How can SMBs effectively leverage AI with limited resources?

- How can small and medium businesses best leverage the usage framework given, you know, maybe some of their more limited resources compared to larger organizations? - So I love that question, Ashley, because we are a small business and when we developed usage, we developed it with our needs in mind and we wanted to make it adaptable. So whether you are a large enterprise or you are an a nonprofit or you're a small business, you'd be able to use the parts that made sense for you or you'd be able to scale it accordingly. So let me give you some tips that we have used and how we actually use usage. When it comes to understanding and investing in AI education and literacy, there are so many free resources that are available online. There are technical resources that you can find, hit on over to YouTube. Find learning tools that you can get easily into the hands of your teams. Also follow people online, especially on LinkedIn. It's a professional network. You have lots of different experts, Ethan Mollick, as an example, who are always sharing tips about how they're using AI tools, what's working, what's not working. And so if you're a small business, if you are a solopreneur, you're going to have to get your hands dirty and you're going to have to really dig in to learn on your own or to point your team to resources that can help. I will caution against investing in too many different tools because these costs can balloon. And the dirty secret about AI is that it is expensive. There is a real cost behind the scenes of the companies that are providing the technology. And as an end user, you're going to have to be very thoughtful as to where you can save money and cut costs. So when it comes to understanding, the big tip is, hey, invest in the community. Find people that you can ask questions to online that you can learn from what they're doing, what's working, what's not working, and get your hands dirty by getting into the tools and learning them yourselves. Similarly, there are podcasts that you're able to follow on LinkedIn, on different platforms, that allow you to participate in the conversation, like real world scenarios and use cases for AI technologies. When it comes to thinking about your business goals, the reason why we say align the technology with your business goal rather than starting with the technology is because even if you're a small business, you first need to ask, well, what are we trying to accomplish here? Right? And we talk about assessing feasibility and looking at that versus impact. And a part of the feasibility opportunity matrix that we spoke about is, well, given our resources, what can we do? And so having a frank conversation about that as a leader is going to be important. There are really amazing models out there, but maybe you can't afford those models. You may need to an open source model and open source models are generally free to use. You can run some of them on your own computers and that gives you an additional benefit of privacy, or you can get it at a really low cost by working through companies like Grok or different API providers that will give you these models at an API level really cheap. But I'll give you a meta comparison here. The reason why we say invest in spending the time to come to websites like ours, maginative.com. A year ago Meta released, OpenAI had their 3.5 ChatGPT 3.5 model, and when it came to cost, last week, they released GPT-4o Mini. And the difference in pricing, it's an 800% reduction in cost. And so if you are thinking, okay, I'm using a tool and this is the cost of it, and you are not staying on top of the innovation and the changes that are happening, you wouldn't have known that you'd have gone from $2 per 1 million tokens to 24 cents per 1 million token just because you're using an older model. And that's the reality of being illiterate in a a time when things are moving this quickly. And so just spend that extra time to get a newsletter that gets delivered to your inbox that says, Hey, these are the changes that are happening that you may want to pay attention to. The tools that you're using or that you may not be using may also shift. So as an example, when we're editing our podcast, that was a manual process that we were doing for the longest time. It took time, it took resources, and now there are tools that can literally do multicam cuts on my videos with AI. That is amazing. And what would take hours is done in less than 30 seconds. And again, if I need things prepared for social media, because I'm thinking about my use cases, I can find the right tools that optimize that for me. And so as a business leader, I think aligning your initiatives with your goals will help a lot to ensure that you stay focused and that you don't get distracted by saying, oh, that looks good. Maybe we should try it. And you stay focused on what is practical, what do we need in our business today? And that makes sense right now.