Episode Transcript
Kyle James (00:01.026)
Hey, welcome to the ad Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Kyle James. And today we'll be diving in headfirst to how a market research company called client intelligence agency 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, your own company or 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 dash trainer.com. Today I have with me on the show, Catherine O'Leary, who's the founder of client intelligence agency. Catherine helps entrepreneurs unlock real client intelligence and turn it into scalable growth. Her secret agents, AI powered tools, apps, and systems that attract, retain, and grow loyal clients. Because in this game, intelligence beats content.
every time. I'm very excited to have Catherine on the show today. Hey, welcome in. How are you doing today?
Catharine O'Leary (01:34.108)
Hi Kyle, hi everyone! I'm good, I'm good, how are you? I'm excited to be here.
Kyle James (01:38.894)
Yeah. Cause I didn't have you on the show. So give us a little bit of context here. Like tell us a little bit like you're, you're the founding story of client intelligence agency. Like how did you get into it and like, us some background with that.
Catharine O'Leary (01:49.524)
Yeah, so I love this question. So not to go way far back, but I spent 30 years in corporate doing market research. So I worked up one side and down the other of the Fortune 50. I was at Apple when Steve Jobs was there, did a lot of iTunes and iPod research. I was at Pepsi. I was at Blackberry back in the day when all hell broke loose. And so I've got the war stories to prove it. And, you know, always in that
that sphere of asking a lot of questions and then looking at answers to try and figure out where the pain points were for clients, where they were struggling, what they were challenged with, and what the organization could do to help. And that's what market research is all about. So when I started my own business, I realized that entrepreneurs and businesses don't ask a lot of questions. I mean, the big corporates do.
but you know, everyone else tends to guess and guessing will send you down a rabbit hole pretty quickly and it can be very expensive. so I wanted, I wanted people to stop guessing and start asking. And, and as I grew that, I started with quizzes and quiz funnels, which was great. And I did that for, for a couple of years. I got frustrated with people that wouldn't look at the data on the backend. So they were using it as a.
you know, a lead generation, an email capture. There are more efficient ways to capture emails than having people go through a quiz. And if you're not going to use the information, it's just, it's a little rude to be asking all these questions and not actually intend to use the answers to help, you know, your business get better at, you know, meeting those needs of your clients. So I called an all stop on that last summer and decided
If I had to do it all over again, I have to blow it up and put it all back together. What do I want it to look like? And I came up with the Client Intelligence Agency, which actually helps people understand their ideal clients through asking questions like surveys and quizzes and polls and onboarding forums and your discovery calls and like all the ways your podcast, all the ways that you ask questions. But then how do you use that information? And that was what was missing.
Catharine O'Leary (04:12.234)
was how do we use it? And then if you kind of geek out a little bit, how do you find the patterns in what people are telling you so that you can actually create the offer or the bundle or the messaging that is going to attract your ideal clients with more ease, make sure that they're getting through the transformation that you're promising and that they stay along longer so they can spend more. That's the ideal goal. Really, best in class? Let's co-create.
with our ideal clients as opposed to guessing. if you do that, like you'll have a good time of it. I didn't wanna say easy days, cause that's not true, but.
Kyle James (04:51.35)
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So the quiz, so going from the quiz funnels to like taking, like you reset the approach and you decided, okay, we're to take the surveys. We're going to do different approaches. Like what, what did you find? Like when you made that transition kind of maybe a little bit eye opening before AI, we're not talking AI just yet, but like just making that transition from, one piece to the other. What was that? What were you noticing from that?
Catharine O'Leary (05:15.356)
Yeah, well, for me, was a little bit of going home, right? So it was a little bit of instead of just doing the front part of asking the questions, now I'm asking the questions and using the information in order to create the product services and messages. Right. So I was going back to my corporate days and kind of bringing that forward. What was surprising, I think, was how people didn't realize how powerful that could be. So, you know, the the
Kyle James (05:39.406)
Hmm.
Catharine O'Leary (05:42.698)
best products out there, the products that you would use every day are usually found by mistake. And they're found by, you know, somebody kind of looking at a pattern in the way that that their customers are either using their products or not using their products, and kind of filling a gap there. So if you think of things like the Swiffer, right, the Swiffer was never like a floor cleaning product, it was something completely different. You know, Febreze was a dry cleaning product.
for the longest time, like when it first came out, like LinkedIn was a dating site. know, like it was, it's, it's, you know, like usually these businesses, they don't start out with the way, like the way that they ended up. and it's usually through client intelligence, like really understanding your ideal client and getting to know them on a deeper level. And, you know, when, when I started doing that, really what I wanted to do was say a lot of the quizzes out there right now, they're perceived.
personalization. So when you go through a quiz, one, maybe two questions actually tell the report, like which report you're going to get, right? So you get one of four buckets, you get one of five reports, whatever it is. That's not real customization and personalization. That's not one to one. It's hard to do one to one though, until you actually factor in AI. And then the doors really open up to be able to
Kyle James (07:08.198)
So that, yeah. So tell us about the AI cause that's, that's a lot of more data you're bringing in and you're getting different perspectives. So I walk us through that on the, on the client intelligence agency. Like how did you start implementing AI and like what, specifically were you trying to, you know, challenges and things like that you were trying to solve.
Catharine O'Leary (07:10.218)
Yeah.
Catharine O'Leary (07:21.825)
Yeah.
Catharine O'Leary (07:25.926)
Yeah, so the first thing that I wanted to do was use every answer in a quiz to actually give a response. And what that does is actually give you a one-to-one personalized, customized experience at scale. That wasn't possible before AI, right? Without like a ton of code. So that was like that just snowballed. Okay, well, like if we can do that for quizzes, then what can we layer on top of that? Can we create
you know, a dashboard for, you know, businesses, especially coaches and consultants, you know, where, you know, maybe somebody starts with a quiz and then they, you know, buy something and then they do an onboarding form and you get, you know, maybe deeper, you get more questions, you get more data. And as you build more data, as, as you know, most of us know,
It starts to get a little unruly and a little like, how am going to look at all this? I don't have time. I'm running my own business. What are you talking about, Catherine? Like I can't be a data analyst. And again, this is where AI, AI is a marvelous data analyst. I mean, AI is my employee of the week every week. so give AI the, you know, like tell it, you know, Hey, take all these, you know, verbatim questions, these text questions and give me a word cloud.
Really quickly, show me exactly what words are popping up for people, whether negative or positive.
Kyle James (08:51.19)
Yeah. So like on the, on the one-on-one customers, like when, so if there's mixed understandings correctly, so the AI is kind of taking over as this survey where it's asking like questions and then the user can like elaborate deeper or like how, do mean by like one-on-one customize?
Catharine O'Leary (09:08.03)
So I mean, as you're going through the questions, you may have, say we have six questions, right? And you have certain buckets of answers or you allow people to actually answer, you know, just in text format, like, tell me about your best day ever. You know, what if we allowed the AI to have all those answers as the input and create within like a framework, create a report, right? Like,
you're struggling with this and this, you're doing really well here. And what I'm hearing you say is that when you want to get to this spot, this is what we need to do. Right? So the iterations and the amount of different reports that could come from six questions is astronomical, right? It exponentially gets bigger as more people take it. So.
Um, how do you handle that? And in, if you can just teach the AI, okay, when you get this input, this is what you do with it. Right. You test it and you make sure that it's not hallucinating. You make sure it's not going off into like a left field. Um, and, and then, you know, that gives people a grounded, Hey, Kyle, this is you. This is like, you are the only one that's ever going to get this because you're the only one that's going to answer these questions in this way. So it's the, it's the report, like the, the.
Kyle James (10:27.362)
Hmm.
Catharine O'Leary (10:30.54)
development of the report in real time with real answers, that's a game changer for people.
Kyle James (10:37.58)
Yeah, I love that. So outside of the survey and like kind of the different like, approaches that you're using within AI, like, well, I guess, is there any other things you're using it? Cause you said like, it's your, it's your, it's your employee champion week after week. what exactly are you using the AI specific outside of the surveys and things where your client like, and what does the process look like? That's maybe something worth highlighting that, that you've noticed since you've been using it.
Catharine O'Leary (10:39.284)
Awesome.
Catharine O'Leary (11:01.74)
Yeah, so it's kind of like my market research business in a box, right? So it can, whether you're doing discovery calls and you've got transcripts or you're doing sales calls and you've got those transcripts or you take people through an assessment, maybe you have a daily journal, like an online journal or things of that nature where you can actually
things into a database and then you can query and have AI build different, maybe it's a 90-day plan for the first, for the person that's got like just bought a new program, right? Hey, your 90-day plan, your plan is this, it's yours because you answered these questions in this way and we can actually go back and say and two months ago you took this quiz and we have that. So we're going to use that along with this and you start layering the, you know, the information on top of each other and
being able to actually meet people where they're at in real time.
Kyle James (12:04.652)
Yeah, I love that's awesome. So, and since you've been making the change on the AI and obviously you're doing a lot of consulting with, within the agency working with like what, anything that's worth highlighting as far as like key results for either like your customers that you've been working with or even internally, maybe start with customers first and just tell me if there's anything that comes in mind on that.
Catharine O'Leary (12:27.006)
Yeah, well, so at the Client Intelligence Agency, we have something called the Academy. And the Academy has access for people to do their own kind of market research, but with AI. So we have something called the Ideal Client Profile that we give away for free. You you answer four questions about your business, you get a nine page report on your ideal client. You take that, plug it into another tool that's called the Client Roundtable. And I've actually designed that to be a focus group.
So based on your ideal client profile, it actually creates a room full of people, three to five people of your ideal clients, and they have a conversation about the questions that you ask. And so you can, like it's not, as you know, take it with a grain of salt, it's still AI, you still need to talk to real people. I'm not saying that you don't, but it can get you 80 % of the way there without spending $50,000 on a focus.
Kyle James (13:09.9)
Wow.
Catharine O'Leary (13:27.402)
So let's do that as opposed to everyone just going off and guessing what people want. So how do we create the apps and the tools of the AI enabled conversations so that we can have the human conversations that we need to have? So let's make sure that our businesses are growing and getting faster at the production side and being able to implement some of these strategies.
Kyle James (13:32.803)
Hmm.
Catharine O'Leary (13:55.564)
without hiring a massive market research team or a massive data analytics team, but still having the information to be more strategic so that when you do have that onboarding call or that sales call or that, you hey, I just noticed that you're still stuck in module three, what's going on? You okay? Like, do you need extra help? you know, like what, like talk to me, like how can I help you? If we have more time to do the human to human, that's just gonna make us,
Kyle James (14:15.534)
Hmm.
Catharine O'Leary (14:25.364)
you know, serve our clients at a higher level. And, you know, that's, what we're all about at the CIA.
Kyle James (14:31.052)
Yeah, for sure. That's, very impactful. so it seems like there's a lot that you're doing on the, on the backing with the AI and clearly there's a lot of changes happening in the industry within the AI, but for, for client intelligence agency, like where do you feel like the, the maybe upcoming AI initiatives are our aim mentors and where do you see it playing maybe some of like the biggest role in your operations over the next couple of years?
Catharine O'Leary (14:56.146)
I think it's going to be around innovation. And I think that this idea of vibe coding and, you know, tools like SupaCoder and v0.dev that, you know, kind of take AI and make it easier to develop AI apps and, you know, to actually deploy those at a faster timeframe than we have been able to before. I think that's a bit of a game changer, if used correctly.
So if you're just throwing app after app out there, right, and not connecting to a database and not being mindful and intentional, I think that that's gonna be a fail, right? I think on the other side, if you kind of sit down and go, okay, here's my roadmap of my client journey. And these are like the pain points or the points that I wanna get feedback on. I wanna make sure I'm understanding how people are doing.
And then you have a system like a client intelligence system and a feedback loop. So you're constantly in innovation mode and in creation mode and in improving mode. And you have all the time in the world to do the human to human contact. I think that you'll actually dominate.
Kyle James (16:10.765)
Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that perspective, Catherine. And as we start wrapping the conversation today, where can people maybe learn a little bit more about you and then maybe a little bit more about client intelligence agency that you'd recommend them, you know, check out.
Catharine O'Leary (16:24.884)
Yeah, please check us out at join cia now.com. So join cia now.com and and and take the ideal client profile. It's free. It's right there.
Kyle James (16:37.944)
Cool. Great. Awesome. Thank you so much, Catherine. It's great having you on the show today. And thanks, everybody, for listening in. Catherine, hopefully, we'll have you again on the show in the future. We never know where it might go. And again, for those listening in, 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 the AI could cause, it may not be worth it. Schedule a call with GPT Trainer and let them build out and manage your AI for you. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com.
Catharine O'Leary (16:46.988)
Perfect, I would love to.
Kyle James (17:05.484)
Signing off for now, thanks everybody for listening in. Looking forward to seeing everyone on the next episode of AI Chronicles.
