The Businesses Using AI Right Now Are Pulling Away – Here’s How to Catch Up: Piers Linney
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What happens to businesses that wait too long to adopt AI? Adam Stott chats with Piers Linney, explains why the gap between businesses using AI and those ignoring it is growing fast, how to automate the work eating up your time, and why being late to this shift could make it almost impossible to catch up.
Piers Linney is a former Dragon on Dragons’ Den, serial entrepreneur, investor and co-founder of Implement AI. He has built, invested in and sold businesses across technology, telecoms and cloud infrastructure, and previously served on the board of the British Business Bank.
He explains:
- Why you should stop thinking about AI and start thinking about automation
- How businesses can replace hours of admin, prospecting and customer service with AI
- Why small businesses now have the tools to compete with much larger companies
- Why businesses that delay adopting AI risk falling further and further behind
- How AI can transform customer engagement, sales and personalised marketing
Chapters
• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:01:11 Piers Linney’s Journey Into Business
• 00:03:03 The First Business He Started At 13
• 00:06:05 Why Every Entrepreneur Needs To Learn Sales
• 00:08:06 From Lawyer And Banker To Entrepreneur
• 00:11:13 The Reality Of Building Your First Business
• 00:13:01 Learning Through Failure
• 00:14:24 Why You Should Play To Your Strengths
• 00:16:37 Building And Losing Millions In Tech
• 00:18:37 How Piers Ended Up On Dragons’ Den
• 00:23:18 Why Successful People Should Give Back
• 00:26:12 Ads
• 00:27:19 What Dragons’ Den Is Really Like
• 00:29:00 Piers’ Best Dragons’ Den Investment
• 00:30:23 How To Use Your Personal Brand Properly
• 00:31:18 Inside The British Business Bank During Covid
• 00:33:40 Why Piers Is Going All In On AI
• 00:34:02 The Jobs AI Is Already Changing
• 00:36:34 How Implement AI Helps Businesses Automate
• 00:36:53 Stop Thinking AI. Think Automation.
• 00:38:01 The ROI Of Replacing Manual Work With AI
• 00:38:44 The AI Tools Every Business Owner Should Start Using
• 00:40:55 Why Fear Of AI Could Be Fatal For Businesses
• 00:42:04 Why Businesses That Wait May Never Catch Up
• 00:43:05 Understanding Exponential Change
• 00:43:42 How To Stay On Top Of AI
• 00:44:31 Creating AI Avatars In Different Languages
• 00:45:50 Why AI Gives Small Businesses A Huge Opportunity
• 00:46:12 Why Big Companies Are Investing Millions Into AI
• 00:47:02 The Future Of Hyper-Personalised Marketing
• 00:47:50 Outro
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The following is a verbatim copy of the episode transcript and as such may contain minor grammatical errors.
There’s a huge gap to businesses that are using AI and those that have implemented it and are replacing people’s time using the right AI tools. And that’s what we discuss on today’s episode of Business Growth Secrets.
Don’t think about AI, think about automations.
Where do you spend hours doing stuff that you shouldn’t be doing? Admin the mundane, automate it.
I take you behind the curtain into one of our Business Icons event, where I am with Piers Linney. Piers is a former dragon from Dragon’s Den, one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the UK and a pioneer in AI.
people said to me, people like you don’t become lawyers. You know, you go to the right school. You didn’t go to Oxbridge, got Oxbridge, then you didn’t go to Oxbridge, you know, don’t get your hopes up.
So I became a lawyer.
In today’s episode, if you are that business owner looking to get your time back to understand AI in a better way, you’re going to find a tremendous amount of value. As I take you live into the room for an interview with peers. Let’s go on to today’s episode of Business Growth Secrets.
stuff. Well, thank you for coming. As I was saying, there we. I survived my mountain biking weekend. Yeah. Was it fun? I tried to kill myself just for you.
Yeah, well, you made it here, which is awesome. So, look, really been looking forward to having you here as a guest. We wanted to have you for quite some time. You know, because of the broad experience you’ve got in terms of building businesses and, you know, and we’ve got so many people in the room that are looking to to grow and scale their businesses.
And we hear from them a bit later. But you’ve had all this experience, you know, finance, being on the board of the British bank, launching businesses, selling businesses, scaling businesses, being a dragon lawyer. There’s a lot here. How do we unpack that? And if you took us all the way back to the start of where you started out, you know, what did a young peers look like?
And and how have you gone on to have this amazing career? The young peers are the slimmer, better looking version of me. So I grew up in, in the, in the Pennines, basically in Lancashire. So I was born in Stoke on Trent, I was about nine and I was always fascinated by the Industrial revolution. Right. It was all the mills and the weavers cottages always fascinated me.
And it talks about the entrepreneurs, you know, the, the Stephenson, the Isabel Kingdom, Brunel’s, all these kind of entrepreneurs in just the revolution and the Americans, your Vanderbilts. Carnegie’s fascinated me, and I always wanted to be in business. Now, I didn’t even know what that meant. And where I grew up, everybody had a grandmother quarry. Eddie had a building business.
Derek had a joinery business. There were quite sort of manual labeled stuff your hands, really. When asked if they wanted to go into business and finance, everybody looks at me like I was insane. So when I was about 13, my first business I had was that I had a paper around 5 pounds a week, and in those days when it snowed up north, it covered your car literally.
So it was quite a lot of hard work. And I thought, there’s got to be a better way. And one morning I got to be a better way. My late father said to me when my son, because Sunday morning the newsagents asked me why didn’t deliver newspapers? He had to go and get it because I think they were big or whatever.
They couldn’t be bothered to go and get my paper and I’ll give you a tip. So I got my BMX, went down to the bike shop a half mile away, picked up his paper and it gave me a tip. You can see where this is going. So then I thought, hang on a minute next door neighbor, that’s great.
Can you get mine before? Anyway, I bought this sort of Sunday morning paper round business, which was a massive bag, but of course I couldn’t go and buy the papers from the newsagent because I’d be. I’d be charging the customer what’s costing me no margin. So I’m already learning these things at the age of 13 about margin. So I disintermediation local news agent went straight to the wholesaler.
Really? Wow. But that did and and got this big bundle of papers dropped on the door. Like seeing films every Sunday morning sorted out rotor who got what, delivered them at £20 on a Sunday morning for about four hours work. So I learned they’re talking about, you know, what you learned is that if you see a problem, a niche or you solve it for somebody, that’s your problem, solve it for somebody and you can do it where there’s enough money was a margin for your time to make it worthwhile.
And, you know, let’s not forget, you put a lot of hard working. Let’s not forget that. Then you can create some wealth and make some money. And I wanted to buy a BMX bike. I’m still in bikes. I love bikes and allow me to buy my first in a posh BMX basically, but I took a lot of weight.
You remember one? It was. It was a Curtis. I’m actually still helping the bike company today. Curtis Curtis BMX I’m talking to the guys. I had a mongoose to remember them. Yeah yeah yeah that’s cool. Yeah man was mine was a British brand. All right. But I took this all away and you learn a lot from it. Then I kind of took through and at the age about 60, I think it was, it wasn’t cool to a paper anymore.
So it was my first exit and I sold it for £200. Did you know I was in M&A? So you can see the whole almost the whole life cycle of a business. The days we didn’t want to get out of bed, but it was raining. But that’s about was how I got into it. And then after that I was, I don’t know, old well in the room, but who remembers better, were better, were cool.
So delivering pots and pans and things to help her and an older lady open a jar. And I was selling things and I was selling these, like, door to door stuff. And that’s where I learned to sell, because nobody really wanted a bit of rubber to get a little off a jar, but I could sort of try and persuade you to buy one off me.
And that’s why I understood about, you know, more. That was more, I’d say a bit about selling a bit about customer service and also dealing at quite a young age with quite a large company as it was. How important was that learning to sell? Because I truly find that obviously we train thousands of business owners and, you know, we have done for many, many years.
Often if this piece is missing, it can really, really, you know, make it tough for an entrepreneur, isn’t it. So learning to sell early, how much do you think that helped you? So I think I made a video on this on a poster somewhere once. So in retail it can be location, location, location in any business we tell included is sell, sell and sell some more if you.
So you probably you’ve learned building businesses that revenue solves a lot of problems. Just money just coming in the door. You can make lots of mistakes with revenue. If you haven’t got revenue, make a mistake even more costly but you just slows you down. Can be very, very risky. But I like that way of putting it though I think that that you can’t sell.
So forget location case location sell sell sell. So if you can’t sell or even if you try to learn to sell and you’re not confident, you’re not having the right personality or you’re not very good at it, you’ve got to find somebody else who can. If it’s online, it’s digital. You’ve got to find someone understands and really can be Ainley retentive about data and analytics and converting and a B testing, because that’s not everybody either.
So if you can’t do all fashion sales I’ve done or to the digital marketing which is kind of sales on a page, find someone who can. Otherwise you will not succeed. And that’s simple. And you learn in that a better way going out so you aren’t thoughts at all knocking on doors. So you actually went door to door.
You delivered a pamphlet, give it a bit of chat. And then he came back a week later, said anything you want. Oh, look to that, look to that. Then you be kind of like pointing at the page saying, oh, you should definitely get an easy whole can opener or whatever. And then you sold it. And then after that I did things like a well, university.
Of course I did party, things like that. And at law school I did company formations and how to form companies. And when I was a trainee solicitor, I did film finance. So EA’s like funding into films you could put some money in and get a part in the film was an extra, usually a corpse on a on a battlefield.
So it wasn’t. It wasn’t that exciting. So from even from my paper, and I guess after that I was always in business. So I was sitting there in my as a banker at Credit Suisse after being a lawyer in the city of my M&A banker. Even then, I was doing the film finance and then a was a side project called Side Hustles.
Now, I don’t like the word hustle. It’s not hustle, it’s a business. And then that became something I stepped into out of the city, into my first com in 99. What mate. Because you do you had that very much that that corporate career you were and those companies you mentioned Credit Suisse. And so when you look at my you look at my CV and you go, well, you know, you went to Manchester University, you got a degree in law and accounting.
You then went to a law school, decent law school. He then joined the good law firm, qualified as a lawyer. You then joined a good bank. He then moved up to a better bank and became a hedge fund manager. Then you left? Yeah, well, it looks like I had a plan. Yeah, if you look at it from my end.
Right? I’d never clue any of that was. I didn’t know what being a lawyer was for the university. I didn’t know what being a banker was until I was a lawyer. And none of this stuff. I never Scooby at all. And that sort of battle my way. Climb upon a box and look over the hedge and see. That’s interesting.
I want to do that. But the beauty of it is, I always say that when I said I want to be a corporate lawyer,
people said to me, people like you don’t become lawyers. You know, you go to the right school. You didn’t go to Oxbridge, got Oxbridge, then you didn’t go to Oxbridge, you know, don’t get your hopes up.
So I became a lawyer.
When I was a lawyer, people said to me, I want to be in the West Bank. And they were like, it’s very hard to move from law to banking. Look, I did an accounting and law degrees. I knew numbers. And again, people like you don’t become investment bankers. So I became an investment banker.
So you can see I was always rebelling, quite blinkered, quite blinkered in a way, but very, very determined to sort of get on. And I think that rebellious streak though of is quite a good thing for an entrepreneur. You know, that if somebody says that you can’t do it, if somebody says you can’t have it, and just actually having that strong will to go and create it is a is a real entrepreneurial dangerousness.
If you’re if you’re successful, how you measure that. And so imagine you’ve got your chips and you put it on red. Red comes up. Yeah. I’ll put it on red. Red comes up I’ll put it on black. This time black comes up and you think I’m a genius. That is so true. Put them all in red and black comes up.
That’s. That is so true. You’ve got to be slightly careful that you’re hedging your bets along the way. And when you’re when you’re successful, you’re not just putting all on red again. And it is. I’ve definitely been there 100% where you feel like you everything you touch turns to gold and then you realize it sinks. Yeah. You know, because of that, you feel like a fool.
Yeah. Well, why would I have done that? Yeah. But again, it’s experience. Yeah, definitely. Definitely is experience. So. So when you went through that process and you go out and you, you step out of that world into starting your business, what kind of what did you experience? What changed for you? Did you see things differently? Did you. Yes.
It was an interesting time. So I kind of left. So I was I was a lawyer. I joined Credit Suisse First Boston, which was like Goldman Sachs, big banks. I was only 25, but my first kind of debit card now for all this is grab a flat in there for cash. Almost my bonus. I was giving my mum bonuses and she was crying and it was just like money and and I was crying because the problem is, no matter how much money you earned at that age, you spent, you spent 110% of it.
So, so, so at that issue, property prices were growing then. So that was all right. But what was interesting, I think, is that so I, I could understood law, finance. I was good at presenting things. A lot of banking PowerPoint and presentations, not the numbers. It’s selling deals to companies like, you know, we were trying to merge a Halifax and that kind of thing into each boss.
And, and I came out and I thought, well, I’ve got all these skills. How hard can it be? So you have a business plan and you go out and someone gives you about £1 million, I think, put 1 million pounds and you’ve got a business plan, you get your little office. Well, how hard can it be building a business?
And then very, very quickly reality bites, you know, hiring people, building a team technology, managing technology, building technology, which was as simple as it is today, cloud technology. So we realized very quickly, actually the the reality is quite different to the textbook. You know, it is. And essentially it’s about people managing people. And how did you learn on the job?
How did you learn on the job? You started to build that team out, but maybe the first time you’d done that part of it, what was it like for you? So I’m quite a fast learner. I’ve tended to have until I had one business more recently, which didn’t quite work out where I had a co-founder. So it was, I found as a sort of augmented me, augmented each other.
So I learned very quickly. But you tend to learn by making lots of mistakes, you know, both in terms of strategy, execution, people, timing of them. But we had in the. Com phase, this is late 99. What was interesting is we raised the money and in March, you know, the bubble burst quite literally. So suddenly we’re going from raising money.
Well I left Credit Suisse, I left you see the films like these, like Hollywood films were the big bank and they get fired. They got a box of a plant in it, literally like that. So you go and get your bonus, make sure it’s you make sure to have your bank accounts. Yep. And then you go and resign and they give you a box in your plant and off you go.
And as I left the building, people say, well, what are you going to do? Were you leaving? I’m going to start com. I raised 700 grand leaving the building. Did you? I probably close about 400 of it. But the people that are up on some money, that’s how. That’s what it was like. So I went from that to halving the size of the team.
Couldn’t raise any more money doing a down round with those listing investors and then me having to end up leaves. I was too expensive as well, even though I was only half less for 10% were known as a banker. And then my co-founders family funding and I left. So I saw kind of really a whole economic cycle that probably take you a decade, normally a bit shorter now, but a decade in about 14 months.
So I learned a lot very quickly. And then I went into dance music and music and record labels and all sorts of interesting things. But eventually then what I did was I came out of that and I thought, what is my course? What can I do? Which is quite important is, you know, play, play to your strengths. Don’t just always try and reinvent something that you don’t know anything about, or you sit on YouTube without a book about, you know, do things you’re innately or can learn to be good at and then just be world class at it.
And I thought, what? I’m very good actually selling and finance and being innovative in finance. So I ended up I ended up going to Manhattan. I built a website, looked like Goldman Sachs, went to Manhattan. People looked at my CV, kind of stacked up, and I ended up getting lots of hedge funds, funds that do to the technical investments.
And I put in putting hedge fund money into broadly, mostly UK listed company investment opportunities. So I became an estate agent for hedge fund money. That’s my first made some cash. Yeah. So you playing to my strengths which was selling and finding financing. So understanding the finance world and bringing it to people that pretty much didn’t understand it almost.
Yeah. So solving that problem and that set you on your own, set you on the path, raise the money. And then I was always I wasn’t I wasn’t spending it, I was I was investing in friends businesses, trying to do a bit of M&A. It just fascinated the whole thing, helping someone said a company up, buying a bit of a business.
Then we bought a couple of businesses and one of them was a we bought off Dixons. That was quite, quite big money by now, buying companies like, you know, for 5 million maybe it’s not enormous for 5 million. And then we bought a company off Dixons, which was Currys and it was a mobile phone business they were interested in, and we built it into quite a big business, about 4 to 5 million in revenue by 5 billion EBITDA.
And then we sold that. So my first kind of made money like income and capital. Yeah. That was the first kind of exit. Then after that a few sort of exited. But what I found with me. I have to keep planting seeds like a farmer. Otherwise I can’t harvest them. I can’t, I can’t sort of I get this sort of dry patches sometimes.
Then after that, really, I went into cloud. I bought a business in cloud. This is like cloud infrastructure. Everyone’s used to it now. You think about, you know, think about it back in the day, you know, you were putting servers in a room in the corner of your office and you were calling it the server room. And that’s all in the cloud.
You don’t think about it. And I was one of the first. Well, my business was the pioneers trying to get businesses to adopt cloud technology. And we built that up and we won a massive tender tender. Didn’t the tender will mention the name big telecoms businesses didn’t get to market in time and we ran out of money. I sell it in a fire sale.
I lost about £2 million. Did you really? Wow. And it’s so interesting. You mentioned cloud. You know, I remember many, many. I think this must have been. I remember them talking about cloud. And I remember watching Marc Benioff talk about the launch of Salesforce and at a Tony Robbins event. And I was really young. I mean, this was like ages ago, and that went on to be a multi-billion pound company.
But what’s really interesting is as we were set outside and we’ll come back to this maybe in a minute. You were talking to me about AI and how that’s where your focus is, or a lot of your focus is at the moment. I think that’d be really interesting, which will come to you in a minute. But one of the things that I’ve been doing with the team, obviously, what an amazing career team, right.
You know, amazing. And obviously you have a very strong mindset. And you’ve got to be, you know, you got to 2010. Yeah. Well you know 2010. Well you then got this fast forward a little bit. We’ve been talking about halo effect today and building a brand and how when you become known, things typically become easier for you. You get more opportunities.
Talk about that as what was the case? Yeah. No, I’d be really interested to hear your take on it, which would be awesome, especially for everyone in the room, because there’s people at different stages. There’s people here that have gone on and built really great businesses. There’s some people early in the stage, some people at the beginning, some people that are looking to grow, some people looking to scale.
We’ve got all these different sizes and they’ve got to make themselves known and build that brand. I know that you took the how did you come to find yourselves after all of that, getting yourself onto Dragon’s Den? How did that come about? So you don’t kind of get yourself to kind of come and find you. So I said about 2008, I was approached by the government to be a role model for young black men and boys, and I was kind of like, why?
I never thought about it, because I was just doing my thing. And I said, well, look around you. Do you ever do you ever meet yourself? I was like, oh, you’re right, I don’t. Especially my mum’s in Barbados, my dad’s from my dad was from Manchester. So I never anyone with Caribbean heritage and anything I ever did so became a role model.
And then from that, I ended up on a list of the most influential black Britons. The hung is a hundred most influential black Britons. But that used to say in at 99, so well done. So and then through that the research is not looking at TV programs. How do I find someone that takes a few boxes wrapped? I do a comprehensive school kid, you know, mixed race, all that stuff.
Grew up in Lancashire, and I ended up doing The Secret Millionaire members of a secret. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was 2011. I was on a secret millionaire, a little, little interesting thing there. So I had a lad a lot in prison. I was in prison, basically. And the Young Offenders and he got 11 years at the age of 19 for drugs and firearms related offenses.
Wasn’t as bad as it sounds. But that’s what he got, and I, I want to mentor him. The producers lost their minds. He can’t give him money because I’m getting him money. I want to mentor him. So he came out, I did it, Molly Codling I was I was like the uncle who never had a bit of advice.
His first rent guarantee gave him a job, actually as a support engineer. And I was, you know, it business. He loved. It. Made him redundant. Slightly awkward day. He then he then started a business. Didn’t work out. Went back into sort of computers and cloud and now what, ten years later. I saw him about three weeks ago and went on to his house.
He’s probably only 130 grand a year cloud infrastructure architect with a family. So the point there is in your life, or people you work with or anyone’s life, if you can deflect it here, right? Ten years down range, right? It’s somewhere very, very different. So that’s what that start our story is about. Anyway, through that, the research is then approached me saying, you want to go and Dragon’s Den.
And I was kind of like, do I do I do I really I don’t know, and I was away, I’m busy, I was away with I’m going to drop some names now. So it was the way was to Branson at his private game reserve and call it Ulu Saber in Kruger. Not because he likes me, because I gave you a charity about 50 grand.
So so so we were all away in this place, right? It’s like a but there’s a lesson in that. Well, yeah. Yeah. And to be honest with you, I did a lot of work with Branson’s after that, and I’m, I’m still friendly with at least Holly. It was a good networking to do. Anyway. He’s got this sort of James Bond there in the bush with a satellite dish on top of it.
And they kept bringing me saying, where are you? What are you doing? We need to know. And for who do I talk to about how you mix business and the media? So I have the conversation with the Branson only having. I remember this clearly. It’s not it’s not made up reverse engineered found story. This they often are. And we’re having a corona sitting on this table looking at lions chasing impalas around.
And I went through the whole thing and he goes, no, you should do it. You’d be good at it. And people on TV like you, he said, I used to get on a plane for TV spot and don’t forget the power of TV. It’s slightly pre like, you know, Instagram taking off and he goes, you should do it.
I go, thank you for your time, I really appreciate it. And I got up to walk off and get back here. Made me call the producer who I know to this day and said and tell her that I’m in. That’s ended up on Dragon’s Den. So I get I get it now, sticking up my stinger, thinking that you’ve got to remember that this comprehensive school kid, the only black in the school of 2500 kids, a big school.
You’ve gone from there. You fell. I did my fell. My 11 plus did my O-levels twice. Did did an A level twice. So I got into law and then suddenly sitting with Sir Richard Branson. Then I ever, ever looked up to on his private game reserve, ask him for advice whether he should be a dragon on Dragon’s Den.
It’s pretty amazing wise.
It freaks me out. And I have to ask because I think really, I love the fact that you, you gave to the charity. What what what motivated you to do that was, you know, where did that come from? Well, I’ve 50 grand. Yeah. So I was able to do it. So partly it’s I’ve always been, I think philanthropist a bit strong, but I’ve always been, so my, the only meant I’ve ever really had is a chap called Sir Lisa.
So it’s kind of. This is a Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London. If you ever see the royal family out in London, coronations, funerals, weddings. He’s the mixed race looking guy in a nice black suit with a sword. He looks after the royal family and I meet him every six months and he’s like, I have a little meant. I met him about a week ago, actually two weeks ago.
Have a little mentor session and he’s actually got a coat of arms, which I aspire to have, and his coat of arms and the leaflet says do well, do good. I think that says it all, doesn’t it? So my view is, is that if you can give back, if your glasses, you know, overflowing about how much it is about a bigger glasses, you should give back.
And my focus has been diversity and inclusion, not just in terms of ethnicity. It can be gender, sexuality, anything. But my view is, is that ambition like this room? Right. Different ages, sexualities, genders, ambition for as I’m concerned, is evenly distributed, right? Access to things like this. What you do is guidance, finance, support isn’t. And you need to connect the dots because everyone should have a chance of being the best person they can be.
So if you can and what you even this room you all think you’re hearing, you’re learning, you’d be up. You’d be surprised at how much social capital you’ve already got. Yeah. And you can meet somebody just like I did with Daniel ten years ago about deflection. He met me or I did was some guidance from social capital clubs, capitals, just you, your contacts where you grew up.
You may have a bit of extra cash to help out. And by deflecting his life there, you know, ten years down range, eating a very different place. So I’ve always thought about giving back something I’ve always done. And I’ve found it about two charities. One way of sucking that aim to do that. Nice. How did you meet him as a mentor?
How did that come about? I think he’s a good example of how you get a mentor. So I met him at an event. I think he was like the sort of the black powerless where I was on his list of influential black Britons. He was number one, and I thought, I want him to be my chairman. And then we got talking.
He became my chairman. He actually sought him out. Yeah, he was my chairman in the business. It took him about a year to say yes. And then I helped. Well, I was a founding trustee of a charity he found it’s called the Alito Foundation to help, sir, sort of help more Afro-Caribbean leaders of tomorrow. And we helped to start that charity up.
And then he became my chairman. And then that business is the one that didn’t work out very, very well, the cloud business. And then but since then, he’s been my mentor and he’s the guy that people blow smoke on my backside, right. Quite often, sometimes too often. And he’s the guy that I went to about just after Covid, you know, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next.
I was just getting over, getting divorced, got lots of various issues, and I sat down. I was going about it. He kind of said to me, PSP Pierce, sorry, what? And he said, he says self-pity does not suit you.
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He’s one of the few people that can literally you do need that get out. But you do need to remember leaving. You think you know what? He’s absolutely right and sometimes you need that 100%. Yeah, that sounds so. He helped you and you took that opportunity. When you’re with Richard Branson in South Africa, you made the decision to go on dragons.
Then what happened next and how did that. I say, come on, Dragons Den, you turn up at the set, they put some makeup on. I clearly needed it. And they and they you sit there and his chair. Deborah. Peter, what the hell? And then they they come out of the lift, which is not a lift. Actually, it’s a looks like a lift.
They go in, they go in a cupboard, there’s some footage of some machinery and they come out the cupboard again. So the magic of TV and and you’ve got your 50 pal of 50, which is not actually the top 2 or 50 and they paint the sides, but the I’ll give you all the way in honor, ruining it for everybody but the, the artists who make those things.
You can be in the lift literally, where they’ve got that old paint dripping down or where some, some old canister scratched the lift side. It’s all painted, but it looks so real. It’s amazing. So you sit down there and these entrepreneurs start coming out, you know, and they you probably see, what, 12 minutes on a full pitch, maybe four and a little short version, but they’re there for an hour and a half full in them.
And I did nine deals, nine handshakes, six happened. Some don’t because they’re not really there for the deal, but there for the PR. Yeah, yeah. Some of you do something which some people do forget. It’s called due diligence. Yeah, yeah. So you actually find out that it’s just a pile of nonsense. Yeah. Yeah. Just making it up as it went along.
And then six quite got on quite. Well. One didn’t work out. I call your business but I’m still friendly with the founders. Well we’re now four. Got my money. Back comes the day where you’re like look, it’s lifestyle business. You want me involved in it more. And they’re like, okay, we’ll give you a bit of money. Jog on.
So I did, and then I invested in one called wonderfully, I’ve Got Children, these beautiful personalized books, and I think that’s the best thing ever done on Dragon’s Den. Best deal in terms of investing. Build a business, sell it. So I put in 100 grand in there for 5%. I was the first to do kind of tech deals.
Really. All the dragons. This is like Deborah, Peter and Duncan. I did Duncan quite well to this day. And they are you doing. You can’t get 5%. It’s not. This program is about you’re going to ruin it. You know, coming here changing everything. And I was like, we’re talking about it’s a tech investment for 30% of the 30 grand.
No. And they had a term sheet from a VC. So I thought well someone’s done some due diligence. Yeah. And therefore by the valuation I’ll go with it. And they sold it for it’s not a public number but I’ve got a 45 x return. Nice. Well have that right. Well done. So so you know so and that’s like a real if you know a venture capital my portfolio.
And Dragon’s Den is like the perfect miniature venture capital portfolio. A few don’t work out if you go bust what they call things you’re never going to get out of because they don’t grow enough. And one returns the fund. That’s what they call it, and that’s what it did. So a great experience. But like I saying before we came in is that you were saying that it’s always good having a profile.
And I think with a profile it’s like you need to you need to understand who you are, what it is and what you want to do with it. I wasn’t sure I ended up on TV suddenly, and they call me beloved and celebrity. You know, I didn’t go to the opening of the fridge of the opening of an envelope.
I was interested and I had to think about, you know, well, who am I? You know, what do I represent? And actually just sit down and remember, it’s probably after, well, actually sit down and think, well, who am I? What do I do with this profile? What can I do to make money fair? What can I do in terms of leverage it for good, and what else could it be used for?
It’s all about, I’d say four years probably to really sort it out. And I remember Sir Ken saying, right here, you can now become a celebrity and go in the jungle and eat which grubs, whatever the hell it is. Or you can be serious. So I became a trustee of Nestor, the UK’s largest innovation foundation. National lottery Money 600 million Foundation.
Learn a lot there and up in the board of British Business Bank during Covid to bounce back loans. We put 90 billion into the market and it’s sleep for what you’re doing. That signed up for a board meeting a month within two a week with 200 pages of reading saying, you know, should we should we should we release 15, 20 billion into the market to SMEs with no credit checks?
Is this kind of conversations? I glad we did. So I kind of went in a serious way. What was the impact of that? I mean, it’s been a longer arc. I think it’s come good over time. So do you think just celebrity first like now? They probably see me more. He’s more of a serious person. That was a celebrity.
So I haven’t been defined by Dragons Den. I think it’s quite important. And the banking that you did and you were involved in that and you did, you know, the British Business Bank was the one that did all the loans as you, as you mentioned. What do you think the impact on the economy that that will have or long term, do you think is the right decision to think it was the right deals saved it.
You think about, you know, if you’re trying to probably now people go for these committee and try and try and think about the past. If they hard to imagine what it was like to be in the past, in the future. But, you know, at the time it was like literally the economy is shutting down, literally on a daily basis.
The lights are going out. So what do we do? You need to get the money out of the door. So any barrier you put in front of it was going to be an issue. Also, creating a whole new scheme would have been difficult. It takes time. What they had was the loan guarantee scheme. So use the same rails but put a different train on it essentially, and then got it into the market and didn’t do the credit check.
So you know there’s going to be fraud and there’s going to be, you know, complications. But it’s the only way to do it and save the economy. Yeah, very massively powerful in terms of the impact that it did keep the lights on for a lot of people. Didn’t they tell people that you on the board of business, they can’t.
Sometimes I kick myself and it’s quite, quite amazing actually, that I was there at that time, which was, you know, a time for which you can have an impact on the economy for the next generations, actually. Awesome. So I guess the next question is like, what’s next? So I am so, so I’ve been involved in web 1.0, the internet.
Really? Yeah. And then I was kind of I kind of did a bit in blockchain, but everyone in blockchain got lost making money out of crypto. So deliberately that bit of social media then Web3 kind of crypto blockchain and then now the big one really is, you know, what I’m going to say is ask Mr. Intelligence. So I when so when I was a trustee of Nesta, did a lot of research on the impact of AI and robotics on regions.
So imagine that. I did a post recently that kind of blew up on LinkedIn. Imagine that in the northeast, broadly speaking, there’s a lot of call centers, right? And weighing hundreds of thousands of people. Right. The days of humans. And you can talk about this maybe in terms of your businesses, the days of humans answering the phone in first line customer support, the days having a team doing prospecting and initial prospect qualification.
They’re done. It can be done by eyes. And even last week, OpenAI launched a ChatGPT four Omni. Oh, that’s even better. I mean, they sound like humans. They can do things, they can interact, they can set appointments, they can update calendars. They can they can interact. APIs update your CRM. They’re infinitely patient. You don’t need a desk, a phone, the headset, a call center, a building, or heating rates, lights, blah, blah.
It’s all going away. The call centers going to be disappear and sucked up into the cloud anyway. So we were looking at that kind of research thing. How is it going to affect the economy? That’s what I first interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning. And then when you saw ChatGPT arrive, I thought, this is the one. Anything I’ve ever done in my whole life is pointing at this.
And I thought, do I invest in it because it changes so quickly? The things are just I’ll give you an example. But, you know, you saw there’s a model called open OpenAI Sora, which makes 62nd HD quality videos. From a prompt you can say, I want to fly through that. And I think one example of which was an old West town, it looks like an old West town.
Looks like you filmed it with a helicopter. Unbelievable. And when they posted it on Twitter because of X, X then starts populating my feed with all these videos, all these adverts from text to video startups and literally my fees full of adverts of companies have just died. So that’s the danger of AI is moving so quickly that it’s knowing where to invest the beauty of AI.
If everyone in this room is that you’ve now got cloud infrastructure, which means that you don’t need to own infrastructure, then it’s own anything at all, almost. It’s all subscription based. It’s fully scalable. And on top of that cloud infrastructure, now you’ve got large language models in AI. And that might not prove to be the technology that works.
But right now it’s a large language model. So we collectively can innovate across the top in ways that you couldn’t, you could not have dreamt of two years ago. So my view was, how do I paddle into this wave? So I started a company with another chap unknown for a while, one of my podcast few years ago. He’s a dentist by background.
He did a machine learning how to look inside your mouth with a laser and do your dentistry, and we set up a company. We thought a lot about the branding and we called it implement AI. So just say what it is on a tin basically. So we help companies understand it, embrace it and automate their business.
Don’t think about AI, think about automations.
Where do you spend hours doing stuff that you shouldn’t be doing? Admin the mundane, automate it.
And then secondly, normally where can I use technology to do things in you in interesting ways like prospecting or customer service knowledge bases. So your your company implement AI. How do you is that something that you supply businesses with that tool. So how does that work.
So we decide something. You might have a client here. So we do like Productized consulting really. So what is it. Embrace training. It’s often with this technology if I talk about it in the room a lot of you thinking what does it mean? How could I use it in my business? So let’s you’ve done some training. You don’t really understand these capabilities.
And when you did a bit of training, you can say are that’s what it can do. So actually it could automate all this crap that I do. I’m here every Tuesday morning or weekend. No one spends time with the kids that walk the dog. So it’s a bit of training. It’s a bit of understanding your workflows and processes, picking off the ones where they can add some real value and then automating them.
There’s like a pilot. Once you’re comfortable with it and you want to stand it, you start to automate everything you possibly can. So the product that you’re building will that serve businesses of all sizes or is it start off of bigger businesses? Well, yeah. The consulting the best one there. Yeah. But we work on a turn investment. So it’s just going to say look listen work out what it’s costing you today.
Say a call center in a call center. We do a lot of voice stuff in a call center. Cost you maybe add it all up 4 or 5 pounds a call. We could do it for like a pound without the stress and the training and the manpower. It just it just does it just. So if there’s one thing I for my session today, one thing you take away.
I’ve heard this. Some of the tips I’ve given you is sign up to ChatGPT Plus or Claw Pro, one of these paid for AI models, and use it. Use it. Not that they want to. I’m obsessed with Adam’s business here, but use it as a mentor. Gino was running it. Ironic. Piers is one of the things I did as I was driving in this morning is pulling my phone up and said, give me every single detail on Lindley and give me seven really powerful questions to ask him.
I think that’s for you. Definitely it is.
I’ve probably got more on you than you did on me, but so open air, I’ve just launched this Omni. It’s just come out. Can’t get it yet. And what’s amazing is that making it available to the free model. So now you’ve seen the film her. So it’s in the film her this guy falls in love with this with Siri basically.
And so the free model now of ChatGPT, not the plus one plus one gives you a few bells and whistles. You can now talk to it and it will talk to you. And it sounds like a human. It’s fast. You can change the voice, the intonation, the way it talks to you. You know it. Sex is gender, whatever you want.
And it is basically you have an infinitely patient sounding board, mentor, business partner. You can ask any question and if it suffers a bit ticking but your business doesn’t understand, you can upload information in the background giving context. Now it becomes an expert in, I don’t know, dog walking or who’s got the holiday homes, the holiday homes, whatever it might be someone mentioned.
So you can give it context, understand you, who you are, what you’re trying to achieve and what you do. So when you talk to it, you’d have to keep doing it every time. It’s just there. So that will I will say it’s like, so imagine you, you’ve been dragged out of this room now and you’ve been forced to get into a cage, fight to the death.
And it’s a steel cage, right? And it’s a big, massive dude in there. It’s been case fighting all of his life or woman and and and you can take I am mum with you and you go yeah. You know what? Now the night works. It’s like that initially you are missing out on that kind of person, so agree to change your outcomes.
What I find is incredible is that a lot of people, and it’s amazing how fear dictates people taking action. Fear, uncertainty and doubt. Yeah. So with any technological wave you have the old curve called S-curve. So you’ve got the early adopters, rapid adoption. Then it slows down and tapers off. You see a mobile is going to everyone’s got one now.
So it’s tapered off. And then you get the new tech comes in which might be glasses that you can talk to be the phone anymore. But in this case it’s AI. So AI kicks in and you get this period as the new tech kicks in. The early adopters are FUD, fear, uncertainty, in doubt. And on my website there’s an article I wrote a blog and it’s saying that FUD this time can be fatal.
So FUD with cloud didn’t really matter. You know you can you can go to the cloud tomorrow, next year in five minute matter, right? Digital transformation. You might get around having a website. Maybe you use Google AI. No. So in AI, think of it this way. Picture in your mind there’s a big shiny ship leaving the harbor. We’re all set on the key side and we can all still make the leap onto that ship.
But it starts to move away faster and faster and faster until the exponential speed and the point where you cannot make the leap onto that ship. And if you’re not on it, it is not coming back at this time, you know, and the last part of society are going to be left on that key side. And we all need to collectively work out how we support those people, but especially in business, in an exponential world, being late is fatal.
You can never catch up. It’s an exponential. So I always say people, people struggle with it. So try this. How can we adore? You know, I love I love this conversation because I think it’s really awesome for everybody in the room, actually, you know, even if it’s not the sort of conversation you were you were looking to be exposed to today, I think it’s an important one.
It will change the way you operate. Oh, I think it’s so important. Yeah. You can build a business now where you think adding people and costs, do they build your revenue and the cost them do that anymore is flat. There’s more revenue, more profit. But the point is this, you know, think about I think about you walking your dog past the lake.
Massive lake. Can’t see the side. And there’s a tiny bit of algae just there in them. And you look at it next day, you walk past, it’s doubled in size, next day it’s doubled inside and doubles inside. And after 30 days it’s just about covered half the lake. So in an exponential world, how long will it take for it to cover the rest of the lake?
It’s a day. It’s two lakes in two days. That’s exponential change. So the key is not to panic about it, but is to understand it, use it, embrace it, and just learn what are the sort of things that you’re doing to stay on the front foot. I mean, I live and breathe it. I’ve got we’ve got a podcast.
It’s all we talk about every week. What’s the podcast? It’s called the AI Assisted Organization. The AI assisted organizations, we call it we call these AI assisted organizations some more good podcast platforms. Although last week because I was in mountain biking, so probably the call one tomorrow or tonight or tomorrow night. And that’s really about how do you use AI for business, not for consumer, not all this, you know, how do you how do I make a nice picture of some fluffy dog with a pig ears?
Just how do I use AI in my business? That’s what we focus on. And I. I write all the notes, do the research myself. So I want to learn and even I struggle to keep up with it. So it’s not really worrying about that. It’s use the platforms that are that are evolving. So Google, Google, Gemini, Claude very good for documents.
Clawed pro implement OpenAI. You heard about it. Use them and just understand it so that you can start to understand. Well actually I can actually automate this. And you could do this for me. Or I can improve my sales prospecting or my customer engagement. So now I’ve got a video, I won’t get it out. But I was in Wales at the weekend and I created an avatar of myself, took 20s and I typed it in something saying this is peer talking, different languages and also Welsh.
So it talks. It’s me and my lips are like deepfake their chains like I’m speaking that language is English. So it’s me speaking. Looks just like me, a bit posher, the accent, but it comes on me and then it’s me again in Welsh, you know, it’s built wealth, right? And my lips are shaped like Welsh. And I asked the Welsh speaker that Wales and they said, that’s pretty good.
Not. Oh well it didn’t do this. And it was like that. They were quite shocked actually. So now you can engage customers in any language in real time. Amazing. Your face. Yeah, that’s pretty incredible on it right. There we go after launch in China now you know. But that’s the sort of thing. Is it global? The beauty of AI is this right, is that we all said that cloud meant that small companies could go after big opportunities.
Now, you know it’s the infrastructure, right? The large language models on top of that cloud about this additional infrastructure that allows you to innovate in ways you never been able to do before. So even now, even more than ever. It’s a great time to have a small business because you can now do things to compete with the big operators in ways you’ve never been able to do before, and you’re going to be more nimble.
What’s interesting, though, I have to say, is the big companies get it because they understand this is when it takes all their throwing millions at it. So unlike some technology, the big companies are really you’re seeing it is happening. They’re embedding this technology because they know what the ROI is. And I think all real top entrepreneurs. It’s interesting that you’re saying, I remember I was listening to someone interviewing Mark Cuban, for example, the other day, and Mark Cuban was just like, listen, I’m all in on AI.
I’m forgetting everything else. I’m just going all in. And he’s like, I’m taking the training courses. He was doing all the, you know, really trying to. It’s really, really interesting. I don’t think AI. Think of automation. How do you augment? How do you automate the mundane? How do you get rid of admin? How do you embrace customers engage in new ways, you know, so we’ve all got an email list, right.
And you have customer avatars personas. So you might say, I don’t know. I’ve got a thousand people on my email list. It’s about five types of people. So I’ll send 200 emails of five different types to this thousand people. Now, you could send every single person based on their profile, their website, what you know about them, what’s in your CRM system?
An individual personalized email in any language that you’re speaking to them, to a thousand different people. So you’re getting into hyper personalized engagement. So who’s going to win that customer you doing that? Or somebody else sending an email after 40 hours with from MailChimp? Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, I think it’s I’ve loved the conversation a real good. Should we give give it up for pairs.
Yeah,
Well, I hope you enjoyed the episode. Piers is an amazing guy with a great business, and if you want to get in these rooms and come and meet me in person, hang out with my team, understand exactly what we’re doing to grow and scale businesses. If you are a business owner, it’s ambitious. It’s exactly the type of room that you want to be in, because it means that you stay on the cutting edge in order to take that step, to start working with us, all you’ve got to do is head on over to.
Co.Uk and you can see where the latest icons event is happening. And I’m sure that there will be one soon that you can come and attend. Get yourself into a room where you feel more motivated and more inspired to grow your business. I want to say a big thank you again for listening. We appreciate you. I hope it’s helped you today, and I look forward to seeing you all on the next episode.