Artificial intelligence in sales

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Introduction

Nice to have you with us again for another episode of Digital 4 Productivity. Don’t be distracted by the background noise, it’ll be gone in a minute. I’m on the road.

This time you will receive the recording of the Smile2 seminar, AI in Sales. I hope you enjoy this recording and wish you good ideas and inspiration.

Yes, we have the topic I love you, from digital frustration to digital pleasure with a focus on sales. Those who know me know that I am a salesman at heart and soul, but I have some bad news: AI will replace sales. Really?

I don’t think that’s the case. I think people will still want to buy from people in the future. I think that’s more the picture of the future. And I can highly recommend a book I read recently by Dr. Miriam Meckel and Dr. Lea Steinacker on the subject of artificial intelligence. So if you haven’t read it yet, it’s all there at once. A highly recommended book. And in their interviews, they always say very, very nicely: What is artificial intelligence? – or artificial intelligence in English. And Miriam Meckel always says so beautifully: artificial intelligence is the climbing frame for thinking. And I think that’s a very nice way of putting it, which for me also means that AI is officially translated as artificial intelligence. I like to translate it differently, as augmented intelligence. In other words, an extension, like augmented reality – you probably know the term and you probably know augmented reality – to say that I superimpose another layer on top of the real world. And that is exactly my understanding of AI, that I say, okay, it simply helps us to be even more human as a tool.

However, I also always like this image of the 911 of Porsches. Of course, I can be totally fast with it. But if I’m on the wrong road in the wrong direction, then there’s no point in having this fast machine. Or if I have to drive across a field, then I’d probably rather take the vehicle that they used to build. Porsche also used to build tractors. So, with this in mind, first switch on the brain, then the technology is always my motto, which you and you know from me.

Mercedes-Benz use case

And I would also like to go back a few years, to Mercedes-Benz in the USA. A long time ago, they thought about how they could improve sales, because they said that if someone in the USA buys a car on a Saturday, it’s not like that. So if you told them you’d have to wait nine months for the E-Class, they’d ask what kind of weed you’ve been smoking. In the USA, you go there and you drive the car out of the yard. So now they had the problem that they had a structural problem. As you can see on this chart, there are a few doors. If someone at the car said, I think this car is great, I’d like to have it, then the salespeople said: Let’s go back to the office and finalize the leasing contract, and one or two of them turned off at one of these four exit doors before signing. What did they say? Okay, closing the doors is perhaps not the most philanthropic option. We have to come up with something else. And the moment a customer says: I want this car, the moment he was sitting in the car, they simply said: Okay, please sign here. In the car. And I use this example quite deliberately, because what the experts see here is a first-generation iPad. And so it’s not about: shiny, bling, bling, but it’s about the fact that I’m just discovering in sales and thinking about where the bottleneck is and what the right mechanics are. And the bottleneck here was simply that the moment the customer said I was ready to close the deal, it was simply too difficult for the salesperson to close the deal. And they solved that with the simplest technology. And now you say, what does that have to do with AI? It’s quite simple. In times of AI, one of my guiding principles applies more than ever: relevance before frills. So, before I think about what 125,000 tools are available, it’s always very, very important to ask myself: Okay, what is my customer’s relevant problem that I can solve? What is the relevant problem in my sales process? And if I say, for example, that I have a piece of paper where I can get the signature and I have a pen with which I can do this, then it can make a lot of sense, even though it seems very Stone Age, to say: I have an analog process if I can close the deal there.

If I have a higher completion rate, then yes, I’m happy to do it in analog. So I’m a long way from saying you have to do every single thing in digital just because it’s digital. I’m also far from saying you have to do everything with artificial intelligence. I always say that before we start with artificial intelligence, let’s start with common sense. But if I then have the whole thing, then it all makes sense.

Use Case Tesla

And don’t worry, I’ll also show you a few use cases on the subject of AI, as some very successful companies are doing. And one company that is doing this very successfully, for example, is Tesla in the USA. I don’t think I need to say much about Tesla. The guys are probably relatively well known. But what is not so well known in Germany is that when you configure the vehicle in the USA, it can happen that your phone suddenly rings. And it can sound something like this. You should hear that. Give me a thumbs up, J. Mai, if you hear the sound too. Hello? Hey, James. Yeah, who’s this?

Hey, James. It’s Alexander from Tesla Motors. How’s your day going so far? It’s going pretty good, man. How about yourself? You said from Tesla, right? The car company? Yeah, that’s right. I’m calling from Tesla Motors, the car company. Did you have any trouble or questions while customising your car on our website? No, we were just shopping around and just taking a look. Got you. That makes sense. Sometimes we’re just exploring our options before making a decision, and I totally respect that. Can I ask you why you were looking into a Tesa in the first place… I’ll break it off now. In the next stage, he asks very, very structured questions, saying: Tell me, what kind of car are you driving today? Why are you thinking about buying a new one and asks things that not every car salesman has asked me before. So when I say that AI is replacing sales, I’m saying that many of the sales reps I see in car dealerships, who I have to drag away from their desks to sell me a car, can easily be replaced by AI. The mechanics, however, are completely different here. And two, the idea is to get people into the dealership for a test drive.

Use Case Air AI

And they are highly successful with it. In other words, they generate a lot of test drives with it, completely generated with AI, and there is another exciting use case if you go to the website of this provider, i.e. Air AI is a company and it exists. You can also go to their website. There is currently a very, very nice example of the Apple Vision Pro use case. Someone configures themselves in Apple Vision Pro and just before they click on buy, they realize, oh, 4,000 dollars might be a bit much money and cancel. And what they do is they put this AI on it. In other words, if you order an Apple Vision Pro online in the USA and you don’t complete the purchase, the AI usually calls you and says: “Hey, you just added the Apple Vision Pro to your shopping cart here. Why didn’t you order it? And then over 90% of people say: Yes, it’s a great box, but it’s just too expensive. And what does the AI say? Did you already know that you can finance the thing interest-free? And let me tell you, this is also an issue in other sectors.

So if I stay in the automotive industry, I’ve learned that in the 1970s we spent roughly what percentage of our annual income we spent on a car? Post it in the chat. What percentage do you think we spent on a car in the 70s? In other words, what you bought privately. So what percentage of the year … write it in the chat, you’d be interested. Exactly. So let’s estimate 50 percent, exactly the estimate. I’ll also go straight into the subject of data protection and so on, not an issue at all. Under 50%, exactly. Quite right, it was under 50%, so it was 38%. What do you estimate today? How much of an annual salary do you spend on a car today if you pay cash? 75, a good estimate, over 100. It’s currently around 80%. And that’s one reason why, when you say it’s 80% of the average disposable income, it doesn’t mean that salaries have risen at the same rate, but that cars have become disproportionately expensive, which means that the issue of financing has become much more important.

And it’s the same in other industries and it can be done wonderfully. Now, of course, the question is: exactly what does the GDPR look like? Of course, on the one hand, you always have to make a distinction between the USA and Germany. On the other hand, if I say on a page that I’m configuring something here and say: Okay, you agree to our terms and conditions, then I can legally do that even in Germany. And the question is always: Okay, who wants this? Am I allowed to do that, and so on. And what I simply find brilliant in the USA … I don’t think everything in the USA is brilliant, but what I find brilliant in the USA is that they say: We’ll just get started and we’ll do it. In other words, they’re more likely to say that they might walk through the door a little too quickly, but while we here are still thinking about what we haven’t yet considered in terms of data protection, the guys from Tesla are already selling a bunch of cars by test driving them. And if I take a look now, for example, if one of you has a Vodafone cell phone contract and has a problem, it’s no longer a person who answers this hotline, but 100% is now AI-inbound in the case and over 44% of all customer inquiries are already resolved at the end of the case.

And only the other 56% goes to real people. And the interesting thing, and there is a lot more information on this topic, is that companies that have replaced customer support with AI have not only achieved cost savings of up to 70%, but have generally even generated higher customer satisfaction as a result, because customers say, and this is also measurable: I have a relevant answer much faster. I have it, I get it much faster. I have the answer much faster. I have a more competent answer and the AI is not emotional. So, that means I don’t have the issue that somehow again, if a customer agent is having a bad day, I’m having a bad day. Exactly.

Regulation of AI

Of course, this issue of regulation is also very important. I don’t want to push this issue of regulation away either. And I also think it’s good that with the AI Act, for example, there are now regulatory initiatives that address issues such as facial recognition, for example, as well as issues such as how I use this information, which I also find important. There is a word for this that is very important, it’s called Plane Level Field.

In other words, the idea behind this regulation is that, ideally, providers should also have the same starting conditions. This means that AI providers are also in favor of regulatory initiatives that set out clear guidelines. I also compare AI to a knife to a certain extent. I can murder a person with a knife or I can prepare a meal. And the knife isn’t bad, it’s the person who doesn’t use this knife appropriately that’s the problem, and it’s the same with AI. In other words, and I’m going to put it brutally and bluntly on the subject of AI, there are three groups of people when it comes to AI. There are people who say that AI is bad, AI is not privacy-friendly, I don’t want AI, AI is not allowed, i.e. AI deniers. The bad news is that you have an 80% chance of having difficulties maintaining your business model tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow at the latest. So without AI, it will be really difficult in most business models. There is the second group. These are the standard performers, the standard performers who do an okay job, who come very close to the top performers with the help of AI. In other words, if I’m in management consulting now, if I’m in publishing, for example, then the people who used to stand in front of the blank sheet of paper, who now write something with AI, can now manage to get something reasonable out of space.

They are not yet at the same level as the Göthes, who really do take the whole thing to a completely different level. The danger is that even if you, as a top person, as a top expert, do not deal with this topic, you will be overtaken by the, I say, basic, by the standard performers. That’s why it’s important to deal with this topic. And I don’t know about you and yourselves. I have many customers who say that we don’t just have a shortage of skilled workers, we have a shortage of labor. In other words, it’s simply getting harder and harder to get staff and we have to do a lot more with the same team. In other words, this is also an issue that can definitely solve the shortage of skilled workers and even make it possible to do significantly more business. There are studies by McKinsey that say what particularly successful companies do – particularly successful companies focus on being more human. And my esteemed colleague Christoph Burker always says so well: Don’t be a robot. So anything that a machine can do better, that an AI can do better, please let the AI do it. Let Customer Service handle the standard requests: When can I have a workshop appointment?

Please let the AI do that. Only if it is so intelligent that, for example, the AI … And there is a Mercedes dealer in Hanover, for example. If the customer has gone through an automated, AI-supported process to make a workshop appointment, the AI ensures that all the parts required for this service are already at the workstation when the customer arrives. In other words, the mechanic doesn’t just have to pick out the parts and say: “What is this?”, but the AI already has all the parts. Just like a medical operation, everything is prepared and everything is there. Point number two: Look at this system, tell me, how long has the customer been driving this AI? And if it has a certain mileage or a certain age, this car, for example, was over 90,000 kilometers, three and a half years old, then the salesperson immediately gets the information to say: You, by the way, there’s the customer. Why don’t you drop by by chance when the customer is there and talk to him about a new car? That’s what people do again. And so it makes sense for me to say that AI can help to simply improve the entire customer service process, make the processes leaner so that the customer has a better service and then also ensure the flow of information.

Use the chatbots in the service area

And I don’t know who has ever experienced that. I’ve never experienced that when I’ve taken my car in for an inspection, someone has actively approached me and said: Wow, somehow you’ve already got almost a hundred thousand kilometers on your car. What about the next one? I haven’t experienced it yet. Congratulations to everyone who has. And there you see again, it’s a combination of human intelligence and artificial movement. Another topic I’ve already mentioned is chatbots in the context of customer service. I can now use chatbots, and they are so intelligent and so easy to build that I can now build such chatbots very, very quickly. And I’m just going to show you what it looks like. So, I’m going to move the bar to the side. So, that means I’m just going to go to a page where I can show you what it looks like. Let’s just go in here live and where do we go in? Let’s go into the room. So, Digital 4 Productivity, Koch. So I’ve simulated a page here and now I can ask, for example, which models of the Mazda MX5 are available from you.

So, I’ll just ask now. I’m sitting there on a Sunday evening, thinking about this thing and he says: Ah, wonderful. Now there’s the relevant information. To say: So, in which engine versions? I can ask again now. And then he tells me straight away: Okay, is it available in different engines and so on? And now I can say: Okay, where can I take a test drive, for example? So here is just a passive one. And then he says: Okay, test drive, appointment, cooking and so on. And now I can say: Where is the address or what is the address? Like this. And then he says to me right away: Okay, hello. Can you find me in Tiergartenstraße? And so on. So, is that rocket science now? No, any of you can do it yourself. I’ll show you how it’s built. The service I use here is a service called ChatBase. And ChatBase is just that. And dear Marco Windmoch, to say: Yes, a chatbot has never been able to help me with my concerns? I was completely with you until six months ago. Until six months ago, they were simply useless.

In the meantime, and this really changes on a weekly basis, maybe you’ve got an idea, I’ll say, of how good the quality of the answers were just now. So I asked: What models do you have? I asked: In which motorization? I said: Where can I go for a test drive? What is the address? So that’s the answers I got. And that’s not even a … There really are high-level chatbots. The things that Vodafone uses, for example, are really, let’s say, one level higher. But anyone can do that. And this chatbot that I built here, Cars buys my Bekoch, what did I do? I’ve just added sources here and with these sources I can simply say, I just give it websites and I’ve just given it the websites of Auto Koch in Berlin, in the automotive group, I’ve given it and you only need to give it the top page and it pulls in all the subpages accordingly and I’ve just given it three or four pages of that and it has pulled in all the subpages and I now have the option that, if I want, I can even give it PDF files, I can give it the text and I can give it Q& A. I’ve just given it three or four pages.A to him.

So, with this bot, I can set it up in fifteen minutes and simply embed it into a website. In other words, and one of the biggest mistakes we make, especially in Germany, is that we’re just, there’s a garden hype cycle now, everyone may have seen it before, where we say, okay, a new technology like AI is coming and we say: yes, AI can save the world. So, then chatbot is totally brilliant. Then we try out the chatbot and that’s exactly what happens. Superhuman reaction: A chatbot has never been able to help me. These things are shit. So that’s this valley of disappointment and then most people drop out. And it’s a bit like when we learned to ride a bike. I remember getting a bike as a birthday present. It was a great bike. It kept hitting me in the face. I said: Dad, I’ll never ride a bike again in my life. Bikes are totally stupid. Fortunately, my father said: No, it’s not that stupid. You may look a bit stupid now, but you’ll manage. So he kept pushing me and supported me to keep going.

Today I’m glad I ride a bike and AI is just like riding a bike. And it makes no sense to be so totally hype. But it doesn’t make sense either and there’s a danger of dropping out. And unfortunately that’s also the case in the media coverage. A good example of this is Metaverse. Everyone says Metaverse is dead. Complete nonsense. The current ideal pig being driven through the village is now AI. That means no one ever writes anything about Metaverse. But if you look at what Lufthansa is doing right now, for example, Lufthansa is currently testing how Apple Vision Pro can be used to train onboard staff, i.e. flight attendants, on how to deal well with guests. They are currently practicing this with the Apple Vision Pro. And it’s the same with AI. Please don’t make the mistake of saying that AI is the solution to the world. I had a bad AI day yesterday. I was really frustrated because everything I tried yesterday didn’t give me any good results. But then I looked again: Okay, did I brief the system properly? Did I use the right system? And this topic here, I’ll show you some more chatbots that I have here.

Another example: I have a customer, we did Microsoft 365 there. They have a lot of employees and they simply had a bottleneck in IT support. What did we do? We said to the sources: Okay, okay, you can put all the training documents about Microsoft 365 in there. You can put all the websites in there and so on. If I now have a question about Microsoft 365, I can ask the bot there. They have 80% of all support requests. In internal IT, they now use a chatbot that they have built with this tool. So this is also an internal support issue. Or I could say: Swen, you’re in the insurance sector, for example. It’s also a highly complex product. I don’t know whether you’re already working with chatbots. Well, I do know areas in the banking and insurance sector where people say, okay, I also have questions about products, for example. And to say that for employees, too, more and more things like this are being used for complex products, where people say, “Hey, I have a question about an occupational disability policy and so on. And the tools are now so advanced.

The Afforai use case example

Let me give you another example. Afforai is a tool. The idea that I can build chatbots here is perhaps also very interesting for you privately and for other topics. The idea of this tool is that I can say that I have made a bot for the automotive industry. What have I done here? I have uploaded the DAT report here in this bot. This is the Diebel in the automotive industry and I simply imported a complete year of a magazine that I subscribe to anyway, which you can also get as a PDF. So now I can simply ask: Okay, how is the market for Auto-Abus developing? That’s not even an intelligent question. So, just a stupid question: How is the market for Auto-Abus developing? So, now he’s looking for all the documents I’ve given him and I can tell him: Are you just looking for the documents or should you please pass them on? So, and now I see a very qualified answer here, which is based on these documents. And now, if I say I want the sources, I can go to the source, I can see the text that has been extracted here and I can go straight to it and say: Okay, I want this source, I just want to have a look at it in the file viewer.

And that means it jumps to the respective source here. In other words, I can go in here and say: Look, a file viewer, we’re live here. So at the moment it takes a little while. Manage and connection is not quite as fast here right now. But then it jumps in here and I can see where it is on the source. In other words, AI can help tremendously and it’s also highly relevant in sales that they say: I have a lot of training documents, I have a lot of product documents, where I say I can find them very quickly. And this is also a tool for those who don’t know it yet. One platform that I can highly recommend is Absumo. It’s a platform where you regularly get great deals. I’ll also say something about Copilot, which suits me. Exactly. So, exactly So to say, Aphorei has included Mr. Gema here, exactly, so from the background. And by the way, there are also these bots, exactly, Chat-Base-CEO is the name of this tool. So, and you can set this up so that this bot is purely, and this applies to both the chat base tool, which I showed you, for this, is already on the first page, is already GDPR compliant.

That means I can also tell him: Should you use the web or should you not use the web and if I now ask questions here, for example, about cars, about product information, sorry, if I look at this bot I had here, about buying cars, we cooked. All the sources I have in here are publicly available sources on the Internet that you search through. So that means there’s no question of data protection here, because firstly, it’s not personal data that I have here, it’s product-related information. This means that I do not have the facts of this GDPR issue, that I have personal data. But if I also upload personal files here, for example, and things like that, then I can also say: No, please don’t return them. So you can solve it accordingly. Dear Sven, it’s a great pity that there is no demand in this area. I’m currently doing a lot of work in the mature banking sector, where they are very, very concerned about this: How can I simply take the quality of advice to another level by saying that every advisor, even if they are relatively new, can never have an overview of all products and can’t always answer every question, but if I even have a chatbot in the customer meeting where I say: “So, what are the special insurance conditions here?” and things like that, then that’s quite interesting.

In which situations does Microsoft Copilot make sense?

Yes, I also use Copilot. I can also say something about the co-pilot. Let me tell you what Copilot is and where does it make sense? There are different levels of Copilot. The good news is that you can use Copilot, Microsoft’s AI, free of charge, even if you don’t have a Microsoft 365 account. So it’s available to everyone free of charge and the best way to use it for free is via the Microsoft Edge browser. I used to call it the Microsoft Edge browser, because if you had to use it, then you had Edge. But now it’s very useful, it’s really, really good. It even has some functions that are better than Chrome. What is definitely good, as you can see here, in the Edge browser, which you can download free of charge, is available here and we can also discuss it again afterwards, dear Sven. That’s why I just had another lengthy conversation on the subject with Matthias Das HES from Pfeffer Minzia today. I also see a lot of potential in the insurance sector. And in the insurance sector, for example, AI is now also being used for this purpose, probably already in your area too, in risk management.

If you can still hear us, you’re gone. I’m gone? Now you’re back. Okay, thank you. Sorry. I hope I wasn’t gone too long. So here’s the Copilot topic again. This is the page, I’ve included it in the chat. You can open it in the Edge browser and then you can log in for free … And you can see that GPT-4 is already here too. And if you use the left or right option, you even have the new ChatGPT-4 model. And if you do the whole thing on the iPad – I’ll switch to the iPad for this – there’s also a Copilot app on the iPad, which is simply called Copilot. And if you use the Copilot app, which you can also put on the screen as a widget, if you have it on, we’re live here. Connection attempt. Let’s see if he can do it with the Internet. I’ll do it without WLAN. I should be able to manage that. Then I have a tick in the Copilot app where I can use ChatGPT 4 free of charge without having to log in. So all iPad users, the Copilot app makes total sense.

We’ll see if he’s in the connection again later … Yes, I was too insignificant. So, there he is. So, that means I can now … And I’m not registered here. So that means I haven’t even logged in here, I can just say here with the Copilot app: Please use ChatGPT 4. And then I already have the good model here, which normally costs $20, which I can also use on the iPad. And I can even put a budget on the home screen here, which is very, very nice, and I can use it straight away without even having to put any money in. On the PC and on the Mac, there are even more levels. On the one hand, there is the option of logging in here with your Microsoft 365 account. And if you have a Microsoft 365 account and you don’t even need the extra Copilot license, but just a normal Microsoft 365 license, write me a single chat, who has something like that, be it in the company or privately, who has a Microsoft Microsoft 365 license from you. There are a few ones in there.

Wonderful. If you have that, just go to the Copilot page in the Edge browser and sign in with that Microsoft 365 account. If you do that, you have a huge advantage that also addresses a bit of what came up earlier as a valid point. Then the data is not reported back to Microsoft, obliquely to OpenAI. In other words, Microsoft has privacy protection here, which is not available in the free version without Microsoft 365, but if you have Microsoft 365, then these things are not reported back to Microsoft, so they can also be used in a corporate context, because it is of course a legitimate point to say: What about confidential information? I might not want that. If I somehow have things from an insurance company, I don’t want the competition, my colleague praying, to read Sven’s things. You might not think that’s so nice. So that’s why I say that you don’t want to report back certain confidential or personal information. The next step is to book an extra license as part of Microsoft 365. This costs just under 30 dollars a month, so it’s not cheap, but it certainly doesn’t cover the whole thing.

And dear Jacqueline Croer, he is as safe as the Internet can be, so to say, if you want to be safe, you can’t be on the Internet. So I’m going to be relatively brutal here. Who invented it? The US military invented it and anyone who believes that they voluntarily closed their backdoors when it was going around in civilian companies also believes in Santa Claus, the stork and the Easter bunny all rolled into one. So of course the US secret services are technically reading everything that is on the Internet. Anyone who has not yet read Edward Snowden’s book should perhaps read it. So I say you’ll be disillusioned by then at the latest. On the other hand, you’re not fit for work if you don’t work with the tools. And from that point of view, I also had a very intensive discussion with Christian Müller yesterday on the subject of data protection and data security. It’s not without risk. It’s important to properly assess the risks in terms of the GDPR, in terms of Dora, in terms of all the legal issues. Edge is currently based on a Chrome browser, and we’ve done some more herding.

It is also a bit more secure than Chrome. So if you have the choice between the Edge browser or the Chrome browser, the Edge browser is more likely to be used in the company today for the right reasons, and I can also control it a little better centrally. I hope that answers some of your questions. Exactly, Firefox is also a well-hardened browser, but it’s not as easy to configure and control centrally as the Edge browser, especially if you’re working in the Microsoft universe. Then, if I have this Co-Pilot here, I can do things like that. Here you can see what’s new from the person after just now? What did I last discuss with the customer and so on? When does that make sense? Firstly, it makes sense if you send all your emails via Microsoft 365. In other words, your email account runs via Microsoft 365. Point number two: If all files are also saved and synchronized via OneDrive, via OneDrive and SharePoint. It makes no sense if you have the files on a network drive and they are practically not accessible to the co-pilot, because the co-pilot in Microsoft 365 can access the Microsoft 365 data, i.e. the SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams data and Outlook Exchange data.

Only then does it make sense. So I recently accompanied a customer who said: Oh, we have all our data on our own network drives, but we already use Microsoft 365, I said: You can save yourself the money, because this thing really has the power as a very, very powerful search engine, practically. So the idea is that there is already a component called Microsoft Graph and Microsoft Graph is practically the Microsoft 365 internal search engine. And this is practically pimped with the Copilot theme. This means that I can practically do things like: What do they have? What was the last thing I agreed with G? And then he looks it up from Teams conversations, from chats, from files, from e-mails, from everything to the complete graph. And that is, I’ll write it in, Graph. That’s the name of the component. It’s practically under the hood, you can’t see it as a user, and Graph is also so intelligent with the co-pilot that the co-pilot also ensures that the authorization concepts are adhered to even with the AI, because this is of course also very important within companies, that the AI cannot access more data than the users are allowed to and that it doesn’t go outside.

So that means here, the Copilot as an extra license, I have it, but it only makes sense if you really work completely in Microsoft 365 and to be honest, it’s still a bit, I’ll say, version 0.7. But what works well in the Edge browser, I can now go to a page and can say: So, Digital for productivity, I’ll go to my website and that already works with the free version. Then there’s an icon here on the right and then I can open the copilot and now I can already say, this is in the free version, I can already say: Make me a page summary. And then I say: I would like to have this relatively precisely and I say: Okay, I would like to have a page summary. It then takes a little while and then a page summary is generated for me and in the first step you won’t be super enthusiastic right away. It takes a little while until it’s there, but it gets better from version to version. And if I now see you? do you see? do you see? do you see? do you see? do you see? do you see? do you see? do you see? do you see?

So, that’s the summary of my website and when I look at it now, it’s not so stupid what he writes in there. Exactly. Excellent consultant, super system, so very, very good system. No, joking aside. I also use it, for example, sometimes there are sites where you have PDF studies that are 50 pages long and are on one URL. Then you can have a 50-page PDF summarized. So you can use it in a professional context, if you have studies summarized, you can also use it, I don’t know which of you have schoolchildren there, for example. So you can say, for example: So, give me some material from the Federal Agency for Civic Education on certain topics. Then you can say: Let’s summarize this. Great stuff in this area. That works with the free version. While we’re on the subject of paid or free, a few words about ChatGPT, the classic. It’s available in two versions, and there are now even three versions. There is the free version 3.5, which is what many people use.

Give me one in the browser who has the paid version of ChatGPT. So I’d be interested to know how many have the paid version. There are already a few. Great. Let’s say if you hadn’t had a paid version, I would have cut your bill from Vitality afterwards. But that wouldn’t have worked at all, from that point of view. No, wonderful. I think it’s great. The paid version is available in two levels. The paid version is available in the normal version, in ChatGPT 4, and there’s another one here, if I take a look now, you can see the workspace setting here. In other words, there is a third version. There’s the free version, there’s the Pro version and there’s Customer Interactions. But now he’s really hitting it out of the park here. Do you mean ChatGPT or where do you mean? Once again, please. I can say something about that in a moment. That means that in the paid version I can use a ChatGPT 4 once and there is also a team version, which I also have with me, which you get from two licenses, costs $30 a month and which then has the option that if I post here, then I can post here to say that I don’t want this information to be reported back to OpenAI.

So this works from the version that costs 30 dollars a month, from two licenses. This is the version where you can set this tick here and say, okay, please don’t report them back. The models should not be trained with this. In other words, there is not only the Pro version, but also the Team version. From the team variant onwards, which I generally recommend in the corporate environment, I have this. Yes, what can I do now with the ChatGPT 4 variant again? Those who say, wait a minute, there are these cool plugins. Bad news. Plugins no longer exist, they have been discontinued. But all the good plugins are now available in so-called GPTs. And GPTs are bots and there are a whole lot of them, which are practically included here as part of an ever-improving chatbot marketplace. You can search for specific areas. And I’ll give you a few examples of what bots I use here. For example, I have Summarize-wise here. This means that you can easily summarize websites. I can upload a file here, I can write texts in here and I can summarize them.

I have here, so for all of you who think Prompt Engineering is the future profession that the kids should take on. Sorry, God of Prompt can do better. So there are now bots where you can say: Please give me a perfect prompt for ChatGPT or for Midjourney and so on. The AI is already doing that itself. I can also surf the Internet with Browser Pro. That’s another thing I can’t do with the free version. I can have books summarized. I can search scientific databases with consensus. I can have completely SEO-optimized articles written here. So I can also say here, for example: Please optimize my website SEO-wise, or write me an SEO-optimized article on a specific topic. So these GPTs, that’s really where the music is, where there are extremely good things and you can also build them yourself. So I’ve built my own chatbot here, for example, and when I configure it, I can set the custom interactions down here. I can set them here at the bottom.

So if we’re talking about the same thing, this is, I’ll say, a question from you, the customer interactions. That’s what you call them down here in the English version. That’s also called Customer Interactions. What I can do here, I’ve built myself a bot. I often give presentations and here I said, okay, I need a bot that supports me in building presentations and now I can say, you are specialized in presentations and I say, it’s about titles, subtitles, it’s about formulations, core messages, the main messages and the interesting thing is simply that I can upload up to 20 documents here. In other words, I have uploaded books that I have bought as PDF booklet files, such as the book here: Wie fange ich meine Rede an? by Michael Rosier. I just bought it and uploaded it here. And if I say here, for example, Start, I’m going to do this, then he simply guides me through this process. And that is also an impulse that I would like to give. We abuse and use ChatGPT. We mostly use it incorrectly.

We use it like Google. We ask it a question and expect an answer. The really exciting use of this system starts when I use it as a sparring partner and when I let people ask me questions. In other words, I can build it in such a way that I say: Please always ask me questions. Of course, I can simply go through this with them. I can say: Please ask me the questions individually, ask me questions back and things like that. In other words, please use AI intelligently here to continue doing things like this. When it comes to using things like Google, which I also use in sales, there is an alternative that I recommend, called Perplexity. I’ll put it in the chat again. Perplexity is for me, Google Gemini is also very good, but I think Perplexity is much better. For example, I simply asked a question here yesterday: How high is the Fortunio Castor model year 2024? What comes out? The corresponding one height comes out immediately. The sources come up. In other words, I immediately see sources. I can say, how wide is it? The width comes out immediately and it is also so intelligent that it immediately differentiates between with and without mirroring.

Search the Internet with Perplexity

It’s always interesting when you run different queries in different systems. Perplexity is the only system I have tested where it is so intelligent that it can go even deeper. So for me, Perplexity is really the tool where I say you can simply do very, very good research with it. I really, really like using it when I say, for example, I want to prepare for certain presentations and can say: So, how can I use Apple here in the medical field? And then I can make suggestions, and then I can go deeper and deeper. And if I go in here and I go to Pro, then I can always go back to the questions, I’ll do 9 here, I can also set a focus and can say: Should you please search the entire Internet? Should you please only search in the academic field? Do you want to go in without going on the web? So especially in times of a lot of AI-generated garbage on the web, it’s sometimes very, very good to be able to disconnect the web and just work with your own data. You can do that with it too. In other words, if that’s what you’re doing there, I recommend doing it.

I’ll give you another use case in sales on the subject of what you can still do brilliantly with AI today. What you can now do excellently is translate videos. This was still difficult until recently and I’ll give you an example here. My colleague Erik simply made a video the day after the product launch of the new ID7. That’s what it sounds like in German. Today we’re introducing you to the brand new Volkswagen ID7, Volkswagen’s new electric flagship. So, and now it might have customers close to the border, yes, just in one language. Vandaag we just introduce the glutnieue Volkswagen ID7 to jullie. That was Dutch. The whole thing in French, no problem. Aujourd’hui, nous vous présentons la toute nouvelle Volkswagen ID7, le nouveau Wesseau Amiral Electric de Volkswagen. Indistinguishable today. So that means here and what’s really interesting is to say that I have the opportunity to generate videos in other languages very, very quickly, which I didn’t do before because it used to be far too time-consuming to work with translators. So I’ll give you an example, one for customers.

The Meiko use case

Meiko, for example, dishwashing technology. You may know one or two of them, they’re a customer of mine. So, what do they have? They also had the challenge internally, for example, that they said we have great value videos, but we have a problem with strategy alignment. Our colleagues in Japan and so on don’t even know what our strategy is. So I said: yes, have they seen your great values videos? yes, they’re in German, they don’t speak German now. Then I say: Yes, then just use a tool and translate the whole thing into Japanese. In other words, there are also a lot of things internally, especially with international companies or customers close to the border and things like that. And the whole thing can be done with a tool. I’ll show you the tool I use for this and I’ve really tried out 30 or 40 tools. The One and Only is currently Hey, Jen. So Hey, Jen is really the tool where I say it blows everything else away. I’ve tried a lot of different ones because Hey, Jen has the big shame and anyone can do it. Now when I say video translation, how does that work? I upload a German video here and say I want a new translation.

I upload the video and then I simply say in which language we should download it. It’s not rocket science, anyone can do it. And here’s another example: I recently gave a one-hour keynote in German to a customer and a Dutch colleague was there and he said: “Can you also give the keynote in Dutch? I said: I’d be happy to do it in English, but my Dutch isn’t good enough. Then he says: I need it in Dutch. Then I say: Would the AI generated also be okay? Now you can see how I give my speech in Dutch. Here’s a short excerpt. It’s possible to make a chatbot on a page. Now I can, bijvoorbeeld, ask: What is bijvoorbeeld Expressnetprexis? As if I say: Let’s have a look. What comes out? Nothing comes out at all. So I stand there in front, show something, explain it in German and that’s also translated into Dutch. That also means here and the good thing about AI is that these are all things that used to be extremely time-consuming, cost an incredible amount of money and are incredibly complex.

And for me, that is the real revolution when it comes to AI. Everyone is talking about AI. It has now reached the point where it is in everyone’s hands if the topic is dealt with openly. And the great thing is that there are still several possibilities. I can also do video parties here. In other words, I now only need two or three minutes to record myself on my iPhone. That’s exactly, can lip-sync. In other words, I can lip-sync completely and I have the option of being able to translate. That is also lip-sync. So what you’ve just seen, this topic with the car salesman, that was lip-synced in Dutch and in French. In other words, lip sync is translated. I can lip-sync text to video. That means I can enter a text and either with an avatar that is there. So there’s a studio avatar here. I can say, I have a selection of avatars here that I can work with, or I can record my own video and say, okay, I’ve recorded my own avatar once and now I can say, there’s always a standard text in here, I’m going to do it Welcome to the new era of video production with HeyGen.

Just type in your script to get started. So the voice wasn’t mine, it was generated with my voice, which is what I always prefer to do, I don’t enter any text, but I always like to do it in such a way that I record a sound, so the audio track is real and he practically builds the video on top of it. And that’s the case, for example, with some companies where, when it comes to internal communication, for example, a CEO doesn’t always like to stand in front of the camera and say: I don’t have the time, I don’t have the nerve, not everyone is suitable for the camera. But what can he do? He can simply send a quick voice message to an assistant on his iPhone. And the assistant uses it to send a weekly video message to the whole team. And that works. And I’ve accompanied a few companies in the process. Of course, it also contains AI-generated, let’s say, images, the employees know that, but it’s also great for internal communication. And what I can also do with it, I can now even make personalized videos here.

Let me show you an example of what this looks like. So, this is Hi, Emma. Welcome to Hey, Jenn Personalized Video. This is Wayne, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Hey, Jenn. So he said: Hey, Emma, and now he’s saying the same thing? Hi, Justin. Welcome to Hey, Jenn Personalized Video. So one Hi, Emma, one Hi, Justin. In other words, I don’t know which one of you makes the corresponding newsletters. With this tool you can make personalized video newsletters. That means I have a CSV file with the name and then I just have to record a video and I can send a completely personalized video to 400 customers. And I think you get the idea that it’s very different from sending out a non-personalized video, because hardly anyone does it. And the nice thing is that it’s super easy. Yes, it’s a paid license. So you can start for free. I use it quite a lot now, then it costs 700 dollars a year. But to be honest, just translating a video into another language by a professional, I’ve already recouped the money. So against that background, if you use something like that, it’s really good value for money and that’s why HeyGen is so good, because with HeyGen I can translate videos, I can do text to video, I can do audio to video in a quality that’s almost impossible to achieve.

I can translate. And what the latest shit is, I can now say here, just to say, I even have a streaming avatar. And with this streaming avatar, I can now repeat the sentence: Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, I have my own avatar, I’ll use it now, start streaming. Okay, I’ll have to … Oh, I’ve already got it, Find Two. I’ll have to use the other one, I’ll have to use that one. Exactly. That means you have to pay 200 dollars for this one. That’s brand new now. Until recently, it was only available with this CEO. It’s only been around for a week now. That means I can now chat with him and I practically have a digital twin of my sales colleague. Colleagues. In other words, I can now say that Sven Riemann, for example, is currently talking to the customer. But if Eber says: I’d like to talk to … I have a question, then you can say: I’m the digital colleague here, because the real Sven is out with the customer right now, but you can talk to me. And it’s now so sophisticated that it works really well if you look.

Now people are saying that this is the latest shit, it’s only been around for a week, that you can also do this with your own in this form. And that’s why I’m a big fan of not using millions of tools, but using a few tools that can do a lot, using them properly. And that’s why I find chat-based work, I find ChatGPT a good measurement, especially when it comes to building your own bots. When it comes to chatbots, especially for customers, I’m a big fan of Chatbase AI. When it comes to video communication, I’m a big fan of Hey, Jen. So the idea is that they say: What can I do with these systems? In other words, here, or for a topic that you might not always think about, is to say, here for this topic, employee recruitment. And of course I can do this professionally. So I really don’t understand why you’re making such a big fuss about the movie. All the information about the jobs can be found on our new careers portal. And now many people might say: Wow, to do something like that so professionally.

You can see the camera in the background. We can’t afford that, we don’t do that. I’ll show you the counter-example and that brings us full circle back to the beginning, where I said Relevance found it before cases. There’s a master glazier, Sterns, and he was looking for apprentices a few years ago. And what did he do? He simply put his Android phone in his journeyman’s hand and without a microphone and said: I’m coming out here right now with the glass and you film it. And that’s how it turned out. moin. I have two apprenticeships to offer. I’m not interested in where you come from or what kind of education you have. Giving up or dropping out of training, along the lines that it’s the others’ fault, is not an option. And it goes on like this. If I take a look now and that’s why I say to myself Better done than perfect, if you feel like it, search for Glaserei Sterns on YouTube. What do you think? How many views does he have on his channel? By the way, I also use CopyCockpit and I think it’s very good. Above all, it’s very good for texts and for things that you reuse in the German-speaking world, i.e. CopyCockpit.

And what I really appreciate about CopyCockpit is that you also have these regular Zoom calls, where I think you have very good support. That’s why I can highly recommend CopyCockpit, especially if you want a German-language tool. And give me a recommendation. How many views do you think it has on YouTube? What do you estimate? How many times has this video been viewed? Thousands? Nearly 600. 500 somehow, 93,600 pads wanked there. He did it again last week when I checked. He couldn’t save himself from applications. And that’s why I say: Guys, better done than perfect. Don’t make it so complicated, make it as simple as possible. You’ve seen it here with Hey, Jammer and so on. You can hyper-personalize with AI, which is very interesting in sales. I can, and this is what I said earlier, please, if these expectations are exaggerated, disappointments will follow. And 2024 is the year of AI disappointments. It’s important not to say: they can’t do anything, they’re all stupid. It’s like when I have a new employee, they can’t do anything at first either.

And if I don’t brief them properly and don’t support them properly, the result will be just as meaningless as if I tell an AI to write me an article. It’s like the journeyman coming in and saying: “Master, I’ve painted the windows now. Should I paint the frames too? So that’s a clear briefing, I’d say. It just helps when I give them a task. And an AI isn’t even intelligent enough to know, okay, when it says paint the windows, that it means the frames. So that’s why you get into proactivity when you’re there. And very importantly, I love this quote from Mario Andretti: If you have everything under control, you’re too slow. And that’s especially true when it comes to AI, and it’s very, very important to say: “People, switch on your brain first, then the technology. I’m really sticking with that. And then simply use technology. And I hope you’ve got an idea that it’s not all that complicated. I’ve also added the direct link to my AI tool list here and in the chat.

I’ll put it in here again, I’ll put it in the chat again. Here you have the direct link to my padlet, where you can see my current AI tools that I use. I’ve just put it on the screen here, you can see that I’ve basically got a few prompts on the topic of AI, I’ve also got a few prompts on the topic of texts here, I’ve now got a few prompts on the topic of images, how to generate them, I also say photorealistic images with me, Journey super. On the topic of chatbots, here is the topic of Chatbase. On the subject of summaries, on the subject of research, I have FVRI. I have Puplexi here, we talked about that. I’ve included the topic of HeyGen. I have a few more here. So as you can see, it doesn’t get boring, there’s a lot going on. In that sense, that’s me exactly. This is a padlet. This padlet is this padlet is this tool. I’ve put the link in, which is something I really appreciate about Padlet. It’s a tool, if you go to the link, you’ll notice that you don’t have to register for it, but it’s a tool where you can make such boards available without registering.

Conclusion

That’s why I like using this tool. Yes, I’m not at the end of my tether in that sense, but I’m already at the end, four minutes over time. Sorry for that, dear Jay, times. I hope it was still worth it for you and for all of you. As always, I am not unionized. This means that if there are any more questions, I will of course answer them. But I’ll officially close now and gladly hand it back to dear Cema.

Yours, Thorsten Jekel

Also available in: Deutsch

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