of the, did you say [00:18:00] pictureit.ai? 

Sami Hero: Pictory, it’s Pictory. It’s yeah, it’s P I C T O R Y. ai. I’ve used it for about a, I don’t know, a year and a half, maybe now it’s and it’s actually quite good because it can also do transcripts of existing videos and closed captioning and all sorts of fun stuff like that.

Trudy Rankin: Now that’s, that sounds really interesting. Certainly a use case for me would be to take a transcript, pop it in and have it crunched down and a video created from that. Thanks. That would be interesting. Have to have a look at that. I’ll put those in the show notes.

So coming back to your area of specific expertise around the marketing side of things. Could you just delve, you’ve already touched on it a little bit in terms of talking about ads and stuff. But could you just. Talk a little bit about how a small business owner who perhaps struggles with their marketing or finds that the marketing process is so full on or so complicated that they, they just find it a pain in the neck to do, or they can’t do it at [00:19:00] all because they just don’t have the time or the tools.

How could they use AI to minimize the effort that they have to put into creating marketing assets or marketing funnels, whatever you, however you want to call them? 

Sami Hero: Yeah, obviously it depends a little bit what you’re doing, but if you’re like, let’s say you’re a main street small business, right? It’s and you are very local business.

So you’re not necessarily trying to attract people from thousands of miles away, but you’re local. So one of the things is literally to ask, try GPT is to prompt it and explain what you do where you operate and what you’re trying to sell and what your customers, your ideal customer looks like.

And ask ask for ideas on what next and act actions you could take. It will actually give you very like a go to market question. Essentially, it will tell you in a very good way about how to explain your offerings and given who you are trying to target what kinds of things you could use.

So that could be like a one way of literally [00:20:00] building a draft marketing plan for you. It’s start the prompt with build me a marketing plan for my small business on Main Street wherever Canberra or somewhere else. And and you can get ideas on, and usually it’s, and it’s ask me more details along the way and the AI will essentially keep on prompting you back as well.

Then I think the other way is that once you have an idea of what you want to do, if you want to attract more more customers in, so you may want to, you may want to do things on on TikTok, or you, depending on who your clients are, like, if you’re selling some trendy stuff for the young people, you might be best off using Instagram and TikTok only.

And then because it’s, it tends to be video, so then you are like, okay, so now if I want to do video, so I could use the picture. ai, or if I want to have a talking head. who explains something about my product or my offering. There is this thing called Synthesia that has avatars that you just give a text and you pick up the avatar and they, and the accent and everything.

And and they will do the, the talking head for [00:21:00] you. If you are like me with a face for radio, right? It’s you that’s how I would look at it is the what is the exact immediate problem to solve? If you want to do you want to get help on pricing, one way of or if you have some new competitors, let’s say if you’re like, I don’t know, hardware store and you want to compare your

your stuff to the other guys. You can essentially ask the AI also to compare your website and your main messages on your website to your competitors. And and the AI will literally give you a point by point comparison on your main messages compared to their main messages or their products and pricing and things like that.

So there is there is a lot of ways of of attacking this and And, or if you are like a consulting business and you need to build some pretty, pretty PowerPoints real quick. You can use something like napkin. ai, you write up your content and then you are like, okay, give me some beautiful graphics out of this.

And of course, PowerPoint does a lot of that too, but with a co pilot, but there is [00:22:00] also like really sophisticated tools out there that can help you. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s really interesting. Cause there’s a lot in there that you could go in there and, Try those things and see how it will help.

So once again, I’ll put some of those into the show notes. I’d like to, before we finish up, I’d like to come back to what you were talking about at the very beginning and that was about how you go in and help the organizations. who are part of, basically they’ve got some of the venture capital and you’re going in there and you’re helping them just be more effective, more efficient and be successful and profitable.

Can you talk a little bit about the key things that you look for when you start to talk to these organizations with that thought in the back of your mind that you’re there to help them, just basically get more effective? 

Sami Hero: Yeah, there are, yeah, there’s a, they’re two extreme ends.

Assuming that they are yeah, they’re, that, that tends to be two ends. One is that they’re very [00:23:00] much in the beginning, so in their own internal use is that they know just GPT. They used it a little bit. They have an idea of prompting. They maybe have a one person marketing department.

And and they’re a little bit like, where do we go from here? They’ve tried co pilot, they tried maybe Google Gemini. Depending on the platforms they’re on and, but not very far. And then you have the other spectrum where we have these 18 tools we are, we’re trying out. Because and there’s nothing wrong with it.

It’s it’s good to try out things and and I always like to A, B test everything. And and then it becomes a little bit is like we have this singular tool for absolutely everything or sometimes three tools. It’s like we generate images with with open AI with copilot, or then we use mid journey or we use something else for for creating them, which is great.

But then it’s I have too many toys on my desk, which one do I choose to do what? And so when it’s that kind of we’re just starting, then the [00:24:00] conversation I usually do is like what we had a minute ago is that let’s talk about the use cases of what we’re trying to achieve.

And rather than picking up maybe the best tool for absolutely every single task, let’s figure out if there are some tools that can do two or three or four of those things at the same time. And so that we can start testing it. We can, because it’s not every business gets a huge benefit from from this content.

And if you are, you still need to be able to edit and improve and make it look like non AI. Obviously images, if you get a mid journey image, it is mid journey image. You check that the person doesn’t have six fingers. There are those little things you check first. But but trying to make it your own and make sure that it feels the the tone of voice of the organization and so forth.

And then in the opposite end we just actually had this kind of conversation with somebody just last the week before last, where it’s a little bit is that, okay, so you’ve got a great selection of tools. Are you getting the full benefit from them? If you’re paying 20 [00:25:00] bucks a month for each tool, suddenly we’re looking at this pretty significant amount of money when you have 20 or 30 of these tools.

Are there some that we should just kill and merge or get something that maybe doesn’t do every single thing as well, but does, generally speaking, three things pretty decently? But you replace those three things with one. So you suddenly saved a little bit of money. So that, that’s the type of kind of triage in, in that end of the spectrum.

Trudy Rankin: Interesting. Interesting. I went to an online presentation for consulting organization that actually goes into an organization and uses AI to look at everybody’s job description and then figure out how they can use AI to save time for each of those roles. And that was a, it was fascinating to see how they had set up a series of GPTs in order to be able to do that.

Do you have a process that you use? I assume that it starts with what’s the problem, what’s the challenge you’re facing, but how do you go about creating [00:26:00] GPTs that are, fairly sophisticated and end up taking you from point A to point B to a number of complex steps? 

Sami Hero: Yeah, I wouldn’t necessarily create specific GPTs.

There are now some workflow tools I happen to one called Cassidy.ai, that, that helps you create complex workflows within one tool. And it doesn’t require you to create a separate GPT for every single action. They help you actually create those, like I’d say, like a workflow, like where somebody fills in a in a form on a website.

You get the email and you get the email, you can go scrape it from LinkedIn. You can add some enriched content around that person and then write it into a HubSpot, for instance. I find the it’s it’s very tempting to do just what you said is go check people’s job descriptions.

But how many times you’ve seen that people are actually doing what their job descriptions are in an organization? It’s I find that there [00:27:00] is a lack of documentation, generally speaking, within organizations when it comes to their processes, especially when it’s a small business, it’s very rare. I’ve been in very small startups and and I have friends who run small businesses.

It’s rare that they are super well organized. There’s always a little bit of chaos. The chaos can be 10 percent or 80%. It depends on the business, right? But by thinking that something sophisticated could come in and diagnose it automagically with AI and produce something it goes to the category of too much magic.

And I’m much more relying on having conversations with people and and listening carefully to understand what’s going on, what they’re trying to achieve, what they’re doing and where their stress, stressors are, because it might be that somebody has 80 percent of their their job description is focused on certain type of things, but it’s the Pareto’s rule, it’s 20 percent of their job description takes 80 percent of their time and you should really focus on those [00:28:00] things instead.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, no, I actually 100 percent agree with you. Because if you, and it’s the talking to the people that matters because I’ve got a background as a Chief Information Officer, and any time we went through any kind of change scenario, you had to understand what people were doing, what they were really doing, not what their job description said.

What are they really doing? What is stopping them from being able to do their job the way that it’s now shaped up to be? And having those conversations and helping people do the change in a way that’s natural and not forced upon you in a very I’m very unhappy way in many instances.

So it’s, that’s interesting. I like that approach. Talking to people as always. is always good value. And AI is not going to be able to take the place of people to people conversations. I don’t think, not for a very long time. 

Sami Hero: Yeah. Yeah. And I’m a huge fan of science fiction and I love the Asimov’s books and and I still remember the HAL 9000.

I’m sorry, Dave, I cannot [00:29:00] do that. So there’s always the If we rely too much on automation and we don’t always, again, it’s the question of biases. We don’t always know, what’s behind it. If we blindly rely on something, it’s obviously, we blindly rely on things like weather forecast until we look outside and we check what the weather actually is.

But but many other things I always take them with a kind of pinch of salt and try to triangulate a little bit, even if it comes from AI. Is that obviously if we’re asking who’s the king of England, the answer is pretty straightforward, but if it’s something a little bit more murky, it’s always good to check.

Trudy Rankin: Yes. Complex and a little bit subjective depending on where you stand. Yeah. I that’s been really fascinating talking to you with Sami and just hearing a little bit about just your worldview around AI and some of the things that can be done with it. Yeah. Also how we need to be a little bit careful with it.

So if people were interested in finding out more about you, or they wanted to get in touch, where would they go? [00:30:00] LinkedIn. 

Sami Hero: LinkedIn is the best way. Yeah. I’m happy to engage with everybody, I believe, in in just open communication. Happy to help. It’s you can find me, I’m the only Sami Hero on on LinkedIn. So it’s it’s easy enough. 

Trudy Rankin: It’s a good place to go and look for people. I’ll put that into the show notes as well. And just thank you so much for sharing with us and for being on the podcast. 

Sami Hero: No, thank you for having me. It’s been great.

Trudy Rankin: Thank you for joining me and Sami Hero today. I hope you found his insights into using AI to simplify marketing, save time and work more effectively as helpful as I did. AI is really powerful, but with the right approach, it can also be practical and even a lot of fun to explore.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please hit subscribe and leave a quick review. Your feedback helps others discover the podcast and helps me make more episodes that matter to you. So until next time, keep taking those steps to make your business the best it can be, and I’ll see you soon.

Resources

• Pictory:  https://pictory.ai  – Quickly turn articles or blog posts into engaging videos.
• Synthesia:  https://synthesia.io  – An AI tool for generating videos with digital avatars.
• Lex Page:  https://lex.page  – A writing tool for generating drafts and AI-assisted editing.
• Napkin:  https://napkin.ai  – Quickly transform ideas into presentations.
• Cassidy:  https://cassidy.ai  – For building complex, AI-driven workflows.
• AWS Rekognition – https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/  – Amazon’s image recognition service for identifying objects and enhancing accessibility.

Today’s Expert

Sami Hero

Sami Hero is a general partner with True Global Ventures and a technology leader with a rich history in AI, sales, and marketing. His career began in software development and evolved to consulting and executive roles where he focused on making AI-driven solutions accessible for companies of all sizes. Sami’s work today is centered on helping businesses harness the potential of AI to improve operations, reach new customers, and increase profitability.

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