Turn AI Into a Real Business Advantage

Turn AI Into a Real Business Advantage

Artificial intelligence is changing how businesses operate

         

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Most business owners are experimenting with AI.

Some are getting results.
Others are getting overwhelmed.

👉 Follow the show so you don’t miss conversations like this.

Artificial intelligence is changing how businesses operate, but where does it actually create value? In this conversation, Christy O’Connor explains how business owners can use AI, automation, and AI agents to improve efficiency, create better customer experiences, and save time without losing the human element that builds trust.

What You’ll Learn

  • Why today’s AI revolution resembles the early dot-com era
  • The biggest mistakes business owners make when adopting AI
  • How AI agents can improve efficiency and save time
  • What should never be automated inside a business
  • How to identify the bottlenecks AI can solve first

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About Christy O'Connor

Christy O’Connor is a marketing strategist, automation expert, and AI consultant with more than 26 years of experience helping businesses leverage technology for growth. Her work focuses on marketing automation, AI implementation, customer experience, lead generation, and operational efficiency. She helps business owners identify where AI creates meaningful leverage while maintaining the trust and relationships that drive long-term success.

Transcript

INTRO
TONY: Welcome back to the podcast. Now, most business owners right now are experimenting with AI. I am. Some are getting small wins, some are overwhelmed. And a lot of people are quietly asking the same question: is this actually making my business better or just adding more noise?
Here's what's happening in real time. We're in a shift that feels a lot like the early internet days—when having a website went from optional to expected to absolutely necessary just to compete. And AI is following that same curve, but faster. And the gap is already widening between two types of businesses: those using AI as a novelty and those using it as infrastructure. The difference? One creates content. The other creates leverage.
Today's guest has been through that kind of shift before. Christy O'Connor has spent over twenty-six years in marketing, from the early dot-com era all the way to today's AI-driven landscape. She's focused on something most people get wrong—not just using AI, but actually making it work inside a business.
We're going to get into what should be automated and what absolutely should not. We're going to get into why most AI tools still feel robotic, and how to build systems that sound human, perform consistently, and actually move the business forward. So if you've been curious about AI but also skeptical about whether it truly delivers, this is worth listening to. Let's get into it. Let's bring her on. Hi, Christy. Welcome to The Tony D'Urso Show.
CHRISTY: Hey, how are you doing? Thank you.
TONY: It is so good to have you on. I've been on your show and it was great, and I truly appreciate the opportunity to have you on mine. Marketing and AI is on the forefront of all our minds right now—how to turn AI into a real business advantage. And I think one of the best ways to get going is: what did you see during the early dot-com era that feels similar to what's happening with AI today?

INTERVIEW – PART 1 (THE DOT-COM PARALLEL: NOVELTY VS. INFRASTRUCTURE)
CHRISTY: Back then you had two camps. You had people who were just throwing up websites to have one. They thought it was a novel fancy, thought they were being cutting edge. And then you had a smaller group of people who were methodical, thinking things through, and quietly building systems. They didn't realize it at the time, but they were building funnels, understanding the scaffolding in the background, how the crawlers worked, and actually generating leads. They were leveraging the system to be found in the algorithm. Those are the people who got in early, succeeded early, and rose to the top. That's where all your SEO and meta tags come from. Now it's old hat. And we're experiencing the same thing right now with AI.
TONY: While you were saying that, I was thinking—what are people getting wrong about AI right now? I wanted to kind of get into that to educate the people listening today. But go ahead.
CHRISTY: We have people who are just sitting behind a console passively interacting with AI, and then you have experienced people who can see the value and want to use AI at pivotal crossroad points—to either route tasks or make decisions—in order to create the speed and competitive edge we need in business. That's the distinction. It's not a novelty. It's about plugging AI into where you need speed, responsiveness, and where the revenue really flows.
For example, when someone buys something in your online shop, you send them an automatic thank-you message. You might also include, "Other people bought these things." Those are basic automations. But where you can really leverage AI is in the decision-making process—detecting how long an individual struggled to find their order or get to checkout. Those are real insights you can act on.
So you still have two camps: early adopters with more experience in the digital space who can see the value and understand where to plug AI in, and then people who are seeing it as a novelty. There's also probably a third group—people with AI fatigue who are resistant. They feel like it's going to replace them, or it's too complicated, so they're avoiding it.
TONY: I've learned that myself—it only does so much. You have to quality control it and check what it's doing because it's not perfect, it can make mistakes. The way I look at it, AI is like having access to a library. It just pulls information and gives it to you based on what you've asked. It may not give you what you want, or it may not give you all of what you want, or it may improperly collate things. So you have to provide oversight. It's not as easy as some people say. It takes work.
CHRISTY: You definitely have to have a human in the loop. You don't want to replace the trust-building portion of business. Voice AI is huge right now—everybody is adopting it. But there's a lot of resistance because consumers will say, "I don't want to talk to a bot." You'll have recordings and transcripts with people yelling, "Representative!"—a keyword that used to trigger the old automated systems to say, "Let me get you someone that can help."
We're relying as consumers on our memory of what it used to be like. But businesses are scrambling to adopt new technology to compete and keep up, and there's still a disconnect.
If I can talk for a minute on how we can help businesses make that connection—how to give their customers a predictable path forward. There's a lot of debate about whether to disclose when something is AI. Some business owners want to get the best voice model and the best experience to avoid the disclosure. And we currently lack regulation requiring that it be disclosed. But there are best practices.
In the old-fashioned sense of customer satisfaction: if your customers are left wondering, if they're confused, if they're frustrated, you don't have happy customers. Happy customers are paying customers. Unhappy customers go somewhere else.
The best way to get customer satisfaction is through a predictable path forward. Let's use an answering service as an example because AI voice is so huge right now. If you have a busy contracting office—plumbing, electrical, whatever—and you say, "It would be great to have AI voice handle my calls so customers aren't left waiting." Great. But if your consumer doesn't understand the process and they've got a robot trying to ask them questions and they don't know how to interact with it, you no longer have a predictable path.
When you have an answering machine or a human answering service, that's a predictable path. The old way is predictable—it's a machine, I leave a message, I know a person is going to call me back. But with AI, businesses think, "Now that AI answers the call, I don't have to make the calls anymore. It's fully automated." That's not what happened. All it did was take maybe a one or two dollar answering service bill and reduce it to thirty-five to fifty cents a minute. It did not remove the person. The predictable path still has to remain. You still have to call people back—just like with an answering machine.
I want to use one more example. The code readers on cars. A lot of mechanics used to work on old-style carburetors and combustion engines. Now everything is computerized—chips, sensors, all of that. My father would get so frustrated working on those cars. Lo and behold, years later, you can just plug in a code reader. Rather than doing trials, errors, and diagnostics, you plug it into the machine, it gives you a code, you read the book, and it tells you what's wrong.
That's a similar process to what we want with AI. It didn't remove the mechanic—all it did was help the mechanic avoid all those checks and diagnostic actions. It helped them get to a solution faster. That's a good analogy. Collectively, it's important for everyday businesses to bridge that gap between the online tech people readily adopting AI and your normal, everyday small business that just wants to compete and continue the service it provides daily.
TONY: We're speaking with Christy O'Connor. We're talking about how to turn AI into a real business advantage. You can find her at OConcoMarketing.com. That's O-C-O-N-C-O marketing dot com.
Christy made an important point. Most people think AI is the advantage. But AI by itself isn't the advantage. The advantage comes from knowing what problem you're trying to solve, and then using the right tools to solve it faster.

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And now back to Christy O'Connor, who was talking about AI automation and how business owners can use technology to remove repetitive work while creating a better customer experience.

INTERVIEW – PART 2 (DOMAIN EXPERTISE: WHY AI CAN'T REPLACE EXPERIENCE)
TONY: Something came to mind recently. We had a service person at the house to fix an appliance. The person had just started their own home business two years ago, so they couldn't possibly have known all the ins and outs of all these models. What did the person do? This isn't working—replace it. That isn't working—replace it. That isn't working—replace it. We spent more money than the cost of the appliance and it still wasn't fixed.
And I'm thinking—that could be a great case of someone just checking AI. "What could this be?" "Well, replace this unit." The cost of replacement wound up being more than the cost of a new appliance. It really happened.
I think that's something people can get skewed on with AI. It takes a human. It takes oversight. It takes somebody looking at what it says and evaluating it—"Is this really true? Does this make sense?"—using discernment. Otherwise, you're taking the information fed to you without questioning it.
CHRISTY: I completely agree. That is an actual fact that's being discussed in our community on a daily basis—what we call domain expertise. Whenever you have AI in the loop, you absolutely must have a human being in that loop with domain expertise. Because AI is so confident when it's wrong. It'll send you on a wild goose chase every single time.
And we're becoming familiar with the term AI slop. Go back to SEO, blog writing, websites—there's good content and there's bad content. There are experts with domain expertise who can finesse their craft, and then there are people who aren't. AI is the same.
Here's a good example. If I have a flat tire, my ABS light might be on my dashboard. Well, I'm a human being—I can physically see I have a flat tire. It's not my ABS. But now take that same code reader, plug it into the dash, and the code reader says, "Your ABS light is on, there's an error code on your ABS, you should change that sensor." The bot lacks domain expertise—the eyes, ears, and human discernment to see what's actually happening.
In professional circles working with professional AI, there is very real awareness of the need for domain expertise. We actually just went through user skill sets that you give bots in large models when you're plugging them into agentic flows. They have to have a skill set—written documents in a knowledge base. The quality of that knowledge base is what really dictates how well your bot is going to behave and carry out its task.
You could do a quick Google search and come across a TikTok video that tells you everything about a subject with absolutely no real experience. Or you could come across a scholarly research document that cites multiple sources with a long history of academic authority. Those two things have different weights.
When we teach our agents to use their large language reasoning models, they need to weigh—just like Google does—the expertise, authority, and trust factors of the sources. If it's AI slop, that has a weight of about one. But if you've got a thirty-five-year veteran with hard facts and data-driven results, that's an authority of ten. We just need to understand as small businesses how AI thinks and where it's getting its information. There are good sources and bad sources.
Okay, now we've gently critiqued AI. But there is a combination of it that is very powerful, very useful, and can really catapult a business. If we use automation together with our marketing knowledge, we can create serious leverage. Are there types of business models where AI can work especially well?
TONY: Yes—are there types where we can really create more success?
CHRISTY: One hundred percent. One thousand percent, without a doubt. I'm a proponent of AI when it's used ethically, correctly, and plugged into a workflow. AI can create video. It's a workhorse for social media management, sentiment management, and pattern recognition. And talk about lead generation—you can take data from your PPC ad campaigns, anything that requires budgeting numbers, reducing overhead, increasing efficiency through numbers. That pattern recognition to create operational efficiency is really where the leverage is.
Wherever you're losing time, wherever you're losing leads, wherever you don't have time for follow-ups, crunching contracts—for example, in business development when we would sign on affiliates and make sales, we used to spend hours combing through fifteen to twenty-page contracts with our legal department, looking at liability clauses, non-disclosure terms, contract terms. You can now take your weighted knowledge bases, set your red lines, and have a bot evaluate: does it pass? You still have to scan contracts—let's not go over the top—but something granular and detailed like that, which might take several hours, you could very easily pass through a bot.
TONY: That's a good point on contracts. And I'm thinking—is there something that should not be automated, even if we think it should be?

INTERVIEW – PART 3 (WHAT SHOULD NEVER BE AUTOMATED: TRUST & RELATIONSHIPS)
CHRISTY: Yes, absolutely. Once again, it comes back to the predictable flow for your customers. Human beings want human beings. Bots are good for saving time, increasing speed, and helping you get a competitive edge. But they're not good at relationship building. Our business models are built on trust. If you don't have a foundation of trust in any business, it doesn't matter what business it is—you won't succeed. The human oversight, the judgment, the governance—those cannot be replaced. And it would be irresponsible to replace them.
TONY: And part of using AI—when I do it at my level, I'm asking it to help me write a post or organize information. But what I get out is sometimes a little too scholarly, and there's no human connection. It's nice sounding words but it doesn't really show the human element. Is there a way to make AI sound more natural?
CHRISTY: Yeah. If you have a custom model that you're training or a custom GPT, you can simply give it examples and have it follow that style. Just like a child—this is good, this is bad, this is success, this is a fail, I like this one, I don't like this one—and it will definitely learn.
But going back to what shouldn't be automated—take this conversation for example. We're both in business. If either one of us decided not to show up and sent our digital twin instead, the other person would be very offended. "I really thought I'd be talking to you today." Or the person coming to fix your appliance—you have a certain level of expectations. That's what a brand is. It's a predetermined set of promises within a predictable path.
To have a bot sound more human, it has to be coded and instructed. Bots don't naturally have the same cadence, emotion, or the ability to pause and think the way humans do. A lot of it is mimicked and modeled. We have to clearly identify the model for the bot to follow. But it can definitely be done. And that's the sign of a good AI engineer or architect—someone who understands where to put the pauses, how to include the trust factor to reassure the customer, and how to not let things get too broad or too verbose.
All of those things are built into what's called conversational architecture—a dialogue flow that's pre-written into the knowledge base for that AI. And once again, it comes down to domain expertise. People more familiar with it can handle it.
TONY: When I scan social media, I can tell so easily—this was written by a computer, this was written by AI—versus the ones written by a person. It's the word choice, the human element, the way they write. I've tried using AI to screen my podcast guests. I give it my parameters and it would say yes or no. But it wasn't always right. If I gave it broad instructions, I'd get a preponderance that looked like a good fit—but then I'd have to go through them because it might suggest an industry I'd never thought of, and I wouldn't have thought to tell the AI to exclude it. So it's kind of like a rough filter.
And when I get pitched by AI, I feel it immediately. The person doesn't seem genuine. I can tell if someone is pitching me from a computer. It's just not real. One thing is when there are too many emojis—we don't write with a lot of emojis. AI does.
CHRISTY: Yes. And I keep coming back to the predictable path. We're both in business, we already know the outcome of an AI pitch, and it's not a desired outcome. So we've chosen to opt out of that predictable path. It's really important for us to understand which use cases AI is genuinely going to be helpful for, and which ones aren't.
There's also the reality that some companies work with a lot of inbound calls, a lot of help tickets, a lot of time-consuming tasks. And there is AI fatigue—people who are reluctant to adopt AI.
But once you have some talent working with it, you can create an architecture. That's why people are breaking out into autonomous AI agents—creating multiple mini agents. If you take a large language model like ChatGPT or Gemini, it's a vast multimodal large model. But if you have a mini model that only does one thing—say, respond to social media with three or four words in a human-sounding way, with hundreds of examples of what people would and wouldn't say—that might be a better option. Just one small agent dedicated to one task. Not a big model that overthinks or overspeaks.
People will stop sitting behind the console over-prompting. They'll create a mini model, have additional workflows that are hard-coded automations, and the agent lives within that workflow. Then it goes back over to a hard-coded automation—for example, a welcome email. You might have a standard template: "Hey, thanks for your order. Here's your receipt. We're so happy you're here." But inside, there's a small block where the customer can ask a question. That mini model is only a question-and-answer bot, trained on every question and answer ever asked. It knows what to say and what not to say. It's fully disclosed that it's an AI. Its job is just to help the customer get to their answer faster.
People want answers now when they want them. But when they want a person, they want a person. So if we can help them get to a person faster—the roofer can't answer the phone when he's on a roof. If instead of pretending you're human and having this weird-sounding AI that everybody knows is a bot, you just say, "Hey, I'm the AI virtual assistant. I'm here to take a message for Bob. What message can I leave him?"—then immediately when the person hangs up, they get a text: "Hey, this is Bob's answering service. Sorry I missed your call. I usually check my messages within an hour." If he doesn't check in an hour, maybe they get another automated message: "I haven't forgotten about you. Feel free to check our question-and-answer bot if there's something quick. If it's an emergency, click this button and I'll call you immediately."
I don't want to get too complicated with it, but again—set up guardrails for the agents, limit their ability to go too broad, and allow this to be a tool that serves the customer without removing the human being.
If we take it back to the beginning of the conversation—when people were having websites, everybody had an opinion. "You need one." "You don't need one." "It's just a business card." Now we know that if you don't have hundreds of pages, blogs, images, a Google Business Profile, reviews, email, and social media, you're behind. AI is that same thing—it's a tool and an agent to help us fill in the gaps and get to results a little bit faster.
TONY: Christy just touched on something that's becoming increasingly important. Not every task should be automated. Some things need efficiency. Some things need judgment. And knowing the difference may become one of the most valuable skills business owners develop over the next few years.
Before we continue, I just want to take a moment to thank you for being here. Your time and attention truly matter to me, and I appreciate you choosing to spend part of your day with me. And if today's episode is giving you something to think about, you can follow the show wherever you're listening so you don't miss what's coming next. Every week I sit down with entrepreneurs, founders, executives, innovators, and thought leaders who share what's actually working in business today. My goal has always been simple—to bring you conversations that help you think bigger, make better decisions, and move closer to the future you want to create.
And if someone comes to mind who could benefit from this conversation, feel free to share it with them. You never know which idea, insight, or perspective could completely change the direction of someone's business or life.
Also, if you're not already receiving my Elite Entrepreneurs newsletter, I'd love to invite you to join us. A couple of times each month, I share lessons from my interviews, observations from the business world, leadership insights, practical strategies, and ideas you can apply right away. It's completely free. You can find it at TonyDUrso.com. That's Tony D-U-R-S-O dot com. And while you're there, you'll also find hundreds of interviews with world-class entrepreneurs and leaders from around the globe. Thank you so much for being here.
And now back to Christy O'Connor, who was talking about where AI can create the greatest value and why the goal isn't replacing people—it's helping people become more effective.

INTERVIEW – PART 4 (ELIMINATING LATENCY: REDUCING PAUSES & COGNITIVE LOAD)
TONY: In looking through your material, you talk about eliminating pauses and repetition. What does that look like in practice?
CHRISTY: That's a latency issue. Generally when an AI is pausing, it's because it has cognitive load—it's trying to weigh out the pros and cons or come to a decision through its reasoning. So if you have your question-and-answer bot and you've got two similar questions with two similar answers, that's going to create cognitive load.
When you're creating a knowledge base for a question-and-answer bot, go through it carefully. Make sure they're distinct questions with distinct and concise answers. Don't have two similar questions with two closely related answers that could create confusion. Bots are very analytical—very black and white. Now there are some weighted gray areas, but you want to reduce the gray areas in the knowledge base and have very clear guidelines and clear rules. "Never ever say this." "Always try to do this." Avoid "well, maybe you could if"—those types of ambiguous responses are going to create pauses, make the bot hallucinate, make stuff up. That's how you reduce it.
INTERVIEW – PART 5 (AI AGENTS: WHAT THEY ARE & HOW THEY WORK)
TONY: All right. Let's go into the AI agent. Let's define what an AI agent is and walk us through it.
CHRISTY: We're moving into autonomous agents now where people will—in the very near future—have their own personal AIs on their own servers, working in the background on their websites. These are AI models trained for a specific utility. A question-and-answer bot could be just one agent. That's your customer service agent—an AI employee. You could have a project management agent dedicated only to follow-up calls or answering emails. Think of it as a virtual assistant.
TONY: Christy just said something that deserves a little reflection. We've spent a lot of time talking about AI automation, bots, agents, and technology. But underneath all of that is a much bigger question: how do you decide where you're going? Technology can help you move faster, but it can't tell you which direction to move. And that's becoming more important than ever.
One thing I've noticed lately is that we're living through one of the fastest periods of technological change most of us have ever seen. Almost every week there's a new AI platform, a new tool, a new breakthrough, a new promise that everything is about to change. And some of it probably will. But something interesting happens when everything starts moving faster—clarity becomes more valuable. The easier it becomes to do something, the more important it becomes to know why you're doing it.
Sure, AI can help write content, build systems, analyze data, automate tasks, and answer questions. But it still can't tell you what kind of business you want to build. It can't tell you what legacy you want to leave. It can't tell you what matters most. That's still our job. And that's why I spend so much time talking about vision. Not because vision is a motivational concept—but because vision is a practical tool. When you know where you're going, technology becomes an accelerator. When you don't know where you're going, technology can become a distraction.
In many ways, that's exactly what Christy has been talking about throughout this interview. The companies getting the biggest results from AI aren't necessarily the ones with the most tools. They're the ones with the most clarity. They know what outcome they're trying to create, they know what problem they're solving, and then they use technology to get there faster.
In the coming weeks, I'll be releasing a free Vision Map Starter Guide that walks through several foundational concepts that I've taught entrepreneurs for years. It's designed to help bring more clarity, direction, and intentional action to whatever you're building. You'll hear more about that soon. But for now, I think the takeaway is simple: technology changes, principles don't. The clearer your vision, the more valuable every tool becomes.
And now back to Christy O'Connor, who was talking about AI agents, automation, and how business owners can use these tools to save time, improve customer experiences, and create greater leverage inside their organizations.

INTERVIEW – PART 6 (DECISION MAKING & TASK ROUTING: THE TWO JOBS OF AI)
TONY: For a business owner, how do we use AI agents and how many are there? How many do we need?
CHRISTY: An AI agent is what you create it to be. You give it a knowledge base—basically a written document, like a handbook. "You're my virtual assistant and your job is only to ask one question: How can I help you today? Collect that data and send it to the boss. That's it." That's one job description.
You could give it a completely different job if you want it to be more robust—not only find out what they want, but look up the questions-and-answers handbook and try to answer their questions. It's just like an employee. You put the job description in writing. But rather than a human being doing it, it's AI carrying out that task in the online world.
Really, for businesses, the best way to think about it is that AI is used for two things. If you boil it down: decision making and task routing.
Let me give you an example. I've worked with roofers and they don't like small jobs—they want big jobs. So when we set up the AI answering service, it's trained to say, "Can you tell me a little about your project? Is this a leak? Is there underlying damage?" And because it can think and reason, if it sounds like a large job that most likely requires a full roof replacement, it goes ahead and books an online appointment in the calendar for an on-site evaluation and the roofer shows up to quote. But if it sounds like a small job—a leak around the chimney, only a couple of shingles missing—don't book the appointment. Have somebody call back or send an email with the next steps. That's decision making.
That's a perfect way to use AI for a very busy business—it takes the important calls, books them into your calendar, sets the appointment, and saves you time while filtering out unqualified leads.
And then task routing—same phone call: if it turns out to be an emergency and the person has puddles of water on their floor, send it through. Open an emergency ticket. Make sure the appropriate project manager gets a text immediately. But if it's a salesperson calling to sell a service, put it in the circular file.
Those two things—decision making and task routing—are the number one way AI is going to help businesses. Where are we losing time? Where can we increase efficiency? That's the question.
TONY: Okay. I'm a business owner in a decent-sized town and I want to put something on my website—a "Hi, how can I help you?" that routes people, gets some prospects. Where do I start? Which AI is better? Do I need to hire an AI expert? Can I just find an AI I can install?
CHRISTY: I think you need somebody who has AI engineering and AI architecture experience. There are tools where you can just buy—a hosting company might say, "We'll just give you AI." That AI will help you figure out how to build your email box or maybe build your own website. If you're a do-it-yourselfer, there are lots of tools out there. Scope them out, read the reviews, just like any other product.
But if you're a business and you're serious—you've got a team and you're not interested in a DIY tech journey—I would definitely hire somebody with expertise. And know what they're doing. Because of vibe coding, everybody and their brother thinks they know how to build and work with AI. That's really just not the case.
You definitely need domain expertise. Someone who has experience, who can help you walk through your day-to-day operations and understand where the decision points are in order to plug in the AI within the workflow. With an experienced person, you could be up and running in less than twenty-four hours. You set up these automations like Legos. The first thing you do is take the lowest hanging fruit—the thing that's causing you the most headaches, the easiest to plug in. Get that perfected, get it working. Then: how can we route it? How can we maybe add one more layer? You connect these in blocks, like Legos.
TONY: That's really cool. And for us that are listening—whether we're an executive coach, a professional speaker, a podcaster, a marketer, whatever we do—it'd be so nice to put something on the website that routes people. To me it's like a well-heeled receptionist: "Hi, how can I help you? Where would you like to go?" You don't walk into a building and start wandering the halls. When you go in, there's a reception desk that routes you. That's the old-school analogy.
Now, are plug-and-play AI solutions worth it? Or is it better to have someone who really knows this build it right the first time?
CHRISTY: You get what you pay for. If you think you're going to get your entire business automated for thirty dollars a month, that's not really realistic—depending on what you want it to do. If all you want is a basic question-and-answer chatbot, you could probably get that out of the box. But test it. Stress test it. Use it yourself. Make sure it actually works.
For example, we had a voice AI handling inbound calls and I said, "What would happen if I asked, could you tell me all that you do?"—just as an idiomatic expression. Well, the bot proceeded to tell me everything it did. It literally data-dumped everything. And you're going to be paying a lot in token fees. It's just like a cell phone—if you stay on minute after minute, those minutes add up. So there are fees associated with this.
My personal opinion is that it should be personalized and customized. Everything should be hyper-personalized, because everybody is different. Your podcast is different from my podcast. Even though we both have a marketing background and we both have podcasts, we're not the same. Things should be tailored.

INTERVIEW – PART 7 (FINDING YOUR BOTTLENECK: WHERE TO START)
TONY: I'm thinking with this—kind of like the last question, but trying to make it actionable. Someone's listening and they want to do something. What's the very first step they should take?
CHRISTY: You need to determine where your decision-making path is and where your task-routing path is. Think about your day-to-day. Literally go through the exercise in your mind: I get up, I have coffee, I have breakfast, this is what my day looks like—and where is the bottleneck? Where is that point where things slow down or pile up?
That's what AI can really help do—release those bottlenecks and open up the flow of efficiency. And it's different for everybody. A lot of times people are taking too many inbound calls. That could be an area where the phone is constantly ringing off the hook. Or they don't have time to read through documents. It really just depends on where the bottleneck is in each individual case.
Some businesses have similarities. If you're an online order taker manufacturing widgets and you have too many orders coming in and not enough time to make them all, that's your bottleneck. If your phone is ringing off the hook, that's a different one. Find your bottleneck and then work from there.

OUTRO
TONY: I like that. Very, very good. Once again, this is Christy O'Connor talking about how to turn AI into a real business advantage. You can find her at OConcoMarketing.com—that's O-C-O-N-C-O marketing dot com. Christy, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this. It opened me up and got me thinking. It brought this to the home front of how important it is and how you have to do it just right, just like when the internet first came out. I really appreciate the advice. Thank you so much.
CHRISTY: Thank you so much for having me. It's been just wonderful that you allowed me the space to talk. I appreciate it.
TONY: The pleasure is mine. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Well, there you go. So good to have Christy on. Guys, if you like this, share it with your friends and tell them about Christy at OConcoMarketing.com. Tell your friends about AI and some of the nuances—what it's like, some of the things it can do, and how it can help your business.
And wherever you're following this, wherever you're watching or listening to the show, would you please follow us there? It helps a lot to bring in more good guests to you, to give you insights and help you with your business and so much more. I really appreciate that. Thank you.
All right, guys. Let's use this and let's help you move on your journey to success. Thanks. Remember, just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds. And I'll see you on the next episode.

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