962: Yobi: AI, Entrepreneurship, and Customer Support with Ahmed Reza

Robert Plank 00:04 Welcome back to the podcast here with Ahmed Reza from Yobi, which is an AI powered company dedicated to helping your business excel in customer relationship management. And all COVID is a tech entrepreneur. And his has a story of going from being a child actor to a NASA engineer. So we're hearing all sorts of stuff about personal development and artificial intelligence. So Achmed, blood gotta be talking to you.

Ahmed Reza 00:31 Hey, thanks so much for having me on, Robert. Glad to be here.

Robert Plank 00:35 Glad to have you. And so I didn't know I didn't have enough time just before this podcast to look it up. You're a child actor. What were you in?

Ahmed Reza 00:42 Oh, so I was in Bangladesh. I started out doing some singing. And then some producers spotted me I was I was a little kid. And I approached my mom asked if I'd be interested in acting, and obviously, he's never taken acting lessons. And the producers like, kids act just naturally. So that was my first acting gig. I enjoyed it so much. And they liked my work. So I started getting more and more, until I was I became a relatively well known actor in Bangladesh in the in the 80s. Actually, no, sorry, 90s. Long time ago,

Robert Plank 01:21 but why did you quit if you kept getting bigger and bigger amount of fame? Like why not just pursue that past?

Ahmed Reza 01:28 Because I emigrated to the United States. So I came to America. And it was a pretty harsh awakening after that. Because, you know, stardom has its negative effects. So one of the big negative effects is, people start treating you better, and you start thinking that maybe you're better, right? And that's not true. Because when I came to America, I'm on the streets, like in New York City selling books, and nobody knows who I am. And I'm going like, wait, wait, I don't deserve this. And then I realize, like, doesn't matter. This is how life is right here. Nobody knows what the heck you are, and you're on the streets. And you're just another immigrant who's got to make it.

Robert Plank 02:09 Right, and I can see how this especially being a young person, when our brains don't fully formed until we're 28. And so it's easy to get that inflated ego, and then that works for a while until you you hurt someone's feelings or until reality hits you. And then you kind of have to go through some somewhat of an awakening and somewhat of a transformation. And then so then that led you to being a NASA engineer. So how did you get started on that? And what did that lead to

Ahmed Reza 02:37 is I actually ended up dropping out of school after I came to America, I was 14. And I thought my life was over, got super lucky, was able to get back to school, worked a whole bunch of jobs, and then got a scholarship to Cornell. When I graduated, actually, right before I graduated, I was broke. So I was trying to drop out. And as a student, I was working at Space Sciences, I went to go quit my job saying, well, I'll have to drop out, go work for a semester. And lo and behold, the principal researcher of that project, which was the Spitzer Space Telescope project, offered me a full time job without a degree, because I was a pretty damn good programmer. And he wanted me to continue doing that for NASA. So I worked on the image processing pipeline for the Spitzer Space Telescope. And after that project was over, I was able to, you know, stack enough money aside, to go back to school for one semester, I got a waiver from Cornell and took 34 credits in one semester, and finish up school.

Robert Plank 03:45 Well, nice. And like you hear sometimes about, I don't know what it has all these different terms. There's like, kind of like, like the immigrant work ethic, right, that there are a lot of people that are born in America, and they don't even know how good they have it. And they squander their opportunities and adversity. You have people who go from one country to another and they just they outwork the heck out of the people that have way more opportunities. And so what do you think you in in your travels so far? Like? Are there like principles? Or are there things that you think that you do that a lot of people like don't do or don't have?

Ahmed Reza 04:21 Oh, definitely. I'm personally very biased towards immigrants, mainly because it requires a certain level of motivation to give up everything right and to move to a new place that you're unfamiliar with, right? You don't know what you're getting into. So requires a certain level of, I guess, a sense of adventure and motivation to move away from comfort. That's one thing the other thing that it gave me, I have a really big unfair advantage compared to just about everybody else. Because most folks have lived in just one world paradigm. If they haven't really immigrated or traveled a lot. You can Get some of this from travel. But growing up, for example, in Bangladesh, I witnessed starvation firsthand, there was a drought, a lot of people starve to death, that's one of the most horrifying things that you can witness. And also growing up, I expect, I experienced a paradigm which wasn't quite as I would say, capitalist as America is currently and the whole world is becoming similar. But when you met somebody, you never asked them what they did for a living. This was just a really odd question to ask somebody because, you know, I mean, Robert, you're Robert.

Robert Plank 05:37 Wright, multifaceted,

Ahmed Reza 05:39 exactly. And it may have just been from the fact that, you know, it was more of the upper class and militia society where you didn't necessarily have to work. But your career didn't quite define what you were, who you were. And it would have seemed rude. And the aspirations were very different. So a lot of Indian kids Bengali kids, people from Southeast Asia, they aspire to be like Einstein. So being a being a young man, you know, I was proud of being good at math, you know, I aspired to be good at physics, and just being a geek wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It was something people aspired to. Whereas once I came to America, that worldview is just so very different, right? So much of it is like, hey, what do you do? How much money do you make? And I recall, a fundamentally different way of looking at the world. And knowing that that's also possible, knowing the the good in that, and also the also the bad in that, right? So when I look at the world rapidly evolving, so I remember the 90s great times, by the way, where everything was great. And the biggest thing we were worried about was the president his indiscretions. And then watching the iPhone come out watching internet come in, right? And it transforming society, it creating kind of this new world, where if you go to anywhere in the world, just about the culture feels very similar. People will ask you, what do you do? And how much are you worth? The Instagram effect? So as an immigrant, and as an older person, I guess, I feel like I have this unique worldview and able to, I'm able to not get too attached to the current reality, because I know that it can change and it's not the only one that's possible. So it's been an unfair advantage in being an entrepreneur and being able to try to imagine, okay, now that there's this new technology with artificial intelligence, what does the world likely to look like in 10 years, while most folks will probably just imagine the same ol same, that is never the case, man

Robert Plank 07:54 that they'd like it to be, it's more comforting to think that it's the same as it's always been. But even when you think back to the 90s, with that kind of those were romantic feelings of the warm and fuzzies it even wasn't as great as we remember. And it's like we've all been there we go and find some childhood toy that we played with or play some old video game or get that old gaming system. And it's frustrating, you have to blow on the cartridge and it crashes or your old 486 computer takes 10 minutes to start up and imagine having to use dial up modems, and it's like, the past is a mixed bag, isn't it because it's it's a little bit inaccurate. But so but this is powerful, what you're talking about that there's just the the ability to shake things up, right, and we take all these things for granted. And there's a lot of sameness day to day. And then even our own internal thoughts, you always hear these, these numbers that like 98% of your thoughts are just on repeat. And we'd like to think that every day is fresh, and we're like, like, it's a movie, a new movie playing in our head, it's kind of the same routine and only a little bit is difference. And then especially in in America, we just assume that everything's the same every everywhere you go. And everyone's like us, and everyone speaks English and with everyone, the job you have is so important. But then, and you hear about this concept of how travel expands the mind. And you've tapped into this idea that but by traveling you just see how different things are. And many things that you take for granted and didn't even think about now. Your beliefs are a challenge. And then that assists you in dealing with the inevitable change of time continuing and especially with the whole Moore's Law of IT and technology just rapidly advancing and just really messing us up and we kind of had two choices right? Either cling to the past and and fight change or and hate change, or it's somehow find a way forward to deal with it. And that leads us to this whole I don't know if it's scary, but like the past year or so, AI has become such a Ah, such a beast, right? And it's, it feels like the.com Boom all over again. There were so many things are being said daily, there's so much money being thrown around, there's so much hype so much buzz. And in, in the midst of all that mess, you see some things happening. And I know the how this company called yogi, which helps with customer relationship management with artificial intelligence. So can you tell us what led to Yogi from kind of we're moving along in a timeline here to like the adult years. But what led to yogi and what does it do? And how is it different?

Ahmed Reza 10:34 So I joined a bunch of startups after NASA, I worked for the DOD for a little while doing artificial intelligence for unmanned aerial vehicles. So so as to freak people out from the get go, right? Well, that's that's how I started. But I spent a good amount of time with the government back when the government used to build really cool stuff, right. And that's one of the things I remember from the 90s. Like, being a geek, it was it was cool to go work for the folks that had all the tech, right. So I remember after DoD was pretty heavy stuff, joined a startup. And the startup almost felt like play, except it came with like very real money. So I ended up joining three separate startups, that all did really well. So I realized everybody else had the oh eight housing crash. And I was like, what crash Life is good. And then decided to start my own company. It was a startup using machine learning to help dentists with their marketing. So we captured inbound calls, transcribe them, and figured out which one of those calls converted to patients and which ones didn't. And you could attribute it back to which AdWords drove that call. So it was a very simple calculation of spend more money on the stuff that works. I didn't think it was going to be that big of a deal. It was one of the easier projects I've worked on, right like before that I'm working on spaceflight systems working on, like really hardcore tech. But that's the thing that made me a multimillionaire. We scaled it up in revenues, relatively quickly, dental isn't super sexy. But guess what, there's a lot of money in it. It sold that company in 2018. And I became an investor for a bit. And I learned more about business. So my background was very geeky, very tech heavy. But now I started learning more about business and understanding of things that constrained business from scaling. And in the back of my head, I was just like, man, if all we did was capture a fraction of the calls coming into a dental office, and we were able to help, on average, like help dentists make an extra $400,000 a year, which is a large amount of money for a small dental office. And I thought, that's just a tiny bit of communication. If I captured more of the communication, and I could build a brain in the cloud, I bet it could manage your marketing better, it could, it could probably manage your business better. And around the same time, the Transformers come out, right? Transformers were out a little bit before about there was a seminal papal paper in artificial intelligence called attention is all you need, which was talking about the transformers and how it would change neural nets. This is where my age shows again, because I was like, Ah, I've seen hype before. But this time, it wasn't hype. It was. So this is what caused Chet GPT and generative AI to really come into its own. So I have an unfair advantage. Because I'm very technical. I went off and started working on UB, which is a unified communications app. But really, it's called the OB, because it's short for yo yo bytes. And our domain name was y IV, that IO, u OB is like two to the power at like terabyte, there'll be byte as the largest number of bytes you can have. So I was like everybody who's geeky is going to understand that I'm actually built doing data, AI and building a brain in the cloud. Of course, the first marketer, you know, friend of mine, she's like, nobody gets it. Even geeks don't get it so geeky, even geeks don't get it. You should call it something cute or like UOB so rebranded to yo V, and we call it the unified communication platform. And we simplified it down. We have apps that work everywhere. But really what we've been working on is building synthetic agents. So I have a digital clone of myself that sounds just like me, and as of a couple of days ago, speaks Chinese fun. So is able to carry on conversations posts on social media on my behalf, and has basically generated me into a mini influencer on LinkedIn and other places. And that's just one of the capabilities of what it can do. So for the current company, we haven't scaled up the same way that you'd scale up a traditional company by hiring more and more people. Instead, I literally just cloned myself, I can now handle 700 conversations at the same time. So very different paradigm that we're about to get into. And the journey of the generative stuffs just moved way faster. than even I anticipated. So we rolled out GPT 3.0 in our application like February of last year, not this year, but the last year feels like a really long time ago. And the biggest challenge that we had was we have all these small businesses using our app, because we make it super easy. You know, how do we not Creep them out? How do we make sure they're not like, Oh, my God, this app understands everything I'm saying, and it can automate my conversations. So that's what we spent the that summer on, like, you know, how do we roll this out and carefully and then catchy PD comes out. And our customers are like, Oh, AI, of course, we want more of it. So now we're like, okay, great. We also have digital clones that can sound like you, and can speak in 39 different languages, and can handle customer service and sales better than you could imagine ever imagined. And now we kind of have a huge waitlist on that, because super new tech, it requires, you know, very careful handling, because just like it can amplify my voice. You can also do some pretty horrible things with it as well. As you probably have heard enough about what I might do the larger argument, Reza, shoot, you'll be the tongue shooting, if that's me speaking Chinese, I don't speak Chinese. does.

Robert Plank 16:25 So with and like this whole, this whole idea of like automating your communication. Like it sounds cool. But but sometimes with the like Chad GBT, especially you worry about the accuracy, right? And sometimes when you have it like, right things, it's kind of not quite there. So has Have there been difficulties with that, or have there been, like, you know, customer objections from people using that just because like, sometimes it's a little bit off

Ahmed Reza 16:49 support. That's part of the training. So what we really built out as a human in the loop. So if you can conceptualize my assistant as like another person who's part of my team, I can train that intern once the intern is trained up really well, they're going to be amazing, except this intern when they graduate, never has to sleep or breathe or eat, and works 24 hours. So there's a training process, but we did build out something that's special to us. So it's we call it the goal oriented conversation engine. I saw we're gonna come up with a better name than that. But what it does is it constrains language models. So we're not just using something like chat GPT, we're using, we're using chat GPT. Or for conversational part. It's like a user interface. So you can talk to the synthetic agent. And we can switch out chat GPT with open source models. And I knew that open source MLMs are coming, we're testing the open source MLMs. As soon as they can't came out, the first one being bloom, which only spoke French for whatever reason. But now you have some amazing models that can handle business conversations, just as well as chat up decam. So, in case of business conversation, most of the times you meet people, you know, I say hello, how are you doing? What do you do? Right? The conversations are a lot more constrained. You know, I'll rarely ask about, you know, where did you go on vacation last week, I'll rarely ask very specific questions, it'll be more about products and services. So for us, because we're b2b focused, we needed to make sure that we didn't just open up a language model to customers, which I think is fundamentally misguided. The right way to go about is use the language model for the user interface. And then there's tons of traditional machine learning models that are still perfectly, like fine and powerful. For example, how's my you know, how am I QuickBooks? Or if I close my store next week, how much money am I likely to lose? You can ask that question in natural language, but to do the processing the calculation, some people are trying to use language models to do all of that, we just use the stuff that already works, man.

Robert Plank 19:04 And it seems like that's a lot of your philosophy that you're big on, always learning and being on the cutting edge. And then when these breakthroughs do happen, then you don't say, oh, let's make a copy of this. Or let's try to catch up, you say, you know, there's interfaces, let's just tap it out in the open API's API and just use what they have and combine things and build on top of that. So that way, we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time and so with all these things that you're innovating, how analog with the with the deep fakes and the different languages how soon and so you can be in a podcast like this and it's just not even you

Ahmed Reza 19:41 two months ago.

Robert Plank 19:42 Really? Have you tested?

Ahmed Reza 19:44 Yeah, we already started releasing podcasts are fully AI generated. And at least in English, even my mom couldn't tell it wasn't me.

Robert Plank 19:51 Wow. So if someone wanted to see some of this, if they wanted to see like a video demo of what you've made, is there an easy way to Find that or is that tough?

Ahmed Reza 20:01 It's actually on my LinkedIn, I post it on social media all the time. So the AI community is pretty small, pretty active on Twitter. So when there's something fun, a big part of building startups is just incredibly fun, right? It's just incredibly, it's like watching Legos come together. So when you put one of these things together, so we recently got translations that are in my voice, like the Chinese that you just heard, right, have Dutch and Italian. It's just super entertaining. For me personally, I usually put a post it up on social media, for others in the community to listen to, you know, either get creeped out or be like, Oh, that's pretty cool.

Robert Plank 20:41 And, you know, I think that you've tapped into something interesting here. Like, you know, we, we talked at the beginning of our conversation about this nostalgia idea. And now we're kind of talking about like, kind of come Murni merging the entertainment and the learning. And like, I don't know about you all the time, I look up YouTube videos, or just, you know, old, old SimCity games, or just, you know, Windows NT screenshots, just all these kinds of ways to where like, there's there's entertainment, like watching TV and a movie, but there's kind of that weird entertainment combined with learning. And it seems like that's a good productive way to use social media like like any tool, you could use it for good or for bad. And kind of the bad way is to just mindlessly Doom, scroll and make your brain stupid, or but I think a better use for social media is looking at what some of these guys are doing with their startups and look at what they're innovating. And that way you you can kind of get these little tidbits and get kind of feel some of the excitement. And at the same time, stay up to date with the the scariness of AI because the big thing with AI is everyone's worried about being left behind. And you. I mean, imagine if like your ears saying you created this a year ago, and this two years ago, imagine if you just didn't follow anything AI for a year or two, when you were like okay, now I need to get caught up. There's so much new to know. So I think that you we stumbled upon something here is to scratch that itch of having fun with the the old Atari system or the old Sega Genesis or the old Nintendo 64 or whatever, to get that feeling back, maybe follow some of these startup people see what they're doing. That way you can also kind of feed your brain a little bit and know what the innovations are. So that way, you can maybe apply it to your business if there's some new thing you can bolt on. But at the very least just just stay up to date in a way that's not the the stupid scary American doom and gloom news. Yeah,

Ahmed Reza 22:38 absolutely. I'm a big proponent of I'm a big proponent of like learning new things, and understanding and engaging with technology before it comes out. Like you said, when you said like blowing into the cartridges ever, like fond memories of blowing into cartridges, because remember that excitement of trying something new? Yeah, that excitement of looking forward to the future. I missed that. That that I think is a very American thing. And that's one of the like, the best parts of the American Dream is like you look forward to the future, with hope with with what you can do. But at the same time, like I think wisdom is looking back and then looking forward, and knowing which mistakes do not repeat. So as we are all kind of scared of AI. And the reason I doom and gloom take center stage is because it's a lot easier for people to pay attention to something negative than something positive. And that's where as an entrepreneur, that's where I live man, like, the reason like I was able, I couldn't believe that I made millions off of like, a very, very simple transcription and analyze script. I was like, Oh, this is super easy. I'm gonna get killed. Probably I probably have six months and somebody is going to launch a competitor. Guess what, all the people who are super smart. We're doing the calculations of probability of failure so much that I never really had competition. I think it was four or five, six years in that finally, like somebody else was like, hey, that guy's making a lot of money, we should do the same thing. So because of the negative bias, I think oftentimes we don't we It doesn't serve us well. It's a good idea if there's a tiger in the bushes. But if you're always scared of bushes shaking, right, and it's just a squirrel, you're just gonna live in a state of panic and fear. And it's better and panic and fear doesn't serve you well, when you really need to plan and when you really need to, like guide the future steer right towards the future, as opposed to being dragged along. And you're still panicking.

Robert Plank 24:41 And I think what you're mentioning here is there's there's such a thing as maybe being too smart for your own good. And there's like the logical intelligence and the emotional intelligence. And if you can apply some of those smarts to the emotional intelligence and you can, you can say, Oh, I'm having this analysis paralysis. I'm letting fear get the So me, you have that awareness. And then you can focus on that and conquer that and be in control of that, instead of letting that control you. And we've all been there, we've been in that situation where we're, we're awkward or aware enough to know we're awkward, but not enough to solve being awkward. So maybe some attention needs to be placed on that. And that deep thinking and kind of the time travel you're mentioning as well, of kind of thinking back to the past and thinking towards the future and examining from the new perspectives and new angles that unfortunately, a lot of people don't do, a lot of people are stuck in their box. So if someone wants to bust out of their box, embrace the future, revolutionize their business, improve productivity, and save money, and they say, Okay, this whole, you'll be an AI tool that I can use for my customer support, how does a company know if they're a good fit for using this? And how do they start to take action on it.

Ahmed Reza 25:54 So it starts with just simplifying your communication, you can sign up, and you can get your SMS, Facebook, messenger, Instagram, everything into one app. And as soon as you start using our application, mainly for business, not mainly primarily for business, so we don't actually sign up for personal reasons, right? It is not a privacy focused app, because in business, you actually want transparency, you want the other person to know what conversation you were having with the customer. The reason CRMs exist. So here at the point of engagement, somebody else in your business will know what conversations you had with the customer so that you could take a day off. That's how it starts. And then just like someone else would know, the AI also knows what conversation you have with the customer. Once the AI knows enough, and you're confident that your AI intern is at a point where he can answer those questions just like you could, you can kind of set that you can set that automation agent to like go and do that work for you. So you don't have to. Oftentimes, it's simple things like What's your address, right? It's nothing fancy, but it makes a really big difference to your business. So if you're in business, I customer touchpoints. For a customer relationships are really important. Yo visa, probably a good fit for you. For a lot of small businesses, dentists, landscapers lawyers, we have tour operators, and we have larger businesses as well, like universities, we're using UOB to maintain better relationships with the with students, nonprofits are using it to maintain better relationships with all the all the folks that they serve. If you don't have a lot of customer component to your, like, a lot of customer interactions, like if you're, say, like a donut shop, I do, we could still be interesting, but not nearly as interesting as if you're a dentist who needed to remind people of their appointments.

Robert Plank 27:50 So I think you're on the next level here with this, because you're making me think of, you know, maybe probably 20 years ago when, when some of the first live chat came about, and it wasn't very sophisticated wasn't very impressive. And then a few years later, you started seeing like helpdesk systems becoming more of a thing where you could have kind of unified communication and canned responses. And you could potentially, like train employees to scale your customer support that was kind of a next level. And then CRM became a thing where you can kind of then see all your customer data in one place, there's still been some of these missing gaps. And now with some of these things you've described, kind of training the the usual kind of, you know, routines that you go through dealing with customers. That seems like it's more of the next level. And so if someone wants to check this out, plug this into their business and see how it works for them is the website yo b dot app, is that right?

Ahmed Reza 28:46 Yep, just go to yo b dot app and super easy to sign up and get going with it.

Robert Plank 28:50 Fantastic, exciting. And then also to plug that that LinkedIn so that way people can see the things that happened with with Adobe and AI in general, especially what seems super cool was that 100% computer generated podcast that's a Achmed Reza Reza, how

Ahmed Reza 29:08 do I Reza? Reza okay.

Robert Plank 29:11 And that spelled ah, M Ed Reza. And so, go there on LinkedIn and check out Gob dot app. It's super simple. All in one platform hooks up with all your other systems like Calendly and Zapier. And then so as we're wrapping up our conversation here Aquaman usually, I asked kind of like a deep insightful question, but we've already gotten so deep I don't think you will can handle it. So as we sign off, can I can we kind of trade our favorite next gen episode, and you can't say best of both worlds or yesterday's enterprise or inner light? So what would you say is your answer?

Ahmed Reza 29:50 Oh boy, I think my favorite next gen episode is when when Picard meets que

Robert Plank 29:58 le the first One. Yeah. Encounter at Farpoint very first episode.

Ahmed Reza 30:03 Yep. So I remember that because here's all this futuristic stuff. And in comes Q, which is like, totally like question mark, right? What the heck? Who is this guy? What does he know the future and like time space. And queues continues to be a mystery throughout the entire series including like even even the latest version of Picard. Right.

Robert Plank 30:31 Right. He's dead but now he's back again. Who knows? Yeah,

Ahmed Reza 30:34 cuz, you know, the laws of physics and time is based on Apply. Yeah, and here's this being coming in just like playing with you guys.

Robert Plank 30:43 And Q is also probably the funniest character maybe in all the Star Trek, right? Like he's kind of there's humor there and he kind of has fun and plays and he's not just a maybe the in that one that encountered before when he was sort of a scary villain. But even then with the the courtroom, he was always silly. So that's it's a good reminder of how humor helps out. And so now that you told me yours, I have to tell you my real quick I liked the Royale even though a lot of people say that's like one of their most hated, like, like almost code of honor. And you know that one, right, like the casino episode.

Ahmed Reza 31:16 So no, remind me which one? I don't remember the episode names.

Robert Plank 31:21 Oh, they um, they find this like desolate planet. And there's one little like hotel in the middle of nowhere, and they go there and some some NASA astronaut crashed there. And aliens were sad that they ruined his spaceship. And they wanted to make it up to him. And they found like the this one like really bad fiction book about mobster Casino. And so they created this culture. That's right. And they were just a nightmare. And, and my favorite part about that is that quick because then when they when they try to leave, then there's like the revolving door and they they can't leave they can't get back in until they like when the the craps game, and then they're allowed to leave. And when I was a kid, I didn't like it so much. See that? Now we're getting into like how time changes things when I was a kid, I didn't like it. But when I was an adult, I realized that that astronaut he probably spent decades trying to beat the scenario and finally said yes, I can like go out there revolving door and the whole planets desolate he is he would have no way off the planet. So he probably did all the gambling and and all the solving the mystery just to go outside. And then just to be like, in order to survive, I have to go back in and just like this is my existence now. And we you know, we all have our limitations. We all have our box to that we're stuck in and so it's it's a reminder there of that emotional intelligence concept and to embrace what you have. And and sometimes you're just you're stuck in a casino. But that's that could be fun. Right? It sounds like a blast.

Ahmed Reza 32:50 Yeah, technically, Star Trek is all basically teaching philosophy through entertainment. Right?

Robert Plank 32:54 Yes. And that makes it way, way more interesting than reading a textbook. And it's a cop show, right? It's always a show up some crime in some ways happen. It's a mystery to be solved, they solve a mystery. It's a template

Ahmed Reza 33:08 of final Star Trek reference. The Obi is basically trying to build the computer. So you know how you're running this, you know, enterprise, the starship. And you just say computer do this, right? I know, serious kind of based on that. And all these other, but computers, like super smart computer knows everything. And everyone like really knows what to do for you. Right? And it actually runs the ship. It runs, you know, life support to everything else. So if you look at how Star Trek is organized, like it wouldn't be possible without computer always in the background, but it's never like distracting you. That really is the philosophy of computing and AI that I really believe in. Because I saw it in Star Trek. And I thought that was pretty cool. So that's what we're really building is like, we're trying to build that assistant for your business that runs everything and is like kind of in the background lets you just, you know, let's just let's just do cool things.

Robert Plank 34:02 It's everywhere. When you and I were kids, there was a computer room where the room was just where the computers are. And nowadays, no one has that nowadays. There's the phone, there's the Smart TV, there's the tablet, there's the smart Speaker Now it's everywhere. Just like on the Starship Enterprise. anywhere you're at you just say oh computer, tell me this. So it's all around us. Yep. And I

Ahmed Reza 34:25 believe like laptops, phones, these are all transitional technologies to getting to that point. Sounds crazy, but I believe like this is transitional technology and having lived from the 90s to now I know how fast things change.

Robert Plank 34:40 And yet at some point you won't even need the phone right? You just like you say what you want and it appears on the screen gives you the answer amazing times ahead.

Ahmed Reza 34:49 Absolutely. Now I'm definitely looking forward to it. I'm hoping to like experience Star Trek before I die.

Robert Plank 34:55 Yes. And with the life extension all that comes with a transplant. Word or Word drive and so exciting times ahead and for you, they're in podcasts and your listener the exciting times for you is to check out UB your generative AI powered assistant and the future of business communications. That's why oh bi dot eight p p go there right now. You'll be dot app. We'll see you there. And thank you very much Achmed for blowing our minds giving us like, I feel like it was like 50 podcasts of those wills and ones with some Star Trek bonus thrown in there. I don't think I've ever I haven't been able to talk to anyone about Star Trek in like 10 years except for my wife. So, man, they're just excited the kid in me so thanks for that, and thanks for showing up.

Ahmed Reza 35:36 Thanks for having me, Robert. Take care.

Robert Plank 35:42 Thank you for tuning in to the marketer of the day podcast. marketer of the day is managed by dF wind podcast, clean your 12 podcast boosters at DF Why podcast.com/free