How Business Owners Should Use AI First with AI Advisor Sam Woods

It seems to me like we're right at the time now when the rubber's meeting the road as far as businesses getting value out of that.

Is that what you're seeing? Because it seemed like a lot of hype for a minute where, you know, I'll go to CEO peer groups and stuff and they'll talk about what they're doing.

And I'm not so sure that people were seeing it affect performance, bottom line, you name it.

But it seems like we're right at the point now where it really is.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

I think 2020 to 2022, before ChatGPT comes out, so ChatGPT came out in November of 2022.

And right around before that, it was not easy to work with these models, and it took a lot of work to work with them.

It's not just press a few buttons and then you're good.

We used Python notebooks, a whole stack of them, and thousands of API calls just to get some useful ad copy back or landing page copy back.

And even when Chachi Petit comes out and for the next 2023, 2024, I think what happened is people started to see the potential.

And a lot of the researchers and frontier labs, they're like, hey, this is transformational.

And I think people caught a glimpse of what's possible.

But as you know, there was, and still is, just a ton of hype, a lot of promises, a lot of big picture, a lot of, hey, here's all the things you could do.

But the difference between a demo and something that exists as a system that works and that's making work easier, life easier, and has an impact, huge gap.

And I think in the past year, especially 2025 and into now, we've seen a lot of the hype becoming real.

Not all the hype, but there's still too much of it.

And there's still a lot of...

A lot of people just speculating.

But I do believe, from what I'm seeing on the ground, the people that I work with, other companies that we know in the space, a lot of the capabilities have caught up to all the potential.

Still a lot of it, but it's better.

And it's easier now to realize the value and to build something that actually works than it was even this time, like May 2025, you started to see, especially with agents, you start to see, OK, we now have consistency in how the models are performing.

The models are more capable now.

They can handle tools, code, and a wider range of use cases.

So I think now it's easier to see and easier to also make it valuable and to make it work than it used to be.

The hardest thing is just people coming to us, and other people too, and they have a list of things they've seen demos on and the hype, and they go, we just want this, and we want it next week.