[00:00:00] Zach Hammer: Welcome back to the Real Estate Growth Hacker Show. On today’s episode, we got Arvell Craig with us today. We’re going to be talking about how you can be putting AI into practice, into your business, into your real estate business, real tangible strategies that actually make the power of this technology real for you today that you could take action on and start getting results from.

[00:00:22] Zach Hammer: So Arvell is a season marketing, professional AI evangelist and author of the AI Strategy Playbook. He’s got 20 plus years of experience in digital marketing at the forefront of the AI revolution since 2017. He’s an AI evangelist for VA agents, a sought after speaker and a trusted advisor, and I’m super excited to be talking to you today, Arvell.

[00:00:43] Zach Hammer: How are you doing?

[00:00:44] Arvell Craig: Man, I’m phenomenal. I’m phenomenal. How are you?

[00:00:46] Zach Hammer: I’m doing great. I’m doing great. So why don’t you go ahead and tell me a little bit about your story, your backstory, especially, those of us that are kind of in this world of playing with AI at this point, like obviously it hasn’t been around forever.

[00:00:59] Zach Hammer: [00:01:00] What’s your journey of getting into this AI world and the AI game that’s had this massive resurgence in recent years?

[00:01:07] Arvell Craig: Gotcha. Yeah, so, my story, I’d like to start off saying, I have a problem. And that would be, I chase shiny objects. Just, I’m going to just let it out. And I’ve always been that way. It’s just, I’ve been a gadget guy from Cassiopeia and sidekicks and trios and Palm pilots. I’ve always liked gadgets because they had this promise of making life easier.

[00:01:30] Arvell Craig: And then, I studied engineering in school thinking I would build them. But when I was in school, the internet came out, that was the ultimate shiny object. So I chased that to make my millions. And I’ve been on, again, I’ve been a digital marketer or I said, internet guy, not just chasing sunny objects, but I’ve always had a small team, a small company.

[00:01:49] Arvell Craig: I kind of just, I love the freedom as well. The technology and the internet brings freedom. I was virtual again in 2003, 2004. So I’ve been around for a long time. So the power [00:02:00] of technologies and tools to help me to do more without a big team has always been important to me. And so from marketing automation and email, I realized I had a gift or talent of writing or writing emails and then automation.

[00:02:11] Arvell Craig: And that’s where like the chat bot thing was really huge for me back in 2016, 17. That was like a huge opportunity to automate, not just, you know, emails, but the big theory or the big global trend was that humans online were spending more time messaging people where that was Snapchat back in days, WhatsApp, WeChat, that was the way people use communication.

[00:02:36] Arvell Craig: And because that’s the way humans communicate globally. It’s like, how do we make money with that? So that’s why Facebook, Google, everybody else. Okay. How do we automate messaging? Cause how do you scale it? If you have a business, you have lots and lots of customers. One classic principle of marketing is always be where they are.

[00:02:54] Arvell Craig: If your customer is on TikTok, you’re on TikTok. If they’re on Twitter you’re on Twitter. So you follow them, but as a business, how do you [00:03:00] scale that? So when Facebook and everybody had automation. So that was like my big focus of how do you automate conversations across social media, across websites.

[00:03:10] Arvell Craig: And that’s just, to me, that’s like the overarching global trend, which felt really comfortable for me. And I’m not a programmer necessarily, but I can, and back then I could program basic conversations. And so it allowed me to do things that I couldn’t do before. And again, massively scale and do things, you know, Outside of myself.

[00:03:27] Arvell Craig: So that’s a little bit of the story. It got me into it. COVID happened, business died. I kind of pulled back and then ChatGPT comes out like, okay, chat’s back. So now I’m dusting off all my chat bot funnels and chat scripts and strategies using all the things I learned about conversational marketing, but applying that with AI, with generative AI specifically, and trying to just educate, communicate, and help people figure it out while we’re all trying to figure it out.

[00:03:53] Zach Hammer: Ah, I love it. I love it. You’re speaking my language. I mean, like in terms of chat and messaging, like I still today, I’m [00:04:00] not sure how many people have even heard this. Like I still credit like AOL instant messenger with teaching me how to type, right? Like that’s really what got me past the hurdle of learning how to type was random chat rooms and friends from school and that sort of thing getting on AOL.

[00:04:15] Zach Hammer: And then, that trend, that behavior has stayed true moving into the current reality. The difference is, like you said there’s been more tools to automate, to be able to leverage the conversations that are happening anyway. And People have become more and more open to wanting to have those conversations that they were used to having with their friends only.

[00:04:35] Zach Hammer: Now they’re starting to be interested in having with their businesses, the service professionals, like it’s starting to become expected. I’d much rather send a message than pick up the phone half the time because it’s easier. It’s asynchronous. Right. So that messaging trend definitely makes sense.

[00:04:49] Zach Hammer: And then you’re right. Like this AI world you know, Initially, it was largely like very direct programming, right? Like if this, then that you like really dialed in exactly what to say, maybe [00:05:00] with a little bit of intelligent responses and how it knew how to interpret messages on that.

[00:05:04] Zach Hammer: But it’s moved into now that intelligence just kind of, a thing, right? Like it’s its own thing. It could both understand the meaning and also respond intelligently. And that’s opening up a lot of opportunities, even more opportunities than just the messaging, which you’re very aware of.

[00:05:21] Zach Hammer: So yeah let’s, go ahead and dive into, you know, now that you’re in this world of implementing AI, and helping people to see just what all is possible. I know we mentioned in this, you’re a sought after speaker. You’re speaking on stages about this helping people know what’s going on with AI.

[00:05:36] Zach Hammer: What are some of your big lessons that you’re taking away from this process of what do people know about implementing it?

[00:05:43] Arvell Craig: Yeah. So that’s critical to understand. I mean, and the more I talk about it, the more I think about it, there are certain fundamentals that you really have to have in place because if not, again, I mentioned chasing shiny objects, you know, it’s a positive and a negative thing. If sometimes people are trying to [00:06:00] use AI in ways they don’t need to use AI.

[00:06:02] Arvell Craig: And so there’s one of the things I always start off with is that a business, a person, an individual, you have to know your bottleneck, your constraints, your problems. Cause again, if we’re talking about business, the goal is making money profitable or make profit. The question is, why are you not making the profit you want to make right now? And depending on your answer that determines AI or a person, or is there something wrong with your strategy? Is something wrong in the market? Is there something there’s so many, there’s regulations, there’s so many different factors. So we really need to be really honest and really clear about our business model, about what we’re doing and why we’re not getting what we want first.

[00:06:46] Arvell Craig: Otherwise we’ll just add an AI tool or a tactic or a strategy. Like again, my big focus, if I’m actually adding a solution to a company. It’s going to be a chat. It’s going to be a voice AI call center, [00:07:00] but that’s only needed if you have so many calls, so many leads that you’re not responding to, then you can maybe get an AI to speed up that process to speed to lead, respond quicker.

[00:07:14] Arvell Craig: But if you have no marketing, if you don’t have a bottleneck of customers coming to you, if you don’t have a database of hundreds or thousands that you can’t handle.

[00:07:22] Zach Hammer: Right.

[00:07:22] Arvell Craig: Having more technology is not going to solve that problem. So that’s one big macro meta principle that I learned. Cause like, I mean, you met when we were using AI to write books.

[00:07:33] Arvell Craig: This is a year ago. This is when ChatGPT was like three months old. I met you with at this training, which was great. You know, I was laid off technically for like a month. I asked the client, would you buy this course? If you buy this course, I will sit in the course for seven hours, and I will write you a book.

[00:07:50] Arvell Craig: The client said, yes, I sat there. But the only issue was two hours after the course started, the client’s book was done and we had five more hours, I was like, let me write a book for [00:08:00] myself. So I spent the next two hours writing my own book, but the more of the story is that AI is cute, it could write a book, but for me personally, at that time and that book, what do you think that book did for me, it didn’t do anything because the book was not the solution to my money problem.

[00:08:15] Arvell Craig: So that’s the thing. We can use they at the right books, which is great. But make sure what the strategy or tactic that you’re doing is specifically solving the problem that you have. So that was like my big aha moment that I like to cover. Yeah.

[00:08:28] Zach Hammer: So, what that brings to mind to me. So, like our audience is real estate professionals, right? So having clarity on your numbers, right? Every real estate business has to have your processes where you create business and your processes where you service business, right?

[00:08:42] Zach Hammer: You know, I talk about those as a couple of the main buckets and then under create business in a real estate business, you have your processes for turning attention into leads, turning leads into appointments, and turning appointments into clients. And like, everything fits into there somewhere.

[00:08:59] Zach Hammer: And [00:09:00] you can literally track your numbers and say, well, how much attention am I getting? And how well is that attention converting to leads and you can optimize that you can improve that you can work on that. I got leads. How many of those leads are turning into appointments? Right? And you can optimize that you can look at it.

[00:09:16] Zach Hammer: You could you could improve it. But like, just like you said, right? If you’ve got the best system to turn leads into appointments, but you’re not turning attention into leads like you don’t need that system. You need to work on first things first, right? You need to work on getting enough leads.

[00:09:32] Zach Hammer: And similarly, if you have the perfect back end system to service business, you know, you’re getting listings you’ll put onto the market. You got great negotiation skills to make sure that stuff’s happening. And you’re servicing that business to contract well, but you don’t have anything creating business.

[00:09:49] Zach Hammer: Like you’re solving the wrong problem. Right. So I love that. I think that’s super important for sure. So say we know we got a bottleneck, right? We know it’s either going to be kind of in creating business or it’s [00:10:00] servicing the business. So what do we do next?

[00:10:01] Zach Hammer: Where do we leverage AI next?

[00:10:03] Arvell Craig: Yeah. So let me give you one other thing that’s important for the audience. What is ai? I’m not gonna define it. I’m not going to get into engineering. I don’t know it. But what I will say is that the way we experience AI, there’s four different ways we’re going to experience it before we get, before we apply it.

[00:10:20] Arvell Craig: Like, so using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, using an AI model, a large language model, typing and chatting. To me, there’s only one way to use AI. So when I talk about AI, I want to set the stage because I say the main way I use AI is not going into ChatGPT that is not the way I use AI for the majority of time.

[00:10:40] Arvell Craig: AI is built into my computer. I’ve got AI tools built into my processes, and so that’s like the second phase. I say there’s AI models, but then there’s apps, really niche apps like script like Opus, like all these tools that it’s like the AI prompting and the prompt engineering and all the configuration and the training is built on [00:11:00] top of the model, which for most professionals.

[00:11:02] Arvell Craig: I’m always saying you may not need to learn prompting. That might not be the best use of your time. If you want to use AI, you may want to use a tool that’s already got the AI built into it. So that’s number two. Number three is going to be similar to, but some of the tools you’ve used your entire career, like, Office, HubSpot, Go High Level.

[00:11:21] Arvell Craig: It’s like every Salesforce every online product is now adding AI features to it. So if you want to use AI before you buy something new, you need to Just take a minute and check if your current tool you’re using, if they haven’t added AI features that actually do that for you. So, I want to clarify that.

[00:11:39] Arvell Craig: Cause it’s not just using ChatGPT, even though most people think ChatGPT, which is fine, but again, for a scalable integrated. Something that fits into your current processes. That may not be the best use. And I think the fourth way is you could build your own, whether there’s a node code tool like Zapier, Make, Respell you can, if you’re nerdy enough and you want to make something more custom, that’s [00:12:00] the fourth way, or even engineers and building your own open source, large linguist model, like Mistro or all that engineering stuff.

[00:12:07] Arvell Craig: So anyway, those are four different ways. Technically you can use AI. So we, so yeah, go ahead.

[00:12:12] Zach Hammer: I love that. And I think understanding kind of those practical ways to deploy the different mediums that you might find access to AI is useful. I will, I’ll define how I think about what AI is because I think it’s important to have some level of a distinction here.

[00:12:27] Zach Hammer: I think AI goes back to the foundational idea of literally the root of what it means, artificial intelligence. And anything that is software that is replicating human intelligence is artificial intelligence, right? But what we miss is that I think that exists on a spectrum, right?

[00:12:46] Zach Hammer: Like some of that automation is really simple and you’ve been using it for years and you never thought it was AI, right? Like, clicking a button to schedule an email to go out at a future time rather than sitting there and pressing the [00:13:00] button to send it right now, right? Like, that is a very minimal form of AI and then we get into our more advanced forms of a I where they can actually like reason a bit.

[00:13:10] Zach Hammer: Look at text and understand it. Understand the images that they’re seeing and take that information, reinterpret it and give you back something useful. And so there’s this big spectrum and I think why that’s useful is when you go back to the foundational ideas of what you talked about with the bottlenecks, the reality is the systems haven’t really changed.

[00:13:29] Zach Hammer: The fundamentals haven’t really changed. You still do the same thing. The thing that’s changing is how much can technology start stepping in and scaling those systems that you maybe should be doing anyway, that should be part of your processes anyway, that maybe you already are doing but could be more automated than they were previously.

[00:13:50] Zach Hammer: And as the technology continues to grow and expand, there starts to become more opportunities over time you know, based on that idea. And so really when you’re looking at like, where can AI be [00:14:00] deployed? In the here and now, it takes a little bit of understanding what tools are available, and what can they do right now?

[00:14:07] Zach Hammer: But at a basic level what you’re looking to do is you’re looking to say right now, what are my processes look like and what is the intelligence that’s required to do this? Can that intelligence be replicated by software yet? And sometimes it’s yes, and sometimes it’s no and being able to sort through that is where we could see where to deploy AI effectively and what I love is that you have figured out a lot of great ways in knowing these different mediums and modes that we encounter AI right now, where it’s useful right now, where you’re seeing results and examples right now.

[00:14:38] Zach Hammer: So from there let’s talk about that. So deploying AI into a real estate business. I know in your book, the AI strategy playbook, you actually offer a number of different plays that people can deploy in order to start getting results. Right. So what comes next?

[00:14:52] Zach Hammer: So we go ahead.

[00:14:54] Arvell Craig: Got it. Yeah. Yeah. So we’ve established that you understand how your business communicates, how you make money, where your bottlenecks are. [00:15:00] And if your goal is more money or more profit, you’ve got an idea of maybe two or three or four numbers that you want to change. So how do we change those numbers?

[00:15:08] Arvell Craig: So again, most of my book focuses on sales and marketing.

[00:15:10] Zach Hammer: Right. Right.

[00:15:21] Arvell Craig: they wrote a book on marketing AI years ago, and I like the way they break it down into these five different peas.

[00:15:28] Arvell Craig: And so I took their categories and I wrote my own plays, but the way I start to reference or frame it is how can AI help you when you’re planning a campaign. After you plan, you’re going to like start the production process of producing content, producing assets.

[00:15:45] Zach Hammer: Right.

[00:15:46] Arvell Craig: After producing assets, you have the option to personalize your marketing with AI.

[00:15:52] Arvell Craig: And that’s the only thing AI does. So there’s got the planning, producing, personalization, and now you got to get it out there. And they call it [00:16:00] promotion. Now you got your content out. How do you promote it? How do you scale it? And then lastly, you’ve got the performance. How do you edit the metrics and figure out?

[00:16:07] Arvell Craig: So those five P’s are the ways I look at the spectrum of sales and marketing and AI. And so again, so the question is in most people, I don’t think have an issue planning. There’s no lack of strategy. There’s no lack of ideas. So usually again, and in the book, I give some basic ideas of how to come up with a plan.

[00:16:27] Arvell Craig: Again, if you don’t know plans or strategies, you can use AI to help you to come up with some frameworks. You mentioned earlier about conversion optimization, or if you’re not converting leads into appointments or appointments into clients, AI can help you tweak your offer. So I share some ideas there.

[00:16:43] Arvell Craig: And then I’ll just jump to promotion. You mentioned AI has been around for a while. Like me, most people, if you’re buying media, buying ads for years, The whole situation of cookies and personalizing and all these things that kind of been removed from a lot of the ad platforms. But the key is [00:17:00] social media has always been run by AI.

[00:17:02] Arvell Craig: AI is an algorithm and we know Google has an algorithm. Search has an algorithm. Social has an algorithm. The main thing is AI is already the fuel behind social media. So if you’re buying media, you work with Zach or somebody to buy your marketing. You don’t probably need to add AI into your promotion because AI is already in there.

[00:17:20] Arvell Craig: You just give it a bunch of money, give it a bunch of media, and you allow it to do what it does. So, that’s normally not a bottleneck, needing more artificial intelligence. So that leaves us with two of the main keys. I say either being more personalized. If your media, your communication was more personalized, was one on one, was conversational, it’s likely people might feel more comfortable.

[00:17:43] Arvell Craig: They may feel more connected to you. So that’s an opportunity. How do you create media that’s more personalized? And then before that, most people don’t, I don’t know anybody who communicates too much.

[00:17:55] Zach Hammer: Right.

[00:17:56] Arvell Craig: Talk about burning our list. Maybe if you’re sending out an email five times a day, [00:18:00] but most people don’t, that’s not even an issue, but I typically look at, and I think I learned this from I forgot the guy’s name who was in the, but find something that works. If you were, are you consistent? What do you love to do? Whether you write newsletters, you’re real estate, right? So you may be doing like yellow letters or direct mail, whatever you’re doing.

[00:18:19] Arvell Craig: If it’s working and you got a process it’s consistent. That’s a great place to start. I would take something that’s working. And how can you scale it? How can you infinitely reproduce it? How can you turn it into video, but turn it into audio, turn it into podcast, turn it into text messages, turn it into, you know, threads and Twitter.

[00:18:40] Arvell Craig: So that’s one thing that AI can do. It can take media. And turn it into 101 different ways. So that could be a way to use AI to communicate a whole lot more. But again, you got to start with something that you’re already doing, something that works. Ideally your best form of media. How can you reproduce it?

[00:18:59] Arvell Craig: And one [00:19:00] key with that, I just, I’m thinking of lately, because one thing about AI creating something from scratch with AI.

[00:19:06] Zach Hammer: Right.

[00:19:08] Arvell Craig: Number one, you got the copyright issue. Now that you’re worried about that in real estate, but just know that you can’t own it. There could be some issues there, but if you start with your own content and reproduce it, if the root was you’ve got more flexibility and ownership and rights and things like that.

[00:19:22] Arvell Craig: So main thing you start with something that works. And how can you do more of something that works, you know, all the AI tools to scale from long form video, turn it into shorts, from shorts to turn it into posts, but all the different flavors of turning media in different places. I think that’s one opportunity that most people can take advantage of.

[00:19:40] Arvell Craig: Again, if that’s the bottleneck, if that’s a need, if you’re looking for more attention, what you call it awareness, attention. If you want to scale that in an organic ish type of way there’s a lot of opportunities there. I don’t know. I think you got any thoughts on that.

[00:19:52] Zach Hammer: Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. So I completely agree. One of the things that I talk about a lot is that AI has unlocked the ability [00:20:00] for people to show up as they are and yet get the opportunity to have it be whatever they need it to be, right? So like I found that people tend to have sort of a natural mode where they readily flow, where they readily create content.

[00:20:16] Zach Hammer: Maybe they need to do things live, right? So they record video live or maybe, for some people, that’s really hard, right? Like to do it live and they need to do something scripted. And so they show up on camera and they sort of really think about everything that they’re going to say, and they script it out and they create content that way.

[00:20:31] Zach Hammer: Maybe they don’t like to do video. So they do audio instead. Maybe they don’t like to do either. And so they write, right. Maybe that’s your natural medium of creation. And what’s really cool is that with AI, wherever you show up naturally, you can use that as the foundation to then create anything else that you need.

[00:20:49] Zach Hammer: To create videos, to create audio, and it may not be to the same caliber as if somebody who, like, that’s their main thing. Like, your videos if you normally [00:21:00] show up live, the clips derived from them may not be as clean, as perfect as the person who’s like, they live day in day out on the scripted stuff, right?

[00:21:08] Zach Hammer: But, you get the opportunity to show up there in a good way, in a way that’s sparked by you, by your creativity and your unique humanity. In a way that you couldn’t before and further, like right now, one of the things that’s a really big opportunity that I think a lot of people miss as well, we are moving into a world where you may not even need to be creating content, but rather capturing what you’re doing anyway.

[00:21:34] Zach Hammer: And that becomes the foundation for your content, right? Like so real estate teams, especially you know, they’re training their agents. They’re having coaching calls with their agents. They’re doing recruiting calls, using those, getting those recordings and then turning them into your marketing assets, turning them into your social posts turning them into your podcast episodes at times, those can be powerful ways that you may not even need to add to your like content creation time. [00:22:00] You may already be creating the content and just be able to leverage AI to take it and turn it into all the other stuff that you need.

[00:22:06] Zach Hammer: So yeah I love that. That taking your unique stuff, whether it’s intentionally creation or not, and turning it into everything else is a super powerful way to leverage AI for sure.

[00:22:16] Arvell Craig: Yeah. And let me add two things to this. Number one, thinking of real estate, brokers and teams, I don’t know how much, you know, these companies or companies are hiring other marketing and I don’t want to fight against marketers, but there is an opportunity that if you can figure this out, is that. Again, it’s like you got all these team.

[00:22:39] Arvell Craig: What if you just, I think there’s just ways to scale the production, like fueling your agents with more assets and more resources. And that’s again, that’s that scalability opportunity where if typically one person loves to create content, but your other agents don’t do anything, there’s probably a way you can scale through them.

[00:22:58] Arvell Craig: And then the other thing is like, I know real [00:23:00] estate is big on relationships. You’re local. Hyperlocal. Now we’re talking about personalization and what’s happening. I can’t imagine all the different ways you can collaborate or really just create assets to fuel all your partners. There’s something there that’s untapped because it’s not just about you putting out a thousand more pieces of media.

[00:23:19] Arvell Craig: You can take your same media and simply tweak it for all your partners, all your local restaurants, all your local, you know, mortgage people and whatever else is around your neighborhood. Yeah. How could you fuel and empower them so everybody wins and you can use when you figure out one simple play or one technique or tool, if you can share that with your network, your relationships and referral partners or past clients, there’s probably a way to tap into that network with AI.

[00:23:46] Zach Hammer: Yeah, especially so real estate teams. Typically, the team as an organization will exist to help enable and empower the agents that are on their team. Right. And one of the ways that, that happens is often with giving [00:24:00] playbooks and strategies for how to do things like social media, et cetera.

[00:24:04] Zach Hammer: And, here’s the thing. I just recently did an episode about this. One of the things that typically happens is that you end up having everybody posting the same cookie cutter information and the market could detect that, right? Where it’s like, it’s not like these circles are like infinitely large.

[00:24:21] Zach Hammer: So they might see a few different people posting literally the same exact thing as the other people they’re following, but with AI, now you have the ability to like, have the seed of something that is great and powerful, but use AI to do the personalization where you put it in that agent’s voice, that agent’s point of view, change up the wording, change up the imagery.

[00:24:44] Zach Hammer: And you could do that much quicker and much more at scale than it would be for me to like sit down and try and rewrite something in a slightly different way. So yeah you’re exactly right. Like being able to start with, kind of this body of successful work or useful assets and then adapt it into whatever other [00:25:00] formats or personalization you might need is super useful for sure.

[00:25:04] Arvell Craig: Yep. Yep. Yep. So yeah.

[00:25:06] Zach Hammer: I love that. Are there any other plays in the playbook that you think that real estate agents should know?

[00:25:12] Arvell Craig: Yeah, so again, we were just talking about the, I was giving you the umbrella of content production, of scaling your content is an opportunity. I gave you the principle, start with something that you already do. Start with something that already works. And kind of grow that with AI we talk about, working in teams. Again, being more personal again, we know text messaging, everybody’s using texting for marketing and that’s great, but there are best practices for scaling, understanding the regulations with texting, and when I mentioned I had a chatbot company.

[00:25:44] Arvell Craig: And then I took a step back and then I got back into AI, that gap where I was in the world of TCPA and texting and calling regulations. So I always keep that in mind because again, most of what I do when I help people, if you’re looking to learn about AI, [00:26:00] I have my book, you know, and there’s lots of, but if you actually want to put it into your business, some of the most lowest hanging fruit, it gets going to be companies with databases.

[00:26:09] Arvell Craig: Of leads of emails of contacts that they’re not nurturing. They’re not working with whether you have a call center and you’re just kind of scale it in that way, or you just want some AI automation to go through your list. Either way, there’s just a lot of tools. And I used to research all the AI tools, all the text messaging tools.

[00:26:27] Arvell Craig: And now it’s like, yeah, there’s so many of them. The main thing is that again, I do give some guidelines in the book. I referenced some of my favorite tools. But sometimes I will just do it myself. I tell, you know, if your company like just wants a demo of how you can use AI to have conversations, have one on one conversations.

[00:26:45] Arvell Craig: I just would love to help people out to figure that out. But again, the book has 21 plays. So just 21 ideas started, I call it idea starters to give you, if you don’t know, Oh, AI can take my newsletter and turn it into a podcast [00:27:00] automatically. And I mean, and I’m not saying a word for word. I’m saying turn it into an AI that sounds like me that’s produced on Spotify and Apple automatically.

[00:27:10] Arvell Craig: I have a resource in my book that does that. And I have other, there’s tons of other resources. So I’ve got a bunch of tools, but again, so we can go into something, anything else that’s real specific.

[00:27:21] Zach Hammer: So where can people get the book? What’s the best place to get it?

[00:27:24] Arvell Craig: yeah, you can go to ArvellCraig.com. That’s the easiest way to get the book. I do have a site that I made especially for the book, but I haven’t built it out fully. If you want to play with it, I built a little chat bot that is able to talk to you about the plays in the book. And actually give you some resources.

[00:27:41] Arvell Craig: That one is WhereDoIAI.com.

[00:27:45] Zach Hammer: WhereDoIAI.com? All right cool. Yeah.

[00:27:48] Arvell Craig: Either one is, yeah.

[00:27:49] Zach Hammer: And the book again is called the AI Strategy Playbook. People could get it both in print and digitally, right? It’s a, it’s available both ways.

[00:27:58] Arvell Craig: Yep. I’ve got an audio book, an audio version [00:28:00] where I just, I read it, do a little commentary. ’cause again, I like communicating and trying to be personal. And I didn’t use AI to record it. I could have done, I could have used ai, but again, it’s like one thing with ai, you use it to make your life get more profitable.

[00:28:14] Arvell Craig: More fun, but sometimes you actually like doing what you’re doing. So there’s always that, like, I like communicating so I can use AI to replicate me or I can just show up myself cause I enjoy it. And that’s the thing I like to talk about as well. AI is a tool to help you get your goal.

[00:28:31] Arvell Craig: Some of your goals is, you might not need more money. You might just need more time. You might just want more freedom. So we got to really optimize and use the tool and help us to get to the actual goal that we want. Not just a surface level vanity goal that does actually that doesn’t make our lives better.

[00:28:45] Arvell Craig: But that’s another topic.

[00:28:47] Zach Hammer: Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think really that’s a great place to just sort of tie this episode together that like the foundational principle is like, understand that the horizon of what’s possible with AI [00:29:00] is really big. And really powerful, right? Like there’s a lot of things I think that are coming that as we have this technology, people will figure out more and more use cases for it.

[00:29:09] Zach Hammer: But don’t let that be the thing that stops you that because you can’t maybe do it exactly the way that you’re envisioning this future reality will work that you don’t see the opportunity of like, it could shave off a 30 minute process becomes a 10 minute process and that 20 minutes that you saved means all the difference when it’s something that you do every day or that somebody on your team’s doing every day, right?

[00:29:33] Zach Hammer: Like that’s a big time savings when it’s compounded over time. And so what I love about what you’ve shown and what you talk about, it’s like focus on, what is working. And can we scale it? And like, where are our bottlenecks? And can we fix them? Right?

[00:29:48] Zach Hammer: Like, cause that’s really, you know, here’s the secret. It’s not really about AI. What it’s really about is it’s about Foundational business fundamentals [00:30:00] and AI is just a really powerful tool right now, right? You don’t go to a house and say, Hey, I’ve got a hammer. Let me build a house.

[00:30:08] Zach Hammer: It’s like you start with the vision for the house and then you bring the tools along that you need. AI is just one of those tools, right? You need the blueprints. You need nails. You need screws. You need drywall. You need mud. You need, tiles, shingles, all that stuff, right? And AI is just one of the tools that’s in that process.

[00:30:26] Zach Hammer: Now, given, it’s a really powerful tool. And it’s more powerful than a lot of the tools have been leading up to this point. But it’s still a tool. And you gotta have those foundational things in place. And I love that’s where you started. I think that’s a great place for us to tie it together. Before we fully wrap up, I know people have the opportunity.

[00:30:48] Zach Hammer: So you got the playbook itself said, go to our ArvellCraig.com. We’ll make sure to have that link in the description and on the webpage where you find all this, all of that so that you can click to that easily as well. But I know that [00:31:00] people also have the opportunity to reach out to you directly.

[00:31:02] Zach Hammer: If they have specific needs for why don’t you go ahead and tell us if somebody wants more of that direct help what kind of help do you offer and where should they go?

[00:31:11] Arvell Craig: Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So the book is great for education. It’s great for leaders to kind of get you some direction. Once you get in the book, I give you ideas of which how to actually execute the play in the book. And I have some resources, some other people, I just put them, you know, I share the tools that I use.

[00:31:27] Arvell Craig: The two things that I do personally, number one, if you have a call center or if you have a large, you know, green was a large company and you’re really scaling, you have a high volume of leads that you’re buying and you need somebody to talk to them quickly Fast. You’re using the BPO.

[00:31:42] Arvell Craig: I work at V Agents, that’s VAgents.com. And what we do is we help companies use AI as like AI call center for calling and texting again. We typically, if you have an existing call center with 20 or more people, that might be a good fit. If you want to [00:32:00] experiment with AI on that level, we can do that. If you have a smaller team, but you’re still buying Facebook ads, you’re buying Google ads and you have a flow, but you don’t have a call center.

[00:32:09] Arvell Craig: We can, sometimes we can come up like a partnership. We can kind of work together. We can like help you test AI. If you don’t need that much. We can actually build an AI for you to follow up on all your emails, your calls, and your texts. Okay. In a smaller volume way, and you can kind of test it for 30 days and we don’t charge anything for it.

[00:32:29] Arvell Craig: We want to give you a test, but if it actually helps you, if it converts, then we can come up with a simple fair rev share where we can build AI to actually bring in deals and we get paid on the backend. That’s only for certain companies, but those are the two ways we try to help people scale their database, their calls, their texts, or emails, if they have a volume or a really good flow of leads and they’re just not ready or they don’t want to hire more people, they just want to see how AI can automate that process.

[00:32:55] Zach Hammer: Perfect, perfect. And just for clarity, do you guys do both outbound going after like cold [00:33:00] list of leads as well as inbound? Do you have strategies for both or do you focus more on we’ve got an inbound list of leads that we need proper nurturing for?

[00:33:08] Arvell Craig: Yeah. So we can do both. I will say using an AI voice to call a code list. I don’t think that’s really legal.

[00:33:17] Zach Hammer: I don’t

[00:33:18] Arvell Craig: like, just like you don’t use dialers, you don’t use, you know, there’s, you don’t do that. But if you have consent, if you work with someone and you have that TCPA consent and you want to follow up on them, we can take a list of a couple thousand people and call them.

[00:33:32] Arvell Craig: If you had that original consent begin and that, you know, talk to your attorneys for the details on, if you have the rights for that.

[00:33:37] Zach Hammer: And I do love though, cause you know, you mentioned you, you have history with understanding some of the regulations around that. So at least in terms of putting your best foot forward and knowing what is likely to get you in trouble versus what’s not you’re a good resource to at least have some guidance on that.

[00:33:50] Zach Hammer: I mean, not, you know, definitely check with your lawyers for specifics and all that but at least an informed opinion for sure. So definitely reach out. And is your website the best place for people to [00:34:00] do that as well?

[00:34:01] Arvell Craig: Oh VAgents.com going to be that. Yeah. If you’re looking for that. Yeah. The virtual AI agent to call you, call your leads. Yeah.

[00:34:08] Zach Hammer: Perfect. Perfect. Sounds good. Sounds good. So with that said, I definitely encourage people to reach out to talk to you to get your book. I’ve read through it. It’s good information. I love the way that you laid it out. I think it’s logical. It’s coherent and most importantly it’s practically implementable right now, right?

[00:34:22] Zach Hammer: And that’s something that I focus on too is how do we make this shiny, fun technology actually do more in our business than, you know, just the opportunity of writing raps about our cat, right? So yeah, I love that. Any final thoughts that you’d like to leave people with as we close out the episode?

[00:34:37] Arvell Craig: No, but yeah. And actually I was thinking of one last thing I want to say, because you were talking about AI as a tool and like a tool, if you’re flipping a house, it’s one thing to use, like, what if there was some fancy painting tool that could paint, whatever. The main thing is that I would rather have a professional painter

[00:34:56] Zach Hammer: Right.

[00:34:56] Arvell Craig: manage the painting AI and [00:35:00] make sure it gets the job done versus my nephew or my cousin who don’t know nothing, but because the AI is so fast and it’s so smart and it’s so cheap, then I can find somebody.

[00:35:12] Arvell Craig: So with AI and marketing and in sales. It would be, I don’t suggest you go find some AI tool. And if you know nothing about marketing and best practices, frameworks, copywriting, conversion rate optimization, whatever, to just grab a new intern to just manage the AI and do it for you, get with someone like Zach, who knows the real estate business and understands marketing, and he’s going to be able to navigate and steer that AI better.

[00:35:39] Arvell Craig: So whatever you’re looking at, that’s going to really be the future. It’s not just AI by itself. You don’t just. So if you’re new to it, if you don’t know it, it’s better to partner with someone who knows what they’re doing and let them to manage the AI tool versus trying to do from scratch. I just wanted to throw that out there.

[00:35:55] Zach Hammer: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s one of the keys that I really talked to people about as well [00:36:00] is that AI doesn’t replace the need for expertise. If anything, it’s starting to make it more required because AI can look and sound really confident about things that it is completely wrong about.

[00:36:14] Zach Hammer: And sometimes it’s literally, you know, what they call them hallucinations, where it says something’s a fact that’s just completely wrong. But other times it’s just the nature of how these models work. They don’t know what’s tested, what’s proven, like, they’re not actually testing them in the marketplace to give you back this information always.

[00:36:31] Zach Hammer: And really sometimes you need, like, who actually has experience, who’s tested the strategies, and who’s giving you something that works versus something that sounds great, but it just came out of AI or just came out of a thought, right? So yeah, that expertise matters a ton regardless of whether it’s marketing or whether it’s real estate, etc.

[00:36:47] Zach Hammer: So, you know, if you have that fear of like AI is replacing you, probably not as long as you’re bringing expertise to the table, because that’s still really necessary and really powerful. But when you have it, You can leverage these kinds of playbooks and [00:37:00] plays from your book in order to take them super far.

[00:37:02] Zach Hammer: So, thank you so much for coming on our Arvell. Again, everybody check them out. ArvellCraig.com. We’ll have that link in the description as well. Thanks again. And until next time, we’ll see y’all on the next episode.

[00:37:14] Arvell Craig: yeah. Thank you.