Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) continue to rely on the latest technology trends to enable them to thrive, from fintech platforms to run their payment systems to leveraging social media to reach a wider audience. doing.
As part of Yahoo Finance's Small Business, Big Opportunities feature, Sachin Dev Duggal, founder and CEO of Builder.ai, speaks with Akiko Fujita at the 2024 Milken Conference to discuss how businesses are transitioning to digital. He talks about how he fights the “fear of irrelevance.” Adopt new software that is native and helps owners expand and grow.
“What we're seeing is that depending on when you talk to the small business, they either feel like they're going to break free and they're really excited to do something. That's what I mean,” Dougal said. “Or they're actually very afraid because they've heard about bad experiences or have had them, and in that case it's almost 10 times harder to get them off the shelf.”
However, once the company implements these changes, Duggal has seen primarily positive growth. One big factor is how small and medium-sized businesses are adopting AI and large-scale language models such as ChatGPT to automate certain workflows, such as copyrighting marketing and promotional materials.
Duggal cites increased productivity per employee and enhanced customer engagement as another benefit of AI. “We now have a great hybrid between user interface (UI) elements, chat experiences, and personalization that allows these small and medium-sized businesses to talk to their customers the way they want to be talked to.” Tell you. ”
Addressing concerns about job displacement and workplace reductions facilitated by AI, Duggal believes that ultimately artificial intelligence can help reduce mundane tasks, with benefits such as: Masu.[putting] A cloak that turns humans into superhumans. So you're actually becoming more productive. ”
See more of Yahoo Finance's coverage of the 2024 Milken Institute Global Conference and its Small Business: Big Opportunities feature this week.
This post was written by luke carberry morgan.
video transcript
We will talk in detail about the current situation of small and medium-sized enterprises.
We have the founder of Builder A. i will go.
Yeah, you're in a position to actually help build companies that are specifically focused on business software, so you have a very good understanding of where some of these companies are right now. .
Please tell us how those businesses are doing now.
When I think about such investments, I think there are two things that are most important. That said, there are two notable fears.
It's the fear of irrelevance that makes them say they need to do something different.
You need to become a digital native.
When I need to build software, they are scared that it will fail.
Oh, I don't understand this.
What is I?
How will it affect me?
How do I use it?
What are you going to implement to stop it?
Then I return to the fear of failure, and my heart is shaken.
And what we're seeing is, depending on when you talk to those small businesses, they either feel like they want to unshackle themselves and are really excited to do something. about it.
Or they heard a bad experience and are actually very afraid.
They're going through a terrible experience, um, and it's almost ten times harder to come out of that shell.
But broadly speaking, what we're seeing, especially on the media side, is that companies are looking to software as a way to remove the disparity in the customer experience.
The way to reduce costs and actually be able to scale is by lowering the cost per unit so that you can scale faster.
Ah, co. Um, but what's really interesting is that they're looking at using software to create new business around existing traditional businesses.
Therefore, I would like to explain the new business in detail later.
But when we generally talk about I, I mean Generation A. The progress we've been looking at is clearly I.
How are these companies implementing technology?
So I would say the biggest development right now is peripheral productivity.
What does that mean?
You may use Chat GP T to ask questions.
They may use writer-type tools to assist with marketing automation and copy writing.
Um, but really, that's fair.
It's pretty much on the periphery and it's about the individual productivity of the people there.
I think what we're seeing is a lot of pilots and proofs of concept, especially when you get to 50 to 250 employees, 100 to 250 employees.
That's been my experience about three times, right?
One of these is how we can remove human variants from supply chains and various parts of the customer experience, such as call centers and customer service.
Your experience today was just as bad as the person on the other end of the phone.
I don't know about you, but I've had terrible experiences with call centers, very good experiences with call centers, or no experience at all because no one answers the phone.
right.
that's right.
So now we can use multimodal, multimodal AI, combining things like knowledge graphs and generative networks and neural networks to bring it all together.
The second is to increase the productivity of each person. The same goes for doing 10 things a day.
What can you take away from your day to help you do four more things right?
Higher values, more critical thinking, more creativity.
Ah, that's what we call human workload reduction.
Um, and the third thing, and I think this was talked about a lot last year, is changing the interface of how you talk to your customers.
As you can see, we have come full circle.
When you were writing to your black friends, we were using D OS.
Then we had a UI, a really great UI, a forum, and a really, really sexy experience.
And I returned to chat in November 2020.
We're back to the two-tone writing experience you know.
And now we have a really great hybrid between user interface elements, chat experiences, and personalization that allows these small businesses to talk to their customers the way they want.
A lot of the anxiety surrounding me was around job displacement, but when you think about small businesses, they're often resource-strapped in many ways.
Will this allow you to scale faster and more cost-effectively?
I think you hit the nail on the head, right?
Therefore, I still cannot delete the job.
I think what that does is it deletes what you're currently doing at work. Well, what does that mean? Yeah, I mean, everyday things, like, I don't take notes anymore.
I have an AI that takes notes and I can run queries on it and ask questions that may have previously been someone else's job.
If you go back 30 years, people were attending meetings and their work was a signal.
Well, if you only work on one task, that work will be transferred to something else.
But what I'm really seeing is a huge mismatch between supply and demand. So here's a software development example for every developer on the planet.
With a demand equivalent to 9 developers, there aren't enough people to build all the software, and that demand has increased significantly, with the most conservative figure I've heard being 36% freight It seems like.
But really, when you think about all the new businesses, new entrepreneurs, and all these other people, it's almost like 70 to 80 percent freight.
Well, how are you going to fill that role?
right.
We see it in marketing and we see it in the call center experience.
So you see that at the cross and you can actually use I to put a cloak on a human and make him superhuman.
So you're actually at home.
That means a huge opportunity for companies like Builder AI. What are your thoughts on next steps?
The next steps to grow your business given the scale and demand you are currently seeing.
I think this is really good. It's something I spent a lot of time thinking about. Because imagine you take someone who doesn't know how to build software and say, “This is going to be voice to apps, or voice to software.” But you just talk to her or chat to her, uh, to us, uh, next, yeah, we recognize that customization is required.
I used to use an expert network.
Now she's able to do that a little bit more because she's actually using an expert network to do the code generation.
You have now completed building your application.
What is the first question to ask?
Am I successful?
That's business intelligence.
But the problem is, if you don't know how to build software, you don't know how to build a dashboard or ask the right questions.
So how do you start a conversational experience with the elements, gain real insight from them, and then bring them back together?
By the way, I noticed that the average size of shirt tickets you sell is $400.
You really need a secured credit card as a feature, as it allows you to check out quickly through customs.
So today we have come full circle.
A complete loop requires four or five people.
It's like the weakest link in the link, and ultimately small businesses can't afford full-fledged Accenture IT.
This means that the Consulting I-Team doesn't really get the results that create more opportunities for the company.
Satin Dev de Gala with Builder AI Thank you very much for joining us today.
