Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome RVA to Inspire AI, where we spotlight companies and individuals in the region who are pioneering the development and use of artificial intelligence. I'm Jason McGinty from AI Ready RVA. At AI Ready RVA, our mission is to cultivate AI literacy in the greater Richmond region through awareness, community engagement, education and advocacy. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in today. If you or your company would like to be featured in the Inspire AI Richmond episode, please drop us a message. Don't forget to like, share or follow our content and stay up to date on the latest events for AI Ready RVA. Follow our content and stay up to date on the latest events for AI Ready RVA.

Speaker 1: 0:46

Today's episode is made possible by Modern Ancients driving innovation with purpose. Modern Ancients uses AI and strategic insight to help businesses create lasting, positive change with their unique journey consulting practice. Find out more about how your business can grow at modernancientscom. In today's episode, I'm thrilled to introduce our distinguished guest, a founding funder of AI Ready RBA and owner of Exponent 21, a powerhouse in the digital marketing arena Based in Richmond, virginia. Exponent 21 is not just another marketing agency. They are the architects of digital success for businesses and nonprofits alike, with a mission to engineer experiences that drive better outcomes. Exponent 21 leverages cutting-edge strategies and innovative solutions to amplify marketing wins. Under the visionary leadership of our guest, today, exponent 21 has become synonymous with growth, efficiency, excellence and digital marketing. Please join me in welcoming Will Melton to the show.

Speaker 2: 2:01

Thanks for having me, Jason. This is going to be an exciting conversation.

Speaker 1: 2:05

All right, cool Will thank you for joining us today. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your interest in AI, please.

Speaker 2: 2:12

So I am what you might call a serial entrepreneur. I probably rejected that term for a long time, but as I've gotten older it's become more true and, as somebody with a lot of ideas, I find it challenging to kind of navigate that volume. Ai has emerged as a really great partner for me in pursuing a lot of different ideas and getting things to a point where I decide to move forward or discard it. There's many different pathways. Sometimes things sit on the shelf and I'll think about them for a while, but it really helps me. In that regard and as a business perspective, we used AI to write content largely as our primary use of AI, starting about two years ago at Exponent 21. And so I was an early adopter and power user really when ChatGPT came out. So it's been a wild ride and definitely is something that warrants a lot of our attention.

Speaker 1: 3:11

Excellent. Yes, content creation is where it's at these days, for sure. What inspired you to start? Ai Ready RBA.

Speaker 2: 3:21

So I think that you know I'm almost 40 years old and this is the most transformative innovation that has emerged in the world in my lifetime. I believe that it was pretty evident early on that that was such. But I took a trip to DC with a number of business leaders from across central Virginia and Hampton Roads. We visited our legislators in August of 2023. And Mark Warner Senator. Mark Warner came into the room incredibly animated and very you know you could say excited concerned. He had been in several meetings that morning, one of them with Sam Altman, and he just didn't want AI to become something that is like social media, where we really have this nascent components that aren't in check, that there's no regulation around.

Speaker 2: 4:14

So that was kind of a moment where I said wait, this is happening really fast, we need to be on top of it.

Speaker 2: 4:20

You know we have this perspective, you know, thanks to the trip, thanks to that audience, if you will, and you know I said you know I think we need to do something and we need to do it quickly, and you know things don't move very fast, and one of the biggest challenges that I saw was that if we put this under the umbrella of an existing organization or if we kind of put a working group together and, you know, study it.

Speaker 2: 4:47

You know it's just, it's moving way, way too fast for our region to be sitting by idly and discovering, when we know that we have these tools that we need to be performing. And so that was kind of the impetus. We had a few people who were on that trip that said, yeah, sign me up, let's have these meetings. And for every two weeks for a year we met and tried to understand what the implications were for our region and figure out how we might take what we knew and leverage that into something that was going to be good for the region and for everybody who lives here something that was going to be good for the region and for everybody who lives here.

Speaker 1: 5:32

Wow, that's an interesting story. I wanted to ask so many questions about that, but I'll just say it definitely resonates with me, because I think that everybody comes across AI and realizes that it's going to change their life, and it's already changing things around them, whether they know it or not. And you know, when they pick up on that is different for every single person's journey, and how they leverage that information and that inspiration to motivate them to make change for themselves. I think is the difference between people that know how to take advantage of it and people that don't. So I'm really glad to see that you, as the leader of this organization, knows about these things and recognizes them in larger bodies and entities like Richmond, and it's a thrill to be here with you, so thank you. So how have you integrated AI into your operations? Maybe some more about your your content creation.

Speaker 2: 6:27

Yeah, um. So I would say that it started out as a content creation partner. It has now evolved into a total work partner. I mean, a lot of the tools that we use have um introduced an AI component that we leverage? You know whether it's design tools or if it's, you know, just writing tools. I mean, we all kind of use some element of AI in our writing if we use Grammarly or things like that.

Speaker 2: 6:52

But when it comes to thinking about the work that we're going to be doing, we're often, you know, in chat, gpt, just asking questions and saying you know, how can we take this further? What are we missing? You know what's a good idea, what's a starting point, and or you know what's a work plan, what's a, what's a time budget. You know what are some of the different implications that we might not be thinking about. So there's a lot of different ways that we use it in that regard. But I mean, from a writing perspective, which is such a big part of marketing, whether you're writing scripts, or you're writing content for search engine optimization purposes, or you're writing frequently asked questions for people who are going to be visiting your website or exploring a problem in need of a solution we have an abundant need to inform people, and written content's a really important way that we do that, and we need to meet people where they are, from different perspectives and angles, so there's a lot of volume that needs to be created. So that understanding that it became clear that we would get ahead if we used AI to write.

Speaker 2: 7:49

So we have a lot of different writing tools that we use. We have a lot of GPTs that we've created that do very specific things, from optimizing descriptions for YouTube videos for SEO purposes and identifying links back into website content to, you know, thinking about, well, what's a way that we can enhance a piece of content with visual aids or different resources that breaks the content up, makes it easier to read, enhances the experience for the user. We have script writing. You know chat GPTs. We have just snippet writers. So frequently asked questions are a really great tool for getting people into your website when they're exploring a problem. And more and more of those snippets those featured snippets is what we used to call them. Nowadays they're showing up in AI overviews at the top of the page. Those things are reading these content pieces and getting an understanding of the world.

Speaker 1: 8:46

That's happening more and more, so this stuff is really important and I mean, I could go on and on about this, as you can tell, yeah, so I picked up on leveraging AI in an advisory role like a consultant to make the beginnings happen a lot faster, and then you evolved into leveraging GPTs across various spectrums as you saw need arose, and those GPTs are specialists in the world that you operate, which is really interesting. I'd love to get a look under the hood there at some point, even if at a high level, to learn about how you created or envisioned what those things would do and then how you go in and do them. I mean, I think businesses around here would be extremely pleased to get some insight into that at some point.

Speaker 2: 9:40

Well, there is just as a shortcut. There is a blog post on the AI Ready RBA website that has a collection of GPTs and we published that maybe earlier in 2024.

Speaker 1: 9:51

But there's a starting point there for folks and I'm happy to come back to it, but I'm getting around to it, and that's that's one of the next things I will do. So, all right. So what's your take on how AI is helping workers be more efficient and effective? How has it improved your workflow or your?

Speaker 2: 10:17

business processes A little bit more in depth there, if you will. So I'm not a very process oriented person. Our organization is very much process oriented. We have a bunch of SOPs, we have handbooks, we have guidelines for how we do our work so that we stay on track. We have a lot of templates for the work that we do.

Speaker 2: 10:33

What I have not yet done enough of and this is actually really at the precipice for me right now in my discovery is more of a process oriented, automation based, workflow based operation. We have some workflow things that happen. Obviously, we're marketing automation people, so we're already doing this sort of work for our clients, but from an operations perspective, it's a little bit different. There's a lot of things that need to plug in, and so we're exploring that and I'm excited about really the emergence of AI agents. But really the way that I think we've been able to leverage it from an efficiency standpoint and as a work partner standpoint is, in every single job that we do, we need to be asking the question how can AI make this better? How can we eliminate the parts of the work that we don't enjoy or that just don't really need human input? How do we accelerate the pace of thinking so that we don't feel stuck. How do we really unlock our potential by removing friction with these tools? And when you start to look at it from this sort of compartmentalized state instead of saying, oh well, how does AI help our organization as a whole? There's certainly some high level thoughts that you can get to, you know, the C-suite sort of thinking if you will. But at the granular level, there are all of these opportunities to leverage it and you know, at this point we have recently deployed tools to our development team to be writing code with Copilot and GitHub. So you know, we're doing a lot of code development now with AI as our partner in that, and that's I mean it's more than 10x accelerating the speed at which we can develop software. So it's I feel like every weekend I'm consuming a new way to leverage AI to influence the work that we do.

Speaker 2: 12:25

It definitely takes a top-down approach to be able to inject that into an organization. It definitely takes a bottom-up approach to understand what the actual implications and implementations are, but it takes leadership to say we need to do this Because people you know they're already burdened, they have a lot of work to do. So we definitely need to create that space and that directive. And you know, I don't know if you pay any attention to Salesforce, but Mark Benioff basically did this. He said look, everybody's going to stop what they're doing and we're going to have everybody start working on agent force, which is their version of AI agents, which is out, coming out I'm not quite sure, but it's really fascinating when you have that many people in an organization that are all of a sudden halted from doing what they were doing before to work on something new, that tells you it's big.

Speaker 1: 13:11

Wow, that's exciting. I'm going to have to check that one out. I'm learning so much here from you. So agentic AI is definitely a term that everybody needs to get familiar with, and how we're all going to be leveraging those to build workflows. Automating processes in our businesses has so much potential, so thank you for bringing that to our attention as well on this call. So how about? When using AI tools, what is your process for ensuring it isn't saying or doing something that you don't want it to?

Speaker 2: 13:47

That's the hardest question. You can't. I mean it's going to do things you don't want it to do. It's going to say things you don't want it to do. I think the work is to figure out where those breakpoints are. You know what are the weak spots in the system and backfill that with either human intervention or account for it in and how you build the tool that you're building. So and I say build, you know a lot of these tools are no code off the shelf. You're just, you know, kind of customizing their functionality. When you recognize where those gaps are, you can introduce interventions, and I'll use an example.

Speaker 2: 14:24

I mean, one of the biggest challenges that I face is, you know, as a content writer, there are certain ways that we need to write, to be, you know, authentic sounding and to connect to humans and to really have the content be of substance. And unfortunately, ai is not really good at that, no matter how much you work at it. It's good at the technical things, it's good at understanding structure, it's good at following rules, but it's not really good at telling stories, and so that part of things requires a human element, and often I find myself telling ChatGPT like do not start every sentence. In a world where anything is going on Like it's in a world where AI is changing everything, and in a world where this, in a world where anything is going on like it's in a world where AI is changing everything, and in a world where this, in a world where that, I'm like, okay, like we need a better place, setting opener for for this, and, and so I will come back and say, you know, hey, we need a hook, we need something that's actually going to get people's attention, something that excites them and makes them want to read, read this.

Speaker 2: 15:29

And when I explain that to ChatGPT, it's like, oh, okay, and it kind of gets it better, or, if not, right. But I'm having to constantly give it that feedback, which is really frustratedly. But you know, we have to continue to pay very close attention to these systems that we're deploying. We cannot set them and forget them, and I think that when you talk about agentified AI, that's a real concern understanding the implications of the world. We're already in a world where business development is agentified, if you will, and we're all seeing that in our inboxes. It's unfortunate, but it is a byproduct of all of this, and so now somebody else will have the opportunity to come up with that agentified inbox assistant that's going to be able to filter the crap out and give people what they really need to be productive.

Speaker 1: 16:22

Agentified. Yeah, I think you know. I was using it the other day to write a bio for myself and told it to grab the context of my LinkedIn page and it made up a history of my experience, which was really dissatisfying, but it was easy to catch right. It's the things that aren't easy to catch that that will get you into trouble, I think, when you're not paying attention to it, and if you start putting things out there that just don't make sense or people don't resonate with or has the wrong tone of your voice, your business, it can get you into some serious trouble. So, yeah, I think there needs to be a rule book for how we leverage this and ensure it isn't doing things that we don't want it to.

Speaker 2: 17:12

Well, something else that I would say, too, is recognizing that there are different tools for different applications. And so you know, yes, chatgpt is free for folks and they can just whip it out and ask it a question. But when you recognize the job that you're supposed to be doing, you want to evaluate what tools are available to you and find out if that's the best tool to use. You know, more and more now, we have tools that allow us to kind of control the set of information that's being leveraged to be able to answer questions. We have things like Notebook LM, that is really context-based thinking, and so there's and I use a combination of tools. I don't just use Janchi PT, I use other writing tools. I use, you know, kind of cross things over different platforms to get different perspectives and to kind of formulate content so that it's not falling under the same road, sort of nature, if you will.

Speaker 1: 18:11

Yeah, no, that's. That's absolutely critical to evolving your methods, practices and getting what you need from it. You can't use a hammer for everything. Yeah, sure, all right. Well, can you talk a little bit about a success story that you'd love to share that significantly impacted your business outcomes?

Speaker 2: 18:24

Yeah. So about a year and a half ago I was invited to bid on some work and did a lot of work thinking for about a month, putting presentation together, trying to assemble an opportunity for myself and I would go in and pitch this to a group of C-level folks, and there was a delay in response to the pitch. There was some changes in the organization that were unavoidable and it kind of created a reset moment for me in that whole pursuit and it was rather frustrating, but at least I still had a relationship to the team and the leadership there. So they gave me to to look at it from a different angle and and and bid on it anew and and I was I was I, as I'd say at a breaking point with it. I was like I've put so much energy into this. I really cannot see myself going through and starting over and and fortunately a lot of what was in the original pitch would be leverageable again. But in that moment of frustration I had a brand new RFP in my inbox. That was pretty straightforward and I just said you know what, I'm not going to be frustrated right now. I'm going to put this RFP through ChatGPT. And out came a work plan a budget. I had to kind of massage it a little bit to get it to give me a recommended budget, because ChatGPT didn't used to do that in the early days. But I got it to put together something that I felt comfortable with and I put it out to the client really quickly, which is not something that I would have been able to do without that.

Speaker 2: 20:13

Obviously, I had the foundation of what I'd already presented and it was not a yes right away, but it was. You know, this looks good, I think that we can make this work, but we really need somebody who can, who can present and who can facilitate a session to be able to make this work happen. And you know I said, well, you know, that's that's me. You know I've run board meetings, you know, for for years. And you know this is not something that's out of my area of comfort, you know something we do in the marketing world. So, but it was just having that confidence that, yes, you know, I'm going to be the person.

Speaker 2: 20:39

So in a, in a moment of needing to solidify that opportunity, I just said chat GPT, you know, give me a facilitation agenda, timeline and approach for how we're going to do this successfully and I spit out an agenda sent that off late on a Friday and that was enough to solidify the confidence that was needed to get a signature on the deal, and it's a sizable client that we were able to win a fun and effective, important project with. That led to a lasting relationship, so, and substantial dollars as well. So I think that there are a number of cases like that that we faced and there's a lot of thinking that goes into the work that we do, and then we don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. We just need to put into it what our expertise is and what we know, and let some of the grunt work be done by these computers that are very good at doing that, that grunt work.

Speaker 1: 21:36

Yeah, yeah, that's great. I have content that predates 2022 and I'll bring it back and say, hey, help me clean this up, modernize it for me, and I get a fresh new take on this stuff. That's really helpful in pretty much every any area. You know where you want to revive something. But it sounds like you you really solidified the use of of AI tools in in your business operations, even in the most clutch of of of situations that you've you've come across. That's really cool. Tell me, how. How do you see the role of AI evolving in your industry over the next few of situations that you've come across? That's really cool. Tell me, how do you see the role of AI evolving in your industry over the next few?

Speaker 2: 22:17

years. So I would say that the marketing industry has probably been one of the most affected industries to date, and because a lot of the things that generative AI is good at is, you know, exactly that's the creative stuff. It's writing, creating images, creating videos, creating audio. And what I would say is, while I am extremely sensitive to the necessity of human artists and human creators in the world, a lot of folks would say that these technologies take something away. But I believe just as much as I do with how AI helps in business, it helps in creative endeavors as well. It helps us get to the point of what we're trying to communicate with our audience a bit faster. Whether we're actually using the outputs of AI and leveraging those things in a way that we convey to another audience or to our audiences, that's subject to every artist's decision and you know, I used to think that you know that art had less value than human only created art. But the more I use these technologies, the more I recognize that, yes, it's a partner in this and yes, some of this stuff is good enough that we can spit it out and use it and what we're trying to do. But that's always going to be a discernment that a human will have to come up with, or you're going to end up with a bunch of stuff that's produced for the world that nobody wants to consume because it doesn't actually have the value for a human audience. So you know, the way that I see it evolving is a lot more creative things that don't necessarily require human input, and I'll give you one example.

Speaker 2: 23:56

I did. I wrote a blog article for my personal website, willmeltoncom, and as a way to make it easier for people to consume an important article that I had written, I did a readout on it. I read it with my microphone and, you know, used a garage band to get it on a track and I had to you know, kind of rerecord different sections so that I was clear and sounded good. But I played it back and I was like man, I don't know that I would want to listen to this because it's not a practiced you know this is not a rehearsed speaker, somebody who's trained at this kind of work and um, but I did it anyway, let it go. I put it out there and I said this is important enough to to to get out there. But I came back. I came across 11 labs, which is a generative voice engine and I uploaded some audio. I think I might have uploaded that piece of audio to it and I cloned my voice and I had it basically reread the whole thing and it was better than my spoken readout and so I was really convinced at that moment.

Speaker 2: 24:58

There were some other problems that I had with it. It had buffering issues and some challenges. So I think for certain applications it's not ready for primetime, but when you want to do things like translations or when you want to do things like short scripts and things like that, it's incredibly accurate, it's incredibly authentic sounding and I mean enough to the point where I listened to myself and several different languages and that was fun to do and just you know the convincing nature of it and the quality of it is so high that I'm like why would I spend time in front of a microphone reading out my blog articles when I can clone my voice and allow my voice to be the reader in a way? That's better, that makes total sense to me and that might make other people think, well, that's too much change and that's kind of scary. I think that you know what I'm going to be able to do now because of that. It just. It enhances the quality greatly and I think that that's worth it.

Speaker 1: 25:56

Excellent, yeah. So what advice would you give businesses considering implementing AI solutions? So what advice?

Speaker 2: 26:03

would you give businesses considering implementing AI solutions Broad question, but I would say that, first and foremost, start using it. You know, I think the best thing that anybody could do is open ChatGPT or MetaAI or you know something anything that has a generative engine and ask how can I use AI to do my job better, to improve what I do in my business, and just see what happens, because there's going to be some nugget that resonates in that list of offerings that it comes up with. That leads you down a path, and I think this is the most important way that anybody can use AI, because the biggest challenge of progress, I think, is having a certainty of the direction that you're going to go in, and with so many options out there, it can feel overwhelming to make a decision and to feel like that's a good decision, and so I think one of the things that AI does is it helps you see the spectrum of ideas and decide the best idea to pursue, so that you feel like you're spending your time wisely and you're going down a path that is going to lead to some kind of fruitful outcome, and it can be that assistant all the way through so you get that first step down. It says, ok, this is an idea and this is what you can do. You go down that road and you say, well, what about number seven? And it'll say, well, here's more about number seven. And you can say, well, this is what I know about number seven. And it'll say, well, here's more about number seven. And you can say, well, this is what I know about number seven, what can we do together? And that's, you can go out into the world and start tinkering and start talking to people and start doing stuff and, as you get feedback into your human system, feed that back into that same chat box and say, hey, you know, this is what I learned.

Speaker 2: 27:40

This is the outcome. This is cool, I'm excited. You know what's the next step, what you know. I want to try this. What do you suggest? And so there's this very iterative partnership that you get to leverage and I think anybody, any industry, any business, has the opportunity to start there and even ask it. You know I'm in a highly regulated industry. How can I use AI and even ask it? You know I'm in a highly regulated industry. How can I use AI? I'm in a world where HIPAA is looming over me. How can I use AI. Still, the answer is out there for everybody.

Speaker 1: 28:11

It just needs to be asked. Yes, indeed yeah, I love the memory that it has. It really gets to know you and everything that you've discussed with it before and circles back on those topics very, very seamlessly. It's an incredible technology, all right, Well, it's been a lot of fun, but I want to take away the one final question with you. Well, so could you tell us if you could have any superpower, what would it be and why?

Speaker 2: 28:40

I probably answered this question before, and I think that, whatever I said, the answer was to this. The superpower would be to enable other people to see the world as an abundant place of opportunity. We suffer a lot in life as a result of our lived experience and the hard memories that we've lived through, and it's hard to get unstuck from those things. Sometimes we also have an abundance of choice out in the world, with more than 6,000 ads that we see a day. There's just this overwhelm of information, and so that can cause people to feel stuck, and what I would say is that AI is a really wonderful tool to help us get unstuck and we don't have to feel like our opportunities are limited or that the story that we're stuck is a true story. It's not, and so, yeah, if I could, if I could have any superpower, it would be to help other people see that and give them the hope that you know the pursuit of the journey is going to be something that pays them dividends long into the future.

Speaker 1: 29:54

That's incredible Getting unstuck. I think a lot of people could definitely use that support. I think a lot of people could definitely use that support. They find themselves in whatever rut they're in or not knowing how to move, in which direction to go there's too many options out there and it's only getting worse. So I definitely think that that superpower would do a lot of good.

Speaker 2: 30:25

Well, and if I could add to that just quickly, a long time ago in the AI world, I woke up in the middle of the night in a panic and I, you know, I needed some reassurance, but there was nobody else awake and I don't know that I would have asked another person for help with something like that. So I asked ChatGPT to tell me a story about an artist who had become a struggling artist, who'd become a successful business person. And I don't remember exactly the story that it told me now, and I probably asked it to tell me several, but what it told me brought me to tears, and in a good way, because I had the emotional support that I needed in a moment that I was in a panic, and and so I I think that there are just many, many examples of how we can leverage this technology for human good.

Speaker 1: 31:07

Awesome. Yeah, that's wonderful. Waking up and helping you feel better about life, that's very empowering. Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed this discussion. I really appreciate your time today, will. I've learned a lot. The audience, I'm sure, has learned a lot. There's so much to dig into here. I'm sure we'll have future sessions with you, and RVA as a whole is going to gain a lot from your leadership, and so I very much look forward to the future of working with the organization. So thank you.

Speaker 2: 31:47

Thank you, Jason. I really appreciate it. I've also enjoyed this conversation and I look forward to hearing folks' thoughts, seeing how people put this to work for their business, for their life, for their community.

Speaker 1: 32:00

Excellent, all right. Thanks again, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in today. If you or your company would like to be featured in the Inspire AI Richmond episode, please drop us a message. Don't forget to like, share or follow our content and stay up to date on the latest events for AI Ready RBA. Thank you again and see you next time.