Your First AI Win: Automate What You Hate

00:00:01 Mark Smith
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now, let's get on with the show. Welcome back to the Power Platform Show. Today's guest is Esther. She's joining me from Pennsylvania in the United States. We'll be covering a range of topics today. AI, of course, will be included. Esther, welcome to the show.

00:00:37 Esther Angell 
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

00:00:39 Mark Smith
I'm looking forward to this discussion. I was just saying to you before the call, and I think it's worthwhile, the listeners checking out your company, because your company name is insightfully curious. And I just, it's such a great name. How did you come up with it?

00:00:56 Esther Angell 
Thanks. Actually, it comes from this philosophy that was introduced to me actually when I moved to Pennsylvania and the concept around curiosity and judgment. You can't be in a state of curiosity and judgment at the same time. So I think curiosity took a different role in my life at that point for my job and for my career, for my family. And I think it's kind of essential to how we operate as humanity and how especially we operate as leaders.

00:01:23 Mark Smith
I love this. I love this. My wife and I word last year or phrase last year that we had was humble and curious. You know, stay humble, stay curious. And I love that curious. I love what you said there. You can't be judgmental and be curious at the same time.

00:01:41 Esther Angell 
At the same time. Yeah. That's brilliant. Perfect. Perfect. Tell me about food, family, and fun.     What do they mean to you? Food, family, food is delicious. I like to eat it. I might have been described as a foodie. That has definitely happened. And when we think about food, family, and fun, they all fit together. We have a family of foodies. So my husband decided I've never had it. In the United States, we do Thanksgiving. I've never had a Thanksgiving meal as good as at your family's house. So we think about food, family, and fun. I really think of those things combined and what they mean. And I think that in cultures across the world, right, that we share those in common. That's almost a unifying wherever you are. You share food, I'm sharing life with you and taking you into my family. So those are really tightly connected for me. And I love it to be delicious. As the French say, food is essential for life, therefore make it delicious.

00:02:39 Mark Smith
Yes. And It's funny, that word delicious. I've been hearing so much, so much of this year.

00:02:45 Esther Angell 
Oh, really? Okay, excellent.

00:02:47 Mark Smith
Yeah, this year, because there's actually a guy on TikTok and that my wife shows me every now and again, and she's not on TikTok. She's watching Instagram, which is like the backup of TikTok reels. But there's this Irish guy and he goes, follow me, I'm delicious at the end of every one of us. And he's this, he's just this. full of jolly guy, full of life, but he always said, follow me, I'm delicious.

00:03:13 Esther Angell 
I'm delicious. That can be taken a whole lot of ways, but I'll give you the benefit of that.

00:03:17 Mark Smith
I know, but just the way he is, he's like, he's about 6 foot six. He's a big, towering guy, and he's just phenomenal how he engages. He'll take anything out of the media, and he just puts a brilliant spin on it. I see that, and I just want to segue slightly. Vice President of CRM. What did that, what was that involved in your career? I looked at in your career history.

00:03:39 Esther Angell 
Yeah, So that was, I was in charge of a CRM practice. So this included the Microsoft platform. I actually worked for a company, Dynamics. Yeah, Dynamics platform. It was the company, the first partner certified on the Dynamics platform was who I was working for at Cargus Systems. And so they still support it, you know, 20 years later. So they had a long history there, but they wanted to bring in some other platforms. So they actually brought it, we brought in under, while I was there, Salesforce and HubSpot as well. So I was in charge of all that CRM offering.

00:04:10 Mark Smith
Yeah. Wow. Why did you go out on your own and set up your own business? Tell me a bit about that.

00:04:17 Esther Angell 
Oh, you know, it's always been something I've wanted to do, to start off on my own and to have something that I was building that was mine to build and to own and to rise and fail. And when that opportunity came about, I decided to take advantage of it and go for it and have been just thrilled and loving it. And it gives me, being on my own, starting my own business has really allowed me to support segments that don't always get support, I believe, in the democratization of technology. And I think a lot of small businesses Yeah, robotics, like for instance, robotics is a perfect example. Manufacturers have been using robotics since the 1980s, but it was like the Ford Motor Company. Well, now you see this democratization of technology and anybody can use it. In fact, instead of replacing your $1.5 million piece of equipment, use that piece of equipment from the 1950s that still works, put a robot with it, a collaborative robot with it, and now you can actually get more out of what you already have. So I believe in that methodology. And there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there there's a lot of smaller businesses that are still in that struggle of how do I get not just technology, but also finding that strategy. So there's the Deloitte's and the Accenture's and these folks that are doing these big strategy and complex strategies. And those principles are still needed by smaller businesses. So this is something that I'm really able to emphasize and do because I'm doing it on my own. I'm doing it as my business so I can do it on my own terms and still give a lot of value to smaller businesses and to entrepreneurs. And it's a lot of fun. It's been a lot of fun.

00:06:04 Mark Smith
So I take it that AI is a lot about what you do and consulting with these companies.

00:06:11 Esther Angell 
Yes, it's some of it. I think a lot of times, especially in go-to-market, You think, we've got to use AI. You should be using AI for all the things. Well, you can go on LinkedIn or any social platform now and you can see who's using it and how they're using it. We have to remember we're still selling. You are selling to a person. A person's making a decision to buy. And when we get to a point where AI is selling to AI, then we're in a different kind of space, folks, and not sure it's the space we want to be in. We still have people making those buying decisions. So you're still connecting with a person. So AI, I encourage people, shouldn't be your decision-making platform. It shouldn't be the way you make a decision. Advising, researching, streamlining, emphasizing, helping people do more. So actually becoming more efficient and getting more done, especially for entrepreneurs, people like me. I'm doing so much more than I could have ever possibly done 10 years ago by myself. So that's a big part of it, but it's also that balance, I think, for small businesses, because you can't throw everything into it and expect the same quality product that you would get if you did it yourself. And that's something that a lot of entrepreneurs hopefully don't learn the hard way, but it's something that you have to keep in mind.

00:07:26 Mark Smith
So the typical work or the typical customers you're working with, Are they at the point that they're wanting to get on board with AI, or are they even more further back in that they're not very technologically advanced or mature at this point? And what problems do you try to help them solve early on?

00:07:48 Esther Angell 
Yeah, I think most folks now, especially entrepreneurs, because there's so much weighing on your plate. So if you're small, if you've got less than 10 people at your business, You're figuring out, you're like, it's a tool, let's use it. Like, we've got to figure this out. My suggestion a lot of times is be careful what you're using because a lot of these entrepreneurs will use free tools, which is okay. Just know that your data is training their models. Some of my first advice to entrepreneurs is, what are you putting into this? Is it proprietary? Don't be in violation of any terms, NDAs, any other things. things that you might want to be mindful of from a legal perspective. So that's kind of the first, because most of them are using it. I mean, there's very rare, I don't think I've run into anyone who's not using it. What I find is they're using it at a particular preference level, as opposed to saying, okay, if you've got a HubSpot instance, and that's really common CRM for smaller businesses, as well as large ones now, but are you using it in natural language? You can literally with AI agent that's in the system, comes with the free version, just type in what you want it to do and have it execute a lot of it for you.Are you using that tool? And I'm surprised at how many people aren't. So they might be using something, but they're using it to answer a question or do a research or write a content post as opposed to really make them more efficient at something.

00:09:08 Mark Smith
Yeah, so they're using it, as in it seems to be the low-hanging fruit of the market is to create content, AI-generated content. rather than, let's look at the back office of the organization and see how we could re-engineer that.

00:09:23 Esther Angell 
Yes, and I think, and we might get into this later, but when you look at the failure rate for AI projects, I mean, they're not successful and companies are throwing lots of money into some of these projects. And entrepreneurs, small business, you don't, you can't afford that. So you've got to be mindful and careful about how you go forward with some of these projects. So to your point of efficiency, you may not re-engineer the process per se in. Like we're going to build a different process. Maybe you do, but maybe you just look at your process and say, what are the points that hold us up? What are the bottlenecks we have? What takes a long time to accomplish? What tools are we using right now? And are we using the tools? That's the first thing I tell people, honestly, is what tools do you own? Are you using the AI tools that are built in the software? Now, to be honest, some of them are crap. I've worked with one of them. I will not name names. I'm using it and it's giving you wrong information out of its own help profile. Like it happens. But you should be, that's the first step. Look at what the software that you have, what is it, what the platform's already offering you that they're offering you for free. And because you're paying for them, you're not training their model, so you have more security in place. But yeah, it's about efficiency. I think, yeah, content's great, low-hanging fruit. You have to just be careful because it can get you into trouble. If you're using it to auto response to everything and get you into trouble. Sometimes people do are doing business with a small business because they feel they're connected with a person. So by using AI too much, you can create a disconnect in that experience. Remember, you're creating experience for your clients throughout.

00:10:59 Mark Smith
Yeah, it breaks trust, right? As in it can break trust, and then...

00:11:03 Esther Angell 
It does. And being transparent about what you're using it to do. So I've seen a few folks get super transparent about what is created with AI and what isn't, and their chatbots is AI or isn't AI. And as a user, I appreciate that. So you can imagine that my clients can appreciate that as I create those tools for them.

00:11:24 Mark Smith
Are you seeing, are you coming across... success with AI, and then on the flip side, failures with it, as in the client bases that you're working with? What are you seeing positive and negative?

00:11:38 Esther Angell 
I think the main positive that I'm seeing is people getting more out of the systems they already have. So if I'm already on, like I say, a Google Workspace environment, am I using Gemini to build out gems and to build models and share those with my teammates? And now I've got consistent language. So yes, we're seeing that. I think on failures, it's more of probably misuse or overuse of the same sets of tools without the investment into the tool that's necessary to get that customization. So, you know, plugging in, write me a post or write me a blog about something, and then not giving it enough context or training that model, then you see some pretty junky stuff come out. And that's where I'd say more failures than anything. I think the other one is sometimes data where I've had a few folks that I've talked to, and those, people I know come and say, hey, have you used it to do these? I'm trying to create this spreadsheet and do this thing with this calculation. And that can be challenging when you get into data and number crunching. So if you're saying, let's say, I want to create an analysis of these associated costs with like shipping, or I want to associated costs with quoting models. You've got to be kind of careful how you build out those calculations. Not all software are created equal, and it can still hallucinate without very carefully trained. Some are better than others. And so what I find is, what I found so far is that most of those have to be handled by like, let's get actually our IT team to create an agent. They might have some additional coding that's in. We maybe want to create a custom app to solve this problem, as opposed to I can just slap a spreadsheet into ChatGPT and it tells me what I want to know. it's probably not going to work.

00:13:20 Mark Smith
Yeah. How much is culture affecting the way companies are adopting technology?

00:13:28 Esther Angell 
Yeah, it varies quite a bit. The biggest trend I've seen is inconsistency across organizations. Some people using it more than others. I think it very intensely depends on where that organization's coming from and how people feel about, for example, when we offshored a lot of jobs and you had, you're asking people to train somebody that's going to take their job and they're going to *** **** off. Like those are real, those are real fears. There's real concerns. I think those concerns are more validated and, you know, we're seeing that. articles come out, AI whitewashing, like really, we're just trying to eliminate overhead that we overspent on and we're blaming it on AI. So there is that happening. But it's a real fear for, I think, the general workman of, you know, are you trying to take my job? So I think that plays into that cultural aspect. And this is why it's important to build trust. This is why it's important to have solid leadership and to be really transparent, be authentic and transparent. I just believe in being authentic and transparent across the board. And I think it will not deter, it won't, it will turn, that will give you dividends on how you think about AI, how you're thinking about using it. So when we think about identifying that next step, what is it that you're trying to accomplish with AI? Ask your team, what do you really hate doing? Like start there. So what do you really not like to do? What would you like to not ever have to do again? Let's start there. Let's start at the low-hanging fruit. Nobody really wants to do it anyway. Can AI do it for us? That's a great place to start.

00:14:55 Mark Smith
Nice, Give me some case studies or use cases of where, as in the work that you're doing, where you really get to the point of problem, then get it and develop a solution. What are some of the use cases that you're coming across that are creating big wins for the customer?

00:15:17 Esther Angell 
I think honestly, a lot of those wins are around collaborative content generation. So we think about content calendars, we think about marketing, how are we going to market training? But where I've seen it been a double-edged sword is where folks are using it, but they're overusing it and you don't have a human in the loop. So I think those are probably the most beneficial where I'm looking to use it a bit more, because you got to keep in mind, I mean, my business has been around since like October. So like, I'm not going to have a breadth of case studies for you. Where I'm looking using it for some clients is a little bit more on like data submission and pulling data from places. So when you think about the things, what are the things that nobody likes to do? Nobody wants to track their expenses. Nobody wants to fill up the expense report. Those types of things where it's like the stuff that really nobody wants to do. Let's streamline that. Let's leverage some AI to say, hey, we've got, it's already got built in OCR. Let's just stick all your receipts in this one file and then have it automatically help you start populating the expense, you know, expense report. Those are the types the things that I'm looking to go beyond just, okay, we've created this, you know, we created a little agent that can help me write content based on my, you know, I've trained it, but let's go a little bit beyond that and find the stuff that people don't like doing, and then see if we can find a solution for that.

00:16:46 Mark Smith
Do you think that, you know, the smaller companies, do you think they have an unfair advantage really now? And like you talked about, you know, robotics has been around for other big companies like Ford and stuff like that. and we're really unaffordable by any small business. But I feel like AI is level setting the field and that you can be a small company and if you can, under 10 people, but, and you can get AI, like increase the literacy level, both digitally and from an AI perspective, I think the leverage, impact could be off the Richter scale where a big company has got to, But they've got 1,000, 2,000, 10,000 people. There's a massive investment to create an even playing field for all those staff. There's a lot less investment for the small business to provide a level playing field for their staff.

00:17:39 Esther Angell 
Yeah, no, I 100% agree with that. It's fascinating because sometimes you'll find these companies and their presence online or their amount of work that they're generating and you're like, oh, That's way smaller than I thought that what they were because they are leveraging agents for efficiency. I think, yes, larger organizations are going to have, they also have more data structures. So larger organizations have way larger data sets. And so if you're actually thinking about doing something with those data sets, whether it's really great if it's natural language, so like help desks and components like that, sure, that's easy to put an LLM in. But if you're thinking about streamlining and efficiency, your small business can theoretically take advantage of it. They also could be more nimble, which has always truly been the advantage of small business and working with a small business is they can be more nimble because they can make decisions faster.

00:18:33 Mark Smith
Yeah. What advice, just as in closing, what advice do you have for businesses and really like We're at the start of 2026, I feel like there's been a massive move in the last eight weeks in the space of AI and where more opportunity has been created in my experience. What's your advice to companies and how they tackle 2026?

00:19:04 Esther Angell 
I would say the basics of the principles of business are always the same. Don't lose sight of who you're selling to, your client, your customer, the experience that you're creating. Number one, regardless, those principles are always there. It's always the basics, always matter. The other thing would be to give yourself some space for failure. Lose fast. Try it. If it doesn't work, lose fast. Again, an advantage of a small business over a large business. You can, and your loss is gonna be a lot, it can be a lot less expensive than a larger organization. And then look for the efficiency gain, look for the place. Again, if you've got a staff or if you're a solopreneur, look for the thing that nobody really wants to do anyway, nobody really wants to do that. Start with your low-hanging fruit because it's gonna affect your culture positively if you can solve that problem. So I think those principles are, I know you wanna say like it's changed in the last eight weeks. I could have said that eight weeks ago though, it feels like because it's moving so fast, it's moving so fast. It's not going to slow down. And that's another, that's a topic, the can we versus should we is another point in time. But it's going to move fast. So be purposeful.

00:20:19 Mark Smith
Yeah. I like that. You've said it multiple times through the discussion is going back to solve the thing that nobody wants to do in your business, you know, as in that everyone is frustrated with, solve that and work up from that point because you eliminate and provide headspace for people to explore other things once you get rid of the drudge work out. I've always had this term, and I've been in CRM for 22 years, and that done right, it should get rid of the repetitive mundane of your life. Yes. And I think a lot of work is repetitive, mundane stuff that staff are not excited about. And I think we're at a watershed moment where a lot of that can be be given to AI to do and let us focus on the cool stuff.

00:21:08 Esther Angell 
Yes, I think that's, I've heard it said in a few different places, but yeah, focus on the things that humans are good at and focus on that connection and let AI take some of the junk that nobody really wants to do that anyway.

00:21:20 Mark Smith
Yeah, thanks, Esther.

00:21:22 Esther Angell 
Yes, thank you for having me.

00:21:24 Mark Smith
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Business Application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the nz365guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffee.com forward slash nz365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the starts.