Day 3 Kickoff: Scale with AI Summit 2024

Full video transcript

Good morning everyone, welcome into Day 3 of the Scale with AI Summit 2024. My name is Darby Rollins, joined today by fellow members attending the summit live here on November 7th, 2024, looking forward to a third full day of great speakers, great insights, great tools to be demonstrated, all in an effort to help give you actionable insights and information to help you take these AI innovations and turn them into implementation. We’ll give people a few minutes to tune in. This is the first call of the day where we’re just going to quickly recap what we’ve covered over the past few days of the summit, plus a few brief updates for you, and then we’ll take things from there.

Kelly, great to see you, and welcome in everybody tuning in with us live. Feels like we’re at the start heading toward the end of an epic journey of two jam-packed days that we’ve had so far. We covered the MarketSauce method from Day 1, transitioning to a Gamma Lab workshop learning how to take our ideas and present them faster with Gamma, a powerful tool and an excellent sponsor who is part of what makes this event possible, along with all of our speakers. On Monday afternoon we had a few great sessions with speakers like Ashley Gross on using AI to grow your business, drive customer retention, loyalty, and revenue; Chris Lannon sharing how to build AI voice agents; Chris Dagel sharing what it means to be a Chief AI Officer and how you can approach that concept inside your own organization, finding that AI champion who can help stay on top of these innovations; and we capped off Day 1 with John Munsell talking about building an AI-first culture and demonstrating his process and frameworks for creating prompts that help you become more scalable inside your business.

Day 2 kicked things off with a session with Phil Stringer using AI and ChatGPT and different tools to be more effective and productive, save more time, and make more revenue in your business. We covered AI copywriting and social media, becoming more empathetic with your content and copy with Francis Ablola, and then the Gamma Lab for Day 2 was all about websites — turning Gamma presentations into websites, building full funnels with Gamma, and setting Gamma up properly to do a whole number of things. From there we had a session with Garrett Gravesen on building a personal brand with AI and getting started as a professional speaker, using his own story, which is very inspiring, and running through his speaker-brief process to build a first draft of a speaker kit that could help someone get booked on more stages. Last but not least, Day 2 closed with our keynote from Jacqueline and Frank of Howdy, our other Platinum-level sponsor, sharing how they approach AI to build an AI-enabled global workforce. They hire top talent out of Latin America, but the presentation was more about how to approach hiring out roles you don’t want to be doing, and how important it is — especially for solopreneurs, content creators, and small teams — to identify those specific roles and pick the right AI tools to hire effectively, then enable your own team further with those same tools.

Today we’ve got a star-studded lineup, with the first session kicking off in less than an hour: Jordan Hall, myself, and Chris Lannon on the concept of found money and a tool we developed called the Found Money Bot. It helps you identify profitable segments inside your own email list or customer base that you may not have been aware of, and find additional products or complementary services that you don’t have to create yourself but can affiliate or partner with to bring to your customer base and add more profit to your business. We’ll talk about the bridge concept, which Jordan will get into in more detail, then show you how to use the tool to identify those segments and use AI to create language for that bridge so it makes sense when you’re messaging or emailing your own customers — meeting them where they are and addressing the problems they’re experiencing, building on a concept from a mutual mentor, Travis Sego, called the triangle of insight.

That’s followed by Kelly Tenny talking about AI-accelerated micro courses — creating content and micro courses with AI, with ethics top of mind. This afternoon we’ll have our third and final Gamma Lab session at noon Central, with some demos the Gamma team has been teasing for the last two days. That’s followed by an open invitation for everyone to join our AI Profits Accelerator Mastermind — our community’s inner circle of a small group from inside and outside J University that meets weekly to talk about how we’re using AI to make more profit in our businesses. Applications to join that Mastermind aren’t open right now, but attendees are still encouraged to sit in on the session for whatever insights they can take away.

After that is our AI knowledge-entrepreneur panel, joined by Tyres, Kelly, Mike Gioia from Pickaxe, and Shelley Burman-Robera and Travis Rosser — a co-founder of Kajabi with other ventures he’s working on — on the topic of knowledge entrepreneurship: how entrepreneurs use their knowledge to make a greater impact on the world, not just for profit, and how AI can accelerate that impact. At 3:00 p.m. Central we’ll have our final keynote of the summit with Shelley Burman-Robera on the intersection of AI and human relationships — how to keep humans in the loop while building more effective relationships and leveraging AI to help. We’ll cap things off at 4:00 with a closing ceremony recapping what we’ve covered throughout the summit, along with information on how to stay involved with the Gen AI University community afterward.

Before getting into today’s sessions, Darby shared an update on a directory being built throughout the summit — a Notion document collecting links to all session recordings from Days 1 through 3, along with special deals and offers from speakers, vendors, and sponsors for those who want to continue the conversation beyond the event. He noted the directory isn’t complete yet but will keep expanding as more content is produced.

Darby then opened the floor for wins or insights from the first two days. Kelly shared that the second Gamma Lab session — on building websites — was a standout for her, since she’d previously only used Gamma for slide decks and presentations; seeing it demonstrated removed her hesitation about the feature being complicated. She also found the Howdy session valuable for reframing how to think about hiring a virtual assistant: rather than looking for someone who “can do all the things,” it helps to clearly define the specific role first, or risk setting that person up for failure. Darby agreed, noting that Jacqueline described going through a similar process when evaluating a new AI tool for her team — defining the role and tasks first, then vetting tools against that definition — and pointed to Ashley Gross’s tech stack as an example of choosing a small number of clearly justified tools rather than adding tools for their own sake. He also referenced Frank’s point from Howdy about the productivity gap between people who report AI making them 40% more productive versus only 10%: the more productive group tends to be methodical and process-oriented about how they apply AI, rather than chasing shiny tools and generating output they then have to go back and fix.

A community member, Melissa, shared that Garrett Gravesen’s session inspired her to consider public speaking for the first time, and that she’d started building a coaching website with Gamma the night before. Darby encouraged anyone considering speaking to go through Garrett’s process, noting it can shortcut a lot of the trial and error of figuring it out independently.

The conversation moved into live Q&A. One attendee asked whether a MarketSauce brief could be uploaded directly into Gamma to generate a website, similar to a demo where a presenter uploaded a document and had Gamma design a coffee-shop website from it. Darby’s response was that Gamma still needs a defined framework to build from, so his recommended approach is to develop the copy and structure in ChatGPT (or a tool like Bensen) first — using the brief as reference material — and then bring the finished copy into Gamma, rather than uploading the raw brief and asking Gamma to design directly from it. He suggested setting up a simple custom GPT trained on the blueprint so it can consistently reference that context for whatever copy is being generated, such as an email sequence or website copy. The same attendee asked about a “cheat sheet” or template for what information Gamma needs to design a site the way the earlier coffee-shop demo did; Darby said the team planned to compile some of these requests and follow up with Gamma directly, and encouraged attendees to submit feedback requests, noting he’d already submitted one asking for an embeddable interactive chatbot interface.

Another attendee asked where to deposit an entire knowledge base (including full books) so AI could respond based specifically on that content. Darby pointed to two summit demos: a tool called CustomGPT, built around letting users upload large documents and books and query them directly, and Pickaxe, which he described as having a strong RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) system for extracting the right information back out of uploaded content. He recommended CustomGPT specifically for internal documentation use cases like the one described. Other questions covered whether Mid Journey resources were available (none were taught directly in this summit), whether Gamma allows direct video hosting (it does not — attendees were pointed to hosting on YouTube or Vimeo and embedding into Gamma), and how to access session transcripts, which Darby said would be posted inside the community.

Darby then highlighted Chris Lannon’s AI voice-agent demo from Day 1, where the agent picked up a MarketSauce report and could carry a conversation as a persona, including declining to give medical advice due to underlying AI provider policies — framing it as a glimpse of what’s possible heading into 2025, while cautioning that taking in a lot of new information without applying it will cause much of the context to fade; the key is identifying what has direct impact on your business and then acting on it.

An attendee named Tyres shared that the Gen AI University community had been the most valuable one he’d belonged to, describing how members with different backgrounds and tool experience routinely help each other solve problems — including his own resume/cover-letter tool, which started as a personal project during a period of unemployment and became a side business after community members encouraged him to turn it into one. Darby responded that the community’s approach is built on a “rising tide lifts all boats” mindset, noting the group has been running for over three years with members who have stayed since the early days, and previewed two upcoming implementation workshops for Pro members: a 4-hour integration workshop on the 12th (hosted by Darby) and a 4-hour implementation workshop on the 26th (hosted by Kelly).

As the call wrapped up, Darby noted the Found Money Matrix workshop was starting in about ten minutes, with a caveat that co-presenter Jordan Hall had woken up that morning with food poisoning and might not be able to fully participate; Darby and Chris Lannon confirmed they would walk attendees through the tool regardless. The call closed with informal conversation about staying innovative and adaptive as AI tools continue to change.