So where to begin, well as the story goes. Before AI Mastery my wife and I own our own LLC here in the states we had a team of about 7 people and we provide data entry, cleaning and validation services for a company in the nutrition space. We were providing about 22k USD monthly billed hours to our client as of March 2023 and over the last year they have asked us to reduce that back to about 15k in April 2023, then we were able to bring that back up to almost 18k monthly as of Sept 2024. I was also working a full time job for a company in Hedge Management for commercial elevators and co-ops in USA and Canada for various commodities, mostly grains and livestock. I provided SQL & .net Development for their Hedge Management System that has been in place 20ish years, I had been at this job for about a year at the start of the AI Mastery program.
We really wanted to take our business to the next level and really position ourselves to be able to help small businesses like us navigate all the headaches and pitfalls that we have had to deal with in the last 3-5 years that are usually outside the wheelhouse of the small business (Book keeping, taxes preparation and planning, payroll, data management services & analytics, social media management, process automation & controls and a few other IT related services). We also have a passion about help those who might be traditional disadvantaged in regards to higher paying employment opportunities, single parents, veterans and minorities. About this time earlier in 2024 I attended the AI Summit and learned all about what the AI Mastery program could offer us and with my already extensive IT programming background. So I signed up for AI Mastery Advanced to learn all I can and bring it to our business to help it grow into the dream the wife share for our future.
My actual AI journey started out very well I really enjoyed the classes through September and early October. We even in anticipation of the future business we will be helping and those people whom will be able to train up and provide employment opportunities to decided to refinance and rent out our current house (very remote location in Rocky Mountains) and bought ourselves a new house in a larger urban setting with a lot more potential customers and employees than where we had previously lived.
Then a not so funny thing happened about the middle of October not longer after we had settled in to our new house. My full time job called me in the middle of the day on a Monday to inform me that I had been part of a workforce reduction due to the pending sale of the company. Severance was good so was not too worried about it as I was half way through the AI Mastery class and we still had a fairly solid plan with how the next 12-18 months was going to go for our business. Then an even crazier thing happened a week or so later (still in Oct) got a call from our client telling us their funding had dried up and we needed to reduce our services to them from 18k down to 9k going forward. That was a bit harder pill to swallow.
Our youngest daughter who graduated college back in May was now on her first job as a high school geography teacher in London, UK. We had booked a few week trip for the Christmas/New Years holiday to go see her.
But still feeling very solid in everything that I was learning, all the instructors were so great, the community was awesome, even though I am not a big poster/sharer in there. And we felt/feel very confident in being able to grow our business into other areas using AI and possibly even expand some of our current services using AI. So I pressed on with the learning up to today (day before graduation call, where I am on the last lesson of the Advanced Track).
I have built a few things beside just going through all the lessons. Main thing has been to help with tracking our people in our current company/project. So our team members work on a browser based application provided by our client, where they go through data lists provided by syndicators and they do various tasks to those data items. They have to keep tracking of each task they perform and how many times they perform it during each shift and the hours they work each day/shift.
Originally they track all that information on a piece of scratch paper. Then they go to our website to a PHP form that I built and fill it out and submit it, which in turn sends and email to a dedicated mailbox that my wife monitors. She takes those emails and enters the information into an Excel spreadsheet daily for each employee. We do payroll for the 1-15th and 16th - End of Month. She screen shots me the spreadsheet twice a month for the payroll in QuickBooks for our employees, the one contractor that provides labor for us that we pay twice a month and our client invoice we send out monthly to our customer. At the beginning of each month my wife has a set of reports that she creates to give to our client as well.
So using Airtable and Make I started off with the email monitoring of our dedicated Outlook mailbox. From there I use AI to basically parse the tracking data and hours worked/training out of the email. That information is loaded for the Date/Time into the Airtable.
This piece alone will reduce my wife's workload by about 15-30 minutes daily from the manual processes she is currently doing. I am in the final stages of testing it out and finalizing it before setting it all up so it can replace the extra manual processes she does daily.
The next steps I am going implement is to see about setting up a chatbot where they can enter their tracking directly from their phones via typed or talk without having to go to our website. Then it would respond back to them how many total hours they have worked in the currently billing period. Then for our contractor they would be able to at the end of the month just approve it via the chatbot and it would submit the invoice for the month for them, versus having to email it to us. Then I am hoping to continue the work with a sequential agentic teams that Juan taught us about where I can tabulate up all the information and approve it for the invoice to our client and have it send a PDF directly to them after approval. At the same time it would be able to create the reports that my wife normally does and send them.
I think I'd like to try and integrate the entire system with QuickBooks APIs to take the process even further.
Thanks for reading my story.
Steven Cannon