Podcast appearance
Managing Your AI Reputation: Insights from George Swetlitz, Co-Founder of RightResponse AI
How an enterprise can deploy AI review operations without surrendering privacy, security, accountability, or public trust
Why this conversation matters
The business question
How an enterprise can deploy AI review operations without surrendering privacy, security, accountability, or public trust
What Alec Crawford contributes
Alec Crawford puts privacy, vendor risk, cybersecurity, governance, and executive accountability at the center of AI adoption.
What the episode demonstrates
The conversation connects AI risk controls within the Intelligent Review Responder with the wider review workflow. It is especially relevant to known as Freddy D, service-based business owners, trades, professional services, and operators focused on profitable growth.
Host perspective
- At 04:38 to 05:24, Dudek calls reviews the new word of mouth and compares them with the customer letters he once used as direct social proof.
- At 07:48 to 08:22, he says useful responses create micro conversations and signal that the business is engaged with its wider ecosystem.
- At 12:53 to 13:47, he frames acknowledgement as recognition and appreciation, then argues that a small response can be a big thing to the person who wrote the review.
- At 14:58 to 15:59, he connects emotionally specific review requests with both customer response and employee recognition.
- At 17:20 to 17:40, he calls the assisted-writing approach brilliant because it removes the blank-page barrier.
Key ideas from the episode
- This is the strongest small-business discussion of recognition as the mechanism connecting review requests, responses, customer advocacy, and employee culture.
- Dudek draws a direct line from the testimonial letters he collected as a technology trainer in the 1980s to public reviews as modern social proof.
- He independently describes substantive responses as visible `micro conversations` that show prospective customers, suppliers, employees, and partners that the business is engaged.
- He explains why naming the employee who served the customer does more than personalize the request: it recognizes the employee and can build internal advocacy.
- His `to be terrific, you need to be specific` framework gives an independent operating rationale for location-level topic analysis.
Buyer questions answered
I run a multi-location business. Should I respond to every review, or prioritize certain ones?
Prioritize the reviews where a customer needs real help, especially negative reviews that require follow-up, then use automation to handle lower-risk replies so your team can focus on resolution.
I’m worried review responses will sound generic if I use AI. How do I avoid that?
Use responses grounded in real messages about your business so replies feel informative and brand-consistent instead of vague, templated language.
How can RightResponse AI help me write more business-specific review responses?
It’s positioned as a way to incorporate messages about a business into responses so the replies can be richer and more aligned with the brand than generic output.
Is it actually worth investing time in review replies if I already have a strong website?
Reviews can be where many customers spend their attention, and some people may read reviews without ever visiting a website, so replies can influence trust at the decision point.
How do review replies influence customers beyond just SEO?
Replies can shape what prospective customers see when they’re reading reviews for the unvarnished truth, especially when responses are robust and helpful rather than superficial.
How this connects to the Intelligent Review Responder
RightResponse uses a coordinated, multi-step agentic process to decide what a response should communicate, select relevant approved business messages, write the response, and run final quality checks. That helps the response inform the next customer instead of merely paraphrasing the last one.
Explore the Intelligent Review Responder
See the complete RightResponse AI review-management platform
Related conversations
- Leveraging AI for Personalized Customer Experiences, with George Swetlitz
Why generic replies can damage customer experience, and what a useful response adds - How To Turn Google Reviews Into Profit With George Swetlitz
How specialized agents turn review activity into a bottom-of-funnel growth system - AI That Sounds Relevant: Reviews, Sentiment & Enterprise Feedback at Scale
Why relevant AI needs company knowledge, specialized judgment, and human escalation
[00:00:00] Alec Crawford: I am your host, Alec Crawford, founder and CEO of Artificial Intelligence Risk Inc. And this is AI Risk Reward, a podcast about balancing the risk and reward of using AI personally, professionally, and as a large organization. We will discuss hot topics such as, will AI take my job or make it better? When I ask chat GBT work questions, is that even safe from an ethical perspective, is it enough for big companies to anonymize private data before using it?
[00:00:30] Alec Crawford: Probably not. I'm discussing these issues with AI experts to answer burning questions and stay ahead of the curve on ai. I'd also like to give a shout out to our podcast producer and audio engineering team at Troutman Street Audio. You can check them out on LinkedIn. Hi everyone. It's Alec Crawford, your host for the AI Risk Reward Podcast, and today our guest is George Swetlitz, the co-founder of RightResponse ai.
[00:00:57] Alec Crawford: Welcome George.
[00:00:59] George Swetlitz: Great to be here, Alec. It's, um, looking forward to the conversation.
[00:01:02] Alec Crawford: Yeah, this is super exciting. So, you know, first why don't you give, uh, the audience a little bit of your, uh, pretty impressive, uh, background before, uh, co-founding rate response ai.
[00:01:14] George Swetlitz: Sure. So I, you know, I've had a long career.
[00:01:16] George Swetlitz: It's been split pretty evenly between consulting and operating businesses. So early on I worked at, uh, McKinsey, kinda large consulting firm. Uh, switched to operations, running factories for Sara Lee Corporation. Ran a division in Central Europe right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Um, came back and then went back into consulting, working with companies that were large organizations, fortune 50, fortune 100, that were looking to rapidly increase profitability.
[00:01:49] George Swetlitz: And then, you know, migrated into working with private equity firms and I eventually ended up. Uh, becoming the CEO of a private equity backed roll up in audiology, uh, which we built into about a 220 location business. And we, uh, we sold that in 2022. And in that business we faced a lot of issues. And one of, one of those issues had to do with organic growth, growth by having people call you as opposed to you advertising for people.
[00:02:22] George Swetlitz: And a lot of that. In a location based business is built around reputation and we struggled at, at this business in terms of how do you do that effectively? And we're never really able to find a good solution for that. And so after we sold the business, jet G PT came out, we thought AI might be a route to solve that problem.
[00:02:47] George Swetlitz: And so we, we started right response AI and uh, and launched in. Uh, late 23, early 24.
[00:02:56] Alec Crawford: That's pretty exciting. So you've done a lot of different things and you may have neglected, I think you have a Harvard MBA too, so I gotta gotta get that har Yeah, had a Harvard connection in there as well.
[00:03:04] George Swetlitz: I, I, I plead guilty, but I tend not to talk about,
[00:03:08] Alec Crawford: well, lots of case studies and things like that.
[00:03:10] Alec Crawford: Probably someone helpful. Um, I took one, um, Harvard Business School class when I was an undergrad, and it was for better or worse in accounting, so that, that's super exciting. Unfortunately. Um, so, uh, before we did, we did talk about, um, a book. Uh, it's a great book. Uh, we both read it Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
[00:03:33] Alec Crawford: If you could pitch the audience on that book and kind of relate it to what's going on in AI today, I think that'd be very helpful.
[00:03:40] George Swetlitz: Yeah, yeah. No, so it's, it's really, as we talked, it's, it's a phenomenal book. This, uh, this gentleman who's no longer with us, but Daniel Kahneman, um. Have, uh, had a Nobel Prize in economics.
[00:03:54] George Swetlitz: I think that was around 2002, published this book in 2011. And it's really about the two ways that as humans, that we make decisions. We have this very fast automated system, you know, our gut feeling. That's, that's the thinking fast. And then we have this other method, which is slow and deliberative and analytical.
[00:04:18] George Swetlitz: Which we need to force into action. Mm-hmm. It's not the natural one, it's the one that we have to focus on activating, which is the thinking slow. And so it's, it's a book about that and, and, and how this fast thinking system creates issues for us in decision making, anchoring around a number. That you first hear, you know, every, these are things that we talk about now, anchoring, confirmation bias, things like that, that everyone talks about.
[00:04:50] George Swetlitz: But he was the one who really developed the research that built that into a theory, which is why he won the Nobel Prize. And so, you know, this has been a favorite book of mine for a long time, and I think it has a lot of applications to ai. So just the other day I was. I was doing some research on some companies and I was asking Chachi PT some leading questions, and it gave me a very fast answer and I started thinking, you know, it was a little too fast and I accepted the answer because of confirmation bias.
[00:05:28] George Swetlitz: It was what I expected to hear, and it gave me that answer, and so I accepted it. So I went back and said, you know, did you make this up? And it thought and said, yes, I didn't really do the research. I inferred that these things were the same. And that's sometimes where we get into trouble with AI because it tell the way we ask it questions makes it easy for the language model to tell us something we want to hear.
[00:06:00] George Swetlitz: And so again, I kind of a apply this thinking. To art interaction with ai. But, you know, it's, it's, it's also, um, well anyway, I'll stop there. So, uh, you know, what are your thoughts on that?
[00:06:18] Alec Crawford: Yeah, no, I, I think that's a really good point. And you know, at this point, sometimes you ask AI a question and just blurts out the answer, and other times it says, thinking 45 seconds, a minute, a minute and a half.
[00:06:30] Alec Crawford: And obviously you're getting a better answer. Uh, you know, if it's thinking. You know, one of the interesting things about that right now is, you know, the internet's a huge place, right? And like your business has been focused on, you know, AI rep reputation and how to use AI and things like that. And, and my observation is standard kind of for a company, standard search engine optimization is still important.
[00:06:55] Alec Crawford: Back links, keywords, uh, you know, having your information on there, tagging, things like that. If you then look at the, uh, the under 30 crowd, and, and this is something I wrote about in my, my white paper, um, you know, optimizing for, uh, uh, generative, generative engine optimization as well as search engine optimization.
[00:07:18] Alec Crawford: The under 30 crowd isn't going to Google, right? They're going to chat GPT or Claude and saying, I got a question, or Tell me about X, or, I'm thinking about, you know, finding a new bank or whatever it is, right? And if you're not positioned for that as a company, you're gonna have a problem. And that, that is way less dependent on backlinks and keywords and more dependent on your digital footprint across what AI is gonna look at.
[00:07:46] Alec Crawford: And ai or different, uh, companies that build AI have different kind of, you know, uh, sources that they like to use on the internet. You know, maybe it's. Uh, Quora or Reddit or press releases or the Wall Street Journal or whatever, but you kind of need to know what those are.
[00:08:07] George Swetlitz: Yeah. And the problem is we don't, and so everyone's guessing, right?
[00:08:11] George Swetlitz: How do I, you know, what do I do in order to get the LLMs to ingest and use my information? So, you know, one of the things we've been trying is posing more things as questions because people ask questions. And so to the extent that you're, that you ask and then answer a question and it's relevant semantically to a question that someone's asked, may, it may be easier for the LLM to see that there's relevance than if you just generate a lot of text.
[00:08:45] George Swetlitz: But the problem is nobody knows.
[00:08:48] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:08:49] George Swetlitz: There's, there's no guy yet.
[00:08:50] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:08:52] George Swetlitz: And, and you know, we do. And I don't know, of course everyone's making this stuff up as they go along. Everyone has theories. But I do see, I, I see interest. So for example, um, we're a young company and we write a lot about very focused things.
[00:09:13] George Swetlitz: So I'll write an article on AI review generation AI review requests, and right now. If you type in to Google AI review requests, or number one or number two, organic search, but then in the AI overview up top, we're not in it.
[00:09:35] Alec Crawford: Hmm.
[00:09:36] George Swetlitz: So it's interesting, like the connection between those two. How long does it take before one impacts the other?
[00:09:45] George Swetlitz: What's more important from the user perspective? It's hard to know.
[00:09:51] Alec Crawford: Yeah, I mean, it's gonna take time. It's gonna change over time. Just the way, you know, Google changes their algorithm, or LinkedIn changes their algorithm for posts or whatever. It's, it's gonna continue to be, um, a moving target. So give us an example, uh, without naming names, obviously, of a client that you've helped and what was the, what, what was the starting point and what was the ending point that they were excited about?
[00:10:19] George Swetlitz: Well, so it's a great, it's a great question. So I'll, I'll talk about a large, a large customer, more than a hundred locations. And, and the, these kinds of companies have lots of issues they want to use re, you know, they want to learn as much as they can and get as much as they can from reputation management and ai.
[00:10:42] George Swetlitz: And of course, they're trying to save costs all the time. They don't wanna spend money on anything. And so kind of bridging that is complicated. And so we, we have a customer that very, very large and they were struggling with a desire to respond to reviews, focus on the reviews that were negative, where they actually needed to assist a customer with something and do that in a cost effective way.
[00:11:13] George Swetlitz: And so AI. Or our we, we have a very sophisticated implementation of AI with respect to review requests or review responses because we incorporate facts about the business, and so they were able to spend less time and trust our review responses more because they were richer in the response itself. It was essentially they were able to bring their brand, bring their website.
[00:11:46] George Swetlitz: To the response in a way that they couldn't do with other platforms. And so that was one way of freeing up time. I don't have to spend time looking and thinking about the positive responses because I know that the positive responses are well done and reflect print. And as an aside, more people read reviews than visit websites.
[00:12:12] Alec Crawford: Wow.
[00:12:14] George Swetlitz: Yeah, that's it. So more people will go to go to your reviews and read them and will never go to your website. You spend all this money developing a website that talks about your brand. Yet that's not where people are engaging anymore. They want to know the unvarnished truth from people who've been there, people who've purchased.
[00:12:36] George Swetlitz: And so they go to reviews to get that. And if you are not participating. By providing robust responses where people are choosing to engage, then you're missing an opportunity. And so that's kind of one element of that. So they were able to redirect resources from responding to all sorts of reviews to dealing with customers who actually needed human assistance.
[00:13:08] George Swetlitz: And so they were able to reduce the number of FTEs. Spend that time more effectively. So that was one huge benefit of AI and in particular, kind of robust aim. The second benefit to them had to do with sentiment analysis. And so we have a very, you know, large, large organizations, almost without exception when they come to us.
[00:13:39] George Swetlitz: Are trying to make sense of the reviews. All they have is a rate, average rating of 4.7, average rating of 4.5, and they don't have the ability to differentiate between locations. Why are two different locations, both 4.7? Are they equally good? Are they good for different reasons? What's up with that? And they have a difficult time providing concise feedback to location managers.
[00:14:13] George Swetlitz: And so again, we use AI there. We use a very sophisticated AI and we have tools that allow them to, to plot what we call percent positive. So percent positive isn't anything crazy. It's if there are a hundred mentions of food quality and 90 of them are positive and 10 are negative. 90, it's 90% positive. So it's easy for people to understand what that means.
[00:14:39] George Swetlitz: It's easier to understand than 4.7% positive. You can like figure out what's going on and then you can make a graph and you can say your average percent positive for fruit quality is 92, but here's how all of your locations score. And when you plot them, what you see is that some locations of a restaurant, for example.
[00:15:03] George Swetlitz: Are very high over the average onset food quality, but below on service and others are high on service below, below on food quality. And so it helps the, it helps the leader, the operating, you know, the operations manager, the operations vp, give very precise feedback to the unit managers. This is where you need to improve.
[00:15:32] George Swetlitz: And so what we saw with this client was one, overall cost reduction. Two A, a broad view within the company that they were responding better and, and hearing from customers that they were responding better. They weren't getting reviews anymore that said, oh, this whole system is just a bot. Nobody's really reading these things anyway, right?
[00:15:56] George Swetlitz: Because they're providing informative, helpful responses, and. Operations was saying we're, we're much more able to deliver timely feedback to our unit managers than we've ever been able to do before.
[00:16:13] Alec Crawford: And now a word from our sponsor. Artificial Intelligence Risk Inc accelerates adoption of gene AI safely.
[00:16:20] Alec Crawford: They provide the governance, risk, compliance, and cybersecurity platform that financial healthcare and other regulated organizations need before they can use genai safely and in compliance with regulatory requirements. Their software has won number one, awards for cybersecurity and compliance from Waters technology.
[00:16:38] Alec Crawford: Find them at a IC risk. Dot com. That sounds really good. So I, I wanna shift gears to, to thinking more philosophically about AI and, and maybe thinking about, uh, ethics and ai. Right? Uh, I mean, one, one, um, one thing we keep seeing out there is these papers saying like, oh, you know, super intelligent ai, like no human will ever have a job again, you know, in 30 years or whatever.
[00:17:03] Alec Crawford: Things like that, right. So how, uh, have you run into any ethical questions at this point, uh, with your clients in terms of, Hey, uh, we're just gonna lay off a bunch of people. We're using AI now, like we, we don't, we don't even need those people anymore. Or, you know, anything bigger picture in terms of, you know, is, has AI been able, for example, to maintain, um, you know, consumer privacy and things like that?
[00:17:29] Alec Crawford: There are a lot of kind of ethical concerns about it. I'm just curious what you've run into in your thoughts there.
[00:17:34] George Swetlitz: Yeah, so in the area of, you know, people reduction, you know, we're playing in a space where we don't really see too much reduction as opposed to redirection because the areas that we work in kind of marketing reputation within marketing tends to be understaffed anyway.
[00:18:01] George Swetlitz: And so what's happening is people are able to work on things that are actually more interesting. It's more interesting to engage with a customer about a problem than it is to sit and write a review response. And so people end up being happier in the work that they have. So that's, I think, you know, what I've seen in any case is that that's been a benefit for customers.
[00:18:26] George Swetlitz: The, the area where I get the most pushback. It is around this notion of kind of what I call fake personalization. So when I first talk to cust perspective customers, they'll, you know, be, because there's a lot of fake personalization in ai. I'll give you an example of what I think about for fake personalization.
[00:18:49] George Swetlitz: I get a lot of unsolicited emails, which I'm okay with because how do you hear about what's new in the world unless you're willing to read about what people are doing. And so I get a lot of these solicitations and I got one a couple weeks ago where it was something like, Hey, I see you went to Penn undergrad.
[00:19:11] George Swetlitz: What did you think about this restaurant? Have you ever been to this restaurant? What did you think? So I looked it up and of course it was only like, you know, started 30 years after I graduated. So, you know, fake personalization and AI just looked, you know, they had a. Thing that they were doing. Look at the town where you went to school, find a restaurant as opposed to what I call real personalization.
[00:19:37] George Swetlitz: And real personalization is when the company is trying to use its information in a real way to help the customer. And so I think about what we do as real personalization. 'cause we're not making anything up. We're allowing companies to extend their brand at scale, whether that be in review responses or in review requests.
[00:20:02] George Swetlitz: It's all real information. And so I call that a real personalization, and so when I talk about that people, it's kind of, it shines a light on that and creates a distinction that I don't think many people thought about. So I do think there are these ethical. Questions and you need to decide what side of that you're on and where you're trying to be helpful.
[00:20:33] George Swetlitz: In terms of, in terms of things like privacy, that's a real concern. We work with medical offices and so there's HIPAA compliance, PHI, things like that. And, and I've heard you talk about this before. Uh, we do that scrubbing. Before it ever gets into the system. So we have an agent that looks at every single review for a medical business, identifies instances of PHI in the review, and then develops a set of hard, you know, actions that need to be taken.
[00:21:13] George Swetlitz: And that might be, don't even mention it, ignore it completely. It might be generalize it. So they mentioned a specific test, but you are gonna say, you know, your treat or your experience, something like that, you're, you're acknowledging it, but at a higher level. And so it's important to understand where those points of risk are and build these very hard agentic solutions to making sure they don't infiltrate your environment.
[00:21:49] Alec Crawford: Yeah. That's such a great, uh, such a great point. You know, um, pivoting to our advice section, you know, I think if you look at large companies right now, you know, many of them are adopting AI in different places. They might even have dozens or even hundreds of proof of concepts going on, and they're, they're getting some of the best and most expensive advice in the world from the consulting firms, I'm sure.
[00:22:15] Alec Crawford: Um. If we think more about small and medium sized businesses, and you've got CEOs who really haven't done much in AI yet, uh, at their firms contemplating AI integration, what, what would your advice be to those CEOs?
[00:22:32] George Swetlitz: So I, I would say two things. One would be, start and learn on the simple, less risky problems, because it's a real learning curve.
[00:22:47] George Swetlitz: As a developer of AI solutions, we've been on a tremendous learning curve and so and so we're in it every day and we're on this massive learning continuum. I can't imagine being a CEO that has a million things to think about and, and biting off a big problem before you and your organization learn with a small problem.
[00:23:14] George Swetlitz: The second point I would make is to choose your vendors carefully because you can end up with a big problem without really even realizing in most, most vendors. In our terms of service and our EULAs and things like that, we push all the risk back to the customer. Like you are ultimately responsible for what a request says.
[00:23:45] George Swetlitz: What a response says. That's not our responsibility. We provide these tools, we show you how to use them safely, but if you choose not to do those things and you know, and you put something back out there, it's ultimately your responsibility. And I don't know that Ed, there's any firm that takes. That, that will take that responsibility from the client.
[00:24:10] George Swetlitz: And so you may not even realize you're taking that responsibility as a company.
[00:24:13] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:24:14] George Swetlitz: When you sign up to a third, you know, third party service. And so you really have to do your due diligence and make sure that, that the company that you're working with, of the vendor that you're working with is doing what it can in a rapidly evolving environment to protect the company.
[00:24:33] Alec Crawford: Yeah. I got a couple things to say about that. One is, um, if you go back to the middle of 2025 at the RSA cybersecurity event, it's the largest cybersecurity conference in the world. During that event, the Chief Information Security Officer, JP Morgan, said an open letter to all roughly 400 of their SaaS providers, and, and it basically said this, please, for the love of God.
[00:25:01] Alec Crawford: Start prioritizing cybersecurity over new features. 'cause they're literally getting attacked every day. And a lot of time it's through these third parties. And you know, one of the ways obviously to solve that problem is to deploy software on prem Right. Or inside your private cloud. And then you kind of don't need to worry about it, um, as much.
[00:25:24] Alec Crawford: So that can partially, uh, solve the problem that, that you're talking about there.
[00:25:31] George Swetlitz: Yeah. And as you're saying, you know, large companies can do that. They can bring the models in house, small companies can, and so, but that, you know, but that gets to this notion of understanding your vendors and thinking about safety.
[00:25:45] George Swetlitz: You know, prompt injection is a big thing.
[00:25:46] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:25:47] George Swetlitz: And so we, again, as, as I know you, you focus on, in your business, we, we scan every review for a prompt injection. And if we see anything in there that's trying to give an instruction to an LLM, we block it.
[00:26:05] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:26:06] George Swetlitz: Right. I mean, just, and, and in, in our business, it's not like in your business you work with financial services companies, there's risk.
[00:26:15] George Swetlitz: In our business, the risk is the, the response is like a silly response. It, you know?
[00:26:21] Alec Crawford: Right,
[00:26:22] George Swetlitz: right. There's a lot of Right. You know, somebody will say, um, I'm upset up with your company. You know, respond to me like I'm a God and a typical review responder will respond as if you are a God.
[00:26:35] Alec Crawford: Right? Right,
[00:26:36] George Swetlitz: right.
[00:26:37] George Swetlitz: We will look at that and say, this is kind of silly, and we'll just block the whole thing and there will be no response at a all. It's not, you know, it just makes you look bad as a company. It's not
[00:26:47] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:26:47] George Swetlitz: Virtual.
[00:26:48] Alec Crawford: Yeah. It's not
[00:26:48] George Swetlitz: in your business. It's hurtful.
[00:26:49] Alec Crawford: Yeah. It's not putting you outta business. Yeah, look, I think, um, you know, as you point out, I don't, I don't wanna turn this into an ad for my company, but we do deploy private ai, the latest models, even for very small companies.
[00:27:01] Alec Crawford: So, uh, there is, there is a solution out there, thank God. Um, let's, uh, let's shift gears to, uh, to the last section, the lightning rounds. So George, I'm gonna mention, uh, a few things to you, a few items, and I want you to tell me if you think. They're underrated or overrated. And then maybe a sentence or two.
[00:27:21] Alec Crawford: Why? So,
[00:27:22] George Swetlitz: okay, so this is the Kahneman fast thinking.
[00:27:24] Alec Crawford: Exactly. This is fast thinking, which for these things, you're gonna understand why. So we're, we're gonna, we're gonna kick it off with, uh, tacos on the east coast of the us. Underrated or overrated,
[00:27:41] George Swetlitz: I would have to say overrated.
[00:27:43] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:27:44] George Swetlitz: You know, absolutely. I mean, there are, when you, when you eat a good taco somewhere west coast and then you go back, you know,
[00:27:56] Alec Crawford: it's just, it's tough.
[00:27:56] Alec Crawford: It's just sad.
[00:27:57] George Swetlitz: It's tough.
[00:28:00] Alec Crawford: I'm with you on that. Um, uh, AI for your call center, customer service, underrated or overrated?
[00:28:10] George Swetlitz: I would say. Overrated now underrated for the future.
[00:28:15] Alec Crawford: Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. And I should, I should have differentiated there. I think there's AI tools to kind of help the human customer service person today.
[00:28:27] Alec Crawford: Very small percentage, but growing is, you know, full ai, voice customer service, which. Hey, it's coming. And if you thought, uh, voicemail was bad, uh, just wait for the first generation of those, that's gonna be not fun. Um, next is, uh, Harvard getting a Harvard Business School MBA underrated or overrated?
[00:28:53] George Swetlitz: Uh, I would say there, um,
[00:29:01] George Swetlitz: underrated just from the sense that. It, it op, it opened, you know, it's, it's a huge network and it opens a lot of doors. Yeah. I wouldn't necessarily say that, you know, when you mentioned earlier that you took a Harvard course in accounting. I was gonna say, at the time, that was the hardest course. I mean, learning accounting through case studies.
[00:29:25] George Swetlitz: Oh my Lord. Like, you know why?
[00:29:27] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:29:28] George Swetlitz: Like literally why?
[00:29:29] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:29:30] George Swetlitz: But so I think on the education side. There, there's really no difference between being there and being anywhere else. It's really the, the, the network.
[00:29:41] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:29:41] George Swetlitz: And the doors that get opened.
[00:29:42] Alec Crawford: Yeah, exactly. Um, local marketing strategies, underrated or overrated?
[00:29:53] George Swetlitz: Um, underrated, I would say every. Every local business exists in its own very small competitive environment, and I, I would say most large organizations, most large organizations that have local businesses, do a terrible job of thinking about each location as a business in its own micro competitive system.
[00:30:28] George Swetlitz: And. That's why most lose against high performing small businesses.
[00:30:35] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:30:36] George Swetlitz: Because they focus on local marketing strategy and they'll beat the big ones every time.
[00:30:41] Alec Crawford: Yeah, it's a great point. I think there are a couple of exceptions out there. I think a great exception is, is Trader Joe's where they very aggressively.
[00:30:52] Alec Crawford: I keep the number of products or SKUs as people like to call them in each store down to like five or 600 SKUs. And it's basically if people are buying it, it stays on the shelf. If people aren't buying it, we replace it with something else. That's it. Right. But I think that's rare and most, if you go to a Crate and Barrel or whatever, it's gonna be the same stuff everywhere.
[00:31:11] Alec Crawford: Right? Like, and I agree, like not customizing that or MAR or having a local marketing strategy could be, could make it tougher for that business. How about, um, CEOs needing to be AI fluent today? Underrated or overrated, meaning AI fluency for A CEO?
[00:31:33] George Swetlitz: I would say that's underrated. I mean, I was a CEO and I spend all my time with AI now, and given my background, I think about.
[00:31:48] George Swetlitz: All the ways that if I had had it, I could have applied it. And the importance of kind of putting that front and center and being prepared for the future. I doubt most middle market CEOs have the time, the luxury of the time to think about that and, and as it evolves, it will be harder and harder to catch up.
[00:32:14] Alec Crawford: Yeah. Yeah. If you're not thinking about being an AI first organization right now, you're gonna have a problem a year or three years from now. And um, at this point, the other very interesting thing is there are many very forward thinking founders and CEOs that are starting like, you know, the first, you know, AI native bank and the first AI native, whatever you want to call it.
[00:32:39] Alec Crawford: Right? And those are just gonna have. Huge advantages. 'cause you're not starting with, oh, I got 10,000 people, what am I gonna do? Right. Um, you're, you're designing something from scratch where, uh, AI can do a lot of the, the jobs and the roles. So it's gonna be super interesting over the next, uh, couple years, which is why I also, uh, like being in, in ai.
[00:33:04] Alec Crawford: Um, so next is AI regulation, uh, underrated or overrated.
[00:33:11] George Swetlitz: Well, I would say overrated because I don't feel the impact of it.
[00:33:15] Alec Crawford: Yeah. Not there yet,
[00:33:16] George Swetlitz: right? I mean, it's not really having an impact on what companies are doing, so should it be there? Absolutely. Is it effectively there? I don't think so.
[00:33:30] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:33:30] George Swetlitz: I mean, I could be wrong.
[00:33:31] Alec Crawford: Yeah,
[00:33:31] George Swetlitz: but I don't think so.
[00:33:32] Alec Crawford: Only in Europe, really, where the EU AI Act is enforced. If you're doing high risk ai, the regulators are all over you. Uh. How about, um, retiring to Florida? I'm sure you've got some friends retired to Florida. Underrated or overrated?
[00:33:47] George Swetlitz: Overrated.
[00:33:48] Alec Crawford: Yeah, we done that
[00:33:50] George Swetlitz: 100%.
[00:33:51] Alec Crawford: My wife also agrees with you.
[00:33:52] Alec Crawford: Uh, conferences, uh, and events in New York City? Underrated or overrated?
[00:34:02] George Swetlitz: I have no idea. I haven't been one to one in, in forever.
[00:34:05] Alec Crawford: Alright, well time to come back. Uh. Bowling as a hobby. Underrated or overrated?
[00:34:15] George Swetlitz: I, I would say, um, I mean, I would have to say overrated because I haven't done it in a long time and I've done it.
[00:34:23] George Swetlitz: So
[00:34:25] Alec Crawford: hopefully, hopefully the food and drinks are better than the last time you were there. And then, although there are some kind of hip new bowling alleys in New York City, just to be clear. Um, and, uh, and finally the movie Casablanca. Underrated or overrated?
[00:34:43] George Swetlitz: Well, definitely underrated. It's one of the greats.
[00:34:46] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:34:46] George Swetlitz: And you know, it's one of those movies that no matter how many times you've seen it, when you see it flash on, you know, oh, they've got Casablanca, you, you always watch it.
[00:34:55] Alec Crawford: Yeah.
[00:34:55] George Swetlitz: So,
[00:34:56] Alec Crawford: yeah.
[00:34:56] George Swetlitz: And, and you, and you wouldn't say that for very many movies.
[00:34:59] Alec Crawford: Yeah, I agree with you. Anyway. George, thanks for coming on the show.
[00:35:03] Alec Crawford: This has been George Swetlitz, co-founder of RightResponse ai. That was a lot of fun. Thank you, George.
[00:35:09] George Swetlitz: Yeah, no, it was a lot of fun. Great talking to you, Alec.
[00:35:14] Alec Crawford: You are listening to the AI Risk Reward Podcast with your host, Alec Crawford. You can find us anywhere you listen to podcasts. For example, apple Podcasts Production and Sound Engineering by Troutman Street Audio.
[00:35:25] Alec Crawford: You can find them on LinkedIn. Please like, subscribe, and comment.
