The Social Media Takeaway - Louise McDonnell

Personalized AI Agents: The Next Step and the Unimaginable Future

• Louise McDonnell • Season 1 • Episode 19

Share episode

In this episode of The Social Media Takeaway, I chat with Claude Schneider, CEO of SmarterQueue, to explore AI's fast progress and impact in today’s world. We dive deep into how AI is reshaping social media management, business strategies, and our everyday lives, and we speculate on the unimaginable future of AI technology. Claude offers practical advice for startups and businesses on validating ideas, solving real pain points, and continuously adapting to user needs. This episode provides listeners with actionable insights into embracing AI for growth and innovation. Join us as we explore AI's future and its impact on businesses and daily life.

More about Claude:
Website
Facebook
Instagram
LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to my podcast because more like this is on the way!

If you'd like to book a call to see how I can support you head over to my website here. www.sellonsocialmedia.academy/hello

And please connect on social media and let me know what you thought of this episode!

LinkedIn
Instagram
Facebook
Facebook Group

Check out my 2024 Social Media Content Planner & Guide on Amazon (Amazon UK) (Amazon USA)

Louise McDonnell:

Welcome to the social media takeaway. I'm your host, Louise McDonnell. And today I'm speaking to Claude Schneider about using AI and social media to grow your business. If you enjoy the show, please make sure you subscribe and tell all your friends. And if you want to give some feedback on social media. Make sure that you tag me on sellonsocialm.. So I'd like to welcome Claude here to the show. He is the founder and CEO of social media tool, SmarterQueue. He is a lean startup evangelist, startup mentor, product guy, growth hacker, full stack web developer, social media guru, photographer, and dancer. You're very welcome to the show.

Claude Schneider:

Hi Louise. Thanks very much for having me.

Louise McDonnell:

Not at all. Not at all. Tell us a bit about your journey. That sounds really varied and interesting. So I'd love to hear more.

Claude Schneider:

Definitely some of the things you touched on is how I ended up here. It's a combination of left brain, right brain, having an artist mother, photographer father, that I took a lot of passion in photography and also loved being around at the birth of the internet, building websites that fans could go and see. And I will actually admit this on video, my very first website was a Cranberries fan site. And I loved that I could do something at home that anyone in the world could see. And that led me to learning to program, building web apps. And I then tried a photography fashion networking site, like LinkedIn for the fashion photography industry. And it worked to some extent and there were some competitors and I got a thousand signups. But while doing the social media for that, I realized that the social tools out there weren't good enough. So I started building my own social scheduling tool into my own product and speaking to lots of startup founders in the London scene, realized that there was a need for that. So pivoted that into SmarterQueueueue. So it was my background in photography and web development that led me to where I am professionally right now.

Louise McDonnell:

Very good. Very good. Very good. So, so tell us about SmarterQueueueue so tell us a little bit more about that to get going.

Claude Schneider:

So effectively it's similar to HootSuite or Later or Buffer if you've heard of those social media scheduling tools. It helps you queue up your content so that you don't have to sit there every day typing and publishing. And I built it out of my own need and what I heard a hundred other people say, was that the current tools at the time weren't good enough that they're still doing things manually, listening to customers pain points and the two biggest things that I kept hearing is constantly feeding the machine. So we built in evergreen recycling so you can put your evergreen content like your podcast your quotations your articles. And have them go out every couple of weeks every couple of months. They can be varied a little bit automatically. And then also sorting your content into categories, so that you don't have to try and plan all of your timings manually. You just throw your content into category buckets, you set your weekly posting plan, and it does it for you. And those two things, plus all the other stuff that we've listened to and added, are the core features over the last eight years that are still getting us customers. And it's still the best way to automate that we here people appreciate.

Louise McDonnell:

Brilliant. And what about AI? Have you embraced AI? Is that very much part of the, of the two?

Claude Schneider:

Yes. We added an AI Capture and Writer just about a year ago which was as soon as ChatGPT made their API available. We baked it into SmarterQueue so that you can take your existing content or have guidance for new prompts for things to create. It'll generate a load of options for you. You can then tweak them, give it a tone of voice, change the language, include hashtags and emojis, and then add them to your queue. And you can even get it to generate five variations of your current content, so that when it does recycle, it doesn't always feel like the same post. And it lets you test different things. So people can do that in ChatGPT directly, but having it baked in where you can take your content back and forth, saves you so much effort as well. And that's just the first step. We're planning to add so much more AI into the product as well.

Louise McDonnell:

Okay, so let's stick on AI for a few minutes. So, AI, tell us, like, Opportunities. Where do you see the opportunities for any coach or consultants, anyone tuning in here today?

Claude Schneider:

The biggest areas are to make sure you actually use AI in almost everything you do. So asking it what you should do as a business. So taking business advice, even using it as a business mentor. Tell them your situation, and you can talk to AI as if you were talking to an intelligent human. Give it all the information they would need, so who you are, who your audience is, what problem you're trying to solve. Ask it, here's my website, now that AI has vision, where do you think the website is not converting well. What problems do you think my customers have? How do you think I could solve their problem? Look at the posts I've published. How would you improve them so they convert better? How would you vary this? So using it almost as an assistant for anything you can think of and that's something that I don't think people do enough is Get to AI almost every time you're doing a task and letting it save you time or do it better And that's it There's a whole host of things that it can do, generating ad content for you analyzing your performance creating imagery for you pretty much preparing meetings, summarizing meetings. It's almost impossibly infinite what it can do. So it's just up to you to really embrace, you know, what you're trying to do and getting it to help you.

Louise McDonnell:

And where do you see it going?

Claude Schneider:

Definitely A lot of jobs will change. I keep evangelizing that people become as AI literate as possible as early as possible And that can simply be just following news and tech articles just to know what's possible because it will then Let you imagine. All right. Now I know what tool is there. This is how I could use it. So it will replace some jobs directly. So for example, you may not need to hire a lawyer. You can just work with AI to get some legal questions done at some accounting, etc. But the best way of protecting your job is to Do your job better with ai. So if you are working for people rather than hiring a coach or a consultant who doesn't use ai, they would hire you because you can provide a better service or you can be more efficient or cheaper or just higher quality than what they could offer. So every skilled person should be keeping their career prospects by being an AI literate version of what they are now.

Louise McDonnell:

Hmm. I totally agree. I mean, I just know that AI has totally increased my productivity and even the days that I'm feeling a bit tired, I can do tasks that really well because, you know, I know it's, it's helping me, you know, so and again, like you're at the cutting edge of it. You have chat GPT 3.5, now we have chat GPT 4, this week we got chat GPT. I don't know

Claude Schneider:

4o.

Louise McDonnell:

You call it. For Is it a point? What is it? If you were to try and predict where it's, where chat GPT is going, what would you say?

Claude Schneider:

So this 4. 0 Omni model that came out a week ago, and probably everyone's hearing about it because of the Scarlett Johansson scandal, or potential scandal, that it sounds very much like her, and she's potentially suing them because they've used her voice or likeness of it. It is, if you know the film Her with Joaquin Phoenix, where she voiced a voice assistant, we are now at the point, when it becomes available, of having an AI assistant. And that's this year, a couple of weeks, months away, everyone will have this, person you chat to that can look at your camera feed and can tell you, oh, you're wearing this wrong or you look unhappy. It can listen to your voice and say, calm down. It's what they demoed is actually under hyping what this is going to be able to do. And in six, 12 months, we're going to start having AI agents. And there've been hints of that. And people are trying to build that already, but when ChatGPT and open AI does it, and then Microsoft does it, and then Meta does it, yeah. It's going to be ubiquitous. We're all going to have an AI agent and it'll be personalized. It'll know your history, your lifestyle, your emails, your photos. It will have control of your computer and your phone. So you'll be able to say, create some PowerPoint presentations, email them to this person, go off to this travel site, find the best hotels, book it for me. And we will have that in the coming months. And imagine for your work. Like I need to create a spreadsheet, analyze all the data, export it with charts. You'll just be able to give it instructions. It'll go off and do it. So personalized agents is the next step of AI. And then beyond that, I can't even imagine.

Louise McDonnell:

Holy moly. I knew it was coming. I didn't realize it was that it was coming so quickly. So genie Mac. Okay. Now I actually said something yesterday and I was talking to one of my team. I was going, you know, chat GPT four is 20 a month. I said, yeah. And you know what? If they said tomorrow, Louise, it's actually 200. I think I would just pay it because I use it so much. That's what I'm nearly anticipating that they're going to go, okay, now you all love it so much. And you see how much it actually really helps you be productive and get through your day. How much is this new agent going to be like, is that going to be?

Claude Schneider:

I don't know if you caught it, but so this ChatGPT4o, their Omni model has not just text language model, but it's trained on images and voice. So right now you can kind of talk to it and then it transcribes your voice into text, does its text generation, and then transcribes its response back to voice. This new Omni model has it all baked in, so it's almost instant. You talk and it talks back to you. And you show it a photo and it shows back to you. So it's much more powerful. And the crazy thing is they're giving this Omni model to everyone for free. So initially chat GPT plus prov you know, payers like us and you, we get more features and you get more speed and et cetera, but they're giving this power to everyone for free. And that's one of their business models. is to try and give the world free AI tools. Yes, they're still doing a very good turnaround and profit with their paid plan, and there will always be some benefits, but they're trying to give away more and more for free, so agents will probably be paid initially, and then eventually they'll give agents for free as well.

Louise McDonnell:

Wow. My mind is just boggling over the agents. Like I just, I suppose, yeah, I would imagine straight away, I'm thinking like getting that set up though, that's going to be hard. I would imagine so, or not, I don't know. What do you think?

Claude Schneider:

For you to set up an agent or for them to figure it out.

Louise McDonnell:

For me to figure out how to set it up

Claude Schneider:

so it's I again microsoft had a huge announcement so a week two weeks ago It was open ai then the next day google showed off what they're doing And then this week microsoft have showed off and they have blown Almost all of that out of the water again by building AI into Windows and they call it co pilot and co pilot plus and They have let this AI have full control of your computer and see what you're doing It even has a feature called recall where it snapshots everything you're doing and then you can just keep Ask it, hey, what was that website that I saw this blue dress on? My mom wanted to buy it and I can't I didn't bookmark it or You can be using something and it can ask it. Hey, can you help me fill this out? I'm playing a game They demoed somebody playing minecraft and it narrated to them in real time how you play the game of minecraft So it's now baked into Windows computers already. It's not full agent, but there was one demo where they said, I'm on this website, I need a trainer for hiking, just put something. And it put it into the shopping basket for them automatically. So Microsoft is now ahead on agents.

Louise McDonnell:

So if you're listening to this podcast next year, you'll be laughing at us going, my goodness, they really had no idea what was coming.

Claude Schneider:

Exactly. That's, that's the one thing that I've been following AI progress for the last five years. I keep evangelizing to people, you have no idea how quickly this is coming. Humans don't understand exponential progress and exponential growth. And with the, the Moore's Law, if you've heard about that, computers used to, used to get twice as fast every 15, 18 months or so. With AI, it's now every six months. If you look at ChatGPT3 in 2022 or so, and then 3. 5, and 4, and now 4. 0, it's just going to get exponentially faster. And I don't think people are prepared for what is going to be possible next year.

Louise McDonnell:

I also think, Claude, that what's happening is that, you know, some people would willingly say to you, Oh, no, I'm not using any AI, and then when you go, well, actually you are, but you're just not noticing how it's just becoming part of what you do. It's just there, you know, it's just already integrated into what you're doing and you haven't even noticed it.

Claude Schneider:

Netflix recommendations, autocompletes, so, so much of what is there is AI.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah, exactly. And I noticed a changing. Well, I don't know what I was trying to type. and it kept changing my sentence and I was like, no, that's not what I'm trying to say. So, okay. Okay. So for any business, I know you give advice in your bio, you were saying like you help startups. For anyone starting out now in an AI world with AI companions, social media, we're like eight, 8 billion people on the planet, 5 billion social media users. Average time spent by users on average around the world is three to four hours a day. What advice do you give?

Claude Schneider:

the same that I gave five years ago before AI was even a twinkle in people's

Louise McDonnell:

I love that.

Claude Schneider:

And it, it comes down to the, the lean startup concept, which is what problem are you trying to solve for people? Why, why do people come to you or why will people come to you? And effectively if you can find a real problem that is painful enough that people don't have a solution That are willing to spend money with you that they can't get elsewhere from a competitor and that you can create a business Well enough that somebody else can't just come in and copy you straight away. That's your business model And the the whole business plan used to be like 50 page document that you'd had to go to an advisor bank, etc The lean canvas is effectively nine boxes on one sheet of a4 You fill in each of the boxes and that helps you think have I got a defensible actual business and the one piece of advice is Really validate your idea with people. So my business SmarterQueue came about because I had a pain point I needed a better way of scheduling social posts and I was spending hours doing it You I validated it. Every time I went to a networking event in London startup scene, I talked to the other founders. I talked to marketers and everyone said the same three words. I'm sorry to hate on this, but I kept hearing, I hate Hootsuite repeated over and over again. And they were the market leader. And I realized that there was a pain point that lots of people had. I validated it. When I showed them what I built for myself, they said, take my money. And that's the best form of validation. If somebody is willing to pay you for it and too many business people think I'm just going to go and build this and I know it's going to work. My brother has the same mindset because I really know that this idea is going to be huge. And so many businesses fail because they didn't really validate And didn't have a problem that needed solving, or they didn't solve it right, or it wasn't painful enough. So whatever you're doing and starting off, really prototype as quickly as possible, validates the problem. And there's, there's an amazing book called Running Lean, which I really recommend to every single business person, absolutely everyone, whether you're writing a novel, doing a podcast, launching a business, a startup, Building a car, the same concept applies, and it's really how to validate as easily and quickly as possible, and then build the next test to validate that you're still on the right track. And you pivot, you know, start up talking about pivoting, and it's constantly course correcting and learning from the data you've got. So to spend one minute just giving an example the very first test you can do is talk to people, listen to their pain points. And I, I went about saying, what are your pains with social media? And I just listened. And I asked people, what are your problems? What are your pains? What are you doing about it? Et cetera. I then realized, That this is the core problem and you can drill into why is that a problem and why you're doing this and really find the core of it. And then you come up with an idea and you can sketch it to people, you know, real rough wireframe, just a kind of hand drawn picture or just a prototype. And you put it in front of people and you say, would this solve your problem? And if it does, you then do it manually. You say, right, come to me. I will pull the levers, turn the knobs. I will do whatever it takes to solve your problem. And by doing it manually, you can validate, does this actually work? So often businesses start as email lists or just a manual. I'll go to the shop by the trainers and put it in the post for you. And then once you've validated that you can start building the product and you build a simple prototype. So my, my first prototype was just a landing page. I said, here is SmarterQueue, social media, evergreen recycling, category based. I put it onto a kind of something like Product Hunt, and I got, I think, a thousand sign ups and lots of re shares of people telling their friends. Within a few days, just because, and this was my way of validating that this was needed. So before you build anything, before you start worrying about everything, ask, validate the problem, prototype it, do mock ups and keep learning. Is this something I should go ahead and invest time in? And the same goes for business coaches as well. Find out what your clients need and really test it out before you invest more efforts into trying to do it pitch and package the wrong thing.

Louise McDonnell:

Exactly. Yeah. And you're so right. Like the process doesn't change, you know, so the steps that you follow to do your research, to get your messaging, to get clear on your messaging, to, to create your content, to all that strategy, strategy doesn't change, but what changes is everything else around it. Where do you see. The threats coming from AI, like where do you see people potentially, it not working for them, but what people, what do people need to be careful about?

Claude Schneider:

So I was exactly just going to move on to this topic, how AI changes the whole launching your own business. And one of the boxes in the lean canvas is competitors and who are your competitors and what is your unique advantage? And right now, one of the competitors is going to be AI directly. You can ask ChatGPT and especially now with the voice model to be your coach, to be your mentor, to help you out as a consultant, to do the things you would normally pay a designer for, or an accountant for, or a UX person for. So, and even social media, to be honest, is going to be agent based. You'll be able to say, create this post text image, schedule it out, engage with people. So AI to some extent will be one of the competitors to whatever business you're trying to launch. And at that point, you need to try and find a way to be a better human plus AI than just AI on its own. So we're still going to want to engage with humans. AI will still hallucinate, it'll make up stuff that's wrong. Yeah, it won't be perfect, but it's going to be a harder competitor for a lot of businesses.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah, I think as well, I think, especially for if you're selling a service, you know, if somebody is going to come to you and buy your services, they have to know like and trust you. And if everything that you're putting out there is only AI, then it's not really authentic to you. Whereas I think if you can use the AI to enhance your capabilities, but ultimately when it comes to so, you know, somebody comes to your social media feed, they need to know who you are. They need to know like and trust you. And so. I would always be advocating that, you have to be part of, you know, if you want somebody to connect with you, you have to be there. I love AI and I embrace it completely, but I would say to anyone, if your social media content is only AI generated and you're not, your opinion isn't there, your advice, your face, your voice, your tone, if it, if you're not ever there, I think, I think that will be a problem.

Claude Schneider:

Yeah. And the other part of social media is the word social. It's actually engaging. It's not standing on a soapbox and just spouting your content. Yes. It's so for example, how we met by actually being social and talking and messaging and the other people that we connect with on social media, it's by commenting on their posts. And then when people do engage with the content you put out, if you're lucky to, that's what drives the algorithm and that's what creates a human connections. So I worry when all of those comments are going to be automated because it'll just be bots talking to bots and no humans in the loop.

Louise McDonnell:

Do you know something you can spot that though, at the moment, not everybody can, because they don't know it's, you know, I was saying, if I'm looking down through my feed and I see some, you know, if I see you comment on something or and I know that it's a genuine comment, I always make it my business to reply, but then if I see a comment and I'm like, oh, that's just so AI and it's not even a good AI generated comment, it's like, you know, there's not a person behind it. I don't reply to that. Yeah. You know, I'd love to get everybody else's perspective on this. Actually, if you're listening in, if you see something and you know, it's AI generated, do you bother replying or do you and saying that then you have, like I know in LinkedIn, one of the big things on LinkedIn at the moment is that if, in terms of the algorithm, If somebody's ever messaged you in the past and you've messaged each other, well, then you're much more likely, your content's more likely to appear in their newsfeed. So you know, the, and the LinkedIn and suggestions of, you know, celebrations, like, so wish somebody a happy birthday or, you know, again, that can be a great way to get into somebody's inbox.

Claude Schneider:

Yes, this, so this is a strategy that I've always said. And in fact, I've noticed it myself. You can try and push your content out there forever. And what matters is getting it amplified by big people. Or if there's some influencer you want to start working with, you don't just send them a cold email. You start engaging on their posts, liking their content. And even if they don't respond to it. Your name will show up visually. It's like, Oh, Claude liked my post. Claude re shared my content. And by commenting enough, you will actually be that, Oh, this person liked me. I'm going to engage with them. So I find that's the best strategy is to warm people up by engaging on their social posts. And eventually you'll be someone who stands out rather than just a cold email. I, as a CEO get a hundred of a day and I ignore all of them.

Louise McDonnell:

I know. I know. I wish I could put a sign on my LinkedIn, please, if you don't know me, please don't just pitch to me in the first, hello, how are you doing? This is what I sell. It just drives me crazy. Okay. You were saying, what is the quickest test you can do to confirm if what you're doing is the right thing?

Claude Schneider:

The very quickest is just talk to people straight away. And a lot of people make the mistake of trying to sell their product and then seeing if it's the And people will tend to be polite and go, Oh yes, I would buy your products or just say, maybe what, what you really need to find out is what is the core problem that people have. And if you can get to the nub of that, just by speaking or putting up a landing page or putting a post out and seeing how many people bite like, you know, going fishing, if you put out the wrong bait and fish don't bite, you know, the bait is wrong. So. Either talk to people first and find out the core problem and then once you've got something that you think will solve that problem Put it out there and validate that people actually will click and getting followers is great getting their email address is even better getting them to pay a deposit like Kickstarter kickstarter is a great way not just of funding the product, but actually validating is it worth it? Because putting your money where your mouth is is better than just somebody saying yes, i'm interested So for example, Tesla, they got lots of pre orders and they made paid pre orders, which kind of sorts out the wheat from the chaff and validates people are actually winning this part 1, 000 for this. That means they probably would spend 50, 000 on the final product.

Louise McDonnell:

Exactly, exactly. Brilliant. Okay. Well, how do people find you then, Claude?

Claude Schneider:

I'm probably most active on LinkedIn. Sorry, not LinkedIn, Instagram. That came out wrong. Being, being a photographer, that's still my favorite social media platform. I was hooked on Facebook, but I still keep that as a personal platform. Instagram, I post just kind of my photography, my imagery LinkedIn. I didn't use a lot initially, but it's got better now that Microsoft bought it and seems to be one of the main platforms. I'm hopeful for threads, but I don't think it's taken off that well among people and X, which is what we should now call it. I think we'll have a slow death.

Louise McDonnell:

Okay. And so, so if people wanted to connect with you, how did they find you? What's your handle?

Claude Schneider:

Yeah, it's Instagram at Claude Schneider.

Louise McDonnell:

Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Okay. Any final, one last final prediction. So if we're coming back here in 12 months time, will we all have our AI agents? We'll be speaking to them. Well, what's going to be the thing?

Claude Schneider:

I, I think we will be enjoying a lot of AI media. Films already we have music videos and films. I think Agents will probably be the biggest change in 12 months having multi step tasks completed for us And a lot of our work you'll be able to assign to an agent project management creating complex content I think that's going to be the biggest change in the next 12 months

Louise McDonnell:

One last question for you, because this is just something that I've been thinking about, you know, this, I don't know, there's always seems to be a crisis in healthcare around, waiting lists and queues. Will we see agents in hospitals that will be taking our blood pressure and doing something medical?

Claude Schneider:

So we actually touched on the other area that we're 12 months, robots. Humanoid robots are coming faster than I think people are aware of. Tesla is one of the biggest ones but many many other companies are doing it and with the large language models now with vision and the robot progress, in the next 12 months Factories will have a lot of humanoid robots in two years. We're going to start seeing them in shops in restaurants and homes, elderly homes and over the next few years robots will be affordable Everywhere, I think And maybe in five years, we'll even have a robot, a humanoid robot in every home.

Louise McDonnell:

Wow.

Claude Schneider:

Yeah.

Louise McDonnell:

So the future is coming. The future is here. And the future is going to be AI.

Claude Schneider:

Very much so.

Louise McDonnell:

Thanks so much for your time and your expertise. And how do people find SmarterQueue?

Claude Schneider:

So SmarterQueue is just SmarterQueue. com. And for the American listeners out there who aren't familiar with the word, it's Q U E U E.

Louise McDonnell:

Excellent. Thanks so much, Claude.

Claude Schneider:

Thanks, Louise.