The Real ROI of AI: Why Owner Retention is the Metric that Matters

Pete Neubig: Hey, welcome, everybody!
Pete Neubig: Thank you so much for, joining the VPM monthly webinar. We have, Chris Winn with Lead Simple, and Chris, are you CEO? What's your official title over there?
Chris Winn: Yeah, that'll work.
Pete Neubig: So, look at that, man. My team got me a big dog. We got the CEO of Lead Simple. Usually, I get, like, you know.
Pete Neubig: some, some, like, marketing guy. So, Chris is, CEO of Lead Simple. Lead Simple, if you don't know, they, own… they have a CRM management system and an automation system. So, if you're looking for any kind of automation on backend, or to really,
Pete Neubig: you know, supersize your CRM system, then these are the guys, and he's gonna talk a little bit about that, but today, Chris, you're gonna talk more on the AI, and how, and, AI, and what is,
Pete Neubig: Let me see here if I got this right here.
Pete Neubig: the real ROI of AI. So you can talk about what's fake, what's real, and what we can do, right? That's right.
Pete Neubig: Alright, and like always, if you have any questions, feel free. I believe the chat is open. You can use the Q&A or the chat as Chris is speaking. If you have any questions, I'll interrupt him. But with further… with no further ado, Chris, go ahead and share your screen if you want, if you have a presentation, and…
Pete Neubig: And, off you go, man. Thanks so much for being here, buddy.
Chris Winn: All right, thank you, yeah, and please feel free, interrupt me anytime. So, I'm going to be talking about the real return on investment of AI today.
Chris Winn: Ai, I feel like it's, like, it's always in the background, always, kind of, like, background noise in every conversation, but I want to take a different approach, talking about it as a business leader.
Chris Winn: How do we invest in AI? What should you be looking for? And I want to change…
Chris Winn: the discussion just a bit, around this. So…
Chris Winn: A lot of the time right now, you know, the conversation is something like, well, AI's gonna take all the jobs. Oh, AI is my opportunity to, you know, shrink my team down and, you know, have a smaller team. I can automate everything.
Chris Winn: And I think that it's perfectly natural, that we fell into these, this way of looking, at AI.
Chris Winn: It makes a lot of sense, because what we're really looking for is a rationale. Like, why would I invest in artificial intelligence?
Chris Winn: Well, to know the answer to that, I need a number, right? Like, we really ground… we focus a lot on numbers.
Chris Winn: And it's, you know, the math is really simple. If I'm paying a dollar for, maybe a team, but I could pay 10 cents for AI and get all the same work done, well, that's, like, a very rational
Chris Winn: decision, right? At least from a business perspective.
Chris Winn: I think that the problem with this, is that it's a very, it's sort of a myopic way of looking at it. It reduces the conversation down.
Chris Winn: To some kind of, like, efficiency conversation.
Chris Winn: And so, what I want to talk about today is, this is not an anti-AI talk, it is also not a hype talk around AI. I want to talk about how we build really durable value in our businesses and in our relationships, and I want to broaden a little bit, how we think about AI.
Chris Winn: So… To get us started, though, I want to share a quote that I love.
Chris Winn: Because we are entering a new chapter, we're in something new, when it comes to AI.
Chris Winn: This is in the movie The Big Short. It's right at the beginning of that movie about the financial crisis, but it's a Mark Twain quote.
Chris Winn: It's not what you know that gets you into trouble.
Chris Winn: It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
Chris Winn: And I think a little bit of that is happening right now. Because this is so new.
Chris Winn: We're having this sort of reductive conversation sometimes about team… team investment, team size, team scale efficiency.
Chris Winn: But consider this Right? Like, what's missing, from this AI conversation?
Chris Winn: What's missing is data. What's missing is prior experience. We've definitely had technological revolutions in the past.
Chris Winn: But we've never had one like this.
Chris Winn: Right? We've never had one that is gonna, you know, potentially rewrite whole industries, rewrite all of our software, rewrite how we work. We've never had this experience before.
Chris Winn: So consider this. Do you today
Chris Winn: AI or no AI, do you feel like you have a team that's large enough to support the experience you wish you could provide to your owners, to tenants, to all the stakeholders in your orbit?
Chris Winn: Or another way of looking at it, do you think that today.
Chris Winn: There is work that your team wishes they could do, or that you wish you could do. You know it's important.
Chris Winn: But you just can't get to it.
Chris Winn: Well, of course. Like, I talk to so many property managers. This is the reality, for so many property management companies, that you were already short-staffed before. You already, many of you, not everyone, but many, already have kind of a scarcity mindset of, like, oh.
Chris Winn: I can't get to that thing.
Chris Winn: Or I didn't get to that thing, and it was really important for service quality, or for a relationship.
Chris Winn: So, in other words, before we even talk about, you know, scaling down teams, I just want to acknowledge that for a lot of property management companies.
Chris Winn: and also a lot of software companies, like Lead Simple.
Chris Winn: we were already… it's not like we were running with a surplus before, right?
Chris Winn: So this efficiency gain, it's also going to let us do the things that we know we were already supposed to be doing in the first place, right? So we're starting from a point, in many cases, of labor scarcity.
Chris Winn: I think that this means that conversation
Chris Winn: it's like, it's aiming too low in a lot of the ways. Like, it is not, I would argue, it is not about
Chris Winn: you know, how much can I automate?
Chris Winn: And I even say this as a CEO of a company that sells workflow automation software, but it is not just about automating. That's… that's the end goal, like, that's the thing that you do to get something. What are you trying to get? Well, you're trying to build a team that's gonna provide a fantastic level of service. That's the point.
Chris Winn: Better owner experience, and doing so at scale.
Chris Winn: And I actually think we've seen a version of this before. You know, they… another saying, history doesn't repeat.
Chris Winn: But it rhymes?
Chris Winn: we've been through periods of technological change, even within property management. You know, we went from system of record to system of engagement, we started automating more, we introduced software, we escaped the spreadsheet.
Chris Winn: Some of us have. We've been on this… this journey.
Chris Winn: Of bringing more automation into our businesses.
Chris Winn: So the efficiency is valuable. You want to be able to make sure that you are scaling.
Chris Winn: your door count and your revenue in a way that is efficient. You don't want your operating costs certainly accelerating with that revenue.
Chris Winn: At worst, you kind of want them growing together. At best, you want your revenue to start to break away.
Chris Winn: From your operating costs.
Chris Winn: But it's not just about efficiency, it's about having a strategy for how you're going to deploy this technology, and what pieces of your company it will amplify.
Pete Neubig: It's so funny, Chris, because when I owned my property management empire, we had this challenge where everybody's overworked, underpaid, working 80 hours. We threw people at the problem back then, right? 2014, 2015, and the people we threw were remote team members.
Pete Neubig: Then we went back and we created some checklists, then was automation, and now it's like, okay, now the next step would be AI. It's just the progression of the tools, and then utilizing the team that you have, and allowing them to be exponentially
Pete Neubig: you know, better at their, at their, at their job, or getting more efficient, exponentially more efficient.
Chris Winn: I think that's exactly right, and I would even say, internally, as a company.
Chris Winn: I mean, we deploy AI throughout all of our company, every nook and cranny. We've got some version of AI deployment happening. Of course, it started on the software team, but, you know, the software team
Chris Winn: is still, you know, it's only growing, right? It's not… and so for us, at least, you know, it's not about replacement, it is about augmentation, and the aim is to provide a better customer experience. The aim is actually to do better, higher quality work than before.
Chris Winn: And… sure, like, that's gonna bring efficiency as we grow.
Chris Winn: that's actually not the priority. The priority is making sure customers are having the right experience, and, you know, we'll get rewarded for that over time, and just, like, same for property managers, you all will get rewarded for having that level of service quality.
Chris Winn: So, you know, the opportunity really, I think, is about presence. It's about building relationships, more so than anything, and I think that is the lens that we should always be looking through.
Chris Winn: So it's really interesting. We pulled a lot of data, and some of this data, there's a… if you're interested in digging into any of this, there's a source slide at the end of this deck.
Chris Winn: Some of this is specific to property management, exclusively. Some of this is gonna be more generalized service and support, customer service, etc.
Chris Winn: But the reality, what we see in the market, is that despite
Chris Winn: all of these great AI technologies, all these new products that are coming online, that many companies are actually investing more, in, in their teams.
Chris Winn: And actually, it's really interesting, some of this…
Chris Winn: data did not end up in the deck. But what I saw…
Chris Winn: Was that, if you look at the economy right now.
Chris Winn: you certainly hear the anecdotes. I hear them all the time, I stay up to speed on this stuff of, you know, job loss, job replacement. If you follow, kind of, the tech world, I know that Square.
Chris Winn: jack Dorsey's company, The Little Square Reader, they made a big splash. I think they… I think they…
Chris Winn: shrunk down their workforce by, like, 40%. Something really extreme. But apart from those outliers, you're actually not seeing it yet.
Chris Winn: you're not seeing it yet happen. You're not seeing in the labor data that AI is, like, wiping out jobs. What you are seeing, though, is increased investment, increased productivity, increased efficiency.
Chris Winn: And is that to say that that, you know, those disruptions are not coming, that they won't happen?
Chris Winn: it's just kind of grounding ourselves in what we see in the data right now. What we see is that there's a lot of capital expenditure happening with these AI companies, and then at the business level, there is definitely investment in building out automation infrastructure.
Chris Winn: But there's also, more than ever, a focus on teams just providing exceptional service and opening up more time for those… kind of those people connections and those human connections.
Chris Winn: So, my advice to everyone is sort of like, you know.
Chris Winn: wherever you are on that AI adoption spectrum.
Chris Winn: I would encourage everyone to kind of reframe, you know, if you are thinking primarily about efficiency, I actually think there's a much bigger prize to go after, and we'll keep talking about that here.
Chris Winn: So, this is more generalized customer service data. This is not specific to property management. I would bet, though, it probably roughly tracks
Chris Winn: People still want, human relationships, they want excellent customer service.
Chris Winn: We've actually seen this… I've seen this pop up over the years in a couple different industries, where that actually bringing automation into the customer service experience is a detractor. It's gonna… it's gonna hurt the relationship with the customer.
Chris Winn: I think there's a little bit of nuance going on here. I think that, you know, I'll speak for myself. If I had confidence that I was, you know, if I'm working with an automated system.
Chris Winn: This happened to me a couple weeks ago. I needed to change a flight.
Chris Winn: I did not have a lot of confidence.
Chris Winn: that the AI system at the airline was actually going to be able to help me. I had a very nuanced issue. I knew from the outset I want to talk to someone.
Chris Winn: If I had confidence that that system was actually going to be able to help me, fine. It might be faster, I don't have to wait on hold, I'm going to get my issue resolved quickly, great. I'm okay with AI, in that scenario.
Chris Winn: But I think there's a gap right now. There's, like, this deployment gap of…
Chris Winn: You know, so-and-so's system is not actually providing a better value
Chris Winn: And so I'm actually having a worse experience, because I'm expecting that I'm able to get ahold of a human being who can actually help me.
Chris Winn: So I think we're in kind of a messy middle right now, where actually CSAT, for deployed AI technology in some cases is actually lower
Chris Winn: But the incentive for the business to get it deployed is going up.
Chris Winn: Because it brings so much efficiency. And again, I go back to your North Star is just providing the absolute best possible experience. That is all that matters. Over time, that might bend toward AI,
Chris Winn: might bend toward more human connection, and you've got more time, because you've unlocked all this productivity on your team, and you've, like, given that team… I'm sorry, you've given time
Chris Winn: Back to your team, to… to sort of hold those relationships by hand.
Chris Winn: whatever it is, though, like, building trust, is all that's gonna matter. So don't go in, sort of, technology forward, go in trust and relationship forward, and the technology will…
Chris Winn: Kind of help you, you know… those questions will answer themselves, along the way.
Pete Neubig: Yeah, Chris, along those lines, my experience has been, right now with AI, it's stuff that I can find if I just went on the website, like, they can answer all the… I call them the easy questions, but when you go, kind of, like, dig deeper.
Pete Neubig: again, that trust factor, I'm zeroing out, trying to get to a… trying to get to a person. So, my experience has been basically in alignment with what you're… with what you're stating here. So, good to, good to know.
Chris Winn: Yeah, and, you know, it's…
Chris Winn: no one on this call needs to hear this from me, like, everyone knows this. Like, that… that owner was never buying software. They were buying someone to entrust their property with, and…
Chris Winn: you know, I always think about this, too. So I grew up around… more so on the commercial side, but I grew up around commercial real estate development and commercial property management.
Chris Winn: The very act of…
Chris Winn: Googling, calling up a property manager, saying, hey, I need some help. You know, whether it was an investor or, you know,
Chris Winn: the accidental landlord, like, wherever they are on that spectrum, the very act of hiring a property manager is, like, an expression of
Chris Winn: there's a set of things that I either don't know how to deal with.
Chris Winn: Or I don't want to deal with them.
Chris Winn: But I want to entrust someone
Chris Winn: who is professional and skilled, and licensed, and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Like, I'm gonna entrust them with something that's important to me, like my property, my, you know, and…
Chris Winn: So I think, like, from the outset, property management, it is very local, and it's very human.
Chris Winn: And I think it's… and that's another reason to be,
Chris Winn: not careful, like, but intentional, thoughtful about how we deploy automation… automated experiences. Because if all they wanted was automation.
Chris Winn: There's platforms out there that Blame, at least, that they can, you know, replace some
Chris Winn: segments of the property manager's job. You know, whether those are great software or not, great experiences or not, I have my opinion on them. Probably everyone here does too.
Chris Winn: But they didn't… they didn't buy that software. They hired a… they started a relationship, and I think it's really worth value… worth remembering that, that, you know, people don't like feeling handled, I think is another way to put it.
Chris Winn: So, let's get a little bit more into data, and how we know, are we making the right investments, or are we not?
Chris Winn: Retention. Retention, is…
Chris Winn: it's the metric that matters above all metrics, and it's true, actually, on the tenant side as well, but certainly on the owner side. Everyone here knows this. Your cost to acquire is going to be so much higher than just retaining a relationship you already have.
Chris Winn: And it's going to be easier to build more revenue around that relationship over time, because you've established that trust, you've helped educate about additional services that might be available, and so…
Chris Winn: Retention is what matters as you're deploying these AI technologies. It's, like, the number one, two, and three thing that you want to keep an eye on. And so.
Chris Winn: If retention is, like, the scoreboard, that's the number that we're tracking more than anything else, then, you know, the natural next question is.
Chris Winn: how do I retain an owner? Or how do I retain a tenant and reduce my marketing and my turn costs, right? So as you're deploying these technologies, like, really keep this in mind, that everything that you're building, everything that you're doing with your team, the culture you're building around using technology.
Chris Winn: It all comes back to this, so,
Chris Winn: few metrics, that came out of a PwC report.
Chris Winn: I believe this data is generalized. It would not surprise me, though, if it aligned really nicely within property management.
Chris Winn: People say… so there's kind of, like, two sides to a coin, two sides to how the relationship is starting.
Chris Winn: That they want a really great first experience.
Chris Winn: They want that, that welcoming, that onboarding. They want to understand, kind of, okay, how is this relationship going to work?
Chris Winn: What do I have to do? What are you doing?
Chris Winn: So that first experience is really important, and there is a lot that can be automated in a positive way
Chris Winn: during the onboarding, owner onboarding and welcoming experience. And like, you know, even without AI, Lead Simple's been doing this for years. We have excellent owner onboarding in our operations platform. It's only gonna get better over time because of AI technology.
Chris Winn: But that first run experience is really important, because it's where you're first establishing, kind of, the ground rules of the relationship.
Chris Winn: And it's also their…
Chris Winn: maybe not their first impression, it might be their second impression. First impression maybe was an initial discovery call with you or someone on your team, but it is an early impression, and it's really gonna kind of solidify what they expect in terms of service quality.
Chris Winn: And then along the way, of course, hey, if I can get better speed, better efficiency, then that's really what's going to solidify that retention. Because, you know.
Chris Winn: It's worth remembering, it is painful for you to lose a client.
Chris Winn: It's painful for them, too. It is not nothing to rip up a relationship and go somewhere else. And so, for everyone involved, always want to make sure that everyone's having a really great experience.
Chris Winn: So how do we build owner trust? Where does it come from? And then I'll tie this back to deploying the AI technology. So, owner trust
Chris Winn: Trust in general.
Chris Winn: On our teams, personal life, trust is about a set of things,
Chris Winn: Four things at least. It's probably more than this, but speed. Speed matters in building trust.
Chris Winn: It sounds funny, I don't just mean that we're working really quickly, it's actually about competence.
Chris Winn: You know, like, If you've ever had someone stop by the house to work on something,
Chris Winn: and they keep having to, like, go back to the store to get another part and another part, that's slow. And that slowness might make you question how much competence they have for the job. Like, why don't you have a better plan? Why isn't this going quickly? So speed actually is really important for trust.
Chris Winn: clarity, of course, you know, ground rules in the relationship. I'm going to do this by this date, so it's an execution topic.
Chris Winn: Consistency, you know, we always want to be consistent in our relationships. And then judgment. Judgment is, hey, I had a plan.
Chris Winn: that plan no longer works, I need a new plan, and here's what I think we should do.
Chris Winn: So… so establishing that speed, clarity, consistency, judgment, those are your buckets, for how you can think about deploying AI, and how it can make you do a better job. Obviously, speed's easy, it's… it's…
Chris Winn: It's response time. It's having a clear, standard operating procedure so that your team is able to act
Chris Winn: Quickly.
Chris Winn: Judgment is also about your team.
Chris Winn: Judgment is, do we have a shared sense of procedure?
Chris Winn: if I were not here, could someone on my team make roughly the same decision that I would? Because we're all consistent, we're all on the same page, we have a way to follow through together, we have a way to support each other in someone else's absence. Like, we're all kind of flowing forward as an organization.
Chris Winn: And AI can help you do all of these things. So…
Chris Winn: Speed, stalled workflow, right? I had this great plan, something happened, now that plan is stuck. Are we able to detect that quickly and get the plan working again, get the workflow reactivated? So, incident detection in an automation process.
Chris Winn: A lot of you already have automation, right? So AI can help you find bottlenecks and get back to a plan.
Chris Winn: Escalation paths is really important. It's just like me calling the airline. Is there a really clear way? Have you set clear expectations with your owners, with your tenants? Hey, here's where you go when?
Chris Winn: And if that breaks, here's how to escalate, and here's where you go next. Those are all workflows, and you can use AI to help
Chris Winn: to help that escalation path. You can even build in rules if some of you are using an AI chatbot. Introduce to it standard operating procedures. If you're, you know, if you're talking to an owner, and they bring up this topic, or they seem frustrated.
Chris Winn: Send a text message to someone on my team, let's escalate it, let's get human, let's get in touch with them again.
Chris Winn: Lead Simple can help you automate all those things as well, but whatever software you are using, I think having those clear escalation paths is going to be really important.
Chris Winn: One other thing, too, automating communication, AI's great at that.
Chris Winn: Have people review it. Have… keep humans in the loop, and make sure that anything you're expressing out into the world has some human review.
Chris Winn: And as you start to gain some confidence in your systems, you absolutely should have, you know, on a marketing team, you would call it a tone and voice guide, a brand guide.
Chris Winn: you should have an AI tone and voice guide that is plugged in to your AI technology. Just remember, these things are speaking on behalf of your company, and it's really important that they're doing so in a way that's consistent. I have heard
Chris Winn: both great successes, and I have also heard great horror stories, and if you ever want to hear some of the horror stories, come find me, and I'll share them outside of this, outside of this webinar.
Chris Winn: So those are the positives, and then all the negatives of AI, the way we damage trust. It is things like not having an escalation path, it's things like…
Chris Winn: you know.
Chris Winn: an owner, a tenant, someone has, like, a really nuanced problem, and you just keep them in this loop of providing generic answers, there is nothing more frustrating than that. When I know that I do have a special case that I want to talk about, and you're just giving me some FAQ content, no thank you.
Chris Winn: No, now I'm frustrated. Now I want to talk to a person, but I'm going into that conversation with that human being frustrated, you know, so be really thoughtful about where you're handling those edge cases, because that's where you're either going to build more trust or break trust.
Chris Winn: Maintenance, too. You'll hear Lead Simple talking a lot about maintenance over the next few months. We've got some really incredible products coming out to help make maintenance easier, more automated. But, you know, the short of it is that, like, this is where we really, like, hit the ground, and where those trust
Chris Winn: either we're building trust or breaking trust, but this is where it becomes very visible, and you all know this, this is where
Chris Winn: money matters, who's paying for it, how much does it cost, how quickly is it resolved, is it a habitability issue, etc, like…
Chris Winn: this is both where all of the opportunity and the promise of AI is, and it is also where the landmines are. So, I think that maintenance and AI are converging, and how it gets deployed is going to have a huge impact on owner retention and the growth of your business.
Chris Winn: So I'll wrap up here. I'll just say, you know, that, you know, over the next few months, just as you have in the last couple years, you're gonna see a lot happening with AI. I think the industry is getting this figured out.
Chris Winn: I think we're getting better at building the right types of AI products. We're gonna make this easier for property managers. We're gonna build things that are trustworthy, can do meaningful work, and are high efficacy. I know we at Lead Simple, we're taking this very, very seriously.
Chris Winn: We've got 10 plus years of automating workflows, and we want to bring, that… kind of that rigor, to, to these AI platforms, and make sure that we can all trust, these systems. So, if you do, want to reach out.
Chris Winn: Jumping around a little bit.
Chris Winn: This is our demo link, just go to leadsimple.com slash demo. You can book time with us, you can also book time with me if you want to chat about deploying AI within your teams.
Chris Winn: I love talking about this stuff, I'd love to hear from you, but please do get in touch.
Chris Winn: And also, be excited. The next few years in property management, it is gonna be incredible, and you all get to be the authors. You all get to decide how these technologies come together and what it means for owners and tenants.
Chris Winn: So feel empowered, feel like an author, don't feel like it's happening to you.
Chris Winn: And provide a great experience.
Pete Neubig: All right, Chris, we've got a couple of questions here. One is, how big, as far as, like, number of units do you need to manage before you start thinking of incorporating AI? Is this something that, you know, right away, or should you wait a little bit, have some revenue come in? What are your thoughts?
Chris Winn: That's a great question. You know, I would actually look at it from this… so the answer is, I would start very early.
Chris Winn: don't think too much about your door count scale and size. Like, the reality is it's always better to start early, and it may not be because it brings some huge efficiency gain to you. If you're managing, you know, 30 doors, 40 doors, 2 doors, wherever you are.
Chris Winn: You might be feeling overwhelmed anyway, but once you kind of get your bearings, you can manage, you know, that number of doors.
Chris Winn: without over-investing in software. But I actually think the bigger value in starting early is you are also learning how to use tools, and you're building muscle memory for how to deploy technology. I…
Chris Winn: I'm, like, an AI maximalist when it comes to, kind of technology deployment for myself personally. I am still learning
Chris Winn: tricks to making these AI agents better and more powerful, and I think starting early,
Chris Winn: it's gonna help you be a better author and a better deployer of technology, so that, as you're starting to build real scale, one, it's just… it's all gonna be embedded for you already, and it's gonna be that much better because you did get an early start. I mean, the one other thing I would say about this is, like, don't…
Chris Winn: Don't worry about it being messy, don't worry about making
Chris Winn: internal mistakes. Hopefully your owner's not seeing some of these mistakes, but… but be creative, and understand that, like, you are going through your own learning process, and when we're early in learning processes, good to be creative, good to be Bessie, good to try a lot of stuff, even if you're gonna throw away some things here and there.
Pete Neubig: Thanks a lot, Chris. If you guys want, the next…
Pete Neubig: The next, webinar we have is next month, July 21st. We have Jason Wolf, CEO of Property Management University, and we'll be… he's gonna be talking about training for your, building training in your company, and how to go about building the best training for your company. Thank you so much, everybody, for,
Pete Neubig: showing up. Chris is… Chris has told me that he'll stick around for a little bit longer. If anyone has any questions. Yeah, you're welcome, Robert. Derek, thank you so much for joining. But if anybody has any questions for Chris, he's willing to stick on for another few more minutes. Everybody else, thanks so much for being here, and we'll see you guys next month.
Pete Neubig: If anybody has any questions, just feel free to throw it in the webinar chat. While you do that, Chris, I have one question. Some of these AI solutions out there, they,
Pete Neubig: they claim to be super cheap, and they claim to save you a bunch of money, but in all… in all, you know, in all actuality, they're a little pricey still. Like, I can still hire a remote team member for cheaper than, you know,
Pete Neubig: implementing, you know, another AI tool.
Pete Neubig: So make the case on why I shouldn't hire a remote team member until I have the revenue, or until I can really afford it, and hiring and doing the AI, you know, you know, the AI installation before I, you know, before I hire another person.
Chris Winn: Yeah, well, that's a good question, and I think, you know, we've seen the gamut of, you know.
Chris Winn: some of these products get really, really expensive. Some of them can have, you know, kind of, like, marginal costs that are kind of… it feels like you don't have a lot of cost control over some of these platforms, so I… I totally get that. I… I think what's going to happen, one.
Pete Neubig: It is…
Chris Winn: It's still valuable to have…
Chris Winn: it's almost like an operating system for your company, in a way, where the more you're automating, and the more you have these agents, these AI agents that are doing work for your company, I think there's a lot of advantages to scaling a company that way, because you can sort of install
Chris Winn: standard operating procedures, almost like building culture, into the AI agents, and you can scale in a way that you could not scale before, and I think there's value in that in and of itself.
Chris Winn: I also, though, want to make the point that, you know, I…
Chris Winn: I think, you know, you do want to bias, certainly we do.
Chris Winn: You want to bias toward using the very best models, even if they're more expensive, because I think that we're still in a phase of creativity, of building new platforms, experimenting, and having the most intelligence possible
Chris Winn: I think it's gonna yield, I think it's gonna be worth the investment, and I think those models, over time, they do start to get cheaper. Again, their costs go down.
Chris Winn: What I would be careful of, and I would ask this question of your vendors.
Chris Winn: ask them, what model are you using behind the scenes? Because a pattern that I have seen is, I'm gonna charge you
Chris Winn: Kind of, like, frontier model pricing.
Chris Winn: But behind the scenes, I'm using a model from a year ago, two years ago, whatever, and I think if you… if you are paying premium prices, you should get premium intelligence. And I think that vendors sometimes are not always being
Chris Winn: perfectly transparent about some of these technology decisions behind the scenes, and I would make that part of a procurement process, is asking those questions, because you do want to get value for the money that you're spending.
Pete Neubig: And as a virtual assistant company, I'd say hire the remote team member, then bring on the AI, because the AI is like a… it's like a… it's like a new team member, and let the remote team member kind of train the new team member, or be in charge, or supervisor of the AI, so that we… that way we both win.
Chris Winn: Yes.
Pete Neubig: Alright, Chris, I appreciate your time. Thanks, everybody, we'll see y'all.
Chris Winn: Appreciate it, thank you.
Pete Neubig: Alright, see.