Leveraging Outcomes with AI

Brad Costanzo is a serial entrepreneur, marketing consultant, investor, and podcast host known for his expertise in business growth strategies and leveraging artificial intelligence. He is the founder and CEO Costanzo Marketing Group as well as the principal of Costanzo Capital. Brad also hosts the Bacon Wrapped Business podcast, where he shares insights and actionable strategies for entrepreneurs. He is also the founder and CEO of Accelerated Intelligence AI, focusing on AI advisory and consulting.

Episode Highlights

2:59 – Technology is a lever for outcomes. “Right now, I do AI consulting for business owners who are looking for pragmatic, tactical, applicable approaches as opposed to the hardcore engineering, large language model programming, etc. I got into this space because I was a boutique growth advisor, focusing on marketing and growth for all different types of businesses. I've always utilized technology to help me, and I adopted it really quickly when it came out. I'm a serial entrepreneur that is always focusing on the outcomes. Technology has always just been a lever for the outcome, so I bring the lens of both: how do we use AI to accelerate the pace of growth and the time we have in our lives? Going back a little bit further, I've had a number of companies ranging from software to publishing to consulting to coaching to e-commerce and physical products. Some of them have worked out and some of them have not, but through it all, I built my career trying to understand why people buy, what makes money, and how to use technology. When I got into my first real business, the idea of global outsourcing started to get really big. You could hire virtual assistants in India, Philippines or wherever, but to me, that was the precursor to things like AI. AI is outsourcing your work to somebody who's really insanely intelligent, productive, capable, and even cheaper than global overseas talent. Prior to that, I was a real estate investor and a financial advisor, and I've always had entrepreneurial style jobs. That was just a work ethic that was instilled in me from a young age. I grew up in a small town outside of St. Louis and got out of there right after college because the coasts were calling my name. I went to Florida, then Texas, and now I'm in San Diego with my wife living on the beach. Although I’m living on the beach, my head is inside a computer more often than I wish it was until my AI clone takes over and does all my work.”

6:21 – Keeping up with the ever-changing world of AI. “Honestly, I don't. It is moving so rapidly that I don't think anybody can. It causes a large degree of FOMO, fear of missing out, because it changes so quick. Being in the business is maybe even worse because I'm neck deep in it and I get paid to stay up to speed. For other people who aren't looking at it every day, they see it happening too fast and tune it out, much to their disadvantage. If you put blinders on, you're going to be screwed. I like to say this is the shiny object you cannot afford to ignore. It isn’t optional. That being said, it is hard to keep up with, but my motto is fool around and figure it out. I also have a lot of colleagues and go to a lot of masterminds that are doing AI stuff, so I try to keep my finger on the pulse. It took me about a year and a half to really realize you don't have to keep up with everything because the goal of AI is not to master all aspects of AI. The goal of AI is to make your life better, faster, and less expensive than you ever have before, and to remove the bottlenecks and hurdles that are already in your business. I get clients all the time that come to me enamored with what AI can do, and they're really excited, but I have to slow their roll. It's good to be excited about a lot of things, but it's going to overwhelm them the minute they try to do them all. I back them out to tell me the problems, constraints, bottlenecks or heaviest buckets in their businesses and go from there.”

13:29 – 5 Buckets of AI’s Framework. “I call it my five buckets framework. The whole goal of this is to simplify AI because it's really big and broad, and if you're not paying attention to it, it's too much. I realized AI only does five things. There's a lot of things in these five things, but it is only five real tasks: it helps you think, create, communicate, analyze, and automate.

• Thinking. A lot of people who've played with ChatGPT are brainstorming, researching, ideating with it. I think of this as all the things that the public doesn't see. The behind the scenes.

• Create. Well, it helps you create text, audio, images, videos, and combinations of those. If you want to write a blog post with just text, it can help. If you want to create an entire podcast or do a video where the script, audio and video has been done by AI, it can help. AI can even create derivative shorts of that video by itself.

• Communicate. Think of these as the chat bots on a website via SMS or even a virtual phone agent that talks exactly like a human. It can make appointments, take sales calls, help with inbound and outbound, etc. The communication bucket is probably the closest to the cash register for most companies because it just communicates with clients on a consistent basis.

• Analyze. It helps you analyze things quantitatively so you can upload statistics, business intelligence and spreadsheets with customer buying patterns and find stories in the data. You can also upload large documents and ask AI to analyze it to make sure it is not confusing or boring and then help you fix it.

• Automate. Automation has been around a long time. AI can be programmed that, when this event happens, it triggers itself to do things behind the scenes without human help. Instead of doing it manually, you can insert AI in there, so there can be an AI brain that both analyzes and creates something else. The limit is your imagination when it comes to the automation side.

The reason I call them buckets is because as you go through your business, life or career, we all have to think, create, communicate, analyze, and automate things. Which of those buckets is the heaviest right now without AI? What are you lugging around that is spending a lot of time, money, mind share, and energy on that you wish you could get rid of? This is where the real threat exists for job security. If I can use AI to lighten that bucket’s load and to spend less money, time and energy, I could revolutionize my business. You can take time off or find a way to innovate something else. To me, that removes a lot of the overwhelm with what's possible. Half the game of knowing what's possible is to play. Find out what's possible. That's the non-technical, but real way to keep from getting overwhelmed.”

19:21 – MAC Method & Future You AI Coach. “I call this the MAC method: Mentor, Assistant, Critic. If you're confused, have ChatGPT be your mentor. Ask it to give you ideas on how you can use it. Let it teach you how to use it. Then, make it your assistant. Let it give you a prompt to use, then run that prompt. Look at the output and, if it is not great, have it critique its own output to do it better and it will. Why break your brain over anything? Why don't I ask it how it would do it if it were me? Another part is the therapist. I use this to get people in the door - I call this the Future You AI Coach. I have three primary prompts, and they help create a future self-coach. For instance, I have extrapolated who I am and who I want to be. What are my toxic traits or limiting beliefs? What are all the things holding me back? I then program it to talk to me as me in the future who has overcome all these things. Whenever I ask for advice, it comes back and tells me it remembers the day that we faced this issue. It remembers that this was my strength, this was my weakness, and this is what I did to overcome it. I'm being self-coached from the future. Psychologically, I just have to follow in my future self's footprints.”

33:18 – The different types of AI. “There are different types of artificial intelligence. There's machine learning, which has been around forever. It goes behind the scenes to interpret and analyze. Generative AI recently came out, which generates new things. You can ask ChatGPT to write a joke, a song, an email, and it’ll generate that. It's been trained like a human and creates something that's never existed before. It's not scraping and repurposing - it's generating something brand new. Agentic AI is when an agent uses generative AI to mimic a human. It can do multiple steps at once. ChatGPT has something called operator on their pro plan. I can tell it to go to this website, download this, research that, draft an email, and it can, in an automated way, interact with different programs and do a number of tasks as opposed to requiring you to go back and forth with it. The other day, I was playing with Genspark and asked it to create a visually stunning itinerary for a three-day trip to San Diego. It produced this really beautiful webpage with itinerary. I also told it to research the top seafood restaurants in town. On the output it gave me, there was one restaurant that had a call button, so I clicked call. It called the reservationist and sent me the recording via text message. I did this all automatically - that's agentic and just one microscopic example of what's possible. When people talk about job replacement, this is what they worry about. Agents that can do all the things. AI is not going to replace you. People using AI will replace you. That's why I think it's important to focus on the human touch, experience, and empathy that AI can't necessarily replicate. It is a brave new world, but those of us who harness AI, like Tony Stark putting on Iron Man suit, are going to come out.”

39:35 - The technology is already there, so use it! “The technology is there technically now. Meta and Ray-Ban went into a partnership, and they've got the Meta AI glasses. It can take pictures, play songs, tell you what you're looking at, and more. Everything is there, but it's just not as ubiquitous right now. Imagine everybody's wearing glasses that are AI enabled with bone conduction, so we don't need to put something in our ears. Now imagine your future coach that you've programmed to know you really well is always paying attention and giving you advice through what you see. Don't eat that. Put it down. Don't say that. Save this. Imagine it's that angel and devil on your shoulder – what is possible?”

Episode Resources

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