Buyers and Builders
00:42:04 · David Flickinger
Maybe I can use that for free. Maybe I have now spreadsheet extraction or I'm double checking spreadsheets. I could probably use a Gemini model from two iterations ago that's really, really good at math, is excellent at Python, knows spreadsheets, and it will do a great job but for fractions of a penny. Whereas if I did that with the smartest model, I would be racking up tons of costs. I'll give you an example in one of the businesses that we engage or have an engagement with doing document generation based on a workflow. It was a few cents to do document generation using the latest version of Claude, and that jumped up to about $14 per iteration over the last few months. So these companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, x AI, SpaceX, They're they're soon to be public companies, and they have shareholders now to answer to, and they have to start making the economics work. The only way to do that is to continue to release top models for which they can charge high per token or per usage fees. And so if you as a business owner wanna say, well, I'm just gonna sign up with Claude or just gonna sign up with with Anthropic or OpenAI, and I'll just use that for everything. That could be a very, very expensive mistake. We're already seeing companies come to us and say, yeah. I got my bill from Anthropic, and this is insane. I don't know how people are using AI in their business. Well, what they are doing is they're putting everything through the smartest model. What you wanna do is you wanna have smart tasking like I described. And to the extent possible, you wanna use what are called local models, which don't go outside the walls of your building or maybe they live on a cloud server, but they're not going across. And so if you have sensitive customer information or you're concerned about cost, routing tasks to a local model can be a great option because there's no usage fees for those. The usage fees are are baked in to whatever you spend to to run that model, whether it's a local server on premise or whether you use that in a cloud server, you could use it as much as you want without any additional cost. So I think cost will continue to be probably the top point of discussion and concern among both large and small businesses as they think about AI deployments.
00:44:46 · Mikk
[00:44:46] S0: David, remember I said at the very beginning of this episode that I want this business owner, investor, whoever is listening to to really forward this episode to to their portfolio company or their cofounder to just keep these AI ideas going for them. That being said, I want to finish with you getting even maybe more practical. Let's say there is someone listening who runs one of those traditional businesses, 1 to 10,000,000 of EBITDA, and they would like to do something within the next maybe maybe thirty days. So they have a bit of like a before and after. What would be something you you suggest them to do?
00:45:30 · David Flickinger
[00:45:30] S1: So the first thing I suggest every business do is connect an agent to your systems so that when you start to interact with AI, you can have an answer that's relevant to your business. That first step is easier than one might think. So that's what we do as a first step engagement for a lot of businesses. And then you can start to think about which work streams, whether that's roofing estimating or medical device compliance or some sort of collections reporting that you wanna automate as a particular work stream, maybe as an agent loop. You'll start to hear more about these agent loops, which you essentially set goals and have an agent run within your architecture to continuously iterate. That's step two, three, four, five. The first thing is connecting your systems into an agent that you can interact with so you can start to ask questions of these powerful AI agents, these powerful AI models that have context about your business. So that'd be the first thing I would recommend every business owner do, and there are a couple open source tools that folks can use. Folks have probably heard about this OpenClaw idea that became really popular and then kind of fizzered... Fizzled out. And I still use my OpenClaw here and there. But what you really find is at an enterprise or business level, those don't really cut it. They're probably not secure enough either, but they're really not built for real enterprise or even small business. They're built for individual use cases. But you could certainly, as an individual, if you have a really, really small business, try to do that. The problem with those is they could be technologically overwhelming to set up. You almost have to be a developer in order to get those working properly. And most folks I've talked to have tried to implement OpenCLaw successfully who are not developers who have just spent 10 times more effort and energy trying to get it to work than they have actually using it. But my point would be connect your agents to your systems as the first thing you do before you try to do anything else with AI in your business.
00:47:58 · Mikk
[00:47:58] S0: What I learned today is if if done well, if AI integrated in a correct way, you can make a simple business a lot more valuable by just having all the information in one place, making better decisions, sending out more and better proposals. So that being said, I I know you're busy, but maybe maybe someone would like to reach out. What would be the best way for them to to contact you?
00:48:24 · David Flickinger, Mikk
[00:48:24] S1: Yes. I'm on x, d w flickinger, f l I c k I n g e r, or at Vellm dot a I. You can go to our website. We have a contact form there, and you can schedule an intro call. We don't do a pitch deck. We just have a conversation about your business. We are starting to deploy... Forward deployed engineers into larger businesses. But for smaller businesses, we typically engage folks remotely. And so we're always happy to have a call, a conversation. I would recommend most folks go to Vellm, vellm,.ai, and you can quickly and intuitively book a thirty minute call. We'll have one of our folks chat with you about your business and see if there's a fit. But I would continue to encourage folks to think about how... Where... However they use AI, whether it's through us or through another provider that does similar things to us, if your AI deployment is increasing the value of your business relative to competitors. If you're just using the same off the shelf tools that everybody else is using, are you really enhancing the value of your business? Are you really gaining a competitive advantage? And I think that's the crux of the conversation that we like to have with folks is to explore ways in which we can help them do that. So would, welcome any outreach and always here to chat. [00:49:57] S0: Awesome. This was fifty minutes well spent. So thanks a lot, David, for sharing all those, lessons. [00:50:03] S1: Yeah. Thanks, Mikk. It was a pleasure to chat with you, and thanks so much for having me.
00:50:03 · David Flickinger, Mikk
[00:50:03] S1: Yeah. Thanks, Mikk. It was a pleasure to chat with you, and thanks so much for having me. [00:50:07] S0: I hope you enjoyed this episode of Buyers and Builders. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. It really helps the show reach more buyers and operators. And if you already haven't, go back and listen to some of the other episodes of Buyers and Builders. This podcast is built for people who buy, build and hold great businesses long term. Every guest you hear on this show has real hard won experience acquiring and operating companies. And the goal is, again, very simple, to give you ideas you can actually use in your own journey.