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- [00:01]
A
Hello and welcome to Bald Ambition. I'm your bald host, Mookie Spitz, and the one with ambition today is Mr. Marvin Martinez. He is the founder of Bandsaw AI. Welcome to the podcast.
- [00:19]
B
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here and sharing with your audience.
- [00:24]
A
It's a pleasure having you. AI, AI, AI. Everybody's talking AI. It sounds almost like a cliche, but it's not. It's a true revolution. And startups like yours are popping up everywhere we look. You seem to have a unique approach to things. Cool value proposition. You want to tell us a little bit about yourself, your startup, how you got it going, and what you have going on?
- [00:56]
B
Absolutely. I have been in the operations world for over 13 years. In my previous jobs, I was the guy in charge of making sure that everything in the company was running fine. Everything from hiring the new people, training them, quality programs, production things, hr. So I have the whole logistic view of an entire business. When the AI started to take a hype, I realized that a lot of things that I did in the business world could be done with AI, so I could significantly save time. And I see a lot of business owners, people I know, that they struggle with doing things manually. So I decided to start the company Bandsaw AI because I had the best of both worlds. Number one, understanding the business operations and how to map processes. Because I was in charge of doing SOPs, you know, going to the drawing board, setting up the steps and everything, and then learning a lot about AI to put AI in that process. And right now, what I do in my company, advanced AI, is helping other business owners from service companies to save time and money, understanding where AI takes place or can fit in their day to day operations. And we do that only in 10 days because we focus on understanding your process first, help you to map it, and up to that point, add AI to it.
- [02:38]
A
Great. And in terms of your expertise, what size operation were you responsible for? So your core expertise and small, medium sized businesses? What, what was your. Your. Your 13 years in operations? What kind of.
- [02:54]
B
I started with small companies doing anywhere between 10 to 50 employees. But one of my most senior roles, I was in charge of up to 700 people in a call center environment. So that was a very, very huge learning experience.
- [03:14]
A
Okay, so call center, you got a lot of information, there's a lot of data, you got personnel you got to handle, you know, everything from the conversational reality, customer service, all that. And then they have a lot of tech plugins.
- [03:30]
B
Exactly.
- [03:31]
A
Make it all happen. And now I noticed that you rely on tech plugins as a way of integrating the capabilities of other applications. And then you're adding what seems to me an AI layer to make that support better and more efficient. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Like relying on Slack and many of the other programs that are essentially softwares as a service to boost the benefit you're providing your clients.
- [04:03]
B
This is key. There's a lot of people that when they think about AI, they think about trying the newest tools. And with the way that AI has made it easier for people to create new things in software, you will see a lot of tools out there. So most of the people I speak with, business owners, they believe that to implement AI you have to bring all these new things, cloud code, Anti Gravity, Gemini, whatever, right? But that's not the case. They can continue to use their regular software, Slack or Google chat or their CRMs. You know, they can use Salesforce, HubSpot, and it's easy to integrate all those tools together using tools such as N8N, make.com, zapier. On my side, my recommendation is doing N8N to do all the orchestration and connection because that's where. Where I noticed that most people are losing money. They have information in this CRM, they have information in this other system, they have the SOP in a third place and all of that is not connected. So of course they lose money. So my job is help them understand how everything is connected and understand where AI can make a difference there. So if you're thinking that to implement AI workflows or all that type of things that you listen to in social media, that you have to create this whole new tech stack, that is not the case. You can do it with the same tools that you rely on every day.
- [05:41]
A
So it sounds like you're solving some of the interoperability problems between incompatible or redundant systems. You're centralizing information and workflow. And it also sounds like you're putting an application on top of of multiple applications. So you're creating an AI user interface which could optimize the efficiencies of the organization for various touch points throughout the operation. Is that right?
- [06:10]
B
That sounds about right. Correct.
- [06:13]
A
How do you operationalize this? You mentioned you snap your fingers, you do this in 10 days. That's a bold statement. So I'm assuming workflow mapping is just job number one to understand the business. The touch points, the challenges at each touch point, and the overall data flow, Understanding the infrastructure that they have, the legacy applications they're already using, and then you need to plug it all in and provide your own ui. Is that kind of how this shakes out?
- [06:49]
B
That is exactly how it works and that is part of my framework. And the first step, when I jump into a company, my first question that I ask is show me where your process is. I speak generally with the owner or the founder of the company because they have the vision of where they want to see themselves. And then I discuss with them how, you know, like how much of AI do they need? And then I have a second conversation with the person that makes the operations because they know the process. Most of the time business owners, they know what they do, they know their offer, but they don't really know a hundred percent the process, right? So when I, when I get in, I speak with the operator and then we start, you know, like writing down a checklist of the tools they use and the current process. I use like a drawing mapping tool, usually mirror board, and then just, just put it out there for them to see it. When they can see it, you know, that's a, that's an aha moment. Like that's a wow moment, saying hey, we didn't know it was that simple, right? Because most of the processes lives in their heads. So that's step number one. Then step number two is how much time are you spending doing this right now? Because one key thing in implementing AI is understanding your before the fact state and after the AI implementation so that you can see if there's actually roi. You will see a lot of companies just investing money in AI tools, but they don't know if they are getting money back from that usage. So after we map the process, after we understand step one, step two, step three, step four, we decide where AI makes sense and we start from there using their legacy tools, using the tools that they have in place. And I can give you examples. Like one of the most successful use cases or companies that I worked with was these transportation and logistics companies. They had 46 drivers, 46 vehicles, and they did about eight to 10 trips per vehicle every day. So that was a huge amount of data. They had one dedicated person that spent three hours just putting that information from their CRM into a Google sheet. And when you think of this, you can say to yourself, wow, is that even possible? But they were spending three hours every day. That was 15 hours per week, 60 hours per month, right? If you do that and you do a rate of 25 to $30 an hour for that person, you do the math. That's how much money they were investing. And when we did the automation for them, we mapped the process, we put it together. AI was only 10% of the entire process, only 10%. The rest was just connecting the tools. And it was like an automation with six steps, very easy. After we implemented that, we came from three hours in that manual process to only 15 minutes per day. So we gave them back two hours, 45 minutes per day. That's a huge, huge ROI. And the guys were really happy.
- [10:12]
A
And that's just one touch point and one task. And an organization has many, many of these nodes that you could progressively improve on. So I'm assuming you take a crawl, walk, run approach, you build trust. Look, I saved you X hours and Y dollars in this one role and then you could scale up from that. How does that before and after state look like? So before you've got a bunch of people using a bunch of different software. Could be spreadsheets, could be Google Docs, could be slack to communicate. It goes on and on and on, right? All the different applications, all the different companies, from Adobe to Google to whomever, right? So when you plug in Bandsaw AI, let's just hypothetically think that you can transform an organization from this fragmented infrastructure to a more integrated AI optimized organization. What does that look like in terms of their experience with your application? Do you have a dashboard? Do you have a central ui? How does this shake out? So we could begin with the end in mind.
- [11:35]
B
Typically that really depends on the scope of work and what the person actually needs, right? Like for this particular company, for instance, the only thing they were interested in is saving money. But for other people, they want to see how many customers they reached out using AI. How much time did they save by doing an AI driven action? And let me give you another example. I built a customer service AI bot in a website for this staffing company, right? So they, they knew they were getting visitors, but visitors, they would just look at the page and they were not getting any leads from that, at least not that they were aware of. Right? So we created the AI chatbot. We created a database with all the knowledge of the company. And that chatbot was in charge of two things. Number one, ensuring that the person received a response for any questions they had. And number two, pre qualified them. So the conversation in the chat, right, would qualify the people that was visiting the website. If it was a qualified person, then it would send the information to a salesperson for additional follow up. If not, they just put it in a database for tracking purposes. But here's the interesting part, the person told me, or the owner of the company told me, hey, how do I know how many people we are talking to every day? And how do we know that the quality of the answers that we are providing are to or meet our expectations? So at that given point, we decided on what he needed. And even though we didn't build a dashboard for him, we built an automated report every day at 8am in the morning where he got how many people the bot talked to the previous day. And the answers were the most common questions people had so they could work on that and make it better. Right. So this was not a dashboard, there was a report. But it really depends on the person and what do they really want to track. Right, but we can build Gmail reports or email reports. We can just track hours. We can create a dashboard, like a front end dashboard for people to look at the numbers. As the automation goes, we can track how many executions we do per day. We@BANZO AI really want to make it about you because we care about you. So depending on your needs, we can do either or based on your requirements.
- [14:21]
A
So it sounds like you're offering a custom personalized AI driven operational solution to small to medium sized businesses. And to your point, it's not completely transformative. You don't rip the IT guts out and put in a large language model. You respond to specific needs that your clients have. So one example you cited was just, just operationally heightened efficiencies for one worker handling deliveries. And in another instance you're able to embed a chatbot from a customer service perspective. And then you mentioned putting together a dashboard that fire hoses in data from multiple sources to give them a visualization about the information coming in and maybe analyzing it. So what kind of tools do you use in your, in your armamentarium, in your, in your quiver. So do you have a proprietary LLM or large language model that you could tie into? Do you use agentic technology for some of the operational tasks? Can we look under the hood, a little bit of Bandsaw AI to see what kind of capabilities you could bring to clients?
- [15:41]
B
Yes, I like to keep it simple. One of the key things that we do different is we want to make it simple for you. We reduce fraction to the minimum. We're not going to ask you to buy six, seven different type of tools and subscriptions. Not really. We use two main tools. Number one N8N which is the orchestrator. And it's the way that we connect every other tool. We need to access your email. We use N8N to connect your Gmail account or Outlook account or whatever. Right? Do you want to connect your Slack? We do it through N8N. Do you want to do Google Sheets? We do it through N8N. You want to connect calendly your calendar? We do it through N8N. So N8N is one of our main tools. That's one. And we also use lovable.dev for simple MVPs or front end applications so that people can actually see the automation in action and they can change or provide feedback really quick. Because we make it simple to you, we deliver in 10 days. And we believe, because this would be a question that a lot of people may have, where do I even start? Like what should I automate? Right. I know that we can map the process, we can speak with the operator, but. But what process should I automate first? Right. So that's another thing that we do is helping you understand that you have to start simple. That's why we take 10 days. We recommend the simplest or the low hanging fruit where you can get WINS really fast, where you can see ROI and then just moving on from there. So to answer your question, n8n lowvel.dev just to keep it simple, the LLM system, Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, like we can decide that later depending on the complexity of the task. But you know, we use mainly two tools and we start with the simplest task. So you can see ROI really quick.
- [17:45]
A
Just in summary, just like you're pulling in Slack and Google Information, these are proprietary third party applications of some sophistication. They lack, however, the deep learning and what we would consider AI, although Google now is increasingly plugged in and they're all kind of adding these functionalities. But at their core they're more traditional applications and they're scattered all over the organization. So you use nan, you use lava, which is an intermediary application, to integrate these applications in a way that could be functionally useful for your client. So you're not building any software here. It's almost like you have Lego pieces and you talk to the client, which is, hey, you have a business and let's map your workflow. Step one, let's identify touch points, then let's identify pain points where you have bottlenecks and inefficiencies and then you go back and then you take all the Lego pieces and then you take them apart, you put them back together and then you have a few connector pieces, right, which is like the NAN and Lava, and you're able to bridge them and do your magic. And then you have a reassembled LEGO set of it, which is optimized for your client. So your real expertise is certainly on the technical side, but it sounds to me like it's very much on the operational customer service side, which is a lot of clients don't even know what their workflow is. It's just a big mess. They have a whole bunch of applications all over the place, and they never even really thought about connecting them or combining them or optimizing them. And you are the expert who comes in and puts it all, takes it apart, and then you put it back together again. Is that more or less correct?
- [19:49]
B
That sounds 100% correct. And again, this is what makes us different. We, we want you to use AI wisely in a way that makes sense to you and that pays off your investment of time and money. We're not here for the hype. We know the technical piece. And interestingly, the technical piece is the less complex. People may think, hey, I have to study 100 days before I can start implementing AI. Well, what I tell people is, let's work on getting your workflow ready first, and then the AI piece is going to be really simple to follow. I can give you another example. I talked to this locksmith company in the US and the guy was telling me, you know, every time I am doing a job in the field, if people calls me, I cannot answer their phone call. They go to my voicemail, and maybe I forget at the end or I don't reply back soon enough. And then those people are going away, right? So obviously what you want to do is to, you know, like, avoid that missed call. I asked him, okay, how much money do you lose per customer? He said, $150 for service call. Then I asked him, how many calls do you lose or do you miss per week? He said, maybe one or two. Right? So think about this. How much money is this guy really losing? So it's $150 per service call fee once a week. So that's $600 per month. When you extrapolate that, that's about $7,200 per year in something so simple, right? So I asked the guy, what would you like to happen instead? I didn't talk about AI. So he said, I would like maybe someone that can answer the phone call, collect the information and send me the information. That's all I need. The guy didn't want a fancy robot. The guy didn't want the latest AI technology. The only thing that I want, he said, is take care of the customer's phone call, collect their information and then have the information with me so that I can call them back. I don't want AI to call them back. I want to do it myself. Well, guess what? We built an AI voice reception system that would trigger only when he misses the call. This is not going to trigger after every call. So when he misses the phone call, the call gets routed to the AI receptionist. The AI receptionist has a little script, it's not fancy. The call is about one minute long, it's not even crazy. And then it says, you know, the owner is not available right now. We're going to collect your information, give me your name. So, so what you're calling for, and then the guy, the owner, gets a text message with the process information and that's it. The customer gets the idea that they are being taken care of right away. So now even if he misses one phone call, he doesn't lose that customer because he gets them back as soon as he is available. But that's a real use case of AI application, nothing fancy, nothing complex. We use one simple AI application which is called retail for building the AI voice agent. A couple of LLM calls like ChatGPT and that was it. And then just connecting his phone number. So you see how that easy that is. And it's saving him at least $7,200 per year, which is a lot of money when you think about it.
- [23:45]
A
And actually it's probably more than that because he probably underestimated how many calls he misses. And in a sense it's a glorified answering service or answering machine. But it adds the AI punch of personalization, dynamic content, heightened efficiency and tweak tweakability and what I love about it is it's like there's just an everyday problem that you need to solve. It has immediate ROI benefit and you're not bringing in a Claude bot and you're not charging him a million dollars to plug in, you know, the latest version of Opus. You have a very pragmatic, immediate solution to ostensibly a very simple problem. And what you brought up earlier I think is a terrific point that even as a society we're blinded by the BS that this AI is so super duper complicated and expensive, you need gigabytes of power in a data center before you can really do anything. And I think what you're illustrating is a very pragmatic, common sense approach to solving 98% of the problem, not only in smaller businesses, like what you're describing. But even the larger ones, there's this McKinsey approach that we need to hire a consultant for a million dollars, they need to do an analysis for six months and then we need to rip open their infrastructure and spend another hundred million dollars in order to process an email. And I really like your everyday practical approach. I made a joke on another business call where I don't even care about the trillion dollar AI industry. I just want a smart bot so we don't spend 15 minutes of a 30 minute call trying to figure out when we can have the next call. It's the simple human things like that, missing a call, making schedules, organizing that. Very simple AI solutions can be activated, especially if you know the customer.
- [25:54]
B
Yes. And in fact you can even go like more basic than that. When I speak to people, I ask them what type of AI technology do you currently have in your business? You know the most common answer? They either say ChatGPT, Gemini or even Claude, like the most popular ones. And I asked them how do you use that currently? Well, my employees have a business account. They log in and they use AI like for everyday tasks. Right. So most people don't know that they can create custom GPTs or artifacts in clothes or, or gems in Google Gemini,
- [26:41]
A
where you can provide projects in OpenAI.
- [26:45]
B
Exactly right. So you can actually build a customized tool for your business that has your voice, that has your brand, that has your information. So every time someone wants to use chat GPT, it is not generic anymore. Right. Because most people would go and say hey ChatGPT, write an email for me or rewrite this for me. And that's not the right approach. So even you don't really have to go into automation workflows. You can do something as simple as creating a custom GPT, a Gemini gem artifact project, as you mentioned, and then just make it work for your people. Just think about what are people repeatedly doing every day that is keeping them like that is actually, you know, getting their time. So that's, that's what a business owner should be thinking of.
- [27:41]
A
I work in consultancy too and I do some AI stuff. And what's amazing to me is that clients are often not aware of some of the most basic aspects of AI, like differentiating the application level from the model. They have trouble understanding the differences between the models and they really don't understand what GPT is. They don't understand generative AI even as a concept. So everyone is getting all excited and blowing things out of proportion in terms of anxiety and complexity based on just not being familiar with AI101. So it also sounds like you're educating clients with some basic practical applications of the applications like build your own little nested kind of thing in the models which are more reflective of your needs as an organization rather than just setting your employees loose in the generic version.
- [28:49]
B
Yes. And actually one of the offers that we have, like think about it, are you going to hire one person full time to look at how AI can impact your business? Is that really worth it? So one of the offers that we have, a banso AI is that we serve as your fractional AI guy. So you can hire us for a block of hours, maybe 20amonth, 10 per month, like it really depends. We are open because at the end of the day my end goal and my dream is, is help business owners not to be ripped off and then just use AI to generate money to save time to reduce error. That's my end goal. So we offer that service where you can hire us a couple of hours a month and then we are going to serve as your consultant and let you know where AI makes sense. Right. And where you're going to get your money back. So that's a very interesting approach. And Absolutely. And the other piece I wanted to say as well is that you don't really need to have a fancy, a fancy setup again. Right. I know that we talked about this at the beginning, but I just want to reinforce doesn't have to be complicated. Think about the simpler, repetitive thing in your business and that's how you're going to make a difference.
- [30:08]
A
And also laying a foundation, crawl, walk, run, it builds trust with you. And it also onboards the employees because they're freaking out. They're scared that AI is going to take their job. They're scared that if they implement it, it's going to be too complicated for them to understand and they're going to lose their job. And they. And anytime you introduce anything new and disruptive, people are scared and there's high anxiety and there's a normal reaction to buy a million dollar chainsaw to just go blow everything up when you know, $1,000 scalpel with a little bit of delicacy and expertise can solve just basic little issues one step at a time. I really love your practical, common sense 0Bs approach and I think it applies not only to small to medium sized businesses, but it's an endemic problem and a huge opportunity even at the enterprise level. This same issue keeps coming up for huge organizations. They have antiquated or traditional IT departments who are struggling to Catch up. They have vultures circling above or hyenas at the watering hole of all these AI consultants and vendors who want to sell them multimillion dollar solutions when no one really knows what the hell's going on. And 99% of their problems are what you describe.
- [31:48]
B
You know, my personal recommendation to business owners is when you look at 100% of your process, 80 to 90% can be automated. Pretty much 80 to 90%, but there's always the need to having a human in the loop. That's how we call it. Like a human making sure that AI doesn't mess up. Because AI can hallucinate, right? That's how they call it. Like it can make up statements or data and you don't want that. That's why when we work with business owners, we try to map the process in such a way that the steps are very well defined. Step one, two, three, four, if else, then you have two routes. But we don't let AI decide too much. At least I don't recommend that to owners. If you have ever heard about AI agents, you will also hear a lot of hype. Hey, I have an AI agent that replaced my entire marketing team. You will see like, you will hear a lot of that in social media, but at the end of the day you want to keep it simple because when you give too much power to the AI, AI can make mistakes. That's actually a statement at the bottom of every LLM system. AI can make mistakes. How much money can you lose for an AI mistake? Right? So don't try to think of having AI do the entire job for you. It can do 80 to 90%. The rest, a human can do it. And the other important thing is if you are implementing AI in your business, involve your people, involve the ones that are in the front line because you don't want them to be afraid. You were absolutely correct with that statement. I don't think AI will replace 100% of the jobs or humans. We're not there yet. I don't know if we're going to get there at any given point. But my point is involve your people, tell them what your goals are and that's going to make the implementation easier. Even early on, when you do an automation, a workflow, you have to repeat the process and iterate. Everything will not be perfect at the first run. Believe me, one of my, when I was studying, you know, I spent like two weeks creating an automation for a company and everything worked well in my testing. But the moment they run the automation for the first time live, it broke. So that was a hard situation to be in. But what I'm trying to say is that it will not work perfectly in the first run. It will run, maybe it's going to have a mistake or two. But the important thing is iterate fast and early. That's why we only take 10 days, because we want to do an MVP. We want to make sure you use it. You go to your team, ask them for feedback, you come with that feedback and we fix it. Right? So that's what I believe the right workflow is.
- [34:56]
A
And the right tasks for the agents or for the AI that you plug in have a lot to do with the remedial, repetitive work that many human people are doing. So rather than losing your job, you could look at it as, my job just got better and more fun. If I am spending four to six hours a day filling in fields of a spreadsheet, that's not really doing justice to my college degree or my training or my capacity to add value to this organization. And if your AI does that for them more efficiently with human supervision, to your point, then all of a sudden their job becomes more interesting, creative and strategic. And those extra four hours could be put into better or more frequent customer service. It could be put into thinking of new ideas for the company to do a better product. It could involve better relationships culturally in the firm, so you have a more loyal employee base. So you're actually improving jobs by removing the, the boring, repetitive work and freeing people up to realize their potential in other ways.
- [36:15]
B
Yes, and that's exactly what we stand for, right? Just get the repetitive task out of the way and use your time for the strategic thinking. And that's what, what, what we want to give to business owners, especially if they are solo owners, like for instance, myself. I run my company solo for now. So what does that mean? That my research of new clients and scraping data and also creating messages, that's AI driven, because I know my system, I know what goes first, what's the second step, because I did it myself and I use AI to amplify that and to reduce my effort. There's still some effort that I put in to contact the people, talk to them, like explaining everything AI can do. But at the end of the day, you can actually save a lot of time if you have your process built and documented. So my advice for your audience, if you are a business owner who wants to grow and that want to save time, AI could be the best way or the best decision that you can make at this Point, as long as you make know how your company and processes work, don't be afraid. You will see a lot of hype. Right? Take the good, live the hype outside
- [37:40]
A
and don't fall prey to the, to the scams. And if you look at it, it could be a very sophisticated scam, but it's still a scam if someone is, is demanding millions to solve a problem that you could ostensibly do for a few thousand and it amounts to the same result in terms of roi. And to your point also, humans are always in the loop, not only as a checking mechanism, but that human, human interaction is never going to go away. The lifeblood of a business is human expertise, is human culture. And most products and services ultimately provide value to other humans. And the human never leaves that loop because that's what we're about. So ideally, AI is sophisticated, personalized automation of remedial, repetitive tasks that machines are good at doing. Let the machines do that. Free us up as humans to do more human work. And you're doing it from the bottom up in a very practical, common sense kind of way where you start by really understanding their business and not trying to sell them AI that they don't understand and don't need.
- [39:00]
B
Exactly. You know, I really like that statement, getting AI that you don't need. I, I, you know, this is, this is a fun experience in this AI world. I was speaking with a friend of mine who likes automation, trying new tools. He was showing me this cool thing he did with cloud code. He said, hey, you know, I have nine AI agents working for me. And then he showed me a dashboard of little people, you know, like, like eight bits, guys like walking in a room. And he said, hey, there's my workers. Look at how good they are doing. Right? And don't get me wrong, it was cool to see that. And I told him, hey, that's cool. Now what problem is that solving for you? And he didn't know what to answer. Right, because it's cool to have, to have those things going on. But don't say we use AI just for the sake of saying we use AI in my company, that's not the right mentality.
- [40:04]
A
And saying that and doing that when you don't even understand the basics of AI, like AI 101, like what the hell is it doing? Why is it doing it? Why is everybody talking about it? People have this tendency of either dismissing things outright that they don't understand, or when they sense there's lots of excitement, they embrace it with equal enthusiasm. But even less Real rationale, because they still don't understand what the hell it is. So that's just human nature and being pragmatic about it is probably a good idea. So let me, let me express some potential concerns as a small to medium business and, and let's, let's see you addressing them as you would a client. So concern number one is data privacy. You're going to be looking under my hood, you're going to see all my goods, I'm going to give you access to all of my data. So how can I be assured that my data doesn't get out there, that you're following security protocols? If we are plugging into all of these applications, how do I keep my data secure?
- [41:17]
B
One of the best way of doing that is having or creating your own server. Typically we ask you to. Everything that we do at Banso AI remains with you. So every subscription, every purchase that you do, it's going to go under your name. And if you want really like privacy and you don't want your information going out to third parties or anything, then we can buy a server in any of the server, like the host platforms like Hostinger and stuff like that. And we can just install local LLMs, like llama for instance,
- [41:56]
A
that used to be open source, but.
- [41:59]
B
Exactly.
- [42:00]
A
Nvidia sells Nemo too. So you could bring in Nemo, you could bring in llama, you can bring in a proprietary server LLM, but it's closed.
- [42:14]
B
Exactly.
- [42:15]
A
No plugins to anywhere else.
- [42:18]
B
Exactly.
- [42:19]
A
So your data is secure, how they interact with the data is secure. And you can guarantee that through the proprietary LLM that you bring in. Because they're designed to be local.
- [42:31]
B
Exactly. And that's the best approach. Again, we like, typically for small companies, security or privacy is not necessarily a big thing. But if it is for you, for your company, then we have that approach.
- [42:48]
A
And that's part of your business model is you do not create the software, you do not create the AI. You tweak it and you plug it in based on what you know about the business.
- [43:03]
B
Exactly. Especially where it makes sense.
- [43:06]
A
So a way to look at you is you are an AI implementations operations consultant.
- [43:14]
B
You got it with the technical.
- [43:17]
A
Know how to plug it all in.
- [43:19]
B
Exactly, exactly.
- [43:21]
A
And with that you do get the data security that's part of these, part of these packages.
- [43:27]
B
That is correct.
- [43:28]
A
Okay. And then what about scalability and your bandwidth? I have a company with 10 people, maybe I have a company with 100, 1500. How do you scale and what kind of proven expertise do you bring in
- [43:48]
B
for scaling, typically, we want to make sure that things run in the most basic way. That's why our approach is automating the small tasks that takes you the most time. Right. In a way that we can do that same task a hundred times per day. Like think about this. If we create a chatbot that can answer customer questions, right. We want to make the automation simple enough so that it can run through it 100 times. Right. So that when you get more customers, then we make sure that the answers stay consistent. Obviously, as well, when you are talking about scaling, we also offer subscription packages so that we are on the lookout and continue to upgrade your system as needed. Like, so we build a system, once we ensure it works correctly, we continue to monitor it. And if you want to scale, then that's going to be a different discussion in a separate time frame. Right.
- [44:58]
A
Okay. So your plug and play, you have that scalability. You even have a subscription model to give flexibility. And then what about proven case studies? Obviously, you probably can't or don't want to share them here public domain. But if someone is going to contract with you, do you have proven cases to share of analogous businesses in the vertical of about the right size to show that you guys are legit, that you guys are effective in delivering these solutions?
- [45:35]
B
Yes, we have a couple of clients that can serve as referrals. They can be contacted in case. And we have worked with staffing companies, home services companies such as locksmith, cleaning companies, logistics and transportation, and general customer service companies. All of our use cases are in our website at Bandsaw AI. If they ever want to go and take a look at them, we'll put
- [46:03]
A
in the description links so they can contact you, take a look at your case studies. That's always useful.
- [46:10]
B
Yeah, but again, right. We can point them to the people that we have as references as well, so that they can have the peace of mind. And you know, typically when I speak with people and we get into business, this is what I do. If I don't deliver the automation that, you know, gives you the ROI in 10 days, which is my offer, we'll continue to do it for free until it works. Right. So we have a guarantee as well that you're gonna get going either way. Right. So that's another thing. And you only pay when everything is working. Right.
- [46:56]
A
You got two weeks to get it done. I'm assuming it's 10 business days. And if it's not done in 10 business days, you just keep cranking to ensure that it gets done. Right. And it's pay after you're satisfied, which is a nice business model and it sounds like you don't mess around. And I like again, the pragmatic approach because you're plugging in software and applications that are already proprietary, already exist, and you're doing the discovery on the upfront. So you're figuring out exactly what they need and presumably you're looking for the lowest hanging fruit in terms of improving roi. What's the simplest task that we can automate with the least amount of disruption and hassle to bring you the biggest benefit financially in terms of hours saved and revenue?
- [47:53]
B
That's an interesting question because I get that asked every day. So one of the simplest automations that we can do for you is reactivating your database of dead leads. So throughout the time you build a list of people that have purchased your business or your product or were intending to purchase it. So companies usually have a database of customers, let's say a thousand, two thousand customers. So one of the automations that we do is getting that list of customers and reach out to them with a promotional package so they can, you know, go back to you and start service once more.
- [48:40]
A
So you do CRM for AI?
- [48:43]
B
Exactly.
- [48:44]
A
That's one of. You do chatbots for customer service, you do CRM and Salesforce Optimization using AI.
- [48:53]
B
Exactly.
- [48:54]
A
You do a host of these things and depending on what their need is, that's how you plug and play.
- [49:00]
B
That is correct. And again, we just want to make sure that you get the ROI up front. That's why I was telling you if you have a list of database, we can have AI reach out to them with a promotional offer that you may have. And if you convert five from that thousand, only five, which is less than 5%, you know, you already paid off for the system, so that's an easy one.
- [49:25]
A
From a thousand, that's 0.5.
- [49:28]
B
Exactly. So if only five people and then your, your service product is $500, so you like, you recover 2,500 up front.
- [49:38]
A
I love the, the pragmatic, pragmatic approach. And then what does success look like for you? So laddering up your business, larger organizations, doing enterprise stuff, you seem, you're young, you're ambitious, you started your own company based on just doing operations and seeing how broken everything was and then riding the AI wave in a way. I have to say that what you're saying is very refreshing because I've had other AI folks where we're really talking in the abstract for an hour and it's very challenging for me to bring them down to earth. Can you, can you share with me a practical application? Can you share with me client benefit and the conversation always like it's filled with helium, it just goes back up again into abstraction. I like that. You're very nuts and bolts and down to earth chatbot for customer service, CRM improvement for dead leads. I'm going to be a glorified answering machine. If you miss your calls and see, this is, this is basic. It's not conventionally sexy, but it immediately provides benefit to clients.
- [50:58]
B
Yeah, exactly. And my end goal is to again, right. I was a business owner myself managing small businesses and I know how broken an operation can be. So if I can make you, you know, ensure that your operation gets better and you spend less time doing it, that's my end goal. Right. I speak with many people about this. I don't like the BS or the hype that you see in social media. If you actually go to my LinkedIn, I don't talk about fancy stuff that you can do in one minute. I talk about real use cases of things that I've worked on. And let me give you the last example. Talking about, yeah, talking about CRMs, connections and stuff. I was working also with this staffing company, same client, I've done multiple products for them. So when they hired someone new, they would take that information and they would put it in three different systems. Their CRM, a Google sheet for, for not tracking, but for accounting purposes, and then another CRM. So they would spend like 15 minutes per. Right. And the biggest deal about this is that they could make mistakes by copy pasting the wrong information. So I created for them because we were able to map the process. This is a 10 step process workflow where we created like a form customized for them where the recruiters could enter the information of the applicant. Once they hit submit, it does the number one, it creates the profile for the person, it copy pastes the information in all the relevant CRMs and systems at once so they don't have to go ahead and copy paste everything. So that's two. Number three, it sends an internal email communication that a new person has been added so everyone is aware. And number four, or it starts a sequence of welcome emails to the person that's hired. Right. So all that was being done manually, taking between 15 to 20 minutes and now only one person does it. And once they hit submit, everything happens magically based on their own rules. So we're saving 15 to 20 minutes in one task. That was repetitive. And not only that, but they Reduced their error rate to pretty much zero.
- [53:30]
A
So you are, Marvin, the macro. You are the, you're, you're plugging in kind of this agentic stuff, but in a, in a very basic way. So there's a sequence of tasks which used to be manual. You heighten the probability of errors because there's cutting and pasting and moving data around manually. It's boring remedial work, best suited for a machine. And then you set it up so you understand where the information needs to go and how, and then you automate it. And you're not bringing in a quantum computer or a nuclear reactor. It's pretty basic. If then, if, then, if, then, and then woo, off it goes. And then the worker who used to be, you know, going blind, looking at these spreadsheets, they basically just enter it once, one time. Right. And then woo, off it goes. And then they hit the button. And that's, that's a huge benefit, you know, and that's a great way to sink your teeth into operationalizing AI in a way that's pragmatic and zero bs.
- [54:42]
B
And do you know how much of AI did we use there in that whole process? We used zero.
- [54:49]
A
Yeah. Actually zero is less than not much.
- [54:53]
B
Exactly. We don't have any AI step because the logic was well defined. Exactly.
- [55:01]
A
It's completely deterministic.
- [55:04]
B
Exactly.
- [55:05]
A
You don't need a neural network doing deep learning to do just conditional pre programmed commands.
- [55:14]
B
Exactly. And that's what I recommend. No agentic stuff unless it's strictly necessary for your use case.
- [55:22]
A
And that's terrific because again, you're starting at the bottom and then you're building based on need. Most consultancies start at the top with abstract solutions to problems that often don't even exist yet. And then it just adds to the swirl and the BS and heightens anxiety. So I think we need more people like you, Marvin, in AI. And even if you've got the latest version of Claude and you're checking systems for security protocol at the kernel level, your common sense approach is very, very refreshing because you keep your eye on the prize, which is at the end of the day, these are just test tools. And if the tools don't have a pragmatic application and they can't be implemented rapidly with minimal drama, and they don't immediately provide a boost in roi, then we're wasting everyone's time and money.
- [56:28]
B
Exactly. Exactly. Roi. That's, that's what I'm focused on because I, that's what I like to give back to people. ROI for Their investment.
- [56:38]
A
Great. Well, it's been a real pleasure talking to you. I am going to put your links and description in the notes for the podcast and like comment share everyone Bald ambition with Marvin Martinez, who is the founder. And it sounds like you're the, you're in a sense the operations and consultant, Grand Poobah of Bandsaw AI. And I'm tacitly assuming too that you do a lot of these client consults yourself.
- [57:11]
B
Yes, most of the work is done by myself because I want to ensure that you get the highest quality for now.
- [57:17]
A
Yes. All right. And I love your setup and again, the common sense approach, the basic issues that could be solved simply, if they can be solved simply. You don't oversell or over promise, but it sounds like you do deliver, which is very, very refreshing. So check him out. How does it work? If they click on the link, they go to your website, contact Marvin. Do you organize a little consulting session? Do you have a free consulting session? How does your own business development work?
- [57:56]
B
Yeah. So you have two options. You can either email me at infoanso AI, that's the email you will see in the website, or you can book a call directly with me. The first call is 15 minutes because the first call, which is free, I just want to know if I can help you because if I can't, I will let you know up front as well. Or if you have something very messy that you're not ready to automate, then you're going to hear that from me as well. I like to be very transparent with people. And those 15 minutes that we talk is just to understand what process do you have in mind and if we can automate it and if we decide that yes, we are a good fit for each other, then we have the first initial call, which is the discovery call. And in that discovery call I'm going to map the process for you. I'm going to speak with you, ask you a couple of questions and map the process for you. Right after that you get my proposal and you are going to get the process map regardless if you hire me to help you or not. So that's going to be like an asset that you're going to get back anyways. Right.
- [59:14]
A
So you do workflow and discovery on specific and then they like you, then you plug it in and then you sign a contract for implementation.
- [59:25]
B
Exactly.
- [59:25]
A
And you have 10 day guarantee. Excellent. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time. I wish you good luck. But it's not luck because I think you have a terrific attitude and I I wish you could do a TED Talk because you need to go up there and there's so much smoke being blown right now in AI and it'll be wonderful for you to go up there and just present this brass tax bottom up solution because it'll, it'll help reduce some of the hysteria that's out there, which is counterproductive. Thank you again. Like comment share everyone and go check out Marvin's website and if you got a small to medium sized business and you, you need to optimize, give Marvin a contact and he'll talk to you for 15 minutes and you'll figure it out. Thanks for listening and watching.