AI isn't just for Big Tech: What it means for small businesses

Yahoo

12-06-2025

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This week on The Big Idea with Elizabeth Gore, Exer AI Co-Founder and CEO Zaw Thet joins the show to answer the question: How can AI grow my business? From calendar management to time management, Thet breaks down all of AI's capabilities and best practices so entrepreneurs can use it to maximize their time and help grow their businesses. Yahoo Finance's The Big Idea with Elizabeth Gore takes you on a journey with America's entrepreneurs as they navigate the world of small business.
This post was written by Lauren Pokedoff
How to y'all. I'm Elizabeth Gore. Welcome to the Big Idea from Yahoo Finance, the show that navigates the world of small business and entrepreneurship. All business start with one light bulb moment, and I'm going to take you on a journey with America's entrepreneurs. As the co-founder of the smallSmall business funding platform, Hello Alice, has always been my mission to help ensure entrepreneurs have the tools they need to live the American dream. We're going to get between the spreadsheets with these operators to flow from their smallest failures to their biggest successes. So let's cowboy up.Today's big idea question is how can AI grow my business. Now our industry focus today is software. I was at a small business event last night and I asked 100 small business owners how many of them were using AI and literally every person raised their hand. It was crazy.However, we did a study at Helloa Wallace that showed us that only 7% are actually fully adopting it as a tool. Joining me today to talk about this is serial entrepreneur and investor Zaha. Zah is a wonderful friend and has been at the helm of new technology since the first dotcom era when he was only 19 years old. Zah literally created SMS text messaging with his former company for info. I think I was just riding horses when I was 19.He is currently the CEO and co-founder of Xer AI, the leading clinical AI platform built in collaboration with Mayo Clinic, Duke, Stanford, UCSF and other top health systems. Exer captures human motion to help indiagnose and treat disease. Saul has been a mentor and advisor of mine in Hellowes for over a decade. He's an exceptional dad and a great friend. There's no one better to discuss AI and how it can be used to help small business. So let's talk to Zaul.We've known each other 1515 years now when we when we met when we were 4, and you, I mean, you've lived a lot of lifetimes. That's why I think it's fun to talk to you about AI because you've been kind of since you were 17 doing businesses with that photographic memory of yours, is that right?
It's it's been a long journey since I was 19 is when I started my first company. Well,
I mean, and you basically, you won't say it like this.But
in the baselines. Is that. Well, in the end, what we were doing was basically connecting people to text messaging and so helping people text each other, but then also helping businesses connect over messaging. So if you remember, for those of you that are listening or watching.Um, the early days when it was on a flip phone, like a razor or one of these things where we actually had to go in and type 15 different numbers to try and type something. Yeah, we got so good at that. I don't know how to get back to, you know, if you wanted to get, to get sports scores to get quotes.Any of these things, there was no way to actually connect businesses to be able to do that. So we powered that for all of the country.
Wow.Wow. I mean, not bad for a kid who's coming up from Wisconsin, right? Yeah. Your folks came over from Burma and both clinical scientists and physicians. So how has thatHow is coming out of a household like that pushed you in this direction?
Well, if anything, it was not the direction that I was supposed to be pushed in. The direction that I was supposed to be pushed in was to go be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or something of those nature. And so I was working in science and in labs from a really, really early age.
So tellus about the light bulb moment that made you think, all right, I'm going towards this industry.
Uh, I think what probably tipped me over the edge though was that I got my first computer when I was about 4 years old, 5, maybe 5 years old, and it was an Apple IIC, and so, um, it was one of those things where it had no hard drive and it basically had one of those gigantic floppy disks that you have to go stick in and maybe you had.Uh, 120 kilobytes, which is basically the the page that you have in front of you that you could actually store on this disk, um, and I got that thing to basically say the equivalent of hello world and make, make it print something and I was like, here we go. This is, this is, this is what I'm gonna do. I didn't know it could be a career for the rest of my life until I got to Stanford in the, in the late 90s and then my eyes opened and I was like, OK.This is this is what I want to be doing.
Let's jump forward now. So you have Xer, incredible company, and what I get excited about is is transforming.The way we move, transforming people's access to health care like my mom has such mobility issues. Tell us about
Xer. Yeah, so XR is a clinical AI company and what we do and the premise from very early on has been can we capture human motion just using things like our phones or a tablet, no straps, no wearables, no things that you have to go put on, and can we put that in the hands of healthcare providers? We're not trying to replace.Doctors or nurses or anyone else we're trying to enable them so that they can give precision medicine at scale to people like your mom and so what we do is we basically look at the human body, analyze it assess it all of that is done on the edge so there's no patient videos or anything that gets recorded at all and then we can use that to help doctors and help providers basically treat and diagnose different diseases. So it might be things.Like mobility issues like you're a fall risk. It might be things like you have a neurological condition and you're fighting Parkinson's or some other disease, anything to do with human motion in the body. We basically have built modules for and then worked with big institutions across the country to deploy that. So.
Could thathave even existed even 5 years ago?
Absolutely not. No, there's no way. There was just not enough power on these devices to be able to handle that.Um, so when we first started we knew that it was coming, we knew it was possible we had to go train all of this data basically to to inform our neural networks that we use and then do a ton of research and work with partners across the country to validate that, hey, we can understand and see what and look what.Tremor looks like we know when someone's walking, whether they're walking with a problem, arthritis in their knees, stenosis in their back, all these different kinds of issues. Well,
so with that, our big idea question today is how do I use AI in my small business? And the reason I ask you, could that even happened 5 years ago isYou know, I think every small business should really consider AI no matter what their industry. I mean, what advice would you give? I'm just starting my business. How am I thinking about AI on Main Street?
So AI is everywhere at this point in a in a great way, right? And I don't think AI is necessarily going to replace humans. Like we're not anywhere close to this Grand Terminator notion right of like artificial.
I don't want you to be replaced. You're a good friend of mine.
I want to see. We'll see what AI AI avatar is going to sound like.But I think for small business, there's really 3 things to remember. So the first thing to remember is use it in all the tools that you already have. So if you look at Square, if you look at all the things that a small business might use, there those AI tools are getting built in there so you can definitely do that.The second thing is use chat GPT, use these prompts inside of a business. Um, I was talking to a good friend of mine who runs a hair salon. They use chat GPT to figure out what color to mix, and so they'll basically store it, um, all the different colors that they have, and then they'll ask it and they'll say, hey, you know, I've got to do X, Y, and Z thing. What are the right three combinations of things that I need to mix together? And it it sped them up probably by 10 minutes instead of having to go ask.
If if you ask.Somebody just walking down the street. Who do you think is using AI right now? I don't think they're going to answer a hair salon. And that just inspires me for a bakery, a restaurant. Folks are so time poor. Small business owners, that's the toughest commodity you have is time. And it sounds like it's literally giving folks time and efficiency back.
Itis. I think that's that's the key. It's not just it's time and then it's also solving a lot of the staffing problems that small business have. If you think aboutEither it's finding minimum wage workers right to to help in the front of house or otherwise, right, that's actually fairly difficult and actually fairly expensive and so what we're starting to see I think is a lot of small businesses that are using AI tools to help with things like scheduling and calendaring so.We're also at an interesting point where AI has gotten across what we call the uncanny valley, right? So it used to be that you didn't really know that you were necessarily, you knew when you were talking to an AI of some sort, right? It was fairly stilted, well, how are you my CPUs and that process of learning computer. Now I'm a robot. Now we're at a point where AI can actually conversate with humans. It passes this Turing test, which is an old test that AI has had for a very long time.And so we're getting to where it can interact with humans. It it can solve some of those staffing problems for small business. It can solve some of those inefficiencies still in a way where their customers really feel like they're still getting a great experience. You know,
I think that's great advice for small business owners and getting even more tactical for them. Um, where do I even start? So, you know, are there resources that you would suggest that they look at as they're getting to know how to use AI for their business?
Sure, absolutely. So I think there'sThe easiest areas to start when I think about a small business are basically around sales and marketing, right? So sales and marketing for any small business, whatever, whether you're selling to consumers or whether you're selling to businesses is always an issue, right? Who's gonna build my website? Who's gonna make a flyer, who's gonna create my.My social media posts, all of those things are easily solvable now with AI, um, and so you can go into a tool like Chat GPT and you can tell it, hey, I'd like for you to create a content calendar for me for the next month and I'd like, uh, I'd like for the tone of voice to be fun. I'd like for it to be optimistic, uh, my business is a.Let's call it a dog grooming salon instead of a hair salon. So I want to make it pet centric obsessed with. I know. He's 5 and you're upset about it and he and others can get basically all the content built for them right away.So it's a really super easy tool to use. I would download Chat GPT on your phone. Most folks that are running small businesses are not sitting in front of their desk all day every day. So put it on your phone. And then the other thing to remember, and I think this is the absolute key thing to remember is that you cannot talk to chat GPT or these other AI agents like you're typing something into.Google search engine you.
So I'm typing versus I'm typing in a chats
if you're typing and you've been trained to see that we're saying, right? Cos I want. I want Broadway.for a show tonight and maybe Google, you know, hopefully will power some of those options and the search results will come up. Talking to an AI like Chat GBT or using AI like that, you need to think about it like you're actually talking to a human. Really. And so it doesn't have to be super long, but remember that you have to give it guidance and actually the more guidance you give it, the better.Um, if you go deep into the AI, they keep talking about this idea of tokens, and a token is basically what the AI does with your typing as afterwards, and it turns out that language into tokens and then uses that to go do its magic so we can accept.Up to a million tokens now in chat GPT, which is a ton. You can basically give it pages and pages ofstuff.
So we're all bullish on AI, but are there areas where you think AI needs improvement?
There's tons. I mean, it's growing so fast and things are happening so quickly.I think that image generation still has a ways to go, right? If you're using these professional tools, I think I saw one today where you can create a video ad basically from scratch by just typing in about a paragraph of text that's not really available to most people yet those models and the amount of compute power to nerd it out.and spend that you have to use for that is not there. So you'll notice, and I think people will see this if they try and create fun images like I do with my kids and chat GPT, a lot of times the spelling is off and you're like, how can you create this amazing image? And then you put 4 ends in panini or something funny or this has actually happened to me.So that is something that I think is going to get better over time. We're just in the early inning like I would call this the second inning of the way,
I still can't spell as you know, and so nothing's ever going to improve
that. Maybe I will.So my guidance for people is just remember two things, uh, give it a goal, right, to say the goal of what you want. I'd like to create Facebook messages or Instagram, uh, posts for my dog grooming business, and I'd like for those to be in a fun sassy format, etc.Then you know basically break down what you want the output to look like. I'd like you to return this as a Google Doc. I'd like you to return this as a PDF, and I want you to create these images in in this format. If you give it basically the goal and you give it the return format and then you also give it a couple of things that you don't want it to do, reminders, warnings, and then a little bit about your business, it's gonna return amazing results for you. So, so that's really the the
reminder. All right, so I'll hold that thought. We'll be right back on the big idea.Welcome back to The Big Idea. I'm Elizabeth Gore here with Xer founder Zoet. So I want to talk about the human element a little bit because sometimes there's fear and you and I, I think when we got to be really good friends, it was after you sold for info and you were, I was at the UN and you were donating a lot of your time and money to the UN and we were in refugee camps in different areas. And I remember in some of the camps, there'd be one computer and there would be a line.You know, of 100 people waiting to get on that computer. And so I always thought the internet and computers and so on were really democratizing information. And I actually really feel that way, particularly for small business owners around AI. It's going to give them their time back, it's going to lower their costs.But there's always a human behind it, and you have a very unique day coming up. So you're going to go scrubbing to 4 surgeries and you know, even though you have an AI technology, you're still going as a human being with the surgeons. So just, just talk to me about, well, first of all, tell us really quickly are you're doing today because it's insane. Um, but just what is the human element behind it?
Uh, tomorrow we're looking at basically patients that are going in for total knee or total hip operations. And so by that, if, if most people are pretty familiar with getting their knee replaced or someone that they know getting a knee or a hip replacement,
isn't it? Oh
yeah, total knees a year. Yeah, for 40 because they last forever, for 50 years.So part of what we do basically before and after the surgery is basically analyze how people walk and so that they can when they actually put the knee in or they put the hip in, they can put it in at the right angle so you can actually walk more normally because everyone walks a little different, right? Some of us walk a little bit more bow legged, a little swag, right? Some, some people are just straight up and down, ready to go.
And um why are you walking in the tech is in there.Why does that need to be in the room? Oh,
I think, and I think this is advice for any small business owner. Like I have to go see it basically in action, right? It's, it's one thing to basically sit behind a keyboard or a desk and a computer and look at these things. It's another to really see the impact on the human condition. And that's what gets me so excited about X is like we're changing hopefully millions of people's lives for the better. We're giving doctors tools to deliver this precision medicine at scale.And in order to do that we have to go see how it actually gets used in the field we can't just sit behind a desk and so that's why I'm scrubbing in tomorrow to see what that looks like.
We talk a lot on this show about mistakes and we call our mistakes the dirty unicorns. And so, you know, you and I made a lot of mistakes. We talk about them all the time, but can you pick one of your dirty unicorns that we can all learn from? Oh gosh,
I have so many dirty. I mean, I'm always reminded of that Michael Jordan, right, like how many shots I think he said he missed 000 shots in his career, right? And had a game winning shot.26 game winners that he missed despite all of success. So I never think about it as failure, right? I think about it as feedback. It's like success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm was what Winston Churchill said. So to pick one is hard, but I would say to me, um.You know, especially early in my career, I wasn't great about picking co-founders. Like it was something that surprises me about you. Yeah, I mean, I think you, when you're um when you're in a lane and you have other folks that you trust around you that are suggesting people, you sometimes you get caught up in that and you don't really sit and do the diligence and really take the time to like get to know someone and understand, can you work with them? Or you just blindly say, I can see past those things and it's going to work out even though I'm not necessarily going to be happy every day.And for me, you know, at this point in my career, you know, I'm almost 45, um, I'm at a point, uh, I know, uh, middle aged, uh, middle aged power.I, I'm at a point where like I'm, I'm seeking to, yes, change the human condition for the better, but then also do that, you know, with happiness and with health beside me, and that involves culture, right? That involves team. Like I've, I, you know, I've had some co-founders that I won't name that in previous lives that just stinkers, really dirty unicorns.That you know, 3 years into the journey, it just ended up being, you know, a horrible thing to wake up and go to the office every day. And that's not a that's not a good feeling for anyone. There's no AI that can fix that. No, no, there's no AI that can solve that. There's no therapist that can even solve that. So.That would be my advice is like, don't, you know, don't just jump in, make sure that it's really going to be a good fit, um, because I've certainly learned from those mistakes and sometimes you have to make mistakes and learn from them in order to get to the other side.
Soyou live in Denver.and y'all are big hunting, fishing family. Yeah, and you and I fish together a lot, which is awesome. And um, but I wonder, you know, when do we walk away from AI? You know, when do you get your dog and your boys and go out and you're hunting and just step away.
Hopefully all the time. I think that's the benefit of AI when it's used smartly is that it enables these efficiencies. It gives us time back. It's not something that actuallyYou know, has to necessarily detract like, oh, we're we're turning it over, we're all going to be buried behind computers. Let AI do the work for us for the things that aren't human, right? Or that no one loves to be sit, well, maybe some people, but loves to be sit and buried in spreadsheets or other things all day. I do not either. Um, and so I'd much rather start a task or start 4 deep research projects on chat GPT at a time.And then go have time to go work out or get outside, get some sun, get some vitamin D. Like there's nothing better. Go spend more time with your family.
I love you. You're sweet. Thank you for coming on.At the end of each episode, I like to give a shout out to a small business who is doing amazing work. Today, I'd like to shout out one of Zah's favorites, the Parlor Capitol Hill, co-owned by Brooke Schoenborn. The Parlor is a salon that is based out of Denver, Colorado. What started as a singular shop over 30 years ago in Boulder, the parlor has now expanded to 8 locations throughout Colorado.They provide everything from haircuts to colors to makeup application to aesthetician services and more. Check them out at the parlor.net. Thank you to Za for coming on the show and thank you for joining us. We hope you learned a lot. This has been a big idea from Yahoo Finance. Please make sure to scan the QR code below for Yahoo Finance podcast.Or check us out at the Big Idea wherever you get your podcasts. And if you follow on Amazon Music, just ask Alexa, play the big idea. You can also come say hi to to me at any of my social channels at Elizabeth Gore USA. I'm Elizabeth Gore, and as my grandmother always said, hold your head up high and give them hell. See you soon.
This content was not intended to be financial advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional financial services.