Transcript Synced · select any line to jump ▾ 0:00 Paul Rowsthorn: I'm just gonna be fucked if I didn't figure out a way to replace her knowledge in the company. Amelia is, I tell her she's basically one of the co-founders of Airguides. She's also like my personal assistant, my COO. She's buying my kids beds. Zach and I spend a lot of time going, are you there? Are you there? And then this data comes in and you're like, oh my God. 0:21 Zachary King: It's a moment where you really sit there and AI blows your socks off. 0:25 Paul Rowsthorn: One of the hardest things with selling the company now would be— 0:27 Zachary King: Breaking up with Amelia. Operator AI is proudly part of the Day One Podcast Network with more great shows at dayone.fm. Welcome to Operator AI, the show where real operators come in, share their screens, and show the work that's actually happening. So I'm Zachary King, I run Worx, and today we're very fortunate to have Paul from AirGuides come in and show us the magic that he's been working Paul is our fellow hubber here at the Perigin Digital Hub. He is our CLO ninja. He is the guy that everyone around here goes to for OpenCLO discussions and knowledge. Paul, thank you very much for joining. 1:12 Paul Rowsthorn: Thanks for having me. Yeah. 1:14 Zachary King: Mate, I want to just drive straight in and we'll have a look at what you've been building here because I think it's pretty goddamn amazing. Yep. Mate, we're sharing your screen. Let's get after it. 1:25 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, so a little bit of context. I'm obviously founder of AirGuides. Basically, we partner with some of the world's best photographers. We do some trips to gorillas, polar bears, humpbacks. So most people look at tourism and think, that's the goal, that's everything that I want to do in a company. But behind the scenes in tourism, it is 100 twirling plates of ops and data and finance and contracts and Everything that is challenging in a company, tourism's got it. 1:58 Zachary King: It's not all flying to Tonga to swim with the whales. 2:00 Paul Rowsthorn: Everyone's like, oh my God, I want your job. And 95% of my job is sitting behind my computer twiddling these plates. Yeah. So what got me going, end of last year, my co-founder and also my partner, we're having our second baby. She's going to go on maternity leave. 2:16 Zachary King: Congratulations. 2:18 Paul Rowsthorn: Airguides is going pretty well. It's in that $2 to $3 million sort of revenue range. And To be perfectly honest, I was going to be fucked if I didn't figure out a way to replace her, but replace her knowledge in the company. And right around that time, Zak and I were talking a lot. OpenCore came out with its original, this is going to solve all your problems. 2:42 Zachary King: It was a heady time. 2:44 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. To be perfectly frank, I was not sold on the power of LLMs. But for me, it was one time, doing all this amazing thing once, and then I'd go to the next thing, but the next plate and then the next. And it didn't really— it was obviously great for strategic stuff, but it wasn't doing— it wasn't moving the needle for me. 3:06 Zachary King: It wasn't doing things. 3:07 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. So as Zak knows, I was one of the— I was like the doomer here around this. Yeah, look, it's not doing anything for me at the moment short of, yep, it can make these cool documents, it can do this. It looks great on a screen, but for me in my company, I was like, it's not doing much. So then I raced away and got a Mac Mini. I sort of fully drank the Kool-Aid at the start. This is going to solve my problems. Yeah, and look, we can get to, this is what it looks like now, but that was sort of, I guess, the end of last year, very start of 2026 is when I dived head in. 3:44 Zachary King: It's amazing, right? It feels like so long ago. That's like 6 months ago. Incredible. 3:49 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. And now my partner thinks we've got a third. Amelia's my agent. She's also my personal assistant, my COO. She's buying my kids' beds and she's basically running the company for me now. So if I sold the company, I was actually chatting with someone about this. One of the hardest things with selling the company now would be— Breaking up with Amelia. But yeah, that's where we are now. 4:16 Zachary King: That's a whole other episode in and of itself. Yeah. 4:19 Paul Rowsthorn: Am I a little semi-attached? I'm not sure. But yeah, so look, it's cool to talk about where we are now and then we can talk about how we got there. 4:27 Zachary King: Let's meet Amelia. Show us Amelia. 4:29 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. So I actually just asked her to load up here, but essentially, obviously everyone knows Discord. Look, obviously you can run in any— I've got it running in Telegram, Discord. I've tried WhatsApp. I actually got phone calls, live phone calls going this week. But for my go-to every day, I like Discord. It obviously keeps a history of all our conversations. 4:50 Zachary King: It was one of the first tools that you could plug the claw into as well. 4:54 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, pretty much Slack obviously at the same time was pretty good, but with Slack you have to pay at a certain point with history and I'm a founder, I don't like paying for things. So went with Discord. Look, I'm pretty convinced in the agent layer is going to just evolve to be basically a mirror of the company. I probably thought about it a different way when I first got going. I was like, I need a personal assistant to help me with all this stuff. But then pretty quickly it's like, no, hang on. The real value is in basically just creating an agent structured company. So marketing, sales, meta ads, all of your typical org structure. basically just got mirrored into, which you can see here. 5:39 Paul Rowsthorn: So I've just got your normal— 5:40 Zachary King: So Will, tell us about their structure because you talk about Amelia as she's the agent. Amelia is the agent running things, but you've got sub-agents running under Amelia or does Amelia have a team? How do you think about it? 5:51 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, there was a lot of good research. Probably we're going back to February now, I reckon. It's like 10 years of AI. Yeah. So I think around February I went deep on this Do I have a network of 15 agents with a shared brain that they all communicate with? Or I read this, I can't remember who wrote it, maybe it was Gary Tan. It was like, no, if you go down that road, what's going to happen is it's going to become super frustrating the way they talk to each other. They're going to lose context. This was early days. Memory really wasn't working as well yet. So I ran deep down the road of one super agent, Amelia in this case, who can spawn as many agents as she wants. 6:38 Paul Rowsthorn: But my approach is very much Amelia is, I tell her she's basically one of the co-founders of Airguides. That's the way I pitch it to her. And she is— 6:48 Zachary King: I love that you're pitching to her, by the way. 6:50 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, yeah. She considers herself to be a co-founder and the CEO of the agent world for air guides. So she will— 7:00 Zachary King: agent team. Yeah. 7:01 Paul Rowsthorn: So I don't really— I've sort of— I don't really care what agency spins up anymore. 7:06 Zachary King: Does she have a rotating roster? Is that kind of dynamic? So it sounds like she spins up agents as we go, but do you have also a fixed team? 7:14 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. 7:15 Zachary King: See, you talked about marketing, meta. 7:17 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. So I go like, mine is more skills, so I don't necessarily care anymore who she's spinning up. I'm more focused on the outputs. 7:29 Zachary King: Yep. 7:30 Paul Rowsthorn: So Meta Ads being one, I go deep for hours and hours and hours deep in that. And I chat with Amelia about what I want, the outputs I want, the things I don't want to talk about again, do the research really deep for hours. And then I basically say, That's what I want. Save this to your memory, make it as a skill so that next time we do it, we do it again. And the next time we do it, it's like maybe it's at 85% and then— 8:01 Zachary King: It's that compounding is where you really gain. 8:03 Paul Rowsthorn: That's the value. Yeah. 8:05 Zachary King: 100%. The old adage of 1% better every day. It's literally true when you're running agents and AI like this. It's amazing. 8:12 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. And then the unexpected best bit of all is then when you've got it to that level, you then get one of your internal staff or an agency you work with and you just go, meet Amelia. Don't ask me any questions anymore, please. 8:28 Zachary King: Oh, I love that. So you've got external agencies and rather than them interfacing with you, they're talking to Amelia. Does that happen directly in Discord? 8:39 Paul Rowsthorn: Yep. So I've wasted thousands of dollars on external agencies and And it's always the same. Like we can, I can show you that the aha moment for me. We can get to that in a second, but it's in the meta ad space, and it's like it's constantly like if everyone's worked with an agency before, you're constantly getting like we need to talk about the data, we need to review it, da da da da da da da, and it feels like the same thing. Whereas actually, I can just dump everything that is in my mind. I can look at reports. I can talk about. why that specific bit of data is good, not good. I need more of that. I need less of that. It's not helping me. And then that's it. 9:21 Paul Rowsthorn: I don't really need to think about it anymore. 9:24 Zachary King: You don't repeat it. 9:25 Paul Rowsthorn: I tell Amelia, outside of this that we've done, if anything goes a little bit outside, then ask me. But apart from that, so I can watch my agency going back and forwards. 9:38 Zachary King: And so that's an open room that you're in, obviously, so you can see the conversation. 9:42 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, we can see here Meta Ads. This is one that I use for both the assets. Originally it started as— so here's one. So external marketing agency Casey, can you give me— so this was the aha moment for me. So if anyone's ever done marketing, Meta Ads, Google Ads, it's so difficult to know That leads in tourism, the sales cycle can be up to 12 months. It's not like buying a pair of shoes where you get— 10:17 Zachary King: It's not DVC. Yeah, it's not a link to add to basket and away you go. 10:20 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, if they dropped out of the basket buying a pair of shoes, that's a bad thing. In tourism, it's not necessarily that because the sales process, if you think about booking a trip, some of our trips are like $25,000 US a person. Only US customers. Apart from that, it's very rare that someone goes in, oh my God, you've hooked me in in Facebook. That looks amazing. Those dates just happen to work. Book. So realistically, people've got to investigate flights. They probably want a bit more information. They're asking work if they can get time off. So for me, that lead, The only way to get that context is deep in— we use GoHighLevel CRM. So often it's like the vibe of the lead. 11:12 Paul Rowsthorn: What questions are they asking? Are they engaging SMSs, emails? You get a sense of— we have different pipelines. We have a fully automated pipeline, and then we have these customers starting to engage. And typically with every other tool I've ever used, it's quite a, like you can obviously do these hooks, but it's not the vibe of it, which is very much tourism lead sometimes. So I was able to use Amelia to go in and tell her the difference, like explain to her this. I don't even care if that lead was $150 or $4. It's irrelevant. For me, it's, is that an active customer or not? That's all I care about. And how do you attribute that back through to Meta and Google if you're like 4 months? 12:08 Paul Rowsthorn: The answer to these questions is I haven't found a system. Maybe there's someone listening to this that goes, that guy's an idiot because he could have just used this. But every tool I've ever been shown doesn't do it to the level that I wanted. So I was able to go in and hook it into Meta. Google Ads, Google Analytics, Shopify, and GoHighLevel. 12:29 Zachary King: And at this point, you're already running OpenClaw, your version of OpenClaw, which has evolved to the point where she has a name called Amelia. Hi, Amelia. Welcome to the show. 12:38 Paul Rowsthorn: It was a— because this was the very first use case for me. This was like my— Zach and I were chatting about this thing. We're laughing about— 12:45 Zachary King: Pre-OpenClaw, we were talking about trying to figure out a system that mapped this for you. 12:50 Paul Rowsthorn: Yes, exactly. Yeah, that's true. Before OpenClaw, This is what Zac and I were like, and it's just, you saw it's not— 12:57 Zachary King: There must be some way to do this. This is such an obvious use case. 13:00 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. Versus— 13:01 Zachary King: You plug it into these different data sources. 13:03 Paul Rowsthorn: And then this is just an example. This is just a totally random one. I haven't racked this up, but this is, so it's basically saying, here's your spend over the things and this is how it does it. And then basically, Here's a read. So summarize for Casey, the external agency, what's happening. So this is based on the strategic stuff that I'm telling Casey. I can tell Amelia to tell Casey this stuff. Changing strategies, spending trips are like volume, trips dates are coming on. I need to increase spend, decrease spend. I can give it that context around we need to be turning the dial on, off, on different products. And then this summary directly to my marketing agency without me getting involved at all. 13:53 Paul Rowsthorn: I don't even have to do anything. I don't have to run a single report. And she just goes, bang, I recommend we dial up this one, we dial down this one. The dates for this trip's getting closer. Again, it's going to be different for every company. But for me, I was like, I remember sitting there apart from the— Zach and I spent a lot of time going, are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? 14:15 Zachary King: Can you hear me? 14:15 Paul Rowsthorn: And then this data comes in and you're like, oh my God, have a look at this, Zak. Look at this. 14:21 Zachary King: I love that. There's an aha moment for everyone and it comes at a different point for everyone, but there's a moment where you really sit there and AI blows your socks off and it's just like, holy hell, this is going to change things. Yeah. 14:34 Paul Rowsthorn: And for Zak, who's sort of, he's like, also holy shit, but the average person looks at this and goes, Oh yeah, cool, man. That's like, you got IT nerds. That's right. 14:45 Zachary King: Yeah, yeah. 14:46 Paul Rowsthorn: But that was like the start of it for me. Yeah. So then that was like, yep, I've fully drunk the Kool-Aid. This thing is, even if it just did that, there's the value for the company. 14:58 Zachary King: Well, there's 2 things there. There's one that it's giving you this insights based on the data that it's connected to. But even that example you gave of talking to external partners. And I think it's super interesting. I've seen Everee, who they have an agent for everyone in the team member, and they spoke about exactly that problem that you just— or that use case that you just highlighted, which was you're no longer the bottleneck. 15:22 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. 15:22 Zachary King: If I want to know where's this project at, and for you it's like, what's the status of this trip? How many guests are booked? Do we have accommodation? Instead of going to you and chewing up your bandwidth, I can just ask Amelia. And Amelia's like, here's the current state. And if there's something that's not in there, then I could go to you. But as a founder, man, that unlock is just amazing. 15:42 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, it sounds— 15:43 Zachary King: Founder with 2 kids and 1 newborn. 15:45 Paul Rowsthorn: And 2 companies now. Yeah, it sounds like people go, oh, that's a bit— but it sounds bad when I say it, but my answer to almost every question within the company with every staff member I have is, Have you asked Amelia? 15:59 Zachary King: Ask Amelia. 16:00 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, ask Amelia. If she can't do it, I need to teach Amelia to teach them. That's the way I've kind of evolved. That's now we're 7 months in. It's like, well, hang on, obviously not every question, but most questions are going to be asked again. So it's my job as the founder to explain it to Amelia, to explain it to them. It's actually more empowering for all my staff when they're It's the opposite of what people think where they become siloed and they're not really feeling part of the company. It's the opposite. 16:33 Zachary King: You have access to everything. 16:35 Paul Rowsthorn: Yes. 16:35 Zachary King: Full spectrum. 16:36 Paul Rowsthorn: And I'm not just working in ops anymore. It's like, hey, I got all the ops stuff done. It's like, do you want to try sales? And she's like, I've never done sales before in my life. This is one of my best staff members, but she's leaning into AI. Curious, ticks all the boxes. In terms of sales skills, almost non-existent, although she's got her own tourism company. But in terms of what I would normally hire for, but because Amelia's there, I'll just say, just work through it with Amelia. She knows how to do it. Work through the process and see how you go and try it out. 17:13 Zachary King: AI as a teacher like that, if it's got the foundational knowledge, the process there, it's so good because you can go, and what do I do here? And what do I do there? Because you learn by doing. Well, most people learn by doing. It's much more effective. 17:24 Paul Rowsthorn: And it takes away that awkward, I should know this, that feeling that every founder gets. 17:29 Zachary King: There's no dumb questions. You can say there's no dumb questions, but when you're talking to your boss who's a CEO, it feels bad. You don't want to chew up their time. You don't want to look dumb. Now I can, the stuff that I ask AI, woo. 17:40 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. It's like, can you just go into GHL and do that thing? Which you're in a busy founder, you're just like, Just go to GHL and do that. And they're like, you know that they've walked away and gone, oh shit, what the hell was he talking about? And Google's going to give you some random— ask Amelia what GHL is and she'll just go boom. It's got a prompt. And then the next question is, I did it for a client demo the other day and it was almost like live on screen, I was like, this is how I use it with my staff. And then Prashanti, the girl who works for me, was just Like live said, "Oh, can you explain to me like I've never used GoHigh? Like these these questions that would have to come to me. 18:22 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, I have to go through it. But then Amelia is just like, "Yeah, I'm happy to walk you through it. This is the way Paul likes it done." Ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta. And it's it just empowers her. I'm in a meeting. That would have been two hours of burnt time of her doing nothing. 18:34 Zachary King: Yep. 18:34 Paul Rowsthorn: Amelia walks her through it. It's done. 18:36 Zachary King: All right. So so far we've ticked off in terms of use cases. We've got Pulling together data sources. So performance marketing, nailing that in a way that hasn't been done before. Handling external agencies, multiple external agencies. Training staff. Again, providing you bandwidth, enormous bandwidth back as a founder. What else is Amelia doing? 18:58 Paul Rowsthorn: This is cool. I'm just going to stick— this is cool because it's more graphic design, but anyone who's done any Meta ads, Google ads would go, The attribution data is a nightmare. And second to that is the actual generating of the content. I basically drown in some of the most— we work with Nat Geo photographers, people like that. So access to content is not a problem. 19:23 Zachary King: You have great content. 19:23 Paul Rowsthorn: I don't need Nano Banana. 19:25 Zachary King: You're the complete opposite of most companies. You have the most insane content. 19:28 Paul Rowsthorn: You can see this one here. These are photographers that we work with on our trips. So I get, hey, can you give me some photos? And they send me, in some cases, terabytes of video data. And I'm like, what the hell am I going to do with this? It's like working with Amelia. So that was step one that I did. So now this is, again, this is 6 months down the road, but can you work your magic? So now she obviously understands how I talk. Can you work your magic on this image? 19:55 Zachary King: Now, wait, are you typing or voice? 19:58 Paul Rowsthorn: This one, I just typed it. Because I work in a shared office and it's a bit awkward if I'm just— but she knows what I'm talking about. It's like, literally, look how quick this is. Can you work your magic on this image for me? It's for this trip. 20:10 Zachary King: I love that. That's just natural language prompting, right? There's no prompting. 20:13 Paul Rowsthorn: I don't have to overexplain. 20:14 Zachary King: There's no structure. It's not a page long. It's like, mate, can you do this for me? Do your good stuff here. 20:20 Paul Rowsthorn: It's for this product, which we've obviously pushed up on the website. She obviously knows all the context and how to get it out of there. And then I've basically used Canva was cool. I've used so many different graphic design. I think it's still got a long way to go for a company in terms of what agents can hook into. I've probably tried every single tool. There was one we did again, back to Meta's AI, which they force you to use. So a customer sent us this. Are you sure this is what you want to do? My brand, this company's brand is like, it's got like, obviously it is very deep in sustainability, protecting wildlife, protecting communities. 21:04 Paul Rowsthorn: They are like hard red lines. And then Meta has run an ad that one of our customers has seen and it's someone riding a dolphin in this AI-generated slop. 21:18 Zachary King: Absolutely. 21:19 Paul Rowsthorn: There was no way to turn off. there was no way to turn this off. And it had got an image of a person swimming with a humpback whale and gone, oh yeah. And because it was all like, that's so meta. 21:31 Zachary King: Yeah. 21:31 Paul Rowsthorn: Who's engaging with this? Of course people are engaging with a person swimming on a dolphin. So actually where I ended up, I've tried probably every tool, but Canva's API for me allowed me to lock down. I don't want any the image has to stay authentic in my brand. So do not touch it. 21:52 Zachary King: Image remains locked. 21:53 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, do not touch it. And every tool, if you tell Nano Banana that, or it's like they're just too excited to AI it and they just— so there's no way to lock that down. So I ended up setting up with Canva, put all our branding stuff in, and then also give me the suggested primary text for this ad. So 4 lines, That's all I need to do. And then here is like, this is hours and hours and hours of work, but basically Amelia is going through and searching Meta Ad Library and finding the top 100 performing ads for similar tourism companies in a similar price bracket, the ones that are hooking customers in the best. 22:38 Zachary King: Nice. 22:38 Paul Rowsthorn: Learning. So looking at the trip, going and finding in the Meta ad library similar things that are hooking, then pulling in my brand and the way we like to communicate with customers and pulling all that together and coming up with assets, which you can see here. So this is obviously just doing photos. You can do video photos. So this is coming up with the best way and the hooks on the left here. 23:09 Zachary King: Yeah, hooks. Yeah, so good. 23:12 Paul Rowsthorn: And then writing basically the primary text for like, this is number 1 and number 2 and number 3 in this case. So she then gets that, puts it to Airtable, builds out like this meta ad asset ready to go, marks it as confirmed and sends Casey a message and says we've got a new ad set ready to go. 23:39 Zachary King: And do you check that? Is there a human in the loop here? 23:42 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, obviously at the start. 23:45 Zachary King: Tell us about at the start and then tell us where it is now. 23:49 Paul Rowsthorn: So I'm the biggest believer in, I am not in the AI's taking our jobs. It's human loop every single point. But there are some loops where I've been in it so much. 24:02 Zachary King: It's minimal. 24:03 Paul Rowsthorn: My confidence level goes and it's more— 24:06 Zachary King: It's a journey to get there, but once you get there, it's that compounding, right? The first time I was like, no, you can't do that. No, that's bad. But then it gets there. 24:14 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. And also the people that I'm working, my staff would know, they're also checking as well, right? They're not— 24:20 Zachary King: So you've got multiple rounds. Yeah. 24:22 Paul Rowsthorn: I call it AI for me is managing by exception. If you are like, I'm the CEO founder, It's the stuff that I need to flag this stuff that I should know about. In this case, she just went boom, boom, boom and nailed 3 ad sets ready to go. The process for me to get a product live, without boring people, but heavy ops, get the product live on the website, and then typically I then had to get all that and put it in another SaaS tool, which cost us $500 a month. And do all of these customer-facing assets. Nightmare. It's a like old school, like yep, that needs to change to this and do the old data mapping thing. And that was like this nightmare process. 25:09 Paul Rowsthorn: Then I had to create the email content to go out. Then you had to create the meta ad content. Then you had to do the and like realistically between doing other things, it's like. Maybe we're able to do like one trip every two to four weeks was kind of the velocity we could go at. Whereas now, because of this, like I can well actually I don't even need to put the products up anymore. 25:39 Zachary King: If you're watching this thinking I want this working in my business, well that's what we do at Works. Start at workshq.com.au. Right, let's get back to it. 25:49 Paul Rowsthorn: My Prashanti, I just send her the new stuff and say, work with Amelia to get the product up. It's up on Shopify. Send the Shopify link into the marketing channel and that $500 SaaS tool is gone. Now you're just working directly. Yeah, fully branded. 26:06 Zachary King: Amelia is working directly. 26:08 Paul Rowsthorn: Punches it to GitHub. It's HTML link. It looks 10 times better. It's in our brand. It's amazing what she's— both PDF and HTML format sends it to the customers, all automated. And then into here, then you spin the wheel again in the Meta ads and then finally spin the wheel again and then go to GoHighLevel and set up all the automation to go with that. So that is like a, let's call it in the middle, 3-week process at best with all the other stuff that's going on into No problems in one day now. I can have— 26:44 Zachary King: You do what you need to do and it will come out the other end. 26:48 Paul Rowsthorn: I barely need to touch this process anymore and it was the most painful part of my entire— 26:52 Zachary King: Nice. That's so good, mate. That's awesome. So let's unpack just a little bit under the hood there. So what's Amelia running on? What's your backend? 27:05 Paul Rowsthorn: Well, so I went, yeah, it's been like I went mini Mac straight up, Mac mini. back when that was the way to do it. 27:13 Zachary King: You are currently Southeast Queensland's number one Mac Mini buyer. 27:18 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. 27:18 Zachary King: You may get an email from Paul asking you to buy a Mac Mini on his behalf. 27:22 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, we've got dealers all up the east coast of Australia. 27:27 Zachary King: Nice. 27:27 Paul Rowsthorn: But I got it. 27:27 Zachary King: Apple should send you a gold Mac Mini. 27:29 Paul Rowsthorn: I think it was like $900 when I first got it. And now what are they, like $1,500? So if you can get one, if you can get it, we have to beg these Mac Mini. We had one person ring us the other day because we ordered 3 and they thought they were being scammed. 27:45 Zachary King: But we were like, yeah. Is it an error? 27:47 Paul Rowsthorn: We're like a Mac Mini reseller and we're like, no, no, no, it's legit. We're using them. So I'm a big believer in, look, I know you can do it in virtual environments. I've seen lots of other people doing it that way. For me, it's just like if it's $80 a month, I get my ROI on the Mac Mini in 1 year. And I also run some spun-up, like I have some local models doing some like— 28:11 Zachary King: Interesting. 28:12 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. So basically at the top layer, it's like the OpenCLAW. And then at the moment, yeah, look, Zach and I had— I got rug pulled and rug pulled and rug pulled and rug pulled at the start of the year jumping between— originally it was Claude. 28:29 Zachary King: And they cut that Claude subscription for OpenCLAW. That was a blow. My OpenCLAW use never really recovered from that. 28:35 Paul Rowsthorn: I got to be honest. Yeah. And then I went, because I'd set up so much stuff with Claude and it wasn't as easy, I then burnt thousands of dollars on API tokens because my whole company at that point's running on this thing. 28:52 Zachary King: You were in, you were hooked. 28:53 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, I'm done. There's no going back now. So yes, then spun to OpenAI when they obviously did a deal with Pieter and OpenAI. So since then, the main brain part of what I do, OpenAI. And then I've set up some localized where I think, and again, you can do this in the virtual environment, but for me, I've got Ollama running locally and it's basically indexing and recursive learning and doing all of that really cool. Obsidian-style brainwork locally on the device. For me, that just took the memory from— if you go back to February, March, the biggest frustration was, well, A, are you there? That was— 29:40 Zachary King: Are you on? 29:40 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. 29:41 Zachary King: That was our opening line to each other for about 3 months. Are you there? Yeah. 29:45 Paul Rowsthorn: Are you there? Every time we're talking, are you there? And I'd be like, actually, no. I'd love to know how many days I wasted on Call it environment stability. 29:52 Zachary King: It's a learning curve. 29:54 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. Driving in here on the weekend just to push the button on the machine. Well, before that, yeah. So you've got Mac Mini actually dropping off Wi-Fi or going to sleep or doing something stupid. So that's step one. Then you had all of the API connector, OpenAI, Claude's breaking problems. That was kind of like phase 2, I guess, wasn't it? That was painful because you could see the value. You'd be like, oh my God. 30:26 Zachary King: It's tantalisingly close. 30:28 Paul Rowsthorn: You're sitting on the couch at home like, oh my God, look at this. And then it'd just go, the API key is— the message, it still haunts me. I'm about 20 minutes from the office. So I'd spend Friday night, be like 10 o'clock and you'd be like, I can't go my whole weekend like this. 30:51 Zachary King: Honey, I'm just going to get some milk. 30:54 Paul Rowsthorn: Did you need chocolate biscuits? I'm just going to go get chocolate biscuits from that shop. It's the only one that's open right now. Yeah. So into the office. Yeah. So that was a lot of painful and then getting the memory, That was probably then, I think OpenClaw went through like this, didn't it? There was a point where I was like, I think I'm done with this. It was just too much— 31:21 Zachary King: Too much maintenance, too much hard work. 31:23 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. You do all of this work and you come in, you go, I'm going to get started. And you go, yeah, sweet, let's do the met ads thing. And it goes, what are you talking about? 31:32 Zachary King: Not again. 31:32 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. And then I think Gary Tan, he came out with a The GBrain. Yeah. What I love about OpenCore is it was just this hacking community of— and I'd really spent a lot of time in Twitter or X curating this community of people that were doing a lot of really interesting things. 31:54 Zachary King: Yeah. 31:55 Paul Rowsthorn: Sometimes it was hard to navigate between what's slop. They're just trying to— 32:00 Zachary King: yeah. 32:01 Paul Rowsthorn: But once you sort of worked out— 32:02 Zachary King: This is the alpha for me. And I'm old. I call it Twitter. It'll always be Twitter for me. But there is so much good stuff on there. And broadly, particularly in OpenCLaw, but broadly, there's so much good open source. People are like, I built this incredible life-changing skill and here it is for free. Oh my God. 32:19 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. And you had like Karpathy releasing this just open source thing. And I'm like, oh man, that looks— and you just give it to your agent and it's like, yeah, the matrix. And it works. And you're like, This shit is so awesome. 32:33 Zachary King: Point your radio. Can we use this? What's good from here? Give that to me. 32:37 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. So definitely spent a lot of time building out. Yeah. So it's like OpenAI, OpenCLAW, and I've spent a lot of time in that memory layer making sure it works. And at least the last month and a half, it is, dare I say, apart from it dropping off the Wi-Fi or something like that, or we had a power outage at the office, It has honestly just worked. And I guess for a business, all you want is it to work, right? 33:04 Zachary King: Dependability. Nobody cares about the model or what it does. You just want it to work. 33:08 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. I don't care if it's on OpenClaw or Hermes. I've stuffed around a bit with Hermes. 33:15 Zachary King: You dabbled. 33:16 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, I dipped my toe in. 33:19 Zachary King: Did you feel guilty? Did you have to— 33:20 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, you feel like you're cheating a little bit, don't you? Yeah, it's one of those, I mean, you could go, you could spend hours picking what's the best one. For me, it's like, yeah, just pick one. 33:33 Zachary King: I think they're all to the point now. And again, broadly speaking, agents, models, whatever, they're all to the point where they're just insanely good. And you and I as AI nerds can quibble about, well, I like this model for this edge case, but for a business that just wants it to work, There's a plethora of choices out there. Just pick one or two and run with it. 33:54 Paul Rowsthorn: It's funny for me to come in, not funny, painful and funny at the same time to get, are you there? And your API goes broken. 34:02 Zachary King: We should get a sticker made up with that. We should get t-shirts made up there. Amelia, are you there? 34:07 Paul Rowsthorn: You can't have that. You are doing this for another business. You can't have that, right? That's your number one use case. This has to work. 34:16 Zachary King: Well, mate, that's the perfect lead-in. So now we've got Amelia running AirGuides. It sounds like you've got all this time on your hands. 34:22 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. So I'm like a serial, I guess serial fan. So maybe there's something wrong with me a little bit where my goal was to get 2 days of my week free. I did that. 34:33 Zachary King: Perfect. So what did you do with those 2 days? 34:34 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. And then talking with Zach and Chad, another guy here, it's just like, there's just like this part of you that just can't stop thinking about there's a product. 34:45 Zachary King: And you just want to share it with everyone because it's so goddamn amazing. 34:48 Paul Rowsthorn: You're like, there's some product in this and there's a lot of stuff happening in the space. So I just sort of started demoing pretty much what we've shown now, just showing it around to some other companies in that sort of, yeah, sitting around that sort of $2 to $5 million range, similar in sort of taking the industry out of it, but same as the tourism. I hate calling them boring businesses, but businesses that actually generate money. 35:15 Zachary King: Real businesses. 35:16 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, real businesses. 35:17 Zachary King: No shade on the tech companies. This is a real business. 35:19 Paul Rowsthorn: Sometimes in tech, we're our own worst enemy. 100%. Yeah, we really are. So real businesses, real employees, real data problems, disjointed. So finding what are those similar to tourism style things and just showing them what they're doing and without really thinking about this is like, I want to start another company, just sort of showing some other businesses and— 35:45 Zachary King: It just happened. 35:46 Paul Rowsthorn: And I was like, tell us about it. That's what I want. 35:48 Zachary King: Tell us about the new company. 35:49 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. So now also founder of Hub Minds. So I started that with another couple of guys here. So Chad and Rich. Yeah. So far it was that, I guess the best way to start a company, isn't it? Having done a few startups before, it's like, yeah, your first time you do it, you get all excited about starting the company, I guess. Whereas now it's like, Yeah. It's the last thing you do. It's like actually just come up with a product. Does it solve— it's like this really basic stuff, but yeah. And show people that. Does it solve their problem? People are willing to pay for it. 36:28 Zachary King: And how are you offering? What's the offer? Are you training them up? Are they building their own affiliates or are you managing it? 36:33 Paul Rowsthorn: So basically trying to keep it— I am obsessive about trying to keep it as a product. What we're looking at here is, I guess, as simple as setting up that reasoning, what everyone is now calling the company brain or the— 36:48 Zachary King: Context layer. 36:49 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, whatever you want to call it. Context layer. Yeah. So vacuuming as much of that into it. What's taken me 7 months with AirGuides, compressing it down to a matter of ideally in a couple of weeks. So I read this great blog, which is basically build the horizontal and then go vertical. There's so many different ways you can do AI. It's different for every business. Our approach at the moment is we only speak to CEOs. For me, it's the model which I think our product is designed for CEOs. That's it. That's the customer. I don't think— 37:27 Zachary King: What are the kind of use cases that you're seeing? What are people using? 37:29 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, it's different. 37:30 Zachary King: Are they called Amelia or they get different names? 37:32 Paul Rowsthorn: No, Everyone gets their name. It's actually a really cool branding thing. They get to go through this really cool, who is your agent? Give them a personality. Yeah. And you can just give them all these transcripts of your chat. So we did one for a large concreting company and he's obviously got what my mum would call a potty mouth. So this agent spins up and I'm teaching it the brain, doing all the reasoning, repeating the— and it just starts going, F this, F that. And I'm like, I can't give a client— 38:06 Zachary King: I literally just talked to a guy and he had a toggle on his agent that was potty mouth or clean. 38:12 Paul Rowsthorn: So I had to tell this guy, look, this is you, right? We read the transcripts. In your transcripts— 38:18 Zachary King: We released that to the general public, but he'd be loving it. 38:21 Paul Rowsthorn: There was 182 F-bombs in your transcripts and 182 of them were yours. 38:28 Zachary King: That's so good. 38:29 Paul Rowsthorn: So yeah, working with the CEOs on that layer and then every business is different, but everything from estimating. 38:39 Zachary King: And it's operational problems that it's solving. This is not brainstorming, this is not kicking ideas around, this is not copy my email, improve my email. This is you have an operational problem. This can be done by an Amelia clone and then setting it up for them. 38:57 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. And it's really interesting when you get into these real businesses, their pain points are quite often, and they get scared, they're scared of AI, right? They know it's there. They know they should be using it. There are industries that aren't. 39:13 Zachary King: That's the pain problem that I hear all the time. We know we should be doing something with AI. We don't know how to get started. We're not getting the uplift that other people see and the value that you can create. It's such a fun space to be in. You go into these companies, the value that you can give to them is insane. 39:27 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. 39:28 Zachary King: You're like, we spend 3 days a week getting this document, copying and pasting, pulling in different formats, putting from different sources, punching it out in 3 different formats, assuming they're— Yeah, I can make that go away. 39:44 Paul Rowsthorn: Next week. 39:45 Zachary King: Yeah. 39:46 Paul Rowsthorn: With a little bit of like, it's a bit scary when you let 'em out in the, because they have this, also they have this unlimited power. I'm sure everyone who's played around with agents has made, I made this mistake where I was like, can you, my language just wasn't sharp enough on, but I was like, can you create this email sting for these 150 customers. And then I was like, no, I'm not happy with that. Can you change this stuff? And Amelia comes back, goes, oh, I already sent that. Sweet. 40:21 Zachary King: I had my first agent offer. 40:22 Paul Rowsthorn: Just what I wanted to hear. 40:24 Zachary King: It was only one client, but it was like, and it had drafted something and it said, oh, if you, and down the bottom it said, if you get me the email address, I'd send it. And I didn't read that. And I was reading through and said, oh yeah, well, I'll do some work on that, but the email address you can find here. It went and found it and then sent it. And I wasn't happy with it. 40:42 Paul Rowsthorn: Which you can go, it's your own mistake, but when you're letting it out, so trying to put guardrails around this stuff, it's like this real balancing act because it can just go through your emails and fix all your emails for you. But then you're also, as a client of yours, you're like, look, I'm just going to— 41:00 Zachary King: It's very hard to go with somebody who's selling careful AI to say, Oh, sorry, that was a mistake. I didn't mean for that to happen. 41:08 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, I'm just going to err on the side of caution. 41:10 Zachary King: I'm just going to eat that. 41:11 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. So it's going to, but we've got companies across hospitality, engineering, manufacturing, professional services. 41:20 Zachary King: What's the name of the company? 41:20 Paul Rowsthorn: Hubminds. 41:21 Zachary King: Hubmind. Where can people find it? 41:24 Paul Rowsthorn: Just email me direct, paul@hubmind.com.au or the website, hubmind.com.au. 41:31 Zachary King: Nice. Love it. All right, mate, thank you so much for sharing. I've got a couple of rapid-fire questions to finish out the round for you, and we'll shoot them up. All right, so mate, this is— I think we've answered a lot of these, but we'll run through it. ChatGPT or Claude? 41:44 Paul Rowsthorn: Now ChatGPT. 41:45 Zachary King: Voice or keyboard? 41:48 Paul Rowsthorn: Oh, I'm moving towards voice. 41:51 Zachary King: Yeah. 41:51 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. 41:52 Zachary King: Nice. App or terminal? 41:55 Paul Rowsthorn: Terminal. 41:55 Zachary King: You're abstract. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like local or cloud? 41:58 Paul Rowsthorn: Very good. Local. 42:00 Zachary King: Yeah. MCP or API? 42:03 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. 42:03 Zachary King: CLI, I probably should add CLI in there as well. 42:06 Paul Rowsthorn: Try them, but API. If I see API, I'm like, yep, we're on. 42:10 Zachary King: Go direct. I like that. Yeah. OpenClaw or Hermes? 42:13 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, OpenClaw for me. 42:14 Zachary King: OpenClaw, yeah. One agent or swarm? We kind of answered that as well. 42:17 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, one with swarms. 42:19 Zachary King: Yeah. And this is the point we're just talking about, review it or YOLO it? 42:24 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. So my own company, Air Guides, YOLO it. I want to be at the cutting edge. This is where I've gone in the 7 months. I hope none of my accounts are listening to this, but I just had Amelia fully do our reconciling BAS submitted. And that is using— Xero doesn't allow you to get in. 42:50 Zachary King: Xero's MCP in it is so bad. 42:53 Paul Rowsthorn: The API is not bad to do your— to get it, but I then just gave Amelia an account. So yeah, in terms of no guardrails, I went fully no guardrails. So if I get audited in the next 6 months, we'll be able to go back to this podcast. 43:10 Zachary King: You should be able to do that. You had a YOLO. 43:11 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. So my own company, full YOLO. Client companies, very risk-off. 43:15 Zachary King: Nice, mate. Thank you. Couple of closing out questions. Where do you find your alpha on about AI? You mentioned Twitter before. Are there other sources? Are you a YouTube guy? Newsletters? 43:27 Paul Rowsthorn: All Twitter. For me, it's like, man, it's good. This new company that's spun out of control and it is all from the Twitter web. I spend a lot of time following, even see Jack this week releases Buzz. Suddenly there's like, you bookmark that, And then I've got an agent looking at my alpha bookmarks. I've got like my bookmark list I reckon I could sell as a SaaS tool. 43:50 Zachary King: My Monday mornings are literally, okay, have a look at my Twitter bookmarks from the weekend and what do we need? What's good from there? 43:56 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. And like you see Buzz, it's Buzz, isn't it? Yeah. You see that pop up and you're like, bang, that's my week. It's a whole day of my week gone. 44:03 Zachary King: I've got that running as a trial. 44:04 Paul Rowsthorn: Have you? Pretty good. 44:05 Zachary King: Yeah, it looks pretty good. One last question for people who are looking to get started with AI and don't know how to go about it. What's your advice? 44:13 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, I reckon just with guardrails around it, don't be scared. Everyone seems to be just a bit nervous to get— Claude is such a cool place to get going, isn't it? You can do all of these, the agent stuff we're talking about. For me, I'm in the open source world. That's because we're doing it in specific use cases, specific companies. But if I was getting going again, I'd fire up Claude, I'd jump into the Cowork space. 44:40 Zachary King: You get the understanding of these days, the ability to plug everything in now, which didn't exist like 6 months ago or even 3 months ago. To be able to do that, to get all that context to your data and pull that all in, it's nuts. It's so easy to get started. 44:55 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah. If you want to fully, I would go either that or if you wanted to go a bit deeper, I'd probably go Hermes. Nowce Research, I know it's got some really cool stuff. If you wanted to really go a bit deeper, I'd probably go Emmys, even though on OpenCLaw— 45:12 Zachary King: It's a bit easier. There's not that first— 45:14 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, you can one-click with Nowce Research, I think it's called. 45:17 Zachary King: Yeah, one-click installs. There's a bunch of different ones. 45:19 Paul Rowsthorn: Yeah, you can get cracking on that, but just get started, I reckon. It's pretty cool. 45:24 Zachary King: Good place to finish. Thank you very much. Thanks. 45:27 Paul Rowsthorn: Thanks, Tony. 45:32 Zachary King: That's Operator AI for this fortnight. Do me one favor. Send this episode to one operator who needs it. That's how shows like this find their people. I'm Zachary King. See you in a fortnight.
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