Integrate, Automate, or AI? They Are Not the Same Thing
Download MP3Hello, and welcome to the Service Based Business Society podcast. I'm your host, TiffanyAnn Bottcher. I left the corporate world to build my own businesses, and along the way, I've learned that scaling isn't all highlight reels. It's messy, it's hard, and it's totally worth it. As a mom of three, the author of the data driven method, and a serial entrepreneur, I know firsthand what it takes to build something bigger than yourself.
Speaker 1:This show is where we get real about entrepreneurship. The good, the bad, the beautiful, and, yes, even the ugly. Each week, I'll pull back the curtain to share stories, lessons, and strategies that help ambitious entrepreneurs scale their success. So let's get started. Welcome back to another episode.
Speaker 1:It's been a little event pullover here. Start out with a quick story time. I was out hiking with my son. Beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon. You know, just thinking like, hey, I really wanna just get some fresh air before a busy week ahead.
Speaker 1:Well, I managed to slip, stumble towards the tail end and managed to break my leg in two places, which required a little bit of finagling to get out of the hiking area. My son ended up calling my husband. He came and found us and my husband quite literally carried me out. So we're here. But it's those kind of moments, the unexpected in life that really We're tests all of the systems in a business.
Speaker 1:Because although it happened on a Sunday, Monday morning, I ended up needing to have surgery, get it all screwed back together. And then I... Like, by the time you make it home, it's... And you're you're all medicated. Like, you're not you're not getting back to work immediately.
Speaker 1:I'm not unavailable, but I'm really of no use to anyone after I've had, like, maximum dose of pain medication. It really gives us the opportunity to what I refer to as battle test the systems, the processes, the team to know, like, can it run? Can it can it keep going? Can things just happen? And I'll be honest, does it run exactly like it would if I wasn't there?
Speaker 1:No. But did it keep running? Did things keep happening? Yes. We did have one weird bit of a struggle.
Speaker 1:So if you are on the West Coast, so we're in BC, Canada and we elected no longer to do like daylight savings time. This like, we're not... It's it's no longer. Problem is our time zone in like all of the Google calendars and things, it thinks that we're still doing that. So we had a client dealing with a launch and the calendar was trying to be smart and adjust for the future time change, but there was no time change.
Speaker 1:And so like between the pain meds and the calendar and the calendar being like offset by an hour and all of the confusion, chaos, absolute chaos. And realistically, how do you how do you predict something like that? You know, like I went through I went through it with the team and was like, hey, like, how did how did this happen? How did we not realize that the calendar was offset by an hour? But we didn't realize because the calendar wasn't really offset by an hour until Google thought that the time change would happen.
Speaker 1:So, you know, the Google Calendar was like trying to adjust and be smart and clearly didn't get the memo that the time change had been canceled. So it's those kinds of situations where you just have to kind of be like, how is this happening right now? So hopefully, yourself did not have any calendar blunder issues because it's just frustrating. Those kinds of things where you're like technology is trying to be helpful here, but it's not really. You know, can we just get a plain calendar without an adjustment?
Speaker 1:You know, like those are the kinds of where you're like, hang on here. Like, what's going on? If we go back to episode one of this season, we were kind of talking about, hey, like go back to when the process wasn't broken. I was like, kind of laughing a little bit about that, thinking about that comment and being like, hey, we really just need the calendar here not to be broken. So, you know, here we are kind of testing the systems.
Speaker 1:We're making sure things are working. We're making sure the team understands what's going on. And I would say about 85% of things just kept going. To the point that when I actually saw it, I immediately jumped on Amazon when I got home from the hospital and was like, what types of things do I need to make this recovery easier? So I got a little table that like, you know, comes right next to the bed.
Speaker 1:I got this amazing cushion that like lifts your foot up. I'll I'll link them or I'll show them because they were so helpful. And I got this little like basically stair climbing piece that makes going up because we have many, many stairs. And so it made going up and down those easier. So I jump on Amazon.
Speaker 1:Those things are arriving the next day. And by the time, you know, I get kind of situated, realize what I need to be doing. And then one of... I get my computer moved up on the table next to the bed. I actually was able to get a lot done because the day to day operations just kind of kept going.
Speaker 1:People weren't expecting me to keep replying as frequently as I typically would. And so that gave me enough time that I could get through some bigger projects, get things organized and whatnot. So in the end, it wasn't so much it didn't really create too much of a backlog. But I will say I was like cognizant about what tasks I was doing just based on how I was feeling and whatnot. So a little bit wild.
Speaker 1:You know, my mom just keeps coming back and saying like, one breaks their leg eating cake on the couch. And I I I hear that. I I hear that. It's just one of those like, you know, not great situations, but I'm just so thankful that it's all put back together. And now we just start the healing journey.
Speaker 1:For me, the biggest challenge is going to be that it is my driving foot, and that means I can drive for, as per the doctor yesterday, at least six more weeks. Three kids, one driver. It's it's it's a little bit chaotic. It's a little bit chaotic for sure. So today we're gonna be talking about the Integrate Automate pieces.
Speaker 1:So we were talking about this season being about Integrate Automate, Delegate. We have an incredible episode coming up, next after this one dealing with delegation. We're going to dive into delegation because I think that delegation is one of the most important skills if you are going to rise. Whether that is you're going to rise into management, whether that's going to be you're going to own the business, whether that means that you're going to scale the business. If you want to go up, you need to be able to delegate.
Speaker 1:So that's next week. Don't miss it. This week though, we're going talk a little bit about Integrate and Automate and the difference between the two because I hear them used interchangeably often and they are not the same thing. You add in AI and we're all the way down the path. Sometimes verbiage is very important.
Speaker 1:Other times, it's like a general concept. So in this particular instance, these are very different things. And I see the terms used fairly interchangeably in conversation. So integrate means things coming together. Automate means things happening on their own.
Speaker 1:And artificial intelligence means that there is some kind of critical reasoning that goes on in order for a decision to be made. Automate and AI often use interchangeably. As soon as something starts happening on its own on its own. People call that AI right now. We just added some AI.
Speaker 1:I feel like we're almost out of the automation era and we're like into AI. Here's the thing. It's actually still together. It is those three pieces work best together. So when we look at integration, so that might mean that your job management system.
Speaker 1:So things like Workiz, Jobber, Noify, any of those type platforms, your CRM are integrated or connected with your bookkeeping system. Or maybe your CRM is integrated with some kind of document signing tool. Or maybe your, you know, some kind of document storage is integrated with Google Drive. Any kind of thing that we're connecting is integration. So that means that information is going to flow back and forth or one direction depending on the integration between two systems.
Speaker 1:So for instance, a great example is you use a job management system and you create an invoice and the invoice automatically is created over in QuickBooks. So why do we want to integrate things? Well, anytime that we're doing a lot of double entry, you know, you're you're entering things in one system just to turn around and enter them again. I mean, it's just kind of redundant. No one wants to do this.
Speaker 1:It is all it's, it's slower. There's room for error, all of these types of things. We want to build a business that is super efficient. So if we can connect things together, it is the best option. So that is the Integrate portion.
Speaker 1:Now automation is slightly different because it is based on the premise of triggers and actions. Okay. So typically you're still gonna have things integrated, But the automation part is that things are going to happen seemingly on their own based on a series of triggers. So for instance, we recently built a workflow for a client. And so they have an onboarding form.
Speaker 1:So they've decided they're gonna hire a new employee. And so there is specific questions in the onboarding form. That onboarding form is all of the information that is needed to generate the employee's agreement. Okay. So imagine like how much they get paid, what is their start date, what is their name, email, phone number, for instance.
Speaker 1:Okay. So they interview someone, then they go and they fill out the form. The form then triggers. So when they hit submit on the form, the trigger, the action is to generate the employment agreement with all of the information filled in from the form. Okay?
Speaker 1:So, you know, you've done your job interview. You say, yeah, I wanna hire. Perfect. I wanna hire Bob. I wanna pay Bob $20 an hour.
Speaker 1:I want Bob to start next Thursday. Submit. Now the automation goes form filled out trigger action, create the agreement and send it to the person. So now we have a nice little email that says, hello. Thank you so much for your, you know, the great interview.
Speaker 1:We truly enjoyed it. We'd like to offer you the position. Okay. So that is the automation piece. Now automations can be incredibly elaborate.
Speaker 1:They can be many, many steps, or they can be very simple in that every time something happens, you want another action to happen. Okay. So now a lot of times people automatically then go, well, that's AI. Typically when we want the exact same thing to happen, we're not actually using AI. Now, if where would where AI could could change that flow is if based on a bunch of you know, instead of an employee, perhaps it's a client, a future client.
Speaker 1:So you have a consult call with the client, future client, and you fill out a bunch of information about their job. Maybe you say, I attended to Mr. And Mrs. Smith's house. They really want a new kitchen.
Speaker 1:We talked about some new cupboards. They want a different island. You know, I want to offer them a couple of different options with the tile. You know, they... Like, you know, you're giving...
Speaker 1:You're basically kind of giving some information in context. Now in that instance, AI could take that information, review it, do research. It could pull information from your price list. It could prepare a document. But the difference there is it would be different each time.
Speaker 1:The actual, you know, is there an automation piece? There's a trigger. Yes. We filled out the form. But the response is based on some reasoning.
Speaker 1:There's a response based on what happens from each of these pieces. So it's unique. And so when we start to look at the different options right now, the power is in bringing all of these pieces together. So, you know, some lingo that we hear a lot about right now is, you know, MCP. What is an MCP?
Speaker 1:You know, softwares where, you know, any software that you're that you're using in your business right now, a lot of us are getting emails saying like, hey, we've launched an MCP server. We now have an MCP server. You're like, okay, great. I don't know what that is. So MCP is the new age API.
Speaker 1:And you're like, oh man, this is... We're we're we're we're down in the alphabet soup category. Why is she giving me all these letters? So API is originally how we integrate things. So a lot of softwares would say we have an API.
Speaker 1:You know, a lot of times you, you know, you hear of all of these different automation tools. Zapier was very, very, very popular for a very long time. And so it would use the API. So if you had two pieces of software, that had API available, you could integrate and connect them. So the new age, you know, welcome to the new age version is MCP and MCP, we're still using APIs.
Speaker 1:We haven't done away with them. They do slightly different things. But the MCP version is what allows us to connect things to some sort of AI tool. So whether that be ChatGPT, Claude, you know, any of the other main two ones, Gemini, etcetera. You, that MCP allows that agent to connect into that system.
Speaker 1:So, you know, you can do things like please look up information in the system. You can chat with your AI agent about things going on in the system. So, you know, the growth and progression, you know, I kind of talked about it's a crazy time to be alive and like there's so much development and these types of things. The reason why it's so unique right now is truly the speed in which things are coming out and the evolution of these different pieces. The tool can do things now that it couldn't do a month ago.
Speaker 1:And I say the tool, AI in general, whether you use any one of the different tools, are, they have all improved greatly, you know, and let's kind of talk about that. You know, what tools are people using within their business, in their personal life? You know, we've, we've got Claude, ChatGPT, GrokBot, you know, Facebook just came out with theirs. We've got ChatGPT just came out with their kind of more autonomous agent that would kind of compete more with like Hermes agents. So there's like that it's it's it's big wide world out there with so many different options.
Speaker 1:And I find a lot of times right now, it's, it's kind of that shiny squirrel, shiny like, you know, squirrel moment of like, Oh, what's new over there? What's going on over there? And it's a really, you know, I kind of joked at one point recently because I had, I had been working on something for a while. And I got it super close to finished and then something new came out and I was like, well, crap. That completely changed all of it.
Speaker 1:I don't need any of what I just built for months. I don't need any of that. That's the challenge. And so it's like, you have to decide, am I going to be distracted by the new and shiny thing? Or am I going to stay the course because I've already, I'm already committed here.
Speaker 1:And I think you truly have to evaluate each of those on its own kind of measure. Because, you know, if every time a new model came out, you jumped between platforms, it's like, Oh, Claude's great. ChatGPT is great. Oh my goodness. I need to be over here.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness. That would be very inefficient. You would just, you would just be jumping back and forth all over the place because they're, they're always going to continue to one up each other. That's, that's the goal. It's the race to the top.
Speaker 1:So we don't want to do that. But what if something comes out that, that truly revolutionizes your process and you, you miss it because you were like, no, I'm not doing it. I think the important thing is unless you are super passionate about AI and kind of this trend, you don't need to be one of the first adopters. Okay. So for instance, Open Claw came out quite some time ago and it was like everyone was like, you know, people were like jumping on this and that.
Speaker 1:Then a little bit later, people were like, oh, it wasn't as, it wasn't as great as they thought. And then, nope, the next version is good. You know, I recently saw someone on my Facebook actually said, Hey guys, I want to apologize for a recommendation I made about eight months ago. Really been struggling with it now. And so anyone who is also struggling with it, like, I hear you and I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:And like, this is my new recommendation to replace that because it was like, you know, the, the news, the updates are so new. Recently had someone apply to a job with us and they said they had like twenty years of experience with Claude. And I was like, well, that's impossible. So, you know, knowing that you are already on the new side, if you're doing it at all. And if you're like, oh my goodness, I'm not doing any of that.
Speaker 1:Now's the time. What do we, you know, you're like, okay, well, what, what do I need to do? How am I jumping in? I think choosing some specific pieces of your business and deciding what is slow about them. You know, if you do anything in your business, a few times, you're like, that process is slow.
Speaker 1:You know, if you like dread doing something because it's slow, because it's boring, because it's tedious, because there's so many of anything, you know, you're like, I actually don't mind doing my emails, but there's like 700 of them and no one wants to do 700 of anything. So that's a task I don't enjoy. These are the pieces now where you can start to choose the appropriate tool to help you. I think it's important to put up some guardrails though, because we don't know what we don't know. And we've all seen horror stories of robots gone wild essentially, where things happen that perhaps weren't supposed to happen.
Speaker 1:So the guardrails. Number one, don't give the systems too much access. I run a secondary computer that it has full access to, but I do not allow full access to my main computer because my main computer carry, you know, has access to more things, more files, save... More saved files, you know, access to sensitive information and things. So autonomous, you're going on a brand new clean plain computer.
Speaker 1:Logins. I have set up login information for my agents. They have their own password vault in one password. That's our password tool of choice. We have the passwords for the agent's accounts in the vault that they can access that is secure.
Speaker 1:That way I don't have to be like, here's my password. So then I can restrict access. I can say, you know what? You can read things, but you can't delete them. You can do this, but you can't do that.
Speaker 1:And so you really have to like review. At this point in time, I do not let any AI agent of any brand or variety send emails on my behalf without me reviewing them. Some people do. Some people have no problem with this. I I'm not there.
Speaker 1:I'm just not there yet. I don't know if I'll ever be there. But what I can say is I'm super happy for AI to review certain emails and make some notes, perhaps do the research that, you know, it's like, oh, we need this file or we need this or we need that and add it into my drafts. That's that's a good happy medium. We're seeing more and more development in the, you know, memories, the context, you know, the, the strength and power here in growth is in things that are integrated so that AI, you know, or you has context.
Speaker 1:Okay. So like, if you go to one system in your business and get a bunch of information and then you're like, okay. So we had, you know, X number of leads come in. This many people. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Then you go over here to your other system and you say, okay, well, many... You know, what did each of those people... What did they spend? Okay.
Speaker 1:Great. Then you go to a different system and you say, how many of those people paid? How many of those still... Is their invoice outstanding? And you've got all of this information.
Speaker 1:Now, if you're integrated, now this information is the same in the systems. Now, if you are giving those systems, you know, if you're giving access to those systems by some kind of AI, now it's able to analyze that information and say, oh, okay. Well, your best customer last month came from this specific marketing campaign, which means that we should up the budget of that campaign and perhaps decrease the budget of these other campaigns that maybe didn't give us what we were looking for. You know, you think, oh my goodness, this sounds so complicated. In a way, we're able to do much more complicated things with less steps.
Speaker 1:Much easier. Analysis takes less time. Because if we take, you know, if we take a step back and we say, okay, if I'm running three campaigns and all of my favorite customers, the ones that get the biggest plan, the ones who pay the best, the ones who we enjoy working with, They all come from one campaign. And the people who complain about the team are slow to pay. Sometimes they ghost you or it's just not a fit.
Speaker 1:If they all came from another campaign, why would you keep running that campaign? Right? Most people just don't know. It's actually more common right now in the business owners that I speak to for them to just know that they run ads and they have customers. They don't know if those customers came from those ads.
Speaker 1:They just know they have customers. So that customer could have been a recommendation from some friend they know. It could be, you know, another client referred someone. It could be someone that came through a website. It could be someone who came from Instagram.
Speaker 1:It could be a Google They don't, they don't know. So which means they just need to do all the things all the time. Deeper analysis allows us to know what is working in our businesses and do more of that and stop doing the things that don't work or cost money or, or just, you know, become stressful situations. You know, I want you to just think for a moment of whoever you worked with in your business last that you would prefer not to work with again. We've all got that person where you're like, don't call me.
Speaker 1:I'll call you. If you have multiple of those coming from the same source and you are spending money to get them, would you keep spending that money? I mean, some people would. Some people would say, just want to grow at all costs and I want those leads and I just want to do that. It's a business decision.
Speaker 1:We always, I always say strategic decisions. We don't all have to agree with each other. That's why businesses are each unique is everyone makes different decisions. But ultimately you want to make informed decisions. So we talked about integration.
Speaker 1:We want our systems to speak to each other. So when you're looking at new systems, those are some that even if you're not going to connect them right now, you want to be investing into things that will be able to do that in the future. Okay. So words like API, MCP, these are letters that tell you, even if you don't know what to do with them, even if you're like, is not my jam. You know that that means it's possible.
Speaker 1:Back to episode one, knowing what is possible. Thinking bigger is the step that will drive success. So we say, yes, it's possible. I might not know how to do it personally, but it is possible. Then we look at automation.
Speaker 1:What are the things that happen in my business that like this happens, then this happens. You know, perhaps it's the client signs the agreement and then the job gets opened. And then this information goes into this folder. You know, whatever that process is that happens every single time. Let's get, let's use automation.
Speaker 1:Now, what about the processes that perhaps don't happen the same every time, but with enough context and understanding they can be taught. Think of AI as your new team member. They can be taught to happen. Keeping in mind that AI is great at research. It's also great at pulling things from historical context.
Speaker 1:So we go back to that giving the AI access to things. Well, if you have, you know, the last 500 projects you've done and the way that those were priced that might give the AI some better context about how the next 500 jobs would be priced. Okay. So analysis, looking for opportunities. Then vetting the opportunities, deciding is this an opportunity that I want to take advantage of?
Speaker 1:There is a million things coming at you all the time. You know, it's this app, it's that app, it's this AI agent, it's this. Oh my goodness. We can do this and that and this and that. You could have a full time job just checking things out.
Speaker 1:I was working on a workflow for my own business recently And I was like, okay, so I could do it this way. I could do it that way. I could do it this way. None were wrong, but you had... We had to pick one.
Speaker 1:And so that's when you start to, you know, look into analysis, look at the future costs, look at the scalability of these solutions. So I, right now, I personally would not invest into any software right now that isn't going to be able to, what I call play nice with others. Some software companies are like, they like to lock things up tight because they think they can do it all and they don't want to bring another. Most situations require more than one tool. There's a lot of like all in one has so many things, tools, but I haven't found anything that does the whole job on its own to the best of the situation.
Speaker 1:Like there there's there's better things. So as the season goes on here and we really are kind of digging into these integrate, automate, delegate, these are these, this is the words of the season. We really want to be looking at those opportunities. So I'm going to be sharing more about the systems, whether that be an automation, whether that be some kind of AI piece that we're building. Because we, I want you to think bigger.
Speaker 1:I want you to know what is possible. You know, that the hiring workflow that we were, that I was kind of mentioning earlier talking about, you know, quickly filling out that form. That is one part of a workflow that takes it from, hey, I interviewed someone to all of their tax forms are filled out. They're on the payroll system. They're in the job management system.
Speaker 1:They are ready to book on jobs. We have all of their documentation. We have their emergency contact. We have their driver's abstract. All of these fees.
Speaker 1:They've signed all of the documents. They're all saved in the folder. All, you know, all of these pieces that have to happen every time you hire someone. Whether it's automated or manual, this company was hiring enough that investing in building that automation was worth it. Certain things growing like crazy.
Speaker 1:Evolving. Other things. They'll be the same. You're still going to have to hire team members. You're still going to have to onboard them.
Speaker 1:You're still going to have to do all these. How do we make that process so it is smooth and friction free for the new person and smooth and friction free for the business owner? Integrate. Automate. Next week, we'll be talking all about delegation.
Speaker 1:Super excited to share a very special guest with you. Until next time. That's all. That's all the time we have for today, but the conversation doesn't stop here. Be sure to subscribe to the Service Based Business Society podcast on all of your favorite apps.
Speaker 1:And if you're hanging out over on YouTube, search for TiffanyAnn Bottcher. Your likes, comments, and shares don't just help the show, they help more entrepreneurs find the real stories and strategies that they need to scale. Until next time, keep pushing, keep building, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
