← The Vault Unlocked
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- [00:00]
A
AI is not coming. It is already here and it is moving faster than most businesses can think. The question is not whether you adopt it, the question is whether you adopt it before the gap becomes impossible to close. Today's guest is Jeff McPherson, CEO of Cloud 37, one of the sharpest operators in the AI space. Jeff and his team had been inside the AI world for nearly four years. They have seen what works, what gets oversold, and what most businesses are completely missing. We get into why AI will expose the people who were never really experts, how the next generation of businesses gets built, and the one decision that separates the operators who win from the ones who get left behind. This is not a hype conversation. This is the reality check. Let's unlock it.
- [00:56]
B
Foreign. I have heard that AI is going to take over. I've heard that AI is going to take over in three months, eight months. I have heard that we won't even know who we are in the next five years. Today we have Mr. AI himself. Jeff, welcome to the show. I think this is one of the most important topics we can talk about right now. I mean, where this is going, the speed at which, at which it has been going, and how fast it keeps multiplying. I don't think most humans can even understand. Let's get into it. What comes up when you hear all of that?
- [01:42]
C
A lot of noise, that's for sure. First of all, thanks for having me. It's always good to see your, see your pretty face. No, I mean, there is a lot, there's a lot of overwhelm. Every business is dealing with it right now. What tools do I use? How do I use it? Is my team not adopting it?
- [01:56]
B
Right.
- [01:56]
C
Like, it's the same, it's the same cycle for every business that we talk to. The fortunate thing is, as fast as it's moving, we're still very, very far ahead. So the businesses that really start to adopt this now and understand what some of the stuff that will likely go through, you're gonna, you still have a lot of time. But the only problem with that time, to your point, it's very compressed. So a lot of time is going to move, is going to compound to. Into a very, very short period of time. Just because of that hockey stick effect.
- [02:23]
B
Absolutely. Now, for the audience wondering, well, who is Jeff? Why don't you tell us a little bit about, you know, who is Jeff and why, why you? What you have seen, I mean, over the last, I think, three to five years since you've really dived in.
- [02:35]
C
Yeah. So, I mean, Jeff McPherson, Canadian based with Cave on there. I am the CEO of a company called Cloud 37. We've been in the AI space for almost four years now. Crazy to think how time goes. We started as an AI agency years ago and we were building custom stuff for, for people there. Like you would want something in sales, we'd do it for you and then the next person would come in and we do it for them. We found the same problems with everybody. And this was like early ChatGPT days too, as everybody was still trying to figure it out. But there was the same issues for every single person. It's, nobody had their information set up properly or what, what people call their knowledge base. It's all in like Google Drive or Notion or Airtable and it's just everywhere. And then all of the agents or workflows, we were basically copying and pasting them because how agents are built, it's the same process every single time. The only thing that changes is the expertise and the information that you give it. And that's where we went out and built the platform Cloud 37 which is essentially powering people's businesses and we're helping people scale their expertise into subscription models, which is really cool.
- [03:44]
B
Yeah, we're going to get into that because I, I think it's very fascinating what you're doing and how you're helping. You know, whether it's everyday people or speakers, coaches, consultants that have knowledge that typically are trying to build courses and how to create that knowledge base and kind of an all in one solution. But I think for, for where we're at right now, I really want to touch on the rate of why, like, I mean what we're seeing in the market with AI, I mean for me, with zero development skills. In the last two weeks, right, I've showed you what I built. I built two like basically SaaS platforms with websites, with email integration, I mean things that would have taken me in my business. I, I would say six to eight months, if not even a year. And a lot of headaches, a lot of questions of why it can't be done. I mean I, it, it's mind boggling and I'm sitting there going, if I'm doing this with zero expertise, zero what is the developer who has all the expertise and know what to actually prompt ask change, how faster does that guy's work happen in quicker.
- [04:47]
C
Yeah, well, I mean for us, we, last year alone we ended up getting rid of three engineers and we're, we're growing so it gives us, gave us the Tools to be able to scale and scale properly, like all of these tools, it gives us the ability to just be different. But what we're noticing in the market is like, tools and these dashboards and these platforms are becoming commoditized to an extent. But it's like, how do you separate yourself from everybody else? The only moat that we believe people are going to have in the future is going to be community. And this is something we're heavily pushing on all of our clients that we work with. It's great to have a tool and have all these AI workflows and stuff like that, but when everybody can do the same thing, what's next? What's next? And that's what. We're always trying to keep up with that sort of stuff so people don't have to think they can stay in that process. But for the development side, it's. I mean, we're running our whole software company with some of these big technologies, cloud code being one of them. Sure, there's a couple of the things in behind the scenes and then some of our developers, five years ago, they weren't even developers. So it's like it gives people the ability to learn and learn fast. Yes, there's still levels to it 100%, but at the end of the day, if you're willing to put in the time to learn and become that expert, the tools will do everything in its power to amplify you too, to that output.
- [06:01]
B
So where do you see AI going? I mean, what do you see the future of AI in and how fast? In business, I would say business and life at this point.
- [06:11]
C
Yeah. I mean, on the optimistic side, I think it's going to, like for us, I mean, we've known each other for. For a long time now. I think it's going to give us the ability to do the things that we're actually passionate about. Like, I know that you're big into the sports and the biking and skiing and stuff like that. I think it's going to give us time to be part of our passions, part of our families. But if you're in the right bracket, for sure, there's obviously the bad apples that are going to do the bad things, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Matter what the tool is, there's always those people. In terms of business, there's going to be an upper class and there's going to be a lower class. What I'm most excited for is all of the people that we know on the market who made really good money for a short period of time who weren't actually experts, who were some sort of affiliate or some sort of info guru or wherever. It's going to start exposing them for everything that they weren't. Because AI is just. It's unbiased. It will tell you exactly what's right and wrong. And people who aren't experts or don't really know what they're talking about, it's going to expose them, which is going to give people who maybe didn't have those opportunities the ability to be in that upper class because you still need the expertise there.
- [07:18]
B
Yeah, that's a big loaded answer there. But I want to dissect that a little bit. Specifically, you're saying is going to expose the people that may not. I think what you're politely saying, they became really good marketers but didn't know anything else but that. So they knew how to sell, but they didn't know actually how to maybe fulfill. Or what they were selling was snake oil. But how's AI going to expose that if not just make it better and easier and faster for them to keep going down that road?
- [07:46]
C
There's still going to be people who win. But when everybody can do it, when all. When everybody can do it, what is going to separate people? Because you can only sell snake oil for so long. Like as the markets continued when. Because the problem with the people that were doing it before is if you didn't have that fancy car and you couldn't get pictures, well, I mean, then you didn't have the ability to get in front of those people. But now with content, I could take a picture in front of a Lamborghini and get in front of those people. That content doesn't work anymore. But everybody has seen that guy posting those pictures, selling a course and we all, we all know one of them. But when everybody can get in front of the same audience doing the same thing and building the same products and stuff like that, the only thing that's going to separate. Separate you is truly understanding it and not selling snake oil. Nobody goes through courses anyways. We know this. It's having the community and having better true customer experience. There's still going to be a side of having that human interaction. And if you don't want to do those, I mean, you're just not going to be a part of it. It's pretty straightforward.
- [08:41]
B
Yeah, it sounds like there's no hiding anymore. Like if you're going to actually want to create influence and create community and, or create a offer online there's other factors that are in play now that must be looked at.
- [08:57]
C
Lazy people will not win because at the end of the day, as easy as AI is, you need to, I mean, you understand, it's like it's not, it's easy, but it's not as easy as people think. And you, you put in work to build that site like it took you work.
- [09:08]
B
Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm now probably over, I would say 50 hours, but I mean 50 hours, right, to build it all is just insane. And you know, and I keep laughing About $1,000 in credits. A lot better than the $50,000 proposal I got. Right. So I mean it's interesting because I just, someone said today like man, you're an AI expert. I'm like, no, I'm not. I just use AI and I just use it as my brain and it's allowing me to be expert. I think that's the power of where AI is. But even the AI you and I are talking about is so small, we're talking about LMS here, let alone the robots that are going to be in people's homes, that are going to be able to take care of your kids, clean the house, fix the, fix the sink. I mean what's going to happen with all these professions and people that are worried about their jobs being taken over who are not adopting AI?
- [10:02]
C
Yeah. And like that. So to the at home piece first is you having a robot doing your dishes and helping you cook and stuff like that. I mean like unless it's a passion for you, do people really need to spend their time on it or could you spend time somewhere else with your family? There's that aspect of it all the blue collar jobs and like is it going to be. It's a while before that actually happens. Like these robots can't really empty a dishwasher without proper assistance as much as social media is showing you that way. So we've got a long ways before that happens. But where the blue collar is going to go and is a very easy example. If these robots are doing all the work, they're going to need maintenance. So instead of maintaining a car like an auto body shop, there'll be robot auto body shops where people are going to have to do them. And yes, in time could robots do those? Possibly. But it's like, what's the next thing? I do my best not to try and think, what's that 10, 15 year vision of what AI is? Because most of us don't even know what's going to happen in the next six months.
- [11:01]
B
Well, I mean the rate at what we're going, it's pretty crazy. Like I, I mean I, from what I was told, I haven't looked at this but I was talking to some one else they said like in the last couple days and not putting the date on here but last couple days Claude Code came out and basically sunk like four Fortune top 100 companies. Stock down 20, 30%. Yep.
- [11:27]
C
It's. It's insane what, what these, what these platforms are, are doing and this is why it's like we want to, we are trying to show people. It's like don't build the tools in a, in a respect our own tools. Like you have your knowledge, you have your expertise. The stuff that you've built over a long period of time. If you just know how to bottle that up and sell it to as many people as possible or be an extension of other people's business, that's when you're going to build the community to be able to do the next thing with those businesses. You're going to make really good money and let these big platforms do all the stuff that you just shouldn't do. Like the amount of tools that are on the market that are just going to be obsolete in the next year. And I see businesses signing up for these tools all the time. It's like, it's like you're not going to have it. Like it's just not going to be there.
- [12:10]
B
Yeah, let's get some examples because I have an idea what you're saying. But like get some examples of what do you mean by these tools are going to be obsolete.
- [12:17]
C
So there was there in the early days there was newsletter tools, there was lots of them people helping you write newsletters. I mean you can write newsletters on your own now. Like you don't need to sign up for these hundred dollar a month tools. There's a sales callers now the things that AI sales callers in which you got to be careful with because everybody goes through these or just callers in general. In the last two years we've gone through five different callers. So it's like it because the voice is the, is the thing that people want but the technologies in behind it are getting better. So you have to set your business up that can be interchangeable to the actually multi, the multimodal whether it's text, voice callers, avatars, you want to be able to set your system up that you can change those just like downloading and removing an app on your phone. Yeah, this is how people need to look at it. Because there's your operating system, which is your business processes, then there's your LLM which powers it, just like the World Wide web powers our websites. And then there's like your, your interaction points, which is how people receive value. Whether again it's, you receive it in text, voice, avatar, video, all these things. And those are the layers that, that it comes down to.
- [13:27]
B
It's interesting you're saying that because like the tools, like things that I thought were, oh, you got to really know what you, what you, you really got to have the idea of how to use AI for these things to happen. When you dive in and you kind of realize it's not that hard, you know, example, I'll just use my LinkedIn posts. My LinkedIn posts are like, I had a team who was writing the LinkedIn post and then they would, I mean it's just, it was a nightmare. And I said, okay, you guys are not following directions. I know AI follows directions. Maybe an hour in, I now have a LinkedIn post that automatically gets posted on my LinkedIn. I don't care. You know, people like, it's trained in my voice. It gets smarter as I get smarter because I keep training it up and it spits out a post in a graphic faster than any human possibly could. Before you can even say 1, 2, 3, here's a world class post that gets sent out. So just recently I said, well, if you can do that on LinkedIn, why can't you do that for blogs, newsletters,
- [14:28]
C
blogs, newsletters, all of that, all these things? Yeah, 100%. It's like where, where we try and go to it. Is there. Because is there people who write better LinkedIn posts than us? Yeah, I mean it's a LinkedIn post. Let's go with the newsletter because it's a little bit longer than there's structures to these or like writing scripts for YouTube like this is. There's different levels to it. So if you could. And Alex Ramosi does this even with it, with his own business where you go and hire a consultant for a period time, basically teach you the frameworks. Then you take those frameworks and you train your agents on them. Now you have expert frameworks that you can go and do this stuff yourself and you scale it infinitely.
- [15:03]
B
Absolutely, absolutely. So when my, my question is this, when does it become where like it's just content against con, you know, AI agent. Again, AI agent. I'll give an example of this is. I'm sure you've probably been in legal battles, you know, AI agent against AI agent. Right. I start off with the AI, send it off to business, they come, they put in their AI there, send it off to me and next thing you know you've lost, lost complete. You've like sidetracked everything. I see it, I'm like okay, can we stop with this AI? Let's just be real. Where do you see that becoming problems future in the future where they become actually more significant problems?
- [15:44]
C
It's hard to say. I think it's, I mean it's going to get worse before it gets better for sure. I mean people are going to take advantage of it wherever they can and try and siphon out as much money. But there's going to have to be some sort of guard rails put in place like human guard rails in place especially on the legality side. But it's, it's, it's hard to say really. It's like when they're back and forth because Even like the LinkedIn you can see them. It's like they're commenting back and forth com, like they're having conversations with each other. Like when that happens with like lawyers back and forth when that happens with. And how many years is that in? I don't really know. Is it ever going to come again? I don't really, I don't really know. But is it possible? 100%.
- [16:21]
B
Yeah, yeah. I, it's, it's, it's interesting. So tell us a little bit more about like you know, what your product, how you're, how you're servicing. You know I think, I believe it's coaches, consultants, experts, speakers, I mean anybody that basically is a knowledge based business and, or wanting to scale community.
- [16:42]
C
Yeah. So I mean the community is the, the byproduct to it for sure. So we could just even use you for an example. And this is a good example because people are watching this know you are. So you're, you're, you've, you're a sales expert, you have been for a long time and you've over the last X amount of years you have built and understand sales better than almost anybody, which is great. So those frameworks, those strategies like how you do. Objection. Handling all of these things are your why you do things. So SOPs are essentially the steps and then your frameworks and strategies are why you follow these steps in, in certain orders but the reasoning behind them at certain. So it's like an objection holding. It could come at different times. It's not the same thing every time. But you Understand how to reason with these things. So what you do is you take all of that information, past transcriptions, your frameworks, your strategies, and you put it in a cave on knowledge base and then that helps you do your business better like it just does. It helps you do your output better because you can put in transcriptions, you can train people, all this fun stuff. But where it becomes very, very valuable is instead of just keeping it for yourself because you keep the ip, you essentially bolt it onto another business. So you start training their team on how to use your frameworks because where the difference business model is going, instead of selling an info product, you teach them what good output is. So this is what a good objection handling is. And then you give them the tool that's trained on you to be able to get that output faster. This is where so you become fractional to more people with the exact same information, the exact same frameworks, the exact same agents. So it's like you could do it done with you.
- [18:14]
B
Yeah. So you basically become, I'm not sure it's the right word, but you become a mini LM for these people. So they have, I'm just going to say the Kvon bot and they know that the K V is going to be way better than a typical GPT or Claude because it was actually trained. Bounce back. Filtered through my specific 20 years of sales experience which then goes back to the conversation. I just want to make sure when we I said people are going to be exposed, those people are going to be exposed because they won't actually have the knowledge base, the nuances, the strategies, the years of, of in my case, you know, 101 different sales teams built, $375 million sold. And I don't know how many trained sales reps, they don't have that experience. So now the output of the AI just becomes generic versus very detailed prescription.
- [19:12]
C
And like your ChatGPT is of the world, it's generic knowledge, it has everything. Does it have stuff on how you teach? Absolutely. But what people subscribe to essentially is like your specific frameworks because you focus in your niche but where it becomes powerful because people say well I could do this on GPTs. Well the problem with GPTs like custom projects or custom GPTs is you can't stack the agents. So it's like an agent that does objection handling would also would do something different than writing a follow up email which would do something like there's different agents for different things. Yeah. So if I took a transcription and put it into K. Vaughn's Ecosystem, I would start with the processes and keep going down and then they would be hyper, like the expertise and the output behind them would be even more, more valuable because you're training these agents to do very, very specific things and they work together just like your team does on an individual basis. Because agents can't, can't reason with everything right now. So if, when you give them too many things, this is where it starts to hallucinate.
- [20:12]
B
Yeah.
- [20:12]
C
So this is where we start. And then where it comes in, it's like, okay, well let's just keep adding more things. Where I'm going to help salespeople train more people. So now the same knowledge you train, you train salespeople and then the same knowledge helps you, you create content. So now you're, you're literally just adding more agents into the exact same knowledge base and you're just giving it to these businesses for a subscription.
- [20:31]
B
And then the, and then what I'm going to assume is the, the model itself just gets smarter over time and it gets better over time.
- [20:38]
C
They essentially train your IP to be better. You build the community, they get the output that they want and then everybody, everybody wins.
- [20:45]
B
Community. I would, I'm starting to understand subscription is really what you're calling by community.
- [20:51]
C
Yeah. So there is some people, like we have some people that are doing it for free and they're doing, we have people who are doing it for like low ticket. But here's another example. So this guy, he was building, he does like script writing for TikTok. I won't mention, mention the business name because it's not, it's not important. But he was building GPTs for people in, on, on OpenAI. But what he was doing, he had to build an audience or a profile for these people. Just like anybody has to do is like you're basically onboarding people into your business, your service based business. So he had to manually do those every single time. And then every single person, he would have to create a new project for every single, every single customer. So it is possible. So with the system, what we did is we built him an onboarding agent and then his scripting agent. So every time one of his new customers comes in, if they fill in the onboarding agent and it creates a custom profile for them, it creates their audience and then all of the agents dynamically train to that, that audience. So you have to create one agent that dynamically trains to everybody's custom profiles and that scalability. This guy's doing like 70k a month with two agents. Yeah, selling TikTok scripts and he's, and,
- [22:03]
B
and essentially zero fulfillment because it's all AI driven.
- [22:08]
C
Because then the same information, the same information. We built a customer support agent. So people have questions, they answer the questions. It's the same information.
- [22:15]
B
I was gonna say, that's where they say, I'm sure you've heard it right. There's going to be a billion dollar company with one employee.
- [22:22]
C
Yeah. It's like people like this who are
- [22:25]
B
just understanding how to just use the agent and build the AI. It's, it's, it's interesting because people listen to this. I, I, you know, they could be all over the world in all different areas of business. And for us, you and I, we, I, I would say we've been inundated with AI for like three years. Like, it's like if you're not even using AI, you're already thinking the past. I was just at an event last week where 90% of the people weren't even using AI. They were like, yeah, I kind of use GPT. And I'm like, not even Claude. What's Claude? And I'm going, oh my God, I don't know. I'm not going to be the AI whisperer, I'll tell you that much.
- [23:08]
C
No, I mean Claude's winning for sure. And Claude actually built a system so people could migrate from chatgpt over to Claude. Claude's gonna, Claude's gonna, yeah. Win for sure.
- [23:19]
B
Yeah.
- [23:19]
C
And another use case in terms of the scale because not everybody has to turn it into a subscription because some people like, well, I don't want to turn a subscription. Okay, fine. So we're working with another company. It's in the medical space where they have a whole bunch of providers throughout the us but they have all of this knowledge from like, because they have products and they have like the medical advice that come comes with it. So we trained it in their knowledge base so all of their providers can basically talk to this agent on behalf of their clients and get the answers consistently. So as the company updates new products, the whole system once, so they have it more of an internal, internal training process for these businesses.
- [23:58]
B
I'm going to call it just for people understanding what's happening here. Like it's an fa, a live faq, internal sop. Ask any question about the business and you'll have all the answers right in front of you. So think about employees sitting there or even clients sitting there, or potential customers sitting there and has a question. They don't need to wait and book a Call employee doesn't need to go bother a manager. It's all basically just a data dump of information that allows you to receive, get anything you want from, from your company.
- [24:33]
C
It's the warehouse. That's it. It really is. And it's just a specific knowledge that's used for the, for the use case because they were struggling with how do I keep giving these providers more information as we update it. So it scales knowledge. Like that's all AI is. It's transformation of, of information. That's all it is.
- [24:52]
B
So how do we convince people who are listening right now and saying I'm scared of AI, I don't believe in AI. Like how do, how do we, what do we, what do I, I have to say, what do you have to say to get them to realize like AI is not coming, it's here.
- [25:06]
C
Yeah.
- [25:06]
B
And it's getting smarter by the day. And I believe that there's two camps. There's going to be, you watch this in maybe in a year, maybe two years. I'll tell you, it's definitely going to be happening within two years for sure. There's going to be people you're going to first camp. Oh, I think I tried AI. Oh I dabbled. And they're going to be a thing of the past. Or there's going to be the camp that looked at AI and said I not only am I going to adopt it, I'm going to become the best person in it. So I can exist in a world where AI has taken over but I can be the 1% that still needs to be able to be a prompt engineer and or no AI at the highest level where I still can control my own business.
- [25:46]
C
I completely agree. So there's a couple things. Even when I'm working with CEOs and stuff like that, it's like remove AI from the conversation. It's like what are, what are day to day things that like you like? They're monotonous tasks especially in the business world. What are things that you can just uplift? Like things you just don't want to do anymore. The big thing is people. It's a lot of overwhelm. I don't know where to start. I think a lot of people who's against it, it's more of like I'm. It's kind of like embarrassing cause I don't know where to start. I think there's a lot of that aspect in it. So allowing people to really understand is like you're still so far ahead even if you're just doing a little bit. The problem with it is, is like if you don't do the work, the, the amount, the gap that's going to happen is going to be insane. Like we set up the processes for these businesses to follow essentially like accountability partners where some of their team members didn't buy in and they're no longer with the company. It's like you have to buy into this ever changing thing. AI takes work, you still need to put your boots on, you still need to work with it. But when you learn it, there is something that we call like your AI architect role, which this is I believe going to be the future of people's businesses. These are the people who understand workflows and processes and prompting. These are like your new age coos. They understand all the verticals that are running it and the people that can, who have these in their business or don't they need to hire if they do have them, are they at the skill set yet? Because there's not that many out there. So for the people who are, where should I start? It's understanding the workflows and understanding that process because you can have a very, very big business helping other businesses implement it into, into their E system.
- [27:26]
B
There's, there's going to be. We, we didn't say this beginning but as many jobs, I believe this is kind of like exactly what the industrial, you know, revolution and when the, when the, when we went from carriages and buggies to cars. Right. The reality is this is as many jobs AI will take over, I believe just as many will be created things that we don't even know exist. Jobs will be created to, to service, like you said, to service the AI, to be the AI architect. If somebody wants to, if they, if this is the right fit for them and they're like, I need you because they ain't calling me, they're going to be calling me. They could, no, don't.
- [28:08]
C
Just, just Cloud 37 AI is a good spot. You can, if people want to get on a call with us, great. Or just on social media anywhere. Jeff Mac AI across all social medias is, is a good place to find me as well. But we're very, we're very specific on who we work with. We want our values to align because we know the results that we can, we can provide for you and your business. So those are just the prerequisites. We just want to work with good people because it's a lot of fun and that's just what I have the ability to do.
- [28:44]
B
Any Last departing words for somebody who's sitting there frozen with the idea of AI, what would we say?
- [28:53]
C
As fast as it moves? And this is kind of the, the, the scary thing and the frustrating thing at the same time. As fast as it moves, you have to, you have to be so patient with making your decision. Like you have to move slow in such a fast paced world because you can make one wrong decision, get six months down the line and lose more than six months.
- [29:14]
B
Yeah.
- [29:15]
C
Because it, because getting back. So it's like if you don't understand what the process is, find people like ourselves help you understand what's going to happen before they sell you into the thing that you need. Because I can almost guarantee you that 95% of the time what you're being sold is not what you need.
- [29:32]
B
Yeah, yeah. Or being overpriced, I can tell you that much for what it is.
- [29:37]
C
Yeah.
- [29:38]
B
So reach out to experts that know, understand it's coming, but make slow and smart decisions because it changes so fast and you got to be able to hedge each decision you make moving forward.
- [29:50]
C
Our businesses ran before AI, so they will run with AI. So stop listening to all of the gurus on social media.
- [29:59]
B
I love it. Stop listening to the gurus. But only Jeff. I appreciate Jeff, always, always grateful for you to stop by. And I can't wait to see us on another episode in a year where we're going to be talking about the next evolution of this, all of this.
- [30:14]
C
Who knows what's going to be here in a year? But no, I appreciate you having me.