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- [00:09]
Adeel Akhtar
Adeel Akhtar was a PhD student at the University of Illinois when he was invited to test a prosthetic hand prototype in Quito, Ecuador, in partnership with the US Embassy and the nonprofit the Range of Motion Project. Adil was there to meet a man named Juan who had lost his hand in an explosion.
- [00:27]
Ben Walter
We don't have anything working, but we figure we're going to be there for two weeks. We'll figure it out when we get there.
- [00:33]
Adeel Akhtar
But as soon as they arrive in Ecuador, they get some good news.
- [00:37]
Ben Walter
Tomorrow we've got a meeting with the US Embassy in Quito and they want to see everything.
- [00:43]
Adeel Akhtar
Adil stayed up all night trying to get the hand to work, but with little progress. They went to the embassy anyway.
- [00:50]
Ben Walter
We show them this demo and they are stunned because they've never seen a robot in their lives before. So they don't know what it's supposed to look like and how it's supposed to work.
- [00:58]
Adeel Akhtar
So the embassy schedules a demo for the press a little bit later. Despite a week of all nighters to prep, the morning of the demo still didn't go as planned.
- [01:07]
Ben Walter
We weren't able to get the machine learning algorithm to work to control the hand. Then the patient arrived and every single channel was dead. We weren't able to read any of his muscle signals. And then we go through this two minute training procedure with Juan and nothing happens.
- [01:24]
Adeel Akhtar
Nothing. But this time it wasn't just a demo in a lab. This time it was in front of the international press corps.
- [01:30]
Ben Walter
And I'm just like, oh my goodness, what else could go wrong?
- [01:33]
Adeel Akhtar
At this point, turns out quite a lot. Welcome to the Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. On the Unshakeables we are sharing the daring moments of small business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stor of how they got through it. On today's episode, we're talking to Dr. Adil Akhtar who's doing some absolutely fascinating stuff in science and medicine. He's found the perfect balance of all his interests and he is just super excited to go to work each and every day. He's young and well on his path to changing the world. Thankfully, I've got another young and ambitious entrepreneur back in today to help me tell this story. Kathleen, it's so good to have you back. Welcome back to the Unshakeables.
- [02:21]
Kathleen
Hey Ben. Glad to be back and with this company, it is just so you. It feels like Something out of science fiction.
- [02:26]
Adeel Akhtar
Yeah, I mean, I like science fiction. I think this is rapidly becoming science fact. We've seen a lot of technology come through, and I get to go around with clients and see the new technologies they're building. It's rare that I find my jaw on the floor that fast when I see something new. I feel like I'm looking into the future right now, but in your immediate future. Today's episode with Psyonic from San Diego, California. Some kids want to be astronauts or ballerinas or more worrisome today, maybe influencers when they grow up. But Adeel had his eye on one thing and one thing only, and it wasn't running a company.
- [03:05]
Ben Walter
My parents immigrated from Pakistan back in the 70s to the United States. Every seven years or so we would visit Pakistan, where all of our extended family and relatives were.
- [03:17]
Adeel Akhtar
They took one of those family trips in 1994 when Adeel was only 7 years old.
- [03:23]
Ben Walter
We were visiting like a marketplace that was out there, and there was a young girl who was missing her right leg and she was using, like, a tree branch, using it as a crutch. And this was the first time that I had ever met someone missing a limb before in my life. And it stuck with me that we have the same ethnic heritage, but we have such vastly different qualities of life. So I wanted to become a medical doctor to work with patients with limb differences and get them prosthetics.
- [03:51]
Adeel Akhtar
He was laser focused on that goal right up through college until his sophomore year when he took a computer science class for fun.
- [03:59]
Ben Walter
I loved it. I loved everything about engineering and building my own things. So I was going to finish medical school, work at an academic hospital, and run my own lab there where I would do, like, research on prosthetic designs.
- [04:14]
Adeel Akhtar
There just happened to be a major rehabilitation hospital down the road from the University of Illinois, which is where Adeel was getting his Ph.D. now called the.
- [04:23]
Ben Walter
Shirley Ryan Ability Lab, it's the number one rehabilitation hospital in the US for the last, like, 38 years. They made some huge breakthroughs in these neurally powered bionic limbs. They had invented this surgery there called targeted re innervation, where they would basically take the nerves that you'd still have in whatever was left of your arm, and then they'd reroute them to muscles you still had, and you could use this to basically control a bionic limb.
- [04:50]
Adeel Akhtar
Wow.
- [04:52]
Ben Walter
And when I had first seen that, I was like, this is incredible. This is the perfect combination of engineering and medicine.
- [04:58]
Adeel Akhtar
Yeah, that's serious science fiction.
- [04:59]
Ben Walter
Yeah, right. And I was like, this is exactly what I want to do with prosthetics and working with people with limb differences.
- [05:07]
Adeel Akhtar
While at the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab, Adeel started working on a concept for a prosthetic hand.
- [05:13]
Ben Walter
I wanted to continue to figure out, like, okay, can we make these really advanced bionic limbs that can take advantage of some of those things that they were developing at the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab and other research labs around the world, but do it at a price point that is much more affordable? You know, that technology, it's super expensive that costs like millions to like almost a billion dollars to develop. 80% of the people with limb differences are in developing nations, and less than 3% have access. So something that's that expensive wouldn't really work there.
- [05:45]
Adeel Akhtar
Around the same time, a deal was introduced to the Range of Motion Project. It's a nonprofit dedicated to getting prosthetics to folks who really, really need them, largely across the global South. The founder, Dave, was a U of I alum and was on campus talking about prosthetics. The two of them hit it off. Right away.
- [06:04]
Ben Walter
I was like, I need to go talk to him, because this is exactly what I've wanted to do ever since I met that 70 year old girl. We go out to dinner with a bunch of his colleagues and teammates and then we take him to the lab the next day and I show him that Mark, one of the 3D printed hand that we made.
- [06:19]
Adeel Akhtar
Oh, yeah, you'll hear Adil refer to both the mark and the ability hand. Both are terms he uses for the prosthetic hand he's developed.
- [06:27]
Ben Walter
We actually call it Mark 1, Mark 2, Mark 3, based off of like Iron man nomenclature. If you like, come to our office. We have all the different versions and glass cases on the wall so you can actually see the very first hand that we built.
- [06:41]
Adeel Akhtar
That hand was the one he showed Dave that day in the lab. And it was gigantic.
- [06:47]
Ben Walter
The hand was like three times the size of an average adult human hand with wires going everywhere, plugged into breadboards, power supplies, the wall. And I was like, could you do anything with this? And he was like, yeah, maybe.
- [06:59]
Adeel Akhtar
Then Dave left, and a deal he didn't hear back.
- [07:03]
Ben Walter
Two weeks later, I got this email from him and saying, like, dude, I felt this vibe between us when we met, and we've got to figure out a way to work together. And that's when Dave's and my bromance began.
- [07:15]
Adeel Akhtar
Two weeks after that, Dave was back, this time with an offer he'd gotten Funding from the US Embassy in Ecuador to bring a deal down to test out Mark on a patient.
- [07:25]
Ben Walter
And this was just this incredible opportunity. But the hand that we had built, it was like giant, right?
- [07:31]
Adeel Akhtar
And for the patient, they'd be meeting to fit the prosthesis on their very first patient. I should note, their prototype just wouldn't work. That early prototype included the forearm, which Juan, their patient, still had on his body.
- [07:45]
Ben Walter
So we had to go to a new design that had all the motors and electronics in the hand itself. We found another open source design online and we put all of our own electronics in it and machine learning algorithms.
- [07:56]
Adeel Akhtar
Mark 2 looks super cool. I mean, it's a robot hand, but in terms of functionality, at that point it was still so new it might as well have been a paperweight.
- [08:06]
Ben Walter
We don't have anything working, but we figure we're going to be there for two weeks. We'll figure it out when we get there. So we fly down to Ecuador. Dave picks us up from the airport, and the first thing he tells us is that tomorrow we've got a meeting with the US Embassy in Quito and they want to see everything working.
- [08:22]
Adeel Akhtar
The next morning, Mark 2 was mostly still a paperweight. The hand was supposed to be able to open and close and pinch and grasp with the same relative amount of effort as a human arm. They could only get the hand to close if Adil flexed really, really hard. But this was their only opportunity to work directly with a patient. So they showed up to the embassy for the meeting and crossed their fingers.
- [08:43]
Ben Walter
So we show them this demo and to our surprise, they are stunned because they've never seen a robot in their lives before. So they don't know what it's supposed to look like and how it's supposed to work.
- [08:53]
Adeel Akhtar
During this meeting, the embassy also caught wind of the fact that a deal was from the University of Illinois. Turns out Ecuador's then president was also an alumnus of the same place.
- [09:03]
Ben Walter
And they said, we're going to bump you up to all the international news stations that any chance that they got to promote the university, they'd take it. So if the bar wasn't set high now, now it was set super high.
- [09:17]
Adeel Akhtar
Full court press coverage from groundbreaking medical research from the president's alma mater. It was a great day for the fighting Illini. Next, they met their patient, Juan Sukiyo.
- [09:28]
Ben Walter
He had lost his left hand 35 years prior due to a landmine explosion. We hooked him up to all the muscle sensors and we weren't able to get the machine learning Algorithm to work to control the hand.
- [09:41]
Adeel Akhtar
And that was it. Juan left for a trip. The next time they'd put the hand on Juan would be on live television and it had to go right. And the night before the demonstration, they still hadn't solved the problem. The hand wouldn't work. Dave was coming to take a deal to the embassy at 6am and at 6am a deal was still working. He finally found the issue at 6:08.
- [10:04]
Ben Walter
At 6:08 I noticed this one line of code that might be a little bit off. And it turned out there was one line of code where two variables were switched on the opposite side of an equal sign. And as soon as I switched those two variables back, everything started working. When I made a pinch, the hand made a pinch. When I made a fist, the hand made a fist.
- [10:23]
Adeel Akhtar
Huge sigh of relief. Thank goodness. I think we were all getting worried there for a second. They bring the hand, the breadboard, the batteries, and head off toward the embassy. Now all they need to do is get the hand on Juan and run the test before the cameras roll at 9am and they'll be in business. Except when 9 rolls around, Juan is nowhere to be found.
- [10:43]
Ben Walter
Juan doesn't get there until 10am and so the media is already super annoyed at this point. Now we've got again one to get this right in front of these international news stations.
- [10:53]
Adeel Akhtar
There's no more prep time, just showtime.
- [10:57]
Ben Walter
So Juan gets there, we hook him up to all the electrodes, and the first thing we do is we try to read his muscle signals. And every single channel was dead. We were powering this breadboard off of two 9 volt batteries, and one of the 9 volt batteries was burning hot to the touch and puffed up to about double in size. Have we not noticed it at that point? We might have been on the news for a different reason, but fortunately I had a fresh 9 volt in my pocket and voila.
- [11:21]
Adeel Akhtar
Muscle signals check. That's a lesson for us all. Always be prepared and never ever ignore a puffy battery.
- [11:29]
Ben Walter
But it's one thing for us to read as muscle signals, it's another thing for the machine learning algorithm, the AI algorithm, to work.
- [11:36]
Adeel Akhtar
If you'll remember for a moment that AI is more than asking ChatGPT to make your grocery list, you'll know that a deal's prosthetic hand is being trained on the muscle signals the user is sending to the machine, which the algorithm is then able to replicate whenever the patient flexes those muscles.
- [11:52]
Ben Walter
So we go through this two minute training procedure With Juan, he holds a pinch for 15 seconds, fist for 15 seconds, tripod grip, hand open, relax. The hand opens back up. I ask him to close it, and nothing happens.
- [12:05]
Adeel Akhtar
When the code is seemingly fixed and your patient is there and the battery's been replaced, there's only one thing left that can fix the unfixable. Maybe divine intervention.
- [12:16]
Ben Walter
I happen to be Muslim, and Juan happens to be the leader of all the Muslims in Ecuador. And to put things in perspective, Ecuador is a 99.99999999% Catholic country. And so for me, to A, meet another Muslim, but B, the leader of all the Muslims is just completely, completely happenstance. Like, there's no way that that would happen just by pure luck. Right?
- [12:39]
Adeel Akhtar
Bismillah, for those who don't know, is something Muslims say before undertaking anything. It's an invocation of the name of God, a small prayer of sorts.
- [12:48]
Ben Walter
So he's like, bismillah. Okay, bismillah. Right. And so I hit the reset button on the system, and this time I ask him to close it. And it actually closes. I take a step back. A huge sigh of relief.
- [12:59]
Adeel Akhtar
If you watch the news coverage of that day, the relief on Adil's face is palpable. But the most remarkable part of it is during the interview with the patient Juan, who said he felt as though a part of him had come back.
- [13:11]
Ben Walter
And at that moment that I realized that if I stay in academia, if I finish medical school and go to an academic hospital and run my own lab, that this just ends up as a journal paper. If we want everyone to feel the same way that Juan did, we had to commercialize this technology. And that's when Psyonic was born.
- [13:34]
Adeel Akhtar
Kathleen, it's so good to have you back. We get to meet a lot of clients who are working on some incredible technology. But he just stunned me when I saw how advanced this thing is. And, you know, the fact that it's getting ready for patients is something else fascinating.
- [13:47]
Kathleen
The listeners at home couldn't see this, but your jaw pretty much hit the ground.
- [13:51]
Adeel Akhtar
My eyes are currently popping out of my head.
- [13:53]
Kathleen
That was wild.
- [13:54]
Adeel Akhtar
We've had the pleasure on this show and some of the episodes I think that you've joined for in hearing from mission driven companies. This is clearly a mission driven company. Although it's fully for profit, it is mission driven. What makes them different? What makes mission driven companies different?
- [14:11]
Kathleen
So just to start and set the table, a mission is the purpose for your business. It's your reason for existence. And to get at a Big, ownable mission. You need a big, hairy, audacious problem that you're looking to solve for in the world. So some injustice, some wrongdoing, something you want to make right. And I think the best missions are attacking problems that have really sharp edges. And so there's a sense of urgency that you want to get after something, you want to take it on. It's a foe that is bigger and badder than something that you might normally want to solve. What we saw today is just like the mission is to make humanity better, and he's taking on something that is just so massive as the best companies do. What's your perspective on that?
- [15:02]
Adeel Akhtar
I mean, to speak to the sort of core theme of the show of getting through those oh moments and getting through those tough times. That mission, it's a true north for the entrepreneur, for the company, for the employees, for the buy in. That anchoring to that mission is so important. And we've seen that with so many of our guests on the show about when things were tough, if they were incredibly committed to the mission behind it, that was the sort of thing they could cling to when they were staring over the precipice. Adeel had a hand, a mission and a goal. Now he was ready to go back to Chicago and found the company. Now, keep in mind, at this point, he's also still in medical school.
- [15:39]
Ben Walter
We entered our school's business plan competition back in 2015. So this was the Cozad New Venture competition at the University of Illinois. And we won that. And the following year, we won the Illinois Innovation Prize. And that gave us about, like, 25k in seed funding that we had to work with. And we used that to basically fund a trip to Shenzhen, China, in the summer of 2017.
- [16:02]
Adeel Akhtar
That trip introduced them to motor manufacturers. The next few Marc iterations followed quickly, and as the marks came out, the money ran low.
- [16:11]
Ben Walter
That summer, we started an indiegogo campaign. So it was a crowdfunding campaign, $250,000 to, like, really get this company off the ground. We raised $7,000. It was a horrible, utter failure of a fundraising campaign.
- [16:30]
Adeel Akhtar
No money, no scale, no clear path forward. That summer, Sionic also applied for a National Science foundation grant and never heard back. The fall of 2017 was Psionic's lowest moment.
- [16:43]
Ben Walter
We had $200 left in our bank account. Now we had to figure out how we're going to survive as a company going through a startup. It's a total rollercoaster ride where you're going to have, like, super low Lows and Super high highs. $200 left in your bank account is definitely one of the low lows. But the following week we had in our bank account $200,200 because we just got this grant from the National Science Foundation. This was more money than we had ever seen before.
- [17:08]
Adeel Akhtar
Receiving this grant felt like confirmation that a deal was on the right path.
- [17:12]
Ben Walter
We wanted to be able to make the most impact possible. So the original plan was never to start a company, but it just turned out that by starting a company was the best thing that we could do for making this as accessible and ubiquitous as possible.
- [17:29]
Adeel Akhtar
And that was that. Adeel dropped out of med school. He moved his family and the company to San Diego. And if you're thinking why San Diego? I asked the same question. Basically, San Diego has now become somewhat of a health tech hub. There's a lot of community support, a lot of money, and there's Balboa Navy Hospital. Many prosthetics patients are veterans. Once in San Diego, they use the rest of the cash grant for customer discovery and intensive R and D. Customer discovery.
- [17:57]
Ben Walter
The whole point is to just lay out what you think the market wants and then you actually find out what the market wants. And most of the time you are wildly wrong. Going through that process, we thought that we were going to save the world with these low cost 3D printed prosthetic hands. When we started talking with real clinicians and real patients, the number one thing they complained about wasn't that that their $50,000 bionic hand was $50,000. It was more so that their $50,000 bionics hand was breaking within like a month of using it. And we were like, if we give someone a 3D printed hand, they're going to just break this thing immediately. So how could we still leverage the low cost of 3D printing but make this hand more robust than anything else that's out there?
- [18:39]
Adeel Akhtar
I'm going to slow you down for a second because I have the benefit of video. I'm looking at the hand. Can you describe for everybody fundamentally what is it? What does it look like? What are the features?
- [18:51]
Ben Walter
Yeah, absolutely. So it is a five fingered hand. There is actually six motors inside of it and so all five fingers flex and extend. So I can close the hand like that and I can do like a pinch. For example, if I'm at a rock concert, I can like do gestures like.
- [19:04]
Adeel Akhtar
Rocking on you who can't see? I'm literally watching this happen in real time. It's quite trippy. But anyway.
- [19:11]
Ben Walter
And so I can make all the fingers move in like, kind of like a finger wave as well. So you can see all the different motors moving. You can hear it probably through the microphone as well. So things that make this hand in particular unique. This is the fastest bionic hand. They close in 200 milliseconds. And to put that in context, we blink our eyes in about 300 milliseconds. So the fingers are actually closing in like faster than the blink of an eye, which is just crazy. If you hit it, it flexes out of the way and it can come right back to its original position.
- [19:39]
Adeel Akhtar
What's it made of silicone?
- [19:40]
Ben Walter
Exactly. We took a soft robotics approach where we would make the fingers out of silicone instead of this plastic, this hard material. And because it's made out of silic, when I squeeze the fingers together, they flex out of the way. And I can take this, I can smash it and it survives the impact. I climbed the roof of my house, dropped it 30ft in the air. It survived. I've stepped on it. I put it in a dryer for 10 minutes. So this thing can take quite a beating.
- [20:04]
Adeel Akhtar
Wow.
- [20:05]
Ben Walter
Going through that process of customer discovery, which we still do to this day, is probably one of the most critical things. It tells you what your user needs are, what the market is looking at. And then on the flip side, having come from a PhD, that gives us the lens of knowing exactly what research is out there, what's promising on that frontier. And so we're very forward thinking on that front. So we can mix both aspects of like, what does the market need now, as well as where is it going towards in the next like three to five years.
- [20:38]
Adeel Akhtar
Psionic is on their way toward the future. To date, they've received $2.4 million in grants from the National Science foundation and have raised another 1.4 million in a pre seed round. The first fully formed mark, now called the Ability Hand, hit the market in September of 2021.
- [20:56]
Ben Walter
We have it on over 200 patients. It's covered by Medicare in the US and we have 50 robotics companies using it, including NASA. Meta is using it to do household object manipulation on robot arms. And they're working with Mercedes to put car engines together. So it's been just this incredible journey, you know, starting from this idea that I had from 7 years old all the way to like the world's largest companies.
- [21:22]
Adeel Akhtar
This could easily be just another cool tech toy that stays locked up at these companies. But Adeel is a man of the people. His original goal was to make prosthetics accessible. And he remains fully committed to that mission.
- [21:35]
Ben Walter
Medicare will usually pay something around like $31,000 for a hand like this. And so we sell the hand to the clinicians for about 15k to 20k and they're able then get reimbursed for Medicare and make a margin on that. But to the end user, depending on which insurance you have, you just pay whatever your co pay is. That could be from zero to like at max, maybe like a couple thousand bucks to get a bionic hand.
- [21:59]
Adeel Akhtar
Wow.
- [21:59]
Ben Walter
It's a win for everyone in the value chain.
- [22:01]
Adeel Akhtar
Fascinating. It's really so interesting. And the next generation of prosthetics is even cooler.
- [22:08]
Ben Walter
What we're doing is we have a titanium implant that would go inside of the two bones in your arm and it comes out of your body. And then you would actually attach the hand directly to your bones through this titanium implant. And we call this osseointegration. But on top of that, instead of having the muscle sensors on the outside, we're working with groups to do fine microwire electrodes that would go directly into your nerves. And when you do that, instead of doing these pre programmed grips, the idea would be that you would actually be able to do individual finger control. And then when you touch the touch sensors, it can stimulate your nerves and make it actually feel like your hand that's no longer there.
- [22:46]
Adeel Akhtar
Is that trained on AI?
- [22:48]
Ben Walter
Exactly.
- [22:50]
Adeel Akhtar
One of the things I love about Psyonic is that it's both a software and a hardware company. They make the physical hand and they also make the software that runs the hand. You could imagine them selling it separately to maximize their profits, but that's not a deal's focus.
- [23:05]
Ben Walter
You can't separate the product from the service. They go hand in hand. For lack of a better pun. We want to make sure that our users feel heard, that they feel comfortable with our devices and they're getting the most out of it. So the human element is always going to be there. This company will never be devoid of that human element in particular. So we get a lot of that from the prosthetic side. And by kind of bringing humanity to the robotic side too, we're seeing this synergy between the robotics and the humans. That would be a lot more difficult to do if we were just a robotics company or just a prosthetics company in particular.
- [23:52]
Dave
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- [24:59]
Adeel Akhtar
There was one moment, I'll remember it forever, where Adeel was able to allow me 3,000 miles away from him to control the hand remotely. It did not make it into the episode, but you can go see it on social media. We're also going to include a link to the ability hand in the show notes so you can see it like this is something you have to see to believe. It waved at me from San Diego.
- [25:18]
Kathleen
It was seriously remarkable.
- [25:20]
Adeel Akhtar
For now, Kathleen, I want to take a step back and pick one theme out from today's conversation. The theme running through all of this, I think having listened to a deal today, is just the pace of change. Whether it's technological change, social change, business model change, frankly, government policy change. I want to give small business owners some practical advice on how to think through that. Prioritize, make decisions about which changes matter the most. Which changes can wait? That's a generic question, but it's one that I hear from clients all the time. So I'll give you an example of some of the advice I've given in the past is I say to people all the time, what drives your growth and what drives your margin? And think about the changes that are most relevant to the things that either directly drive your growth and or your margin and work backwards from there. The further it is away from that, the more time you have now. It's easy to say and hard to figure out, but at least it gives you a framework. But I'm curious what you think I'd.
- [26:17]
Kathleen
Say from an internal perspective for small business owners to almost redefine the SBO as a skills based organization, the entire team that you have now needs to be wholly focused on skill building and upskilling all the time. So this idea of having generalists and traditionalists that we used to be able to afford to have in our small businesses, we really can't anymore, just given the rate of change. We need such a level of specialization. So I think that's the real shift I'm seeing. And for those that aren't adapting at that rate of change, they're just getting left behind.
- [26:54]
Adeel Akhtar
Yeah. So I really think a lot about what you just said, Kathleen, in terms of hiring the right people for small businesses, because sometimes my clients tell me I can't afford the level of person that I really need. And I say, I don't think you can afford not to have the level of person that you really need. And I know that's very difficult when margins are tight. But in a world where this change comes this quickly, if you don't have people who can adapt to that, you're going to be left behind very quickly.
- [27:19]
Kathleen
I couldn't agree more. Like the Jack of all trades or the Jacqueline of all trades, it just, it doesn't fly anymore. You just have to keep moving. Like you have to stay in a state of perpetual motion to your point of trying new things, getting contingency plans in place, running and gunning as best you can. Because the one thing that is certain is that we are operating in uncertain times. And that is only going to likely accelerate and continue to take a bit.
- [27:43]
Adeel Akhtar
Of an optimistic view. I think this is a moment that small businesses can seize. And I'll tell you why. Because the technology is changing so fast that for larger organizations, they'll get there. And they can get there by brute force. And no doubt they will. But they can't move as fast and they can't always move as fast as the technology. But smaller businesses can.
- [28:03]
Kathleen
It is so true. The rate of change is just unreal right now. You've got small companies where they can be more nimble and agile, move quicker. I'm seeing them use AI a lot, either as an input or as kind of a QC to optimize on the back end. It's mainstream and it ain't going anywhere.
- [28:24]
Adeel Akhtar
No, and AI in particular. Everybody thinks, oh, it's the big companies who are using AI. It's not true at all. In fact, I mean, we survey small businesses all the time. Almost half of them say they are Looking to add AI tools into their operations this year, including in customer facing applications. There's so many tools that are available off the shelf. These are not just big companies. Smaller companies are moving into this fast. What I will say for most companies is if you're thinking about AI for your business, one of the most important things you can do, and I'm going to use a really dry word, is think about data architecture. Any AI is only as good as the data that it can consume. And one of the advantages small firms have is they don't have a bunch of legacy data around that they have to manipulate and reformat and retool and put in different environments. You can do that fresh from the start or certainly with a smaller base. So getting the data right so that AI can properly consume it and use it is a huge advantage for small businesses. Kathleen, are your clients starting to think specifically about AI?
- [29:20]
Kathleen
Yeah, we're seeing a lot of our small business partners very focused on it. There's a lot of apprehension. They're nervous to use it. They don't know what the impact is going to be necessarily on their business. And especially those in the creative fields I found are reticent because they feel like it's disloyal to their industry. There's going to be forced obsolescence for what they're doing once they start to use these tools for content creation. So there's one foot in, one foot out is kind of the general MO right now, I'd say.
- [29:52]
Adeel Akhtar
Yeah, it's been interesting. I mean, on the show we've been lucky to see a few uses of it. I mean, obviously Adeel is using it to teach the hand how to move. We had Craig Rupp from Sabanto who's using AI algorithms to teach the tractors to drive themselves in the field. Here at Chase, we're working with a company called Ventura who has an AI enabled platform that helps employers, particularly small businesses, find health insurance plans and customize them to what they want. We're certainly seeing them in the creative field fields. So there's nowhere that's going to go untouched. And the easiest advice is head in the sand will not solve the problem. You have to face this, even if it means obsolescence for some things.
- [30:25]
Kathleen
That's right. And I saw you guys actually came out with a great report in January around how people are using it, how small businesses are using it, and it is a cornerstone. I thought it was really interesting that over 56% are using it for marketing and content creation, 47% for customer service and automation, and then 44% for data analysis. So those are great ways. If you're listening right now, you're a small business owner, you're overwhelmed, you don't even know where to start. Those are some potential applications for you.
- [30:56]
Adeel Akhtar
Yeah. And, you know, once upon a time, there was someone's job to sit there with an adding machine and add up the numbers. And then Excel came out, and then you could do it a different way. And now a lot of it is automated. So this is the normal cycle of technological disruption. I went to a lecture. It was a few years ago now, but it's as prescient as ever. This came out of the University of Toronto, where a lot of the initial research for AI was done. If you think about the last 30 years, the computer revolution is clearly what's happened. And what the gentleman described was what's fundamentally happened over the last 30 years is that math has gotten cheaper, because that's what computing is. You can do a lot of math, but what do you do with the math? You analyze things. And so the parallel for today's world is, what does AI do? AI makes lots of predictions. It predicts what you would write, it predicts what you'd say, it predicts what the customer wants. But that can't exist in a vacuum. So what goes with that is good judgment. And so there's going to be a whole industry around applying good judgment. I mean, prompt engineering is a great example of that. Creating a good prompt is good, good judgment. Even though the AI then goes off and does what it does.
- [31:55]
Kathleen
I love that synopsis. Yeah, I love that. And that just reinforces that the human element will always still need to be there. Ultimately.
- [32:02]
Adeel Akhtar
Yeah. I mean, look, for most of our careers, that's the case maybe a hundred years from now. But for now, it's not that this new technology won't disrupt the way we work. It will. It's not that it won't disrupt some jobs. It will. But it will also make us more efficient and it'll create new opportunities and new careers that never existed.
- [32:19]
Kathleen
Yeah.
- [32:19]
Adeel Akhtar
Great advice as always, Kathleen. Thank you so much for your insight. Now let's see what advice Adeel has for our listeners. You could take this anywhere you want to, but if you had one piece of advice for our listeners, what would it be?
- [32:31]
Ben Walter
To make it through a lot of the rough times, it takes a lot of grit and a lot of gratitude. I am incredibly grateful that I get to do what my dream was to do when I was seven years old. And that's not common. At the same time, I'm incredibly grateful that a, I get to work in what I've wanted to do my whole life, but B, the benefit that we get to bring to humanity, I think that gives me a sense of purpose that keeps me motivated to do this day in, day out.
- [33:02]
Adeel Akhtar
Well, Adeel, I can't thank you enough for sharing your story with us. I think we're going to see some incredible stuff coming out of Psyonic and I can't wait to be a part of it. Next time I'm in San Diego, I'm coming to visit.
- [33:11]
Ben Walter
Yes, we would love to have you.
- [33:13]
Adeel Akhtar
Thanks for being on the Unshakeables.
- [33:14]
Ben Walter
Thank you.
- [33:18]
Adeel Akhtar
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Unshakeables. If you liked this episode, please rate and review it. We're going back to New York next week and to the city's historic flower market. In this episode, one man's flower shop was another's opportunity to make a quick buck. Every place on the block was sued by the same complainant. One place got sued twice. I'm Ben Walter and this is the Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. We'll see you back here soon.