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Without sacrifice is not just a slogan. It is the refusal to treat health, family and identity in the same line item which I cannot lend it for my business.
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Welcome to the Think AI Podcast. Each week we talk about the most exciting AI research tools, case studies, and more. I'm your host Dev Goyer and I've been working behind the scene in data and AI for over 30 years. Whether you are an AI expert, skeptic or something in between, this podcast is for you.
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Today is little different. No guest, just me, a microphone and a few stories I have been wanting to tell you for a long time. This is an episode about three things that looked unrelated and turned out to be the same thing. A composer, a handbike, and an AI workforce. By the end, I will have you shown how these three things connect and what they have to do with you. Stay tuned. If you ever felt like the business you build was the thing standing between you and the life you actually wanted, this episode is for you. A few years back, late at night, I had been sitting at my desk for what felt like the entire day. The monitor went to sleep and I caught my own reflection in it. Behind me, leaning against the wall, just like this one, were my crutches. So those who know me, I'm a disabled founder. I have used braces crutches for mobility most of my adult life. And in that reflection, I saw something I had been looking at for a year. My body had been building, killing me. The headaches, the gut, the fatigue that would not lift no matter how much coffee or chai I poured. I had been telling myself I was working hard. The truth was my body was paying off a credit card I never read. That night, I asked myself a question. Not how do I work harder? A different question. What would this business look like if my body wasn't a renewable source? The dark monitor moment came through. The braces came in reflection. Once I asked the right question, the answer was really, really uncomfortable. We talked about it. Nine businesses across my career, five complete, unambiguous failures. I wasn't failing because I wasn't smart enough. I wasn't failing because I wasn't working hard enough. I was failing because I was the single point of failure for everything. Every lead, every follow up, every client question, every scheduling problem, all of it ran through me. I was the bottleneck. And I had no idea how to get out of my own way. A quick side note for my listeners, I don't want to make it a lecture if you are AI curious. You have used ChatGPT a few times. And you wonder any of this is real for a small business. Stay with me. If you are AI enthusiast, you have built a few automations and you want to see a real production setup, I'm about to walk you through mine. If you are an AI skeptic, you think AI workforce is a vapor fair. Today I'm going to tell you about agents that ran my morning standup while I was having a chai or a coffee. So you decide. So most coaches sell sacrifice like it's just few hours skip. So most coaches sell sacrifice like it's just few hours. Skip a few weekends, hit a number, you'll catch up later. This isn't true. Sacrifice doesn't build you in hours. It builds you in things you can't get back. Let me talk about some of those sacrifices. Is the weekend time which is not going to come back. Sacrifice in your health like my GERD or gut issues your energy level. You know, my son is 16 and this is my window to spend time with him. In next two or three years. That window will not return. Sacrifice in my own identity. I used to play guitar. I used to compose. The version of me that did started disappearing. That isn't a balance problem. That's a quiet eraser without sacrifice is not just a slogan. It is the refusal to treat health, family and identity in the same line item which I cannot lend it for my business. Simply put, sacrifice doesn't bill you by hours. It bill you in things that you can't get back. Which is your health, family and your own identity. I want to talk about music for a minute. Stick with me. I grew up on Indian music. Listening to kishore Kumar and R.D. berman. If you don't know that music, picture an orchestra of specialists, none of them famous on their own. All of them holding a piece of the song. The drum that holds the beat and the tempo. The bass holds the groove. The string carried emotion and the singing floats on top. Nobody played every instrument. The composer didn't even play most of them. The composer's job was the architecture and the feeling. The musician job was to hold their part with such precision that the composer's vision could come alive. This is what I am building with AI. Music and AI are cousins, not strangers. Both live and die by interpretation of rules. Music has scales, modes, time signatures, ragas. AI has context, patterns, prompts, training. Neither is freedom from rules. Both are mastery of them. But both reward a flow. A good drummer, as an example, doesn't think about the next beat. A good AI agent doesn't think about the next task. Once the part is internalized, the energy moves to the music. Both ultimately serves emotion. Music plays and human emotion. It's noise could be both. AI is useful when it gives a human more room to feel and decide. Anything else is just automation. So think about AI workforce like this. I am the composer. Maya holds the rhythm of the day. Morgan holds the melody of the brawn. Sasha holds the baseline of the pipeline. Owen holds the harmony between projects. FIO tunes the instruments and I get to play the lead. I get to feel what I lost. When I was the whole band, I was trying to play drums and bass and keys lead all at once. The song was unrecognizable. It was just noise loud enough to hide the silence underneath. What I got back. I picked up the guitar again last month. 20 minutes. First time in over a year. That's the proof. I was trying to play every damn instrument. AI let me become the composer again. There's a song from 1979. Movie name is Golmal. RD Berman composed it, Kishore Kumar sang it and Gulzar wrote the verse. The line is. So this literally translates to the moment that's coming is already on its way to being gone. If you can live a whole lifetime inside it. Because that this moment, this particular moment, the one passing right now, is leaving. I think about that song. When people ask me why I build an AI workforce, they expect me to say to grow faster or to make more money. That's not the real answer. The real answer is this song. I build an AI workforce so I could be in the moment when it arrives. So when my son walks into the room at 4pm, I am not three emails deep in my head. So when my wife and I sit at the backyard, I am there, not still in tomorrow's pipeline. So when I pick up the guitar, I am playing the guitar. Tomorrow's work needs to get done. The follow up needs to happen, the content needs to publish, the pipeline needs to move. But none of that needs me to be the one doing it in this moment. Maya does the morning brief, Sasha drafts the proposal, Morgan shifts the post, the orchestra holds the song. And I get to be in the room when the moment arrives. This song from R.D. verman taught me what AI is for. Not for tomorrow, but today. AI doesn't give me more tomorrows. It gives me back my today. I also want to talk to a group. Nobody talks to disabled founders, neurodivergent founders, founders starting from zero with no payroll. AI is the most powerful tool you ever have had Access to almost no one has told you that I don't have unlimited stamina. My business cannot depend on my body holding up. AI gives me reach, my legs cannot. The standup runs while I'm still in bed. The pipeline review writes itself while I am at physical therapy. The content publishes while I am on the handbike. This is not a luxury, it is my access. I am dyslexic. I think in pictures and structures, not paragraphs. AI built around me. Let me see my business as a map, not a stack of emails. I know founders with anxiety, with adhd, with depression, seasons. They are all struggling with the same thing. AI is a cognitive prosthetic. Yes, I said it. AI is a cognitive prosthetic. It holds the part that crash when your brain is having a hard day. I work in enterprises. I sit in Microsoft rooms watching Fortune 500, spends millions in data and AI projects and transformations. The same capability is now sitting on my laptop for the cost of a cup of coffee a day. The kid at home wondering how to start a business doesn't need an investor or an investor money to compete with an enterprise marketing department anymore. The door is open for you. So let me bring this home to my own businesses today. Think AI is a Microsoft certified data and AI firm. Data and AI Studio is my solo business for coaching and life to 2.0 passions. Underneath both the through line remains the same. I'm a disabled founder building tools so others who were told they could not can. AI is access for the founders whose body or brain or wallet was never going to play fair. AI finally evens that song now before AI got real I tried what every founder tries. The VAs great people well meaning they needed more management than they saved me. I traded one job for three. The agencies beautiful decks, not a whole lot of results. The software, every tool that promised to automate my business. I spent more time configuring these tools than running the company and the pattern I missed. Every solution required me at the center. The VA is reported to me. The agency needed my approval. The CRM needed me to log in. I had built a slightly more expensive version of the same trap which is me needed everywhere. So what I realized I didn't need more people. I needed better systems sometimes. In the last 18 months AI shifted from being a research paper to a thing I could actually deploy. I spent a year building what I needed instead of buying what didn't work. The first morning I got an email from my own chief of staff at 7am with my day layout. You know I Have an amazing year and her name is Mary and she is wonderful. She takes care of everything that I forget. But that's beside the point. My chief of staff now can do repeating things so that it can free Mary's life and my life. Start managing things which we don't want to and we can use our life for something more important, which is family and your own identity. This also keeps me disciplined. The first time one of my agents wrote me a copy, I would not have written. It uses my own speaking and writing DNA and it wrote in a way I wished I ever had. Felt like watching one of my musicians taking a solo. I didn't know they had it in them. The first week I closed the laptop at 5pm with no backlog. I sat with that for a long time and started thinking, what did I build? So what's an AI workforce? I'm calling them my own AI crew. It's not a chatbot, it's not a magic prompt. It's not another software subscription. It's a workforce. Each agent has a job, a memory, a daily routine, a folder that they own. They wake up on their own based on their own schedule. They do the work, they write back and they go to sleep. They also learn based on the feedback I give, based on what's happening, what they do. And they all brief me up in the morning so they do their own standup and when I get up for my morning coffee brief, I see the whole transcription, what happened, where I needed, what actions they need from others. So it's not a chatbot, it's a workforce. So let me introduce you to my team. Maya, my AI Chief of staff, morning brief, calendar, inbox, follow ups and also my commitments for the day. It takes care of it, it works with Mary now and use her human supervision. Morgan, my AI CMO manages my content calendar, my LinkedIn video, podcast publisher, my brand wise. Now Morgan cannot do everything. So like this video, it's either me or Mary who would be editing it. But the rest of the automation, rest of the management, rest of the polishing can be managed by Morgan and her agents and her employees. Sasha, my AI VP of Sales, pipeline reviews, proposal drafts, deal updates, weekly sales reports, all taken care by her. Oven, my AI VP of operation, project execution, vendor management, vendor contract management, vendor coordination, delivery, health and client expectation management, all taken care by him. Felix, my AI cfo, invoicing, expense tracking, month end close, financial reporting, working with my accounting team. Harper, my AI VP of HR roster, vendor onboarding, skill tracking and in future comps and benefits. It's all taken care by Harper and my most favorite employee fio. My AI cto the agent that maintains the fleet of agents and build what I want to build. At times it even guesses what I really want to build and give me suggestions. Every AI on my team has a human counterpart. They co own the work. Same task list, same queue, same standard of done. This is not AI replacing humans. Mary sees the same brief Maya writes. We are on the same thread on imessage and we both see the same thing. Whatever Maya is writing Pranav and Sasha tech team on the pipelines Janhvi and Felix tech team on accounting, cash flows, profit and loss in managing the books. AI multiplies the humans on my team. It does not push them out. The pairings are by design so let me walk you through my Monday morning 7am Standups fire daily standup page in notion populates while I'm still running family course, dropping the dash off and doing other things 7:15 Maya iMessage me a brief top three priorities, calendar watchlist, blockers 9:00am I open the laptop one command, tools, today's task schedule and deal watch list. Now I'm a big fan of top three. So I find my top three and my AI understand how to pick up my right top three. It also gives me manifestations, gratitude and some of the other things that I want to manage. It keeps a focus on my health. If I'm missing the exercise three day in a row, it will prompt me for that. It will try to find a time block for me for that and make sure that I follow that routine. So throughout the day, the skills runs, the triggers, publishing fires. When a content row is approved, I stay in the work that only I can do. And now in evening one command closes the day journal commits. I create a reflection. The next morning brief reflects what just happened and give me any pointers to improve. I have a hand bike for people who don't know what that is. It's a bike you pedal with your hands or arms. For someone like me who can't depend on his legs the way most people can, it's freedom. It's the closest thing I get to running. For about half a year, that handbike sat in the corner of my garage. I walk past it every single morning. Every morning I would tell myself this weekend. And then the weekend goes away because I'm fighting fires during the weekend. I want to be honest about what the bike represented here. It was an exercise. It was a piece of me I had quietly put on A shelf because the business needed every hour I had. The bike was my health, my hobby, my time outside and above all, my dignity all rolled into one. I had let the business eat all four. Now, three months into running AI workforce, the morning brief came in every day. Maya had it covered, the pipeline moved, Shasha had it covered, the content shipped, Morgan had it covered. And I had a Saturday morning with no fire to put out. I went down to my garage, aired up the tires. I rode my bike for 20 minutes. The 20 minutes of serenity and peace and the life that I can get back without any sacrifice. It was the first time in months my body had felt the wind. And I sat with my coffee for a minute and I thought, what did I build? This is not for revenue. This is not for scale. This, this is what I built. My own life without sacrifice. The hand bike was the proof, not the revenue. The bike itself. I'm not going to sit here and tell you AI does everything. It doesn't and it shouldn't. I cannot build trust with a new client over coffee. AI cannot sit in a hard conversation with a struggling team member. AI cannot smell when a deal is going sideways. AI cannot decide what to build next. That part is yours. And most importantly, AI cannot pick up the guitar that I always wanted to pick up. So the rule I live by in my workforce, anything touches money, signs a contract or sends a first message to a client requires me. Period. AI is not touching it. The system is fast because these boundaries are clear. Now you would ask, where should I start? Here's what I would advise. Pick one role that you do not want to do in next 90 days. It's either EA content, sales, follow up or even operations. Just one. Write the job description, the kind that you would write to post a job on LinkedIn. Use a tool, cloud, cowork, cloud code, codex, anti gravity, or even cursor. Build the smallest version, first, one skill, one routine and one weekly review. Run it for two weeks before you add a second one. The mistake everyone makes, they try to build the whole org chart on day one. Build one role, get it solid, then promote the next. And if you need help, I'm here for you. Text me on LinkedIn and I can help. I'm building a business coaching program, Grow without sacrifice. So if you don't want to do it alone, I'm going to have a pilot group where five or 10 people would do it together so that you can learn with each other and build your own AI workforce. Now, every solo entrepreneur is different, so we need to build it according to what your workforce looks like, what pain you are facing, and how AI workforce can help you. That's the episode a reflection in a dark monitor, a composer who finally stopped trying to play Every Instrument, an R.D. burman song about a moment that's already on its way to being gone, a hand bike that started moving again, and an AI workforce that keeps the rhythm so I can be in the room when that moment arrives. The program I'm building around all of this is called Grow Without Sacrifice. The name is the Promise. We don't trade health for revenue. We don't trade presence for growth. We don't erase as parts of being ourselves that made us interesting in the first place. If this episode lended for you, here's what I would love. Pick the role you would first hire. Write one page job description send it to me on LinkedIn. I'll tell you if it's the right place to start.
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You have been listening to Think AI podcast with Dave. Take one idea from this episode and
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turn it into action.