John Munsell Podcast Transcript
John Munsell joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is John Munsell. John Munsell is the CEO of Bizzuka, a three-time Inc 5000 company, empowering businesses to implement AI strategies that deliver two key outcomes. Make money and save time.
Since July, 2022, John has guided over 600 business leaders in scaling their operations. His groundbreaking AI strategy canvas. And scalable prompt engineering methodologies are so impactful. Top institutions like Louisiana State University have made them mandatory in their AI curriculum. A serial entrepreneur who successfully built and sold his business.
John knows firsthand that strategic AI implementation is the key to scaling in today’s business landscape. John’s passion lies in helping companies harness AI’s full potential across their entire organization, catapulting their business to new levels of speed and efficiency, while retaining and upscaling as many employees as possible.
Well, good afternoon, John. Welcome to the show!
John Munsell: Thanks, Brian. Good to see you.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely! I love doing these every single day. Really do appreciate you making the time and what’s really cool. I know AI has been a buzzword, but we’re going to dive into that even some more today because that’s kind of your background and you’ve guided a bunch of businesses and leaders in this space.
So, John jumping into your 1st question here. You have a rich history as a serial entrepreneur. Can you share some key experiences from your journey that led you to founding Bizzuka and your focus on AI strategies?
John Munsell: Sure. So, the long story that I’ll try to make as short as possible. I spent 16 years in financial services and then when the web came out.
I realized, wow, that’s where the future is, and that’s where the growth is going to be. So, I started a company in 1997 to build web applications for people. And then gradually that grew into a software development company, and then a digital marketing agency. And then 2 years ago, I sold that off because I could see the next wave coming, which was a, I, we had started to use a, I, and I saw some tools that were pretty interesting, but they still, I used to say, they just talk in circles, but I knew it was going to get better.
And then when chat, I guess it was 3.5 came out, that’s when I realized, okay, now they’ve taken the barriers off and the walls off and now you can do a whole lot more for it. And so that’s when I started to work with CEOs. To help them ingrain AI throughout their organizations.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate some of the backstory.
It helps us understand what led up to what you’re doing today. And again, it seems like a lot of people are in the financial services market and decide, you know what, I’m going to expand on this and see what I can do and find a solution for the problem. That’s out there. So, I appreciate that. And John, your AI strategy canvas trademarked and scalable prompt engineering also trademarked.
Methodologies have been integrated into top institutions like Louisiana State University. Can you explain these methodologies and why they are so impactful?
John Munsell: Sure, so kind of getting back to working with businesses, 1 of the things that I kept noticing is I was trying to teach them certain aspects. And again, our focus was more on the marketing side of things and using what’s called generative AI.
Right. I started to realize that there was no common understanding. There was no framework from which they were operating on. As I was teaching them certain principles, I realized that it wasn’t quite gelling. And then I recall about, I want to say it was 12 years ago, we made the Inc. 5000 a few times and I went to an Inc. 5000 conference. And I saw a guy present a thing called the business model canvas, and he’d written a book called business model generation. And I immediately bought the book and fell in love with the concept. And then after I had taught 1 of my cohorts, I realized. That the business model canvas was kind of the perfect framework.
If I could adapt it to a I. And so that’s where the idea was born and we built the AI strategy campus and it’s represented by 9 different blocks and you use the canvas. To help to facilitate the discussion of the AI strategy development. Because people in the C suite generally need some sort of way to gel all those conversations.
And then once you create an AI initiative, you get a new group of people together, typically from different departments to try to execute, and you need something to orchestrate and facilitate those discussions. And then once you actually get down to implementation and execution, You need something to help people understand how to structure prompts so that they’re efficient and they’re shareable and what we call scalable.
So, the strategy canvas is used in all 3 of those circumstances. All the way from strategy development down to execution and that’s. Why we call it the AI strategy canvas, but we call it scalable prompt engineering, because unlike what you would typically see out there. These prompts aren’t what we would call scale.
In other words, they’re not shareable. They’re not hot swappable. They’re not components with that. You can swap out and you can’t pull somebody from 1 department into another and have them really understand. The prompt that somebody else has written, but when you use the canvas to develop those now, all of a sudden, you have a methodology for creating prompts that are scalable throughout the organization. Hopefully that makes sense.
Brian Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. And 1 thing that I like to highlight you talked about is having that strategy. I know a lot of people small and medium sized businesses, especially they don’t have a strategy. They go buy something off the shelf, or they see a salesperson present something really cool.
They just jump in and think it’s a magic wand to fix everything. And what they find is they jumped in the middle of this thing without a strategy at all. So, it can be challenging. So, I appreciate you highlighting that. And John, since July 2022, you’ve guided over 600 business leaders in scaling their operations using AI.
What are the, some of the most common challenges these leaders face and how does Bizzuka help overcome them?
John Munsell: Great question. So, I would say the reason we started something that we no longer have, it was called the CXOAI round table. And the idea was to, to work with C-Suiters. Every week and try to understand what problem they needed solved in the market.
And after about, I don’t know, 7 or 8 of these, we realized that the problem was that there was so much information coming at them and I was moving so fast. And there’s so many applications out there. They didn’t know. First of all, they didn’t know what they didn’t know, and they didn’t know how to filter it all.
And so that was kind of the initial problem that we solved for people. But then they also started to realize that. As people in the organization started to use these AI tools, like Claude, chat, perplexity, you know, Gemini, you name it. There was no rule book, right? You know, you talked about strategy earlier.
There, there was no rule book, no framework, no foundation. And so, we then set about trying to help the leadership teams understand, you know, the, the structure of AI strategy so that they could have these conversations, but then also give all of their employees, this common framework. So that everybody understood from the same level of understanding they had a common language, if you will.
And so that’s how we help businesses. And that’s the problem that’s, that’s really starting to get, I hate to use momentum for a word for problem, but it is because people are realizing that everybody is teaching AI a different way. Everybody is using AI a different way. It’s kind of this new software without a user interface, you know, and people think that just because they can ask it a question, it’ll give a response that they know how to use it.
Right. The problem with that is it creates more chaos in an environment that it’s supposed to simplify. And so that’s what we do with people is we help them organize. And minimize the chaos so that the entire organization operates smoothly and far more efficiently and effectively using a I
Brian Thomas: thank you. I appreciate that.
And I’m sure those 600 business leaders appreciate that as well. You know, as we discussed, and there’s without some sort of plan. Or some strategy or a vision, even this can go sideways and there’s just so many nuances around and there’s a lot of APIs that people think again back to that magic one, you know, analogy, just not going to work without a strategy.
So, thank you again. And John, as a thought leader in AI, what emerging trends do you see in AI technology that will further transform business operations in the next few years?
John Munsell: That’s a loaded question because there’s so much going on in AI and it’s moving faster than we’ve ever seen anything move before.
So, the thing that I keep hearing people say is pretty soon there’s going to be general AI and there’s not going to be a need for prompts. I don’t agree with that because I think it actually. Cements the need for a more structured approach to prompting think, think about it this way. If AI becomes infinitely smarter than a human, it still needs instruction.
You can’t hire an individual in your organization and not provide them with standard operating procedures, not provide them with instruction to do their job is going to be the same way. So, it’s smarter. So, it’s faster. You still have to have rules. You still have to have processes. You still have to have ways to tell it what to do.
And there’s going to be software all over the place that simplifies certain tasks. But at the end of the day, every person in your organization has, I don’t know, 60 percent of their day. That’s not tied to a specific application, but needs to be customized to simplify just their communication or operations or things that they do.
So. That’s where I think things are going to tighten up. There will be a definite need for everybody in the organization to follow a specific protocol and to manage their AI tools the same way. Because as you know, there’s turnover in an organization, and we need to make sure that when we have turnover, that it’s easy for somebody to just jump in where the last person was and find their way around and do the job.
Even though the AI tools they use might be smart, you still have to have a way that it responds. In accordance with your brand or your structure, you know, I like to take it 1 farther step. If you think about it. Every agency will develop some sort of a brand guideline for your company so that everybody knows what colors the logo is.
Everybody knows what fonts to use. Everybody knows what typeface to use. Everybody knows how to position the logo. There’s a whole lot of stuff to a brand guideline. You’re going to see guidelines for AI, and that’s where I think you’re going to see a whole lot of new consultants emerge where they help businesses develop those guidelines.
Because it’s not as simple as you think, you know, we’re, we’re in this part where Gartner calls it the AI hype curve. And we’re headed into, if we’re not already there into this area, they call the trough of disillusionment, and that’s where people have found out that the AI isn’t quite as efficient as they thought it would be.
And that’s when they step back and go, oh, I know why it’s because. We’ve let everybody kind of run loose in the playground and we have no structure. So, in terms of trends, that’s where I really see a lot of growth. I see a lot of organization in terms of technology. It’s going to go 1000 miles an hour. So I’m not much of a predictor in that.
I just know that. When technology moves this fast, eventually there’s going to be a few winners and a whole lot of losers and the companies that are going to be the winners will be the ones that pay attention to the technology. That’s going to be properly funded stick around, but they’re going to have their own.
Frameworks to operate and make sure that when they leverage this technology, it’ll be far more effective and efficient.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I think there’s so much in there to impact, but I’m glad that you did break that down for our audience, whether it’s turnover, whether it’s, you know, just jump in and go and don’t read the owner’s manual, as you know, there’s still a lot to be said about the structure and strategy around AI and its deployment, no matter how improved AI gets, you know, we talked on a podcast recently, John, that AI is now at the point where it can start to Invent things and develop products, which is pretty exciting.
But to your point, I think there’s still a long way to go and humans are going to have to hold the machine’s hand for quite a while to work together. So, I appreciate all the insights you’ve shared today.
John Munsell: I totally agree. I mean, if I can just add to that, it can invent things as long as you give it the information that it needs in order to invent things.
And if you don’t have that information. Available to you. It can’t get all that much more creative. You know, we use it a lot to generate a number of things to give us ideas, but we get the best ideas when we have loaded up the AI with all the information that we have about our company and our target prospects and our products and the problems we solve and all that stuff.
Then all of a sudden. AI becomes useful and those are the kinds of protocols that people need to have in their organizations and those kinds of structures. Otherwise, you’re basically asking AI to come up with ideas based on the corpus of information that is the worlds without any idea as to whether it’s useful or not.
It’s like, I always tell people, AI is great, but unless you know what excellence looks like, you’re going to get average out of AI. Okay. Is you have to be able to teach AI what excellence is in your specific job or your discipline.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. That structure and explicit instructions, guardrails are, are the key to excellence, as you mentioned.
So I appreciate that, John and John, it was such a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
John Munsell: Thanks, Brian. Appreciate you having me on.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
John Munsell Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
