329-The Real Risk Isn’t AI, It’s Wasting The Time It Frees with Hunter Jensen

We share a blunt playbook for leaders: stop chasing an all‑knowing AI, design for adoption, protect sensitive data, and turn time savings into measurable growth. Hunter Jensen explains why he pivoted from services to product and how to deploy AI safely at small and mid‑market companies.

• framing AI for leadership, not hype
• risks of the “oracle” model and access control
• adoption as the driver of ROI
• designing copilots for knowledge workers
• small vs medium strategies for starting
• using 365 Copilot and Gemini safely
• defining success beyond hours saved
• reinvesting time in revenue and innovation
• building a cross‑functional AI team
• Compass by Barefoot Labs for secure deployment

Follow Hunter Jensen at ...

His website

https://www.barefootsolutions.com/

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/barefootsolutions

Twitter

https://x.com/barefootsolns

LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunterjensen/

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing AI For Leaders
• 3:20 Meet Hunter Jensen And His Pivot
• 8:10 Adapt Or Die: Blockbuster Lessons
• 12:20 How GenAI Disrupts Hourly Models
• 18:30 Big Mistake: The All‑Knowing Model
• 23:50 Adoption First Or ROI Fails
• 29:20 Guiding Overwhelmed CEOs
• 36:20 Practical Starts: 365 And Gemini
• 41:10 Defining Success: Use Freed Time

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:14

Welcome everyone to politically high tech with your host, Elias. I have a newcomer here, and look, I have talked about AI exhaustive amount of times, and but we're gonna take it a different angle. And because what I normally talk about is the workers' perspective about how they gotta master AI skills just to be relevant to the job market. This one here we're gonna focus more on the leadership, you know, business owners or CEOs, what have you. I want to include the small businesses as well. I'm sure someone could do that, could implement it. And I think the only advantage I'll say about small businesses, if you execute it right, you can actually be more nimble about it. Well, big businesses it will take some time, it's larger, and you gotta get more buy-in and all that. So, without the way, we're gonna focus more on AI implementation and about how it can be successful and how a lot of businesses are getting it wrong. Because we're in the age of AI, AI is evolving so quickly, it already surpassed human capability of adapting real quick. We're gonna talk, we're gonna just talk about that stuff. It's like ships, a lot of them don't know how AI can be implemented, right? And thank goodness we have someone here who's going to solve that problem. We have Hunter Jensen here, and trust me, he's the man for the job because out of the reading his is I'll say his pager, because look, I'm not gonna say biography because it could be much longer than that. I'm sure he has a lot more accomplishments. I'm just scratching the surface here. He has over 20 years of experience. He even works with Fortune 500 companies. These need more convincing or likes of Microsoft, Force, even IMAX. You heard of these names before, right? These are not exactly startup companies that you don't know who the heck they they are. So he's gonna give us some tips about how about AI implementation and especially how leadership could do it. So welcome, Hunter. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Elias. So this is why I like to get started. What do you want the listeners and the viewers to know about you before we get started?

SPEAKER_00: 2:14

Sure. Uh, you know, so founder CEO, a company called Barefoot Solutions, right? Custom software development shop. Been doing that for over 20 years, kind of riding the wave of digital technology, started off building WordPress websites, got into mobile apps very, very early. We had one of the first hundred apps in the app store once it came online. Then came, you know, the Internet of Things and connected devices and smart medical devices and all that. Then came blockchain and crypto, and that was a wild ride. And then came data science. And these tend to come in like four-year cycles. You know, we've we've followed that trend, the trends in technology, but now we have generative AI. So we've been doing machine learning and like traditional AI for a decade, right? But this is different. This time is very different to the point where you know it's it's even put my entire business model at threat. And and we've had to very drastically shift our business model and actually shift from a services company to a product company that's specifically focused around deploying AI at you know mid and mid-market companies and small businesses called Compass is the name of our product. So I've been in this for a while now, seen a lot of kind of mistakes get made, made a lot of mistakes myself, but have a much better understanding of what it might take to deploy, you know, specifically generative AI at the organizational level in terms of leadership. And like you said, that I think that's probably what we're gonna talk about today. So I'll I'll leave it there.

SPEAKER_01: 4:04

Oh, yeah. I mean, look, what Israeli alluding to is look at he had to shift his entire business model. What if Blockbuster did that, right? Some shift. You know, instead of just a video rental store, it could have been a streaming platform just like Netflix. Oh, Netflix took that. Look, they're still relevant, it's still big. Blockbuster, they've only been reduced to one store somewhere in Oregon. I forget where, but that's what you get for not adapting. The price is just, yeah, the the consequences are just dire, just to put it mildly, okay? So we don't want other businesses becoming like Blockbuster, or even worse, just completely gone. At least Blockbuster had America's keep one little store there, but it could be much worse. And Kodak too. You don't hear about Kodak anymore. One time we used to be a big, big photo company. I remember as a kid, Kodak was everywhere. Kodak, Kodak, Kodak, but they're gone.

SPEAKER_00: 4:59

Yep, they've they fell asleep at the wheel on digital cameras and the and the rest is history. Like, you know, to touch on that a little bit, you know, I like to I like to say that custom software development is a bit of a canary in the coal mine. You know, I'm in the business of selling engineering time, right? Hours. We build by the hour. And what used to take 100 hours now takes like one. And you might not even need an engineer to do it. And what does that mean for my business model, right? Do I only get 1% of the revenue? Like it's an existential threat. And it happened to my industry first. It's not coming, it's already here. I'm already losing projects and all the rest of it to vibe coders. I can do things for 5% of the 10% of the cost. You know, it's been happening all year. And the reason it happened to us first, this is just my theory, is that all the people working on generative AI are programmers. They write code. And so it was the obvious use case, you know, for large language models, right? They're language models. We write in programming languages. And in fact, they're a lot easier to deal with than like English, for example, which has all sorts of weird rules and inconsistencies and all the rest of it. So it started with code, but it's coming for other industries next, right? Think about professional services as an example. Lawyers, they bill by the hour too. All they do is read and write. Not all they do is read and write. They think, they read, they write. That's a large part of their job. And we now have this incredible tool that will make them, you know, give them the ability to produce much quicker than they used to. And if you're still build billing by the hour by the end of next year, you're and you're an attorney, you're in a lot of trouble for the same reason that we at Barefoot Solutions were in a lot of trouble, which is why, you know, thankfully, we saw the writing on the wall and you know, went heads down and built the product and shifted our whole business model to not go the way of the blockbusters and the codecs, but actually shift with the times and rather than be afraid of the threat, actually find the massive opportunity in all of this disruption and change. And so that's to me, like when you're leading a business, you know, you got to skate where the puck is going, that old like Gretzky quote. You know, you you really have to be on your toes here and innovate when the circumstances require it. And right now, that's where we're at.

SPEAKER_01: 7:34

No, yeah, man, that is a good time to that question because we don't want another blockbuster and Kodak. Trad, you know, well, blockbuster is on life support to be more precise, but Kodak dead as a business dead, okay? You don't want to be another Kodak. This is this is why I mentioned these examples. You know, you want to be Netflix, I guess. Yeah, they're doing well, they continue to grow, you know, they they get they deal with challenges, but looks like they overcome them. So you want to be more like Netflix, okay?

SPEAKER_00: 8:01

And or or or if you're already in b like, you know, Netflix was a startup that disrupted the incumbents, and that's certainly something that startups should be thinking hard about. But if you're already there and you've been in business for 20 years, you know, you have you need to start thinking about innovating. You need to turn it, you need to be more like Amazon, right? Amazon's in the cloud computing business, and they started off as an e-commerce marketplace, right? They still have the biggest e-commerce marketplace, but a large portion of their revenue is coming from their from their cloud compute from AWS, right? And so they innovated and saw the need for something like that. And this e-commerce company somehow managed to become the largest cloud compute provider in the US, right? And so I think that's an even better example of what like existing owners and leadership need to be thinking about is how do we innovate to stay relevant? How do we be Amazon and not Blockbuster?

SPEAKER_01: 8:59

You're not gonna get an argument from me on that one, yeah. Especially for the established business, yep. Follow the Amazon playbook. Just continue that hunger for growth and solve problems, right? Don't stay stagnant. Oh, we got it, we don't need it, yeah. We've been doing it for 50 years. Why should we change? Well, that's why these businesses they got taken down because of that mindset. So all righty this. So my question is what are the most common mistakes business leaders make when it comes to just implementing AI? I'm sure you got a lot, but what are the most common ones?

SPEAKER_00: 9:34

Yeah, there are a lot, but I'll tell you the biggest one, and this is something I encounter almost every single time I start consulting with a new business. They have this vision that we are going to teach a model everything about their business, and it's gonna be like an oracle, and it can answer any question, it can solve any problem, it can do anything. That is not how we need to be thinking about this, right? One, the technology is not there yet, but two, more importantly, is the only person that would be able to use a model like that would be the CEO. Because if it has all of my HR records in there, how do we make sure that it doesn't give out sensitive HR information to the wrong person? You cannot trust these models to do that, right? We have it's about access control. Who gets what? And if you think you're gonna teach a model everything and then trust it to handle access control, you're going to fail. And it and it might be catastrophic if a lot of sensitive data actually gets out to either your customers or to your employees, you've got a huge problem on your hands, right? So that to me is the biggest misconception is that they think there's going to be this, you know, know it all model that has everything that that knows everything in the business. That's not the right way to be thinking about it. So I'd say that's probably the biggest mistake that that I see from the from leadership. I think you go a level or two down that actually understand the work at a much deeper level. They they are they kind of already know this intrinsically, but the leadership, when they're a bit removed from the day-to-day, might not really understand that point.

SPEAKER_01: 11:24

Yeah, so they got this expectation, oh, this machine's just solve everything, figure out everything, be perfect at it. Expectations is already it's uh expectations. If you got the wrong kind of expectations, that could ruin so much besides just business. Yeah. I mean, but I won't keep it just strictly business here, but yeah, but that could just learn so much. Like, you know what? I used to kind of believe that, but after playing with AI, I said no, you gotta train it. Work with it, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 11:56

And you and so the other the other thing that I'm seeing is kind of this if we build it, they will come mindset where it's like, let's just deploy and not be laser focused on adoption, right? And if so it all comes back to ROI, right? Return on investment. We're gonna spend money on this technology to deploy it at our organization. If you're not focused from the jump on adoption, you're not gonna get your ROI. And the reason is it's it's it's kind of basic math, right? Like if you're only saving a handful of people, let's call it eight hours a week, you know, what does that save you? You know, that's a few thousand dollars worth of like salary time, right? But if you're if it's if it's 300 people, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? And and so you need adoption to get your ROI and and you need to focus on adoption at the very outset, or when you get to the end of the road, nobody's gonna use it and you're not gonna get your return, right? And so, you know, one of the critical things when you're thinking about, okay, well, how are we gonna get people to adopt is making sure that they're included in what it is we're gonna do, what what it is we're gonna build or buy and deploy, and will that actually be helpful for you? The the AI deployments right now at organizations, they are not for the C-suite. They aren't. The C-level executives, if you're doing like kind of more menial tasks that like a junior person could be doing for you, then you've got bigger problems, right? You're not you're doing the hardest stuff that a junior analyst can't do and these LLMs can't do yet. It's for your knowledge workers. Knowledge workers. That's what AI at the workplace should really be focused on. And so in order to make sure you get adoption, you need to make sure that what you're building or buying is going to work for your knowledge workers. You have to, they need to be incorporated into the process, into the design to make sure that when it comes out, they feel like they have some ownership on it. But most importantly, that it's helpful, that it actually helps them. And if it does, adoption will not be that hard. But if you don't focus on that, you end up buying or building the wrong thing. And they say, Well, this how I can't use this because of X, Y, and Z. And now it's you're you're stuck with this software that isn't really gonna get a return. So I would say those are probably the two biggest like mistakes I see leadership making. One, thinking they're gonna have a know-it-all model, and two, is not being very focused on user adoption from the beginning of the process.

SPEAKER_01: 14:48

Oh right, man. Oof. For listeners and viewers, I hope you are getting this. Maybe you're working on the start of business. This is something, you know, have your own promotion if you want to be, you know, the leadership, you know, implementation, RRI. Think about these things, big picture things, okay? And then for those of your business owners, I hope you're paying attention here because I have some things for the business owner. I mean, it's it's still weird for me to call myself a business owner. I've only been doing it for a few years. I still feel weird, but that's just me. That's my personal problem. I'll eventually get over it. Um, you know, this is this is all we're really getting this listeners because this is this this is big. This is big. And a lot of businesses are struggling. You're not alone, but you know what? There's help out there. So don't I know some of you are afraid of AI implementation, but you know what? This is not the only disruption that's ever happened in human history. We go to the industrial revolution or changes medieval times. We are changed. We're human beings, we're capable of doing this, and we need to use our adaptive, more creative mindset, such as you know, doom and gloom, AI is gonna destroy us all, AI is gonna take all our jobs. It's only true if you really let it or be a dinosaur afraid of it. Um that's what I'm gonna say. So I hope you're getting this, people, especially the leadership here. I don't be talking about the workers. Hey, you want workers, you want to become a boss eventually? Get some tips right now while you're at it. So now this is actually a good time to my other question. What can we do for the you know, seals that so overwhelmed as also this machine doesn't know everything? Oh, how can I really implement this thing? I'm scared.

SPEAKER_00: 16:24

Yeah, look, there's so much noise out there right now. It's it's impossible to keep up with. You know, I used to read a lot of books. You can't even learn about AI in books because of the time it takes to write them and publish them, by the time they're out, they're obsolete. They're outdated, they're completely outdated. I read two hours every morning just to feel somewhat up to speed on what's going on with AI. You know, you you likened it to the Industrial Revolution, and I really like that analogy in that they did people do lose their jobs, but in its place, way more jobs get created. And as long as you're able to adapt, then you're actually gonna thrive in the in the medium to long term, even if there might be short-term pain. That's what we've seen, like three or four times now, right? The difference now is the speed. You know, each one got is faster than the last one. This one's gonna be lightning fast. Some of those previous ones allowed for enough time of generational turnover. Like I can keep doing my job as a farmer, and then my children will be using more advanced agricultural techniques as an example, right? Because it moved slow enough. But and over time, you know, it speeds up. And this one, we don't get we don't get a generational turnover. Like it's it's gonna happen to us, right? To the to the workers that still need to keep working, and how they were doing it is not gonna work anymore. It needs to, it's gonna need to change during their career. And so, you know, to get back to the original question though, which is like, how do we make sense of all the noise? And and you know, it's overwhelming. It is overwhelming. And I have a few pieces of advice, and these really depend on kind of the size of your organization, let's say. If you're a small business, you don't have a ton of resources, you're not sitting on a bunch of capital, you stress about making payroll. I'm a small business owner, I get it. What should you what can you do? One of the really interesting things to try is to act literally book an hour on your calendar for a strategy session with ChatGPT 5. I'm dead serious about that. And sit down, and it's a meeting. It's a meeting that you schedule, and you sit down and you treat them like a consultant. They know a lot about the world, about technology, about business. They don't know about your business. So you teach it about your business, and then you ask, how do we think AI is going to impact my industry? What are some options for us strategically to implement AI? Do some research for me and find some some off-the-shelf technology that might be a good fit to solve per certain problems I might have. Right? You would be amazed. And Elias, you know, because you I I know you're you're using these language models a lot, but like for the folks that aren't, you will be absolutely stunned by the quality of feedback you get. It's like having access to like a high paid consultant without paying a high paid consultant. Now, if you're a bit of a bigger business, Hire a consultant. And the reason I say that is because you it is so hard to be an expert at this. It has to, it's like a it's a full-time job just to be an expert at this. This is not like some of these other new technologies where you can learn quickly and make good decisions and kind of adopt new stuff. It's moving too fast. It's too much of a moving target. There's too much noise. It's too confusing. And so bring in an expert. Now, right, if you're sm very small, then Chat GPT-5 might be that expert, right? Or perplexity to do research or something like that. You're a little bit bigger and you can afford a consultant to advise and put together a strategic plan for you, which is not going to break the bank, right? 20 hours of consulting time, and you could, you, you would have a decent strategic plan. And then when you get to the larger companies, I typically recommend an you know, an AI team, like the A team, but an AI team, right? You find five or six cross-department, cross-functional folks, and have them meet regularly with the goal of figuring this out. They and they might choose to hire a consultant themselves, but you know, you find some of the folks that are the most sophisticated in your organization, you put them on a team and you let them and you let them go at this problem. So it was kind of like small, medium, you know, very small, me, you know, small and medium, I would say, approaches to like making sense of of all the noise and like how to where to start and and how to make it approachable. I I I will I will add one other thing, which is that nearly every business is either on Microsoft 365 or G Suite. I can't remember the last time I ran into a business that isn't on one of those two things. They both have AI offerings, they are both cheap. G Suite has Gemini for G Suite, Microsoft 365 has 365 Copilot, and you can get a lot done with those tools. And so if you're feeling truly overwhelmed, you can start with that and just pony up the extra 15 or 20 or 50 bucks a month for each license to give your team access safely because if you don't, they're using ChatGPT anyway, and they're telling it things that they're not supposed to, and that is a huge organizational risk. You have to provide tools for your team, or they're gonna go out and find them elsewhere and put your data privacy and security and confidentiality at great risk, not even really fully understanding that they're doing that. And I'm seeing that everywhere. They're already using these tools if you haven't provided them alternatives.

SPEAKER_01: 23:09

Because, yeah, you know, that that's the concern that I would have as business. Okay, I want to make sure personal information is protected and make sure I give a license to the right person. I understand that you don't just put a bunch of information on AI, especially sensitive information. You know what that is, that's demographic information, social security, medical history, etc. etc. Okay. And that would have been they see me as someone who is very protective of information in my day job. I take that very seriously. If I see left out a little bit, nope, I react almost like, okay, cover that locked it up real quick. You know, that's a habit I developed. But yeah, yeah, but that would be uh concern as uh issue. Yeah, make sure you provide licenses, I would say, to the right people that understands security, they're top mind, so that's just someone who's just I don't know, willy-nilly Pollyanna Explorer. It's good you're explored, but we need to explore with intention while protecting the information. I you know what I completely you know, I agree with that. You know, yeah, I respect policy and all that. You know, that can even be illegal, especially you get busted. It was documented against you. So that's what people, you know, but I don't want to get too legalistic here, but that's just give you some of the risks and consequences, okay? But look, just implement carefully and make sure, you know, you give provide licenses to the right people. And I think that's the only thing I could I could add if I was a consultant. But other than that, I'm not gonna take the thunder from our guests here because I I can't anyway. So um, I'm just all I can say is I'm a well in I'm a pretty well-informed consumer. That's the highest title I'll give myself. I'm like, I'm not an expert, I'm not a consultant, but I say I'm a lifelong lifelong learner in tech technology. I think that's the best thing you got, be a lifelong learner as well. If I'm gonna just throw something practical in there that a lot of people can get. Because look what happened. Again, could it keep reminding me the blockbuster and a Kodak example? We got it, we done this before. You know, you know, get out, get out. We don't need your little silly idea. Well, look what happened. Because we didn't get with the times. You know, nine, you know, 1950 is not 2025. I mean, it's widely different, okay? That's about 75 years apart if I have my math correctly, even though I'm not that good at it. Yeah, completely different time. So if you want to operate like 1950s, you do that, but the consequence is not gonna be great for you. And then, you know, that one I have to side with the employer on that one. So that's that's that's on you. That's really on you. So yeah, you know, you gotta be you gotta adapt. And all disruptions is gonna be a bit messy, but I just is what I think. I think opportunities are just growing and growing and growing and growing. Yes, some disruptions are happening, some jobs are coming obsolete, there's reorganization, yeah. But all major disruptions like that starts messy, it gets better. But I do I do agree with you. The speed is exponentially faster. Just to put it mildly. Exponentially faster. That that's the difference there. And it's changing. I don't know, feel free to correct me here, Hunter. I would say sometimes by months, you know, an Agenic AI is out, before you know, it's gonna be something even more advanced out on pretty soon. Yeah, so you gotta really be a lifelong learner and stay being a lifelong learner until you decide to retire. Or I don't know, you get lucky, get rich, and then there you go. But what are you gonna do with all that free time when you're bored and retire? Come on. You work for a bit, come on. Your retirement does kill you a bit faster if you retire early. Just saying. There's been studies on that. All right, enough of my yammering. I tend to do that. What are, you know, now let's do the opposite. Or you got the negative, or you got some of the solutions. What the successful implementation looks like.

SPEAKER_00: 26:57

First thing, we've already talked about it, adoption. Your people are using it with intention, and it's helping them do their job more efficiently, it's boosting their productivity, or it's boosting the quality of their output. That's one that that people might miss is the output quality. Like these models are already better than us at most things. And so that's what that's how you measure the success, but there's a key component here beyond that. So think about this temporally, meaning about time. Okay. I'll use an example of a buddy of mine, he's a patent attorney. And you know, I gave him a tool that he could use that was kind of safe and secure and confidential, installed locally on his laptop. And, you know, he came back and he said, wow, this saves me eight hours a week. Eight hours a week. It's like getting one extra workday per week. And that's great. And when you if you look at across the entire organization and you could do that for 500 attorneys and they bill out of$500 an hour, then you're talking about, you know, over$100 million and net new value creation. But what are they doing with the extra eight hours? That is the actual key to success. Because if they adopt it and they say, sweet, I'm gonna take Fridays off, all right, that may have a positive impact on your culture, maybe helps you recruit more, et cetera. But that's not really gonna drive growth for your business. Well, you know, it might. I don't I don't wanna, I don't, I don't want to discount that as an option because I do think that is actually quite an interesting option. If like, hey, AI is gonna give you every other Friday off. That, you know, that's pretty nice for a company. And what it, you know, it's not about cutting costs so you can lay off people. Layoffs are not a growth strategy. They're not. It's healthy to reorganize and trim fat and and all the rest of it. I'm not saying it's not part of business, it certainly is, but that shouldn't be your goal. How do we grow? How do we use this newfound time to grow as a business? And so let's get back to that patent attorney. Okay, saved him eight hours a week. What's he doing with those eight hours? He's doing new business development. He's looking for new clients. And so if it takes him, let's call it 40 hours of effort to get one new client, then that means he's getting one extra new client every five weeks. And if each client value on average is$100,000, then you're talking about a million dollars with your 10 new clients that you otherwise wouldn't have had in that year, right? And so by so what it creates is a bit of a surplus of time. And if it's wasted, that's not success. It has to be leveraged, it has to be used in a way that's aligned with the strategic vision of the company, right? Or of your own as a worker, you know, if it if it, you know, and I'll give you another example. Small business defense contractor. They're using it to help them respond to RFPs to write proposals, right? And these are for SBIR, you know, you know, smaller government contracts or you know, nine to two million per contract. And they said we can literally double the amount of proposals we can put out next year with this. And if you have a similar close rate, you're talking about doubling your revenue in a year. That's really, really hard to do, right? And so it's both adoption plus, you know, properly leveraging the newfound time. If you can do those two things, then you're then you win. That's that's a successful implementation. And so, you know, you've heard me say it, this is the third time now. You have to be thinking about adoption at the jump, but you also need to be thinking about what they're going to be doing with their new time.

SPEAKER_01: 31:15

Well, listeners and viewers, I hope you're really paying attention to that because you got that newfound time. We mess around with it, just like I said, it's not growth. It's not growth. You're just fooling around with that. You could be using that for leveraging, like you say, get more clients in, or even do more high impact work, you know, because you're already trimming down redundant tasks. Look, AI is great at doing simple, redundant tasks. I mean, it's amazing at that. Customer service, yeah, maybe basic increase, like a bill payment, things like that. But but someone's having a complicated problem. Uh, it's not there, but at least at least you know, most of them have no idea. It's not there yet. It doesn't have that competence yet, but give it time. It's not an if, it's a when. It's gonna get that right. So, customer service people, you're you know, you're pretty safe for now. I'm just gonna say like that. And enjoy while you can't, cuz yeah, because AI is still not great. It's great from anything, it's great for art. Sure, I suck at art. AI is great for that. I could create, I could look like I don't know, the freaking 21st century, Picasso, whatever other great arts you can fill in there. Yeah, let me show my eco for a second with AI. Without AI, you'll think a five-year-old create that art. Oh, you can use AI like that, you know, you know, this is a more casual example. Yeah, but but to Hunter's point, if you're using that newfound time for growth and leveraging, forget it. You'll be growing exponentially. That's his that's his main point. Don't just use it just for, I don't know, fooling around and I don't know. Yeah. Just use it wisely. Just use that newfound time wisely and use it with intentionality. So just, oh, free time. Free time is great.

SPEAKER_00: 33:03

Well, yeah. You know, let me uh let me actually add add something into that. Like, most people have probably at this point heard of Google's 80-20 rule, which is when you're a Google employee, you're allowed to spend up to 20% of your time on a side project, on not your job during your paid time there. And that's where a ton of the innovative products and services that Google ends up launching come out of that. And that's not that's not new. 3M was doing that in the 60s, it was 15%, not 20, but it can be the source of great innovation. Fun fact the Post-it Note, one of one of 3M's most popular products, was developed in that 15% of innovation time. And there's a whole handful of Google products that work as well. And so, you know, if you're talking about a day a week, right, that's about 20%. So, how do you put it towards innovation? You know, it's well spent if it's driving revenue for your company, driving net new revenue, that's time well spent. But where you where you see not just incremental improvements, but but factorial, right? Like 10x instead of 2x is with innovation. And so to me, the best way to spend that time is to innovate, is to focus on creativity, new ideas, the if only I had time stuff. Get that in there. And that's where you'll see not just incremental, but but major kind of transformative growth.

SPEAKER_01: 34:46

Look at that. Use it using that side project time, free time for innovation. Look at that. Meshing the two together. Look at that. That's hope you were listening, people. This is really insightful stuff. Me as an extremely small business owner, just me right now. I am taking great note of this. I trust me, I am. I was writing some notes even on the side because this if you implement these things, even small steps. Well, I think the quick the quicker you do the better. Let's just be real. Yeah, you be you be growing, you don't want to be stagnant, and eventually the business dies. You want to be growth, you know, for established business, use that Amazon for the newbies. Yeah, let's just use Netflix. You use whatever examples apply to you at the end of the day. That's what I'm gonna say. And look, I'm learning a lot here. This is a comment section activity. What do you learn from this podcast? I know this is more professional than usual, but look, I've been getting more professional guests, so I'm changing a bit here. I thought that I was gonna just talk politics and spirituality, but technology, look, AI implementation, it's it goes way, you know, it's not just a tech thing. It's going it look spread toward healthcare, policing, education, farming, maybe even camping, you name it, all right. AI is there, it's just it's it's globally changing how we do things, and that's not exaggerating. I'm not being hyperbolic, believe it or not. Okay, so I think like I said, the most a whole example I could come up with just to find us. Look, you want to be a cave person and just be Amish, you could go try that. I don't think it's gonna work out well for you, but you could do that. That's up to you if you want to avoid this. But I don't recommend it because it's gonna be such a shock to you that you're gonna go back to the society, most of you at least. Okay, so learn AI, learn AI, people, and take some classes on it. And you already mentioned perplexity. There's so much tools out there, there's some free options out there, and there's some, you know, the ones that cost some money. But either way, just Donald said block a time, you know. He said that block of time, especially those who can't afford a consultant, use Chat GPT or Perplexity as a consultant. That's a very good idea. So people can't afford a consultant, consultants are expensive. Let's be clear. Big businesses could buy them. So, look, I'm just summarizing all this because this is some good stuff here, people. This is some really, really good stuff. So let me wrap this up. Anything else you want to add before uh wrap it up with just your with the shameless plug-in.

SPEAKER_00: 37:23

Yeah, you know, well, this is probably a good tie-in to the shameless plug, but you know, one of the things that I hear when I give this spiel is like innovation. How? What is that? What does that mean? How do I go about innovating? It's a very hard question to answer, right? And I don't have the answer, but I have an example, is what we did. Okay, so it's the same model. All of a sudden, I have developers with extra time. Just because they can write code faster doesn't mean I have more client work I can just give them, right? I only have we only have so many clients. So, so what do I do with this surplus? Well, I could fire them, but I don't want to do that. These are really talented people. It's hard to find good people. You want to keep your people, you want to grow. So instead, I noticed my attorney buddy, wow, that saves you eight hours a week. What if we deployed that at your whole firm, right? We talked about that. It'd be over$100 million in net value creation. So I told my team, hey, with your extra time, we're gonna build a product at Celsa. And that's what the product is it's compass, it's self-hosted large language model plus a RAG database to allow your knowledge workers to interact with the language model safely and securely, like within your firewall. Right? That was innovative. That's a different thing. It's our very first product. We're a services, we were a services company. And so, you know, it's about thinking strategically, seeing where your industry is going and making a move to be a part of that. And don't let it just happen to you, be a part of it happening, right? And so that is how we innovated is with compass. And so my message here is like, go out and find your compass. Like, what what is how are you gonna innovate to respond to what's you know what's happening in the world of technology neck right now? So I'll leave it there and you can you can start the wrap up.

SPEAKER_01: 39:23

All right, I hope we can listeners again. This is it right here now for the shameless plug-in. Give us some support, will you? Go to www. Now I can't talk. BarefootSolutions.com. What an interesting name. It's very digital and advanced. Yeah, Barefoot. What do you think of Barefoot? People like to be on the earth, anti technology. I like the irony there. Maybe he's minimalistic. Um barefoot right now.

SPEAKER_00: 39:53

So I'm not wearing shoes. But it's about it's about keeping it simple. Technology. Is very complex, but we have to remember it's here to help us. So we need to keep it simple. That's that's that's kind of where that came from. I would also ask, all right, so this new thing, so Barefoot Solutions, that's the software company. Uh also check out barefootlabs.ai, and that's where we we formed a new entity for the compass product called Barefoot Labs. And so that's where you can find more information about that. Also, if you want to reach out to me, and Elias, I do this as a thank you to the host for allowing me to you know get in front of your listeners, email me, hunter at barefootlabs.ai. And in the in the first line, I want you to say, I heard you on politically high-tech podcasts. And if you do that, I promise I'll respond to you. I get a ton of cold emails. I delete most of them. But if you open the email with that, we can have we can have a dialogue, we can chat. And it doesn't have to be you don't have to be a potential client, anything. You just want to see what I think about an idea you have, hit me up and I promise I'll get back to you. So that's my my shameless plug.

SPEAKER_01: 41:11

Hey, this podcast is capitalistic pro shameless plug-ins, especially if it's timely irrelevant. Hey, I look I'm all for it. So listen again, go to those sites, give them the support. Could look, he's already provide some free consulting advice right there. Can I put the link in the description and you'll find it there if you're especially if you're a visual person, yep. Unlike everything I got, the Facebook, the Twitter, I refuse to call it X. That's my and LinkedIn. Okay, so you contact him there, okay, people. So now for my shameless plugin, and it's gonna be longer than this. And Hunter, feel free to go if you really have to. You don't have to stay here for this part. So for this podcast, like, comment, subscribe, share this with someone who you believe could tremendously benefit from this. Leave a review, leave a review about a podcast. That's the only ones I'm paying attention to. If it's a four-star or less, give me one specific way I can improve this podcast. This one specific uh you give me even two, I could take feedback, believe it or not. And then for if it's a five-star, give one specific reason why it was great, okay? That's all I ask. And then you can add all the other stuff you want to add, you want to say I'm dumb and all that, I'll just ignore you, or I'm great. I'm gonna ignore that too. I don't take I don't I don't take empty insults or compliments very seriously. But if you get back at a reason, I will read those and get more thoughts with, okay? And then now for the three links. New paper. If you want politics, which I talk about without the the left wing, right wing flare, straight to the point. It's free link, just click it, you sign up for it, you get your stocks, your national news, geopolitical news, even pop culture. Very quick. If you read everything, it's about five minutes long. Well, if you only if you if you cherry pick, it's like one or two minutes long. I know people are very busy, you don't got time to stare at the screen all day. I get you. And then join PodMatch. Podmat is where um me and Hunter met, okay, and it's a great, great system. It's very organized. You don't have to, you know, create a one-pager and then PDF is send it to the email threads, it gets messy. And if you gotta want to update and you gotta do that again, come on. Come on, then let's be smart. Let's be smart. Let's use a system that could just update. Um okay, and you can get you get to meet many people. If you're a podcast looking for guests, it's great. If you're a guest looking for podcasts, it solves that problem for you, okay? And it has a great AI system that matches, say, most of the time, matches well. There's only a few that gets a little off, but hey, no AI is perfect, but it is a great technology. Let me just be clear about that. And then for the final one, if you need a website or you want a new one, click at the link at the free website, guys. You'll be helping me. You'll be actually giving me money without breaking much of your wallet. You get a website right there, you got a team that helps you, especially if you're not tech savvy, it'll guide you along the way and it'll provide you support as well. So that's all I'm gonna say. So, with this wrap up, once you complete this audio or visual journey, you have a blessed day, afternoon, or night, yeah.