Why AI Isn’t Working in Your Business | 064

Profit doesn't happen by chance. It happens by design. Let's dig in and welcome back to another episode of profit connections podcast today. My guest has a fascinating take on one of the biggest things that is happening to businesses everywhere, and I can't wait to talk to him about

it. I would love to introduce you to Dr Kurt Rasmussen. Welcome Kurt. Thank you. Thank you for having me here. I'm going to read Kurt's bio so that you can hear a little bit about him. Dr Kurt Rasmussen is a retired US Navy chief and PhD, industrial organizational psychologist, yes, psychologist,

that's a lot of big words, and he happens to live right now in York, Pennsylvania. He holds seven, seven pending patents, and wait till you find out what those patents are. In at least some of them, he's a bold thinker at the intersection of veteran support, innovative education, AI neuroscience and

Nordic lore. He rides sport bikes and heart. He rides sport bikes hard and forage. Okay, this last sentence, I'm going to try this one more time. He rides sport bikes hard and forges practical paths forward with grit and precision. Thank you and welcome Dr Kurt, thank you very much, Sharon, so I love

that you included in your bio a little bit about what what makes you tick, and how much fun you have riding bikes and and and balancing what you do with the fun side of life and also the business side. First of all, I also want to thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you for serving our country and making the world

safer for us. I truly, truly appreciate that. Thank you. And so we're going to go ahead and dig into some juicy juiciness. And when I teased a little bit about some of your patents and the and what your perspective is on the new wave that's hitting every business, let's go ahead and dive deep and tell us all

about that, sure.

Dr Curt Rasmussen: So I'm involved with a lot of artificial intelligence work. I've been working with artificial intelligence for better part of a decade. My degree is actually in industrial organizational psychology, as you read. So I am a guy that studies work and the people that

actually conduct the work. So it's kind of a weird intersection in some ways, but kind of fortuitous also, because currently that is a hot topic about AI taking over workers positions and AI coming into the workplace in general, and that's that's kind of where I come in. I help businesses integrate AI

into the workplace, if it makes sense, because about 99% of AI projects wind up failing. They don't produce return on investment. You know, they displace workers, and then all sudden, the company has to rehire them. So it's, it's pretty interesting space.

Well, whenever you talk about AI, we talked a little bit before we started recording, about how businesses bring AI in and that that it doesn't work out. So talk a little bit about that where you know, what is it that they're not thinking about ahead of time? Or is it, is it the

planning? Is it the execution? Where does that fall apart? It actually

Dr Curt Rasmussen: falls apart with everything it's it's really kind of amazing. You can bring in AI pretty light into a workplace like, you know, with chat GPT, just so you're, you know, your employees have access to it to stimulate ideas. That's pretty low risk. You know, it's low risk to put GPS in a car

too, but it starts becoming more high risk when you actually start leveraging it for either the completion of tasks. So you know, it's a tool that you have your your employees using, or it actually replaces some function employees have. And where it tends to start going sideways is, is right from the beginning,

because a lot of people don't understand, AI, understandable. It's, it's very complicated, but they also don't necessarily understand how their workers complete tasks. And a lot of people will be like, Oh no, no, no, I know you. How my my workers do it. But, you know, the amazing thing is, an

industrial organizational psychologist, I study that stuff, and the thing is, is a lot of people don't they. They're like, Oh, you know, Bob does this. Jill does that. But they really don't understand that, if Bob doesn't spend an hour on the phone with customers on Monday, that the whole rest

of the week winds up being a waste, because they've never captured it, and now they're going to try replacing Bob with AI, and they don't really understand. And then the AI side of things, it's very complicated. So, you know, people tend to trust the provider. They're not doing it

themselves. They hire a company, and the company says, oh, yeah, we know how to do this. But do they really what evidence do you have for them to do it? And when you think about the cash that somebody can spend on it, some, some AI implementation, it's $25,000 per seat per year. I mean, that that's even for large

business, you know, multi million dollar businesses. That's not cheap, right?

So, yeah. So there's a lot of what I'm hearing you say is that as business owners, employers, sometimes we don't have the perspective of what goes on every day in the nitty gritty, and we just look at it like, you know, it's almost like watching a ballet dancer. You see how

beautiful and graceful they look when they're dancing, and it looks so easy, but you don't see all of the pieces behind it that created that end product. And you know, as business owners, we don't always look at all the things, all the nitty gritty things underneath that go into that result. So it's a really

good perspective that you just pulled out. I really enjoyed that.

Dr Curt Rasmussen: Thanks, you know, and it it's kind of sad in some ways. It's that when you think about it, you know, somebody's going to bring something into a business, and they may not include it in their strategy. And it's such an expensive and pervasive thing, it's it actually becomes

foundational. Most AI projects take from for a small project, two to three months to actually get into the pilot phase, two years. And if it takes years to put it in place, it you you really need to consider it part of the foundation, because you're not going to pivot and go, Well, I had this AI

solution. Now it didn't pan out, and I'm just going to go back to the way it was, that that is not something that happens, but businesses are businesses on the regular. Don't even plan it into operations, much less into strategy.

Yeah, it's like whenever you have a huge ocean liner, if you need to turn that ocean liner around, it's not as quick as turning your car. There's so much that goes into that and bringing in an AI model and and a solution, if you're looking at it that way, without understanding all of the things

that you need to understand is like trying to turn that ocean liner really quickly. So it's not, it's it's not good for anybody,

Dr Curt Rasmussen: right, right? And it is. AI can be truly helpful for a business. I use AI every day for for my business, but I also know its limitations. I have a very good idea of, you know, where I don't want it at but that I'm different, you know, I have a lot of experience in this, this area, and that is

not something, you know, the business owner has experience in that business, not, not in AI business owner has their experience in their business, and not really, necessarily in the workers, you know, yeah, they're part of the business. But these are all things that are very important with bringing

in AI and understanding what it can and can't do. You know, take, take into consideration if you do if you contract with an AI provider, let's say everything works out. You're one of the 1% that this is successful and you're getting a return on your investment. What happens if that provider goes

out of business or doubles the price on you?

Oh. Oh yeah, yeah. That just happened to the company My husband works for, where they invested all this money into an AI platform, and then they raised the price, and they didn't account for that. And this is a huge, huge, huge business that happened, yeah, absolutely things that you, you

don't even think about, talk a little bit about because, because we're talking about all of the mistakes that we can make with AI bringing them in, and you have a few patents that sort of address this.

Dr Curt Rasmussen: Yes, I do. I do so. And sorry if I get a little bit geeky here, but two, two of the patents that I have pending, one's called the multi dimensional algorithm structure mass, and the other one is called the explainable artificial intelligence construct. And amazingly enough,

up until I came up with mass, there's never been a taxonomy of the different types of algorithms for for artificial intelligence ever. So what mass really does is it helps show which algorithms are best. Instead of saying, Oh, well, I'm going to use a large learning a large language model, an LLM,

which is what a lot of people just know they're they're like, chat, GPT, it's great, you know, grok, it's great. But those are not actually very good for certain functions. And if you want to do you know, you have a certain business function you want the AI for that's not often. It's not your best

choice. So mass helps choose that and show you it helps show where you know your data is good enough or maybe it's lacking. And really kind of de risk that whole implementation and where x AIC, so the Explainable AI construct comes in is really that, machine, human side of things, and not just, not to

sound bad, but I'm sorry, most of us just don't have the mathematical background to really understand the algorithm. And it's, I mean, that's not a problem. It's okay. It is what it is. But if you expect you're going to have employees that have maybe average high school diploma and you want them to

understand a neural network, that's you're getting into a very risky proposition where you're probably going to waste a lot of money on training. You're going to waste some money on tool that, at the end of the day is just not going to function for your business. So, so really it we're not putting computers

in the place of typewriters. We're putting artificial intelligence in the place of humans. We're taking humans really out of the loop for certain things for this, and it can be totally appropriate, but there's a lot of uses that it's not and can you afford that?

Yeah, this is I really like your the things that you came up with, because I I don't really know that much about AI beyond the large learning or the large language model. So I hadn't even thought about that. Whenever you're bringing those in, what does it do? How is it doing it? And to

have a tool that's going to go in and go, Okay, here's the information, here's where you measure up. This is the direction you want to go. Or, you know what, you're not even ready for this. That's a really powerful position to be in, because as business owners, we got ourselves over a cliff a lot

in a lot of different areas, and this AI can really, really, especially when you're putting all your eggs in that AI basket, it can really ruin your business.

Dr Curt Rasmussen: Oh, absolutely. In fact, even people that are very much experienced in in tech, I know a business that the the guy was spending $10 million a year for Pan benefits for software developers. Okay, great. And then he, decided to let a lot of those guys go and use AI

instead. Now the AI is working perfectly fine. He maintained a couple of senior software developers, but then it gets into what I call the doom loop, because he has no Junior software developers. So when, what happens, when the senior ones leave, you know, who's going to put up the guardrails

for the AI? Who's going to know when the AI isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing?

Wow, yeah, I love that. I am all about when I work with my clients. I'm all about like, what is the big picture? What do we need to be looking at down the road? What is. What is the strategy that we're using here, instead of just that next quick fix, next quick fix. So I really resonate

with your perspective on that this has been really, really incredible, and you have opened so many interesting doors today. And I do have a question that I'd like to ask you. It's one that I ask all of my guests now, and that is what's the most unexpected experience that made you adjust your approach to your

business?

Dr Curt Rasmussen: You know, probably, probably actually figuring out what my brand is. I thought I knew that. And then I used AI again. I use AI every day, but I'm like, hey, you know, and then I can go. I went back and forth. I'm like, wow, now I actually have a brand. I thought I knew something about

it, which that's not, that's actually not my background. But thanks to some help from from grok and some other AI engines, I I've now polished my brand so

I so hat who Excuse me? AI is useful for I find it most useful for brainstorming and teasing through problems like that. So I love that you used your AI to have a conversation about what is the brand and how is it? How is it showing up? Like I find that those platforms can talk to

me in a way that you know, whenever you try to talk to human beings about it, sometimes there's, you know, our own personal experience that gets tied in there. But you can really, get really laser focused with those like chat GPT and Claude and rock and all of them, to actually have a perspective

that comes back clear, that's devoid of all of your garbage, you know, in terms of not being able to see the forest for the trees, absolutely.

Dr Curt Rasmussen: And you know, the beneficial thing too, is, once you have your brand, at least for me, once I have my brand built, then I can go back and say, How's my brand doing, and I can point it to specific things, and I can say, well, you know, your x account is, it's growing, but it's not, you know,

it's still quiet, you know, this that, and I do that for the cost of a tool that I'm already using, and now it has another function for me. So I'm not even spending, you know, the money out of the box on on an advertising agency which would do, which would do that, and probably do a better job. But at

this point, you know, especially getting started out, you don't necessarily have the funds to to go out and spend $1,000 a month on an advertising agency to do these things.

Yeah, and that can, can get, give you the foundational piece to move forward, so that whenever you do build your business, then you can bring in those higher level expertise on those types of topics. Thank you so much. Dr Kurt, we you can find information about our podcast.

You can join our community. It's called profit connectors. Dot club. That's profit connectors. Dot c, l, u, B, that is our portal with all of our podcasts, all the gifts from our podcast. So you can go in there and you can find Dr Kurt's information and all of our other podcast episodes. Thank you so much, Dr

Kurt for being here. Thank you for having me. Sharon, really appreciate it. Hey. Say hello to York. PA for me, oh, well do. Well do. And remember when you are out working on your business. Build with clarity. Lead with purpose. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time you.