Episode Transcript
Kyle James (00:01.012)
Hey, welcome to the AI Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Kyle James. And today we'll be talking about how an IT services and automation company called Digital Meld is using AI inside of their own business. And we'll share the exact steps that you can take in order to implement AI for yourself. Now, before we talk more about that, listen closely. Are you looking to implement AI inside of your own company or maybe just struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT trainer.
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Schedule a consultation today. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Today having me on the show, Brad Gru, who is the CEO of Digital Mail and the host of the Start Small, Think Big podcast. Here, Brad, he helps businesses harness AI, automation, and data to streamline operations and scale smarter. With the background spanning at NASA, Microsoft, and high impact government and enterprise projects,
Brad now empowers small and mid-sized companies to punch above their weight class using emerging technologies. Really excited for him to have on the show today. Welcome in, Brad, how are you?
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (01:40.328)
Great Kyle, thanks for having me on.
Kyle James (01:41.87)
Yeah, man. So tell us a little bit background. Like you started digital mail. Like how did you get to that point? Give us a little bit of the origin story of how you found the company.
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (01:48.914)
Yeah, so we'll start back to where it happened. You know, I was a child of the 90s and so I graduated in the late 90s in high school and I was going to be an engineer. And then this thing called Y2K came around. not sure. I'm sure some of your listeners will remember Y2K and as a poor college student and I was told I could make 20, 25 bucks an hour updating computers for Y2K. was going to land parties and stuff with my friends. So I got an IT and then I never kind of looked back to after Y2K the world didn't end. And then I just kept in corporate IT and I landed a job at NASA shortly after that. My dream job.
grew up close to NASA in the Clear Lake area of Texas, outside of Houston. from there, I just went to enterprise, enterprise, enterprise, and then I spent five years at Microsoft as a PFE, which is in consulting gigs. So it's an enterprise level consultant. So I just got the largest companies in the world, the Fortune 500 companies you're thinking about, I've probably been in those organizations. And I saw how a good organization was running, how bad organization was running, and that they're both still successful somehow. And so I liked consulting. And so I stayed in that and then just...
About two years ago, I decided to start my own firm with the rise of AI and automation coming on. And we started as a product company and then we soon found out that most organizations don't know how to utilize AI. They know they want to utilize AI and they should utilize AI, but they don't know how. And so much like OpenAI just started their consulting firm, we were like, I guess we're consultants now. Cause I tell people all the time, they're the AI experts. I just know the tool, right? They know their business and that's what makes their secret sauce. And so we're help, we just help them.
unlock their full potential by utilizing the tools basically.
Kyle James (03:16.354)
Yeah, for sure. it's almost like the, mean, because there's so many companies out there too, for sure. Like, we're like, Hey, I want to use AI or I'm using it to like personally, but like, don't know how to use it fully. It's like, Hey, you're the expert in the AI. They're the expert in their business. Let's just marry the two together and make sure it works properly versus trying to figure it out all over their own. You know what mean?
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (03:36.092)
Yeah, 100%. And you know, the big thing is, AI is very personable, right? It's the context that's key, right? The first time you use Chat GPT, you're like, this is kind of cool. But the more Chat GPT learns about you, the better and better it gets, right? And the better your responses get, and the more personable they get. The same thing happens with your corporate data. Once you share your corporate data and your business processes and those things, it can help you unlock new potential ways to utilize and upscale your business as well.
Kyle James (04:01.077)
Yeah, so now you're using AI, at Digital Mail, man. Like, why? Because I'm thinking, go back to like Y2K, and then like, obviously, the Fortune 500 companies, organizations, and now like you're doing consulting, kind of give me the picture of like, how you're using AI within Digital Mail, and like, what challenges specific are you solving when you're working with, you know, lot of the different clients in these different industries?
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (04:24.316)
Yeah. So the big thing, you know, we're a small business, right? We've formed right at two months ago this week, actually. I mean, two years ago this week, I'm sorry. You know, so we're a small business and the only way for us to compete with the larger corporations is with automation and tools. We have partnerships and stuff that help us as well. But for the most part, you know, you have the small businesses and medium sized businesses, they're very lean, which makes them more nimble. So to me personally, I think having worked in those big behemoth companies, these giant ships that take forever to turn.
I don't think most small businesses and medium sized businesses understand the power that they have to actually, what I would say, punch above their weight class and compete with the folks bigger than those. And you can use these tools to do that. And you have access to all the same tools that all of these large organizations do now, especially with the vibe coding and stuff like that. You can build internal tools that you wouldn't necessarily publish to the outside world, but they could use internally and get things done.
Kyle James (05:16.077)
Yeah, what do you see a lot of? Because I like the, what you said, ships forever term. Because I've seen that lot of big organizations, like they're so slow, it's hard to manipulate what you're trying to do. Like in this case, staying lean is the first thing that you and your team are doing. But then that's also kind of like the direction you're helping with a lot of clients is like, hey, we can help you because we're also there to get to that next weight class without having to spend a ton of money as places don't. They don't want to do that. So how do you like...
Paint that picture for me, how do you actually walk them through that kind of step by step of using the AI, getting embedded into their company, right, and actually utilizing internally, and then ideally probably even externally with some of their customers.
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (05:54.718)
Like with most projects, we like to start with the lowest hanging fruit, right? And talking to what we call the boots on the ground. The executives have a completely different understanding of how the business is run than the actual day-to-day operations of the folks, the boots on the ground. So you sometimes get a difference of opinion and a difference of how things should actually be done. So what we like to do is start with SOPs, standard operating procedures, right? And your processes and procedures. And if those aren't documented, that's the first place we should probably start. And we should unlock and use AI to help us do that. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel. You know, sit down in a conference room.
kick up a Microsoft Co-Pilot session to record the meeting and then whiteboard. And then from there, you can actually get an SOP for a business process or something. And then you start at low again, most companies have like an accounts payable department, right? Everybody has invoices and time sheets and those kinds of things. So let's start there. You can do automation there really cheaply and really quickly and make it, you can see the benefits right away and then slowly build that momentum. A lot of people want to revolutionize their business, but you have to take the reason I started my podcast, Start Small Think Big, it's literally,
You know, we say we're SpaceX not Boeing. The goal is to land on Mars, but we're not going to get there overnight. know, have to, you know, Starhopper only went up 300 feet and then landed and now they're catching rockets with chopsticks, right? That didn't happen overnight.
Kyle James (07:03.761)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you see a lot of? Because like, think that's a there's like that kind of that FOMO that happens with a lot of companies, small, know, small, even enterprises are like, hey, look, we see this, we see this wave, right? We see people catching this wave and surfing it down to the sandstorm. It's like, we want to get there too. Like, what do we need to do? What do we spend? Like, let's dump a bunch of money into it. When sometimes that may not be like always the best case, but like, what do you see as some of the biggest like maybe mistakes or potholes?
lot of companies fall into initially because they have maybe a little bit of that FOMO of like, want to get in there quick, but like, I don't know where to start. You know what mean?
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (07:40.508)
Yeah, you have to realize that the AI companies themselves, know, OpenAI, know, Gemini, Google, Gemini, Meta, and their models and things, they're building the train as it's going down the tracks, which is fine for them because they're technology companies. have other business operations that can actually support them as they're doing that. But for you and your business, you don't have a chance to make a mistake. You don't have the chance to get, you know, egg on your face. So you have to kind of weigh those options. I think a lot of people putting the cart before the horse and just like jumping feet first in without having those.
you know, data and governance and cause there have been people that, Hey, we're just going to open up Microsoft copilot or chat GPT internal to our company. And they point it to their ERP system. And then people can just go ask that chat bot, like how much does this CEO make? And it just dumps out how much the CEO makes because they didn't put those guardrails in, right? to say that, Hey, well let's segregate that data. Let's make sure that that's not everybody in the company has access to that. but that doesn't mean there's not, you know, think progress you could make today.
that is incremental and actually you can see that ROI. Again, we're probably three to five years at least from truly revolutionary eye. And even then if you get into power struggles and those sorts of things, we're probably even further from that. We don't have chip sets. There's a lot of other things, but for us, what we found is most people don't understand how to use AI. So we built vision learning models to show them because we all learn with our eyes. And so our first product we built called Rubicon was actually just to show people what's possible. And then once we show them that, it kind of looked like
look what we were able to do for like working with the construction industry and PPE or like, you know, only gas industry with like Firewatch, you can kind of do those same sorts of things internally with your organization, with the data that's specific to you.
Kyle James (09:13.645)
Tell me about this, like the Rubicon that you mentioned, like the first model. what is that? How does that differ? Is that something? Just give me the, give me the background with that one. Cause that's, that was new to me.
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (09:22.182)
Yeah. So if you go to digitalmail.ai that we announced our new product two weeks ago, and basically what is, is an edge platform. So a lot of these companies, have cameras just out there and they're capturing that data. Right. And I always say Microsoft, Microsoft and Google is Google, not because of product or services, but because they're data. And like you have all of these small businesses and medium sized businesses that are capturing data from edge devices, whether it's sensors on a boiler, like, you know, or it's, you know, it's camera, you know, that's watching the security perimeter.
anything like that, you can train models on all of that data, but you have to capture it. And most of them aren't captured. It's just a live feed. And if something goes wrong, Hey, we've got seven days of backups or something. but the, know, what we tell people is your knowledge is your power and your knowledge is your data. And so let's capture all of that data. That's the number one place we like creating a data center of excellence. That's the first thing I think most organizations to do is like, what's our standard way we're going to store data? Where's our data going to be? Cause most people's data is in their heads and their mailboxes or, know, on their hard drives, you know,
Kyle James (10:18.637)
So it's like first of all getting because they're exactly what you said like almost a lot of people have it in their head. yeah, I know the job so well. I don't need to document this. But in this case, like we were saying with like, say, the firewatches example was, hey, they might be recording it for seven days. But like, what are you actually doing with those recordings? Like, what are you doing with that? In this case, like training the AI on that data on the recordings to help you look at some of those things that are popping up on the screens like, hey, this is red flag. Hey, something to be cautious about.
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (10:18.686)
That's the single place I think most organizations can start.
Kyle James (10:48.589)
But it's going back to what you said, Brad, is taking that data and utilizing it with an AI to be able to train whatever it is the process is. It's taking it to the next level. I think that goes back to what you're saying, taking you to that next, what did you phrase it? used the weight class? Punch above your weight class. know what mean? So I think it's a really fascinating perspective. And what types of results have you been seeing so far since you've been...
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (11:05.126)
Yeah, punch above your weight class. Yeah, for sure.
Kyle James (11:15.041)
Really implement not just like this process, like this kind of this mindset for lot of companies when you like, kind of results have you been seeing?
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (11:21.822)
Yeah. So first of all, most people, most people when they think AI, they think chat, GPT or an LLM, right? So it's, it's, it's reactive. So you put something in, you get something out the, the real power of AI and automation is proactive. And so it's doing things automatically on a trigger or when a threshold's met or something along those lines. And so one of the ways we, again, we've talked about accounts payable, but that's one the easiest things you can automate within your organization, Microsoft and Google and Amazon. They, they spent tens of millions of dollars training models.
on how to read invoices and how to read time sheets and how to read documents, just documents in general. And so what we did with the construction company, they were processing about 80 external invoices a month. And they had a really brilliant person with their master's degree doing it because it had to be right. It could not be wrong, right? And so, cause it's a government based contract and we freed up 90 % of our time because we automated that process. We still had what we call human in the loop. There should always be human in the loop for the foreseeable future.
Um, so you have that last check of eyes to make sure that what you're actually doing is, uh, is legit and that the inaccurate, uh, but we ought to the free time that she, she now has, she's, she's chasing more RFPs and more work. And so immediately she makes one more bid and like, get accepted one more that pays for standing up that automation 10 times over, you know, for $20,000, you can automate it. Most of the accounts payable processes for about, about that range, I think. Um, and just anything that you're doing manually.
That's the first place you should look for. you're something repetitively, manually, every single day, that's where you should probably start.
Kyle James (12:48.309)
Yeah, I like that the example like the 80 invoices. That's a lot of invoices per month. can't imagine like doing it's like a full time. I mean, it really is full time person doing that, you know what But it has to be right. Especially if you're like government based, like that's where go back to is like, okay, there has to be someone like the I love how you say like the human in the loop because when it is more important issues, right, or processes are being conducted by like, the AI kind of needs a little bit of hand holding, right, or least a supervisor to go, okay, hey,
what is going on, is this accurate, is this working correctly, and have someone verify it, because otherwise, I mean, the bigger it gets, right, the bigger the task is, the more the increased risk. So, but I'm sure at some point, right, you could probably automate more of it, more of it, but I can see like the benefit of just like having it to where, so anyways, I kind of got on tangent there, but so now, digital mail, like what is, I mean, there's so much happening right now in the AI world, AI space, a lot of changes, but what are some of those maybe upcoming AI initiatives?
for digital mail and where do you see airplane maybe the biggest role in your operations next?
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (13:50.035)
I think the biggest roles for us is, and so I'm sure there's a lot of folks out there that are listening that maybe have been on contracts or wanted to bid on like government contracts. And to me that's like, whenever I started this company, I submitted my pitch as an RFP, know, web scraper, like automated scraper and those sorts of things. That was what I was accepted like the Microsoft founders hub and things two years ago. And it's because having been involved with, you know, large government contracts, we're talking 30 plus billion 30 year contracts, like civil engineering, civil construction.
They make it hard on purpose. Only the big companies can actually get in on those bids. And the beauty is, is now with these tools, you can actually use a tool like N8N or these other open source tools to actually set up scrapers to go scrape all of these public RFP websites and then do some basic reporting on what makes sense for your company and whatnot that doesn't make sense for your company. And so you can focus on the actual really tedious task of it all is filling out the RFP and making sure you have a great bid and a great pitch and those things.
And so that's where I see us trying to bid on larger things. Since we have gotten into the vision model side, you know, we like, there's some search and rescue things we could do with drones and stuff from like a camera on a drone. So that's where we see. But I think for the most part, people should just look at what they see could be revolutionary within their industry within the next three or five years and say, how can I, don't just think AI, I think automation, to me, they're one in the same. and automation are one in the same. And so looking from that perspective, how would it transform if we could just automate this one little section of that? And then just kind of start there.
Kyle James (15:06.017)
Hmm.
Kyle James (15:13.325)
Yeah, I love that. It's definitely, it's pretty interesting to see like the government contracts too, like how they intentionally make it. It makes sense, right? They want the bigger companies, but in this case, like you could easily, not easily, I should say probably, because obviously you guys are working on it, but making sure that you can have a shot at the, the, the chart, right? To be able to get on some of those contracts. But if it's so impossible, right? So many loopholes you got to get through and so many different like biddings you have to do, it makes it harder. And so automating that is definitely seems like something that
makes goes a long distance there. where can people, I'll just start wrapping up Brad, I appreciate your time today and where can people go to learn maybe a little bit more about you and then a little bit more about digital mail that you recommend them check out next.
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (15:52.927)
If you would like to learn more about me, my name is Brad Gru, B-R-A-D-G-R-O-U-X. I'm the only one in the world. If you Google it, you'll probably find some embarrassing stuff from my, you know, from 20 years ago, video games and sports, sports forums and stuff. But that's me. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. And then digitalmeld.io. So the digital meld is a play on the term digital convergence. And so the fun fact, there was a Playboy interview with Bill Gates in 1994. I only read the interview, I swear.
where he talked about and predicted many of the things we have now like smartphones and Netflix and those sorts of things. so yeah, digitalmail.io or just search for Brad Groome. And I'm happy to chat with anybody, know, 30 minute session, no questions asked, just to kind of give you, I like to say put good things out there, good things come back and we're creating a cult of AI. The more people that know about it, the better.
Kyle James (16:19.085)
Hahaha
Kyle James (16:37.997)
Yeah, I love it. Thank you, Seth Brass. It's been great having you on, brother. And appreciate your time today. And hopefully, we'll see you maybe on the next one. And maybe I'll see you in Houston. Who knows? Cool, guys. And thanks, everybody, for listening in. And remember, if you're looking to implement AI into your business today, please don't try and do it yourself. The time and stress that AI could cause may not be worth it. So schedule a call with GPT Trainer and let them build out and manage your AI for you. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com.
Brad Groux | Digital Meld (16:46.001)
Awesome. Thanks so much.
Kyle James (17:04.61)
Signing off for now, have a great rest of your day. Looking forward to seeing everyone on the next episode of AI Chronicles.
