Accelerated HVAC Success Podcast
00:01:55 · Ben Middleton
[00:01:55] S1: So AI seems to be a huge buzzword this year. Everybody's talking about it. You hear it on the news. They're talking about all of the data centers that are being built in order to support all of this AI. Of course, there's some people that are saying, you know, AI can be really dangerous for the environment because of all the energy that all of the computer processing is using. There's other people that are worried about the Terminator movies and Skynet taking over. And then there's other people that are just starting to discover going into ChatGPT for the first time and seeing, hey, this is pretty cool. I can go in here. It can help me write better emails. It can help me, communicate my thoughts better, organize different things. I know my car just got AI integrated into it. And so now I can have conversations with my car while I'm driving and just trying to think through things or, you know, to record notes and summarize different things. But tell us what is AI?
00:02:52 · AJ Jain
[00:02:52] S2: Yeah. I think it's a very funny story. I was just sitting here waiting for my waiting for my turn. And there there was a group of high schoolers that was just standing outside and they were asking what's going on. I said, it's a it's a podcast. Uh-huh. And then we were talking about AI. And then they were shocked. They were like, what do you think about the environment and is it like, again, the Terminator scenario? Yeah. I think it's it's easy to get sensationalized saying that AI is gonna take over everything, but it's a very useful technology. AI's core purpose is to democratize access to knowledge. So, for example, my mom is not proficient in English, but now she can use ChatGPT to write great emails and she she could never do that pre AI. So it's customizable. You can create songs for your loved ones even if you are... If even if I'm a terrible musician, I can do that. So I would I would see AI as a technology that's that's helpful to everyone, helpful to humanity. And in terms of jobs and like taking over people's jobs, it might happen for certain level of skill set, but AI is gonna create so many more jobs that don't even exist today. So I treat it as a technology that has helped me get better at my own job. And what we are doing with Broccoli is also actually impacting hundreds of lives right now. It's actually helping them make more money, say, provide a better customer experience. So there are gonna be bad actors. There are gonna be some applications that might not be good for everyone, but majority of the use cases that I've been seeing are positive and helping a lot of folks.
00:04:42 · Ben Middleton
[00:04:42] S1: You know, I love that you say that, you know, the democratizing of information. And one of the things I've been saying so long as we've been talking with... About AI with contractors is you go back into the the fourteen fifties, and you had the printing press that was being invented. What the printing press did is it finally made knowledge available to the masses because before, only the wealthy could have the handwritten Yeah. Books that were being made at the time. And so it just completely changed society. Another time that we had society completely flipped up on its side as you think about the Internet. And all of a sudden, everybody has access to all of this knowledge and information that the the common person before you had to have a a set of encyclopedias at home to research papers, and now nobody has that encyclopedia because it's all available at their fingertips with their phone. And and what AI is doing is now it's just making it even that much easier, and it gives access to the most powerful computers on the planet to every single human being. And and I think that is such a a cool thing to see how information becomes available to everyone that is out there. But... So you think about the power of it and what it can do. And some people may be sitting here listening to this and thinking, well, am I gonna be left behind? Because there are some companies that are saying, if you're not ready with AI, you're no longer gonna be found on Google, or you're not gonna be relevant as a business anymore. What do you have to say to some of those scare tactics that may be going out there to people and and to contractors that are thinking, how do I
00:06:27 · AJ Jain
[00:06:27] S2: get started in AI? I think with any new technological shift or any... Anything that changes, there's a lot of misinformation, and they're gonna be a certain set of group of like companies, people that want to materialize this opportunity and take advantage of people not knowing a lot about that. There's not a lot of information on how search is going to change in the new AI world. So, a lot of marketing agencies and I've been shocked. I've seen these webinars where they talk about things that they have no idea. And they'll pitch these AI agents that they can use in their company, that they're trying to sell services that don't do anything. So anything that is fear based is honestly not something we we advocate. I'm I'm... We don't think that Broccoli, if you don't use our solution, you're gonna go out of business. That's that's dumb and naive. So I know there is a... There are a lot of companies that are doing this, but personally, I just feel that as a contractor, you should not get scared of anything. Nothing is gonna change. There is like, for sure, if you adopt a new technology, it will go... It's gonna have an impact, a positive impact on your business. But if not, there's no need to rush into anything. The AI of today is the worst it can be. So it's gonna get better. So it's not like if you use AI, it's gonna transform your business. It's still very early days for for AI transforming the whole business. And it's... There's gonna be a timing. The the timing matters and whenever the timing is right, you should you should adopt a technology. And there are folks like you that are trying to educate them the right way. So they should not check out a YouTube video and get sensationalizing that I need to use this. Trust the people that that tell you or, like, trust the sources from where you consume your information.
00:08:25 · Ben Middleton
[00:08:25] S1: So I know that there's probably a group of contractors out there right now that are listening to this that are familiar with ChatGPT. They've logged in. They played a little bit. Maybe they're helping... It's helping them to clean up emails, clean up their grammar. Like you said, even, you know, your mother is using it to to make sure that she communicates her ideas clearly and concisely to the people that she's communicating with, which makes all of the sense in the world. Maybe some people are getting a little bit more advanced or using AI to organize their schedule, to collect their thoughts. I, you know, I use it all the time now. You know, I have an idea pop into my head. You can just real quickly put it into the... Into chat. And then at the end of the day, you can say, summarize all my thoughts that I had today, and you have that nice list of of information there. You can use it to analyze data. So you can upload spreadsheets and say, hey, what can you tell me about this this set of data that I'm putting in here? And it can give you really good information. Daikin today is using AI, and we're about to release an assistant. So you can just scan a model number, and it will bring up all of manuals, and it'll tell you which pages you need to look at in that service manual to be able to accomplish whatever task you're using for. So there's all these great use cases that you can utilize AI for. I do wanna know what is the the the story behind the name Broccoli?
00:09:47 · AJ Jain, Ben Middleton
[00:09:47] S2: I don't think we have enough time for this, but our short answer is very, like simple to the point. Broccoli is good for you. It's healthy. And Broccoli AI is good for your business. That's it. Like, and same way as Broccoli, a lot of people don't like it, but it's good for you. AI, same. It's scary. What about the human connection? I've built this business based on relationships. We're not taking away anything. It's just helping you fix some things that were broken where a customer was on hold for nine minutes. Was being answered by an answering service that had no idea about your business. So Broccoli is a much better alternative than the previous solution. So that's it. It's just good for you. [00:10:29] S1: Okay. Yeah. Well, tell me a little bit. [00:10:31] S2: What does Broccoli do? Yeah. So Broccoli is democratizing access to great customer service. Just like, I'm just building upon what we just discussed. Right now, as a contractor, you need to invest so much in into your call center to make sure your CSRs are trained, they have knowledge about your services, your brand. You need to coach them on empathy as well. So it's hard. You need time, resources and money to do that. Broccoli's goal is to democratize that and offer the best customer service out of the box through AI. So this was a very philosophical answer, but the simple answer is we build AI voice agents for HVAC plumbing and electrical contractors.