Latest / The Good Builder Podcast / The Daily Dose #274 | AI On Your Website Is Working. That's The Problem.
Transcript
- Aaron Ng (00:56) Well, good morning and welcome to the Good Builder podcast. It is Tuesday and we are back from Melbourne. Today, we're bringing some of that conversations we had back from Melbourne with some of the biggest builders around Australia, some of the most well-resourced builders and a few conversations that we had around AI, which were really interesting and how they're implementing it, how they're using it and more so actually how they're not using it today, which is a bit refreshing because everything's about how you use it. Just put it in your business and all those sorts of things. But from the conversations I had, there's some really interesting things that I think everyone out there needs to be very wary of. And it was also made very apparent to me from Gavin Sloan, who runs live chat monitoring.com. I've known him for over 10 years. We were one of the first in the industry to start implementing this when I was at GJ Gardner homes. And we had human agents at the end of it at that time. But now as AI is crept in. There are some things that everybody needs to consider. So I thought today's episode should be dedicated to that. So I reckon we get into it now to set the scene. Gavin Sloan runs live chat monitoring.com and it's one of the most successful live chat and AI agent providers in the world. He's got about four and a half thousand clients that he deals with monthly and he deals with them across a range of industries. And if you look at a lot of the builders in Australia and a lot of the chat that's done well in Australia, you'll see powered by LCM at the bottom and that is live chat monitoring. So he's got a great view of what's going on out there. And it gives him a perspective that other people don't see. So. We had a chat the other day, went down to a nice little bar in Melbourne and we sat down and he said to me something like, where do you think websites are going to be in the future? And, you know, I think they need to be around cause you've got to get information from them, but AI truly has taken over. And that's kind of the perspective people have taken in a lot of businesses and in the construction industry too. So we're seeing all this AI pop up. Now, one thing we started talking about was he said, go to one of those websites with an AI agent on it and ask it to bake a cake. And I've actually done this before. And it will actually tell you on the weekend that prompted me to go to a bunch of builder websites that have AI agents on them. And I said, what makes a good builder and who's a good builder in this industry or in this locality or region. And it gave me other builders other than the builder that I was actually speaking to. And that was quite interesting in itself. So What he sort of alluded to, or more so not what he alluded to, but what we actually spoke about was that the AI is actually working perfectly. That is not the problem. AI is not the problem, but it's the thing that people forget about most and it is guardrails. And that's not talked about a lot. We talk about what it can do, but we don't talk about AI, what it can't do and what we shouldn't allow it to do. And that is what his team is an expert at. And again, what he saw in a lot of the experiments, I guess you could call them that he saw from a lot of builders around the nation that had seen that he even offers AI agents at a reduced cost. We'll move to that. We'll see how that goes. But what had happened was because the AI agents are actually so helpful and can get so much information. They will answer all your questions from how much does this house cost? How much time do you think this is going to take to build all those questions that you're going to get asked to a live person who can probably handle those with a bit more emotional intelligence and providing those answers. And people were simply using it as a research tool, going away and then comparing them to other builders, which is really interesting. So that bring up. the whole topic around guard rails. The other instance that he gave me was that, you know, a lot of the builders that invested in this AI have now come back around and now implementing maybe a blend, a hybrid model, or going back to live chat because it performed something like 80 % better than AI chat. So especially in our industry, While AI is going to save us a lot of time, make us more efficient, that human element is still so important and is very interesting. And actually I put a little post in our TGB community insider on our Instagram page. If you jump in there, we've only got about 19 members on there now, but it's a bit of a closed group where I chuck up my thoughts and we have a few conversations and polls in there. So that was pretty interesting as well. But now I'm going to go into what actually guard rails are. And what they protect. So guard rail sounds something a bit techie, but you know, you think of it about on a road, think about the Bruce highway or up here in Queensland, those guard rails, make sure that you don't slip off the road. And it's the same analogy with AI. So I'm going to try and keep it pretty simple. You can kind of also think about it this way. You've hired a new person. They're smart. They're fast. They're keen to help day one. You don't send them straight to a client without a briefing. You don't tell them how you build. don't tell them what the process is. You don't just say, here they are. Go talk to some clients. It's exactly the same with AI. They needs a briefing in writing, We'd set up instructions before it opens its mouth and starts talking to people. Without it, don't have a trained team member. You have a very, very capable person who knows nothing about your business, but he's willing to help in any way possible, even with cake recipes, as I said, for people that are visiting your website or having a chat with them. When it has guardrails, your AI knows, I work for this business. I don't mention competitors. I don't quote prices. I don't make promises about timelines. And my job is to answer genuine questions and then invite the client to speak with our team. That's it. A few sentences written once and running every single time. So if you think about it, there are things that you need to put these guard rails in to protect you from number one, recommending competitors to prospects on your own website. Number two, quoting prices or timeframes your business can't stand behind. Number three, summarizing contracts in ways that misrepresent how risky shared number four, answering so thoroughly that prospects never feel the need to book and number five, sounding nothing like your business because nobody told it how you speak. last point matters more than most builders realize. You spent years building a reputation in your market. Your clients trust you and others because how you communicate. And then you've got this thing that doesn't communicate like you at all. And that was another thing that Gavin Sloan had actually said in some of the phone AI agents that had been experimented with that a lot of people just aren't ready for AI spoken voice because it is a totally different tone to the human tone. And they can't get that same emotive feeling, especially when buying a home and the excitement around that, or, you know, the empathy if something goes wrong. And I think in the end, this actually just raises that broader question of where AI ends and the person begins. A lot of the smart builders out there that we spoke to down in Melbourne, weren't asking whether to use AI or people. It's deciding when one hands off to the other. AI might handle the volume after hour inquiries, common questions, keeping the conversation alive when your team is on site. That's pretty much valuable. That's some time back. But the moment a prospect turns from curious to serious, and they're asking about a specific block budget or timeline, I don't think that becomes an AI conversation anymore. And that's where it becomes a sales conversation and a sales person has to step in, not software. So there's a range of different ways where this is happening across building businesses. And you might not realize that you might be providing information. outside of what you would normally provide if there were a person manning that particular position or service that you're doing within your business. So here's three things that I think you should do this week. Number one, test your own AI today. If you've got AI in your Facebook Messenger chat, your chat bot there, anything like that, even on your personal social, because I've had a bit of fun on some people's personal social one, LinkedIn, check it out. Chat to it, see what it comes back with, ask, can it bake you a cake? See what recipe and make sure it's a good one. Number two, write the brief, not a policy document, just a few clear sentences of who you are and what the AI can and can't say and what it should do when someone is ready to take the next step. It should take you about 20 minutes. You could probably even use AI to do it for you, but just be careful, do it once and it should protect you every day after that. but we're going to put more of this sort of stuff within our resources and TGB Academy once we release it. And number three, I think this is more of an internal process talk that you guys need to have internally, but decide when the person takes over from AI. Pick the trigger. If it's someone asking about price, if it's someone mentions a block, something like that. If we're talking about AI agents that you're using for sales and charts, which the majority of you out there are, maybe even blog writing. put up a thing in our little TGB community on the weekend, as I said, and we talked about that about 70 % of content that now is online is from AI. Should that be handed off to someone else so you have a point of difference and you can feel more human in the market? All those sorts of questions are things that you should be doing. So they're the three things that I would do. with this AI thing on top of my mind right now. We hope this was really informative and we hope some of you out there protect yourselves and you pick up something that you might not have picked up. Until next time, stay tuned. Please like and subscribe on the podcast. Please download our building health industry report sample is very cool. It'll help a lot of you guys out there. Buy it if you think it's going to be great for you. And other than that, have a great week and we will see you soon on the good builder.