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In this episode, host Matt Rouse interviews Philip Brown from Blu Pitt Automation about project management, AI, and automation. They discuss the benefits of automation for midsize companies, different types of automation, and the future of AI in automation.
(00:43) Introduction to project management and automation
(02:13) Integration of systems in project management automation
(05:04) Automation for midsize companies
(08:32) Productivity and different types of automation
(12:20) Engagement and maintenance of automation systems
(15:50) The future of AI in automation
[00:00:02]
Narrator AI:
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Masters podcast with your host, Matt Rouse.
[00:00:10] Matt Rouse:
Welcome everybody to digital marketing masters. I'm your host, Matt Rouse. And today, I have Philip Brown. Phil, how are you? Great. How are you doing, Matt? I am doing pretty good. Actually, it's a pretty fun day out on, the farm here today. We just got a whole bunch of baby chicks From the incubator. So I have, like, walked out into my little mudroom today, and I just heard this chipping noise, and there's just a box there full of baby chickens. And I'm like, wow. That doesn't happen every day even here. But, anyway, we're not here to talk about chickens as much as fun as that would be.
I wanted to talk today about we're talking about project management and automation of, you know, project management systems. And you work with Bluepit, right, as your company?
[00:00:57] Philip Brown:
Correct.
[00:00:59] Matt Rouse:
I think, You know, I I know we we already read your bio, but, do you wanna give us the quick kinda elevator pitch about what you guys do?
[00:01:07] Philip Brown:
Blue pit works with companies helping them automate their project management. Automation can be anything from, You know, making something work programmatically that you do day to day, or it can be, You know, something that has artificial intelligence intertwined into it that actually has some kind of a thought process behind it that the software does for you.
[00:01:34] Matt Rouse:
So if you're working with a company to automate some project management I mean, we do some automation of project management of my company. Like, we have tasks that are recurring that the system will automatically put them in, you know, just very basic automation. Sure. What kind of automation are you guys talking about?
[00:01:54] Philip Brown:
So a lot of the automation that I do is, companies will bring in a specific software project managers' Management software like, say, Asana, maybe Trello, maybe something more enterprise level by like Microsoft Project or Clarity from Broadcom. And first thing they wanna do is they wanna integrate their systems. So they wanna automate How information gets from their HR system into that project management system so that they can build teams. So they need to know who works for the company, and they build a team based off of that. So I'll integrate in Something like PeopleSoft can integrate the into that. Deltek, which is another timekeeping system Mhmm. So you can actually track time in the project management system, or they'll want to integrate with a financial system like SAP.
Right. So they wanna bring in whatever their financial system may be so that they can look at how much money have I spent so far on This project, how much money do I have left to spend based on the budget that I've estimated? And then On the back end, they may automate the deployment of that to whoever their client is or to their production based Systems so that their customers can use that new system once it's been launched.
[00:03:25] Matt Rouse:
Right. And, Phil, I know your voice is a little sore from From being sick there, so I'm glad you actually made it on the show. All these systems I used to use when I was an IT contractor, like, You know, we we used SAP at Nike and, you know, I you used to use a Microsoft project for a while at Intel, and then they were switching over to, you know, some other base system. I can't remember what it's called now. And, man, you're kinda taking me back. Well Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, kind of smaller enterprise. You know? Sure. I know you're talking about enterprise, Smaller kinda mid sized business. You know that 2 to 15, $20,000,000 range kinda revenue company. They've jumped jumped the hurdle of, you know, getting over the the founders plus 1 or 2 assistants kind of thing, and now they actually have, You know, teams and silos and HR systems and sales and all this kind of stuff. What's the advantages for This type of automation for those midsize companies.
[00:04:27] Philip Brown:
Well so the midsize companies, they're they're just getting into that Chaotic situation where they want to scale. Right? They wanted they actually are having more more pains because they've got More clients, they need possibly a bigger team, they need to understand how to separate their their team into specific roles within each one of the projects that they want to work on. So even though they may not have some of these enterprise level systems yet, They are most likely using some of the smaller systems, but they may not yet have a project management system. They may be using Excel. Right. They may be writing everything out on a Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet and trying to keep track of it that way. So with that, they oftentimes don't have Any insight into how much budget have I actually used, you know, how much money is in the bank now, and how much of that money is from Project x or project y. Right? So this is this is where they they get into that phase of really needing to start keeping track So that they can operate more efficiently and and understand if I'm if I'm a company of 3 or 4 people, Do I need to bring on additional hires so that they can accomplish the 5 projects that I've got slated for this year, Or can I do that with the 3 people that are here and and just spread that out over, you know, 3 months each or 4 months each? Right?
[00:06:01] Matt Rouse:
Right. So a lot of this is, you know, cost and time projecting and Gotcha. You know, being able to Keep all your ducks in a row when you have all the projects on the go. Honestly, you know, this kinda reminds me of we just do a bunch of work in the construction world And, you know, helping with marketing for construction companies, but also, you know, they needed some IT help usually, and we would, I mean, nowadays, we find somebody else to help them, but, you know, we used to do that back in the day. 8, 10 construction projects on the go. Each one Has its own staff resources. Some of them are shared between them that, you know, stuff you gotta order that's gotta be there Before the next thing can happen, if there's anything yeah. You can't you can't bring in the roofers Before the roof goes on the building and the roof needs to be delivered before you can put it up, and then the crane needs to be there to lift the pieces on the roof, and all this kind of stuff goes on. And, Man, I was seeing some of the world's most complicated spreadsheets.
Like, you can just imagine, and I'm like, come on, people. We gotta get some K. This project management in there.
[00:07:11] Philip Brown:
And the sad part about that is that the spreadsheets are usually only managed by 1 person. Right. And if other people need to operate on those spreadsheets, a lot of people don't have that capability in their company yet for Multiple people that work on the same spreadsheet. Right? Right. So they're just transferring it to, like, a Google Sheet or something. And
[00:07:33] Matt Rouse:
Yep. Oh my god. What a mess. You know how many times I've had somebody call me and they're like, I know this is not what you do, But, you know, Jim from accounting deleted our project sheet or Yeah. So
[00:07:50] Philip Brown:
The other thing that's common is you get the you get the CEO that comes down here. You know? In this case, the, You know, general contract attorney is like, hey. Where are we at on the build? What's it look like? Right. Takes you An hour
[00:08:05] Matt Rouse:
to compile the spreadsheets and figure that out. Right? You know, time savings is what this is all about. Right? It's it's Exactly. Saving saving time and money and also stress. You know? There's so much stress involved when you don't have any idea what's happening with your business. Yes. Definitely. One thing I think, you know, talking from the AI point of view since we're on this season of AI here, I think that it It really comes down to productivity. Right? And and I know there's there's types of automation that are AI and there's types that are not. And I don't wanna give people the impression that automation is equal to AI. Right? Because they're not the same thing. Yes.
What do you think is maybe an example of something that's a non AI automation and something that isn't Automation that has some kind of AI involved in it.
[00:09:01] Philip Brown:
So a non AI automation would be Something you know, in the in the corporate world, they call it integrations. Right? So you you have an automation that brings in Information from another source, and that happens daily. Like, you could bring in all of your financial information To your project management software once a day from your banking or your your financial system, You can bring in all of the, you know, current employees and the time that they've spent on projects From your HR system once a day or from a spreadsheet once a day. And that's kind of something that happens automatically. Right? So that's an automation.
[00:09:49] Matt Rouse:
Right. There's no no thought process that goes into that. Right. It just says, hey. Get this data from this source and put it into this, You know, project management tool in this place.
[00:10:00] Philip Brown:
Exactly. If you want to bring in something like You know, the buzzword is AI, but something that's more like a machine learning, which is a a facet of AI. You can train it To say, look at your emails and determine which ones you need to respond to and which ones need to go to a certain place. For instance, if you get emails where bills are due, you can train it to take those emails And put them in a specific spot, alerts you that these emails are in place and that it's going to pay the following bills today Unless you have any other thoughts that go into that. Right? So that gives a little bit of context.
[00:10:46] Matt Rouse:
Search through the accounts receivable or accounts payable emails. Put those into the right bucket in your system, and then, you know, check if you have money in the bank and make sure that, you know, you can have some kind of threshold to say we need the x amount of dollars in the bank, but if we have more, just pay everything out. Or And the cool thing about
[00:11:05] Philip Brown:
The the machine learning and the artificial intelligence portion of that is the more times you do that, the more answers you give it, The more it knows what your behavior is like, the less you have to interact with it. So over a course of 6 months, You may not have to interact with it at all except for once a month, you know? Right. And it can do everything else for you with, And you'll have a confidence level in that. That's 90 95% plus.
[00:11:36] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. And there's some cool automation stuff that's Becoming available for even, like, you know, the very small or the single entrepreneur business nowadays. Like, one example that we've been looking at is having a system that can check inventory, you know, whether that's WooCommerce or Shopify or whatever. You can check the inventory on the project products and say, okay. If we have more than x of a product, Then I want you to create a coupon for it and send an email and create an ad, you know, so it can automate some of the sales systems. And that's something that I think is technology wise is a real leap for the average, You know, business owner. Totally.
But if you're, you know, an IT person, right, like us, and you're familiar with these systems, I mean, some of the things that you can automate are relatively simple automations that take very little management once they're set up, if any. Well, I was gonna say, what is the average kind of engagement look like? Is it is it a one time thing you go in and you Set up all the stuff for somebody and then you're done, or is it more like, we set it all up and then there's a certain amount of maintenance and ongoing work that be done. Normally, the process is we'll go in, we'll set it up, we'll do an assessment,
[00:12:58] Philip Brown:
we'll run through a framework that I have. And then in the end, once once everything is has been assessed, what we once we've done, like, the culture change because we have to make sure Everybody understands what changes are coming. We do the integrations and training, implement systems, and then Once they're in a maintenance phase, we'll go back periodically. But what I really like to do is I like to train The company that I'm working for, how to do it themselves. Right. You know? It it really gives them that that ability to own What we've just done for them, and then if they need additional training, we can come back later on, or we can have some kind of plan that we work with them and do a quarterly assessment. So we come in. We take a look at everything. We make sure everybody's still on track. We see what issues they've had that that possibly they couldn't solve, and we help them solve those, and we go on until the next quarter. I like to I like to make the companies, self sufficient so that they they feel like they really own
[00:14:06] Matt Rouse:
what, what we did for them and what their automations are doing for them. Right. And, I mean, a lot of companies already have either, you know, outsourced IT or help desk or something like that that they can Fall back on if they need assistance with those things after the fact or they can, you know, call you back or whatever. Right? If you're a smaller business, you know, maybe you're, you run an ecommerce shop or something. You only have a few people in the warehouse working with you. I still think there's some very simple automations you could do. I mean, the step one, Besides, you know, as Holly from our business builder throwdown show says is is you gotta get a damn CRM first.
But once you've you've got a CRM, your next step is project management system. Right? Definitely. And It could be something like Asana, you know, that's pretty simple. I'm a big fan of Monday. I like using that. We used to use it before. It was called Monday. I don't remember what it's Zoho project is really good if you need something like a little more complex. And and you had mentioned another one that we have used also, but I can't remember it was now. Oh, a Microsoft Project, of course. Right. Yep. You know, a lot of shops are like a all Microsoft shop. You know, they have they have Exchange email, and they have Office on every machine, and they're using SharePoint for their Internet or, you know, whatever the latest iteration is. And, You know, you might as well use the Microsoft Project because you get a break on the price if you have all the other things, and it integrates with your security and,
[00:15:31] Philip Brown:
You know? Yeah. It does. Microsoft directory. Microsoft Project does really good at helping you manage your projects With regards to resources and time management
[00:15:42] Matt Rouse:
and understanding who's working on what, when, and and when it's gonna be finished. Alright. So, Phil, I got 1 last question for you on the AI side. Where do you think that AI is headed In the automation world, what do you think is coming in the kind of near future?
[00:16:01] Philip Brown:
I think that that AI is gonna be headed to a direction where you can, talk to it, give it information verbally, and it will be able to stack the automations for you and implement them for you. So I mean, that's that's where I think that's headed. So not only will you be able to automate using AI, but, AI will be able to automate for you. So it will be able to set up all those basic automations we talked about that aren't really AI Right. Because it can Take your system and understand how to do those connections.
[00:16:38] Matt Rouse:
Once your company goes in and you set up all these connections and stuff, I think it's gonna be a matter of kind of giving your we, like, call them autonomous agents. You give your autonomous agent, your AI agent Access to the integrations, right, which is basically just another system you're integrating. Right. But then you'll be able to ask it To do things for you, and it can go do it because it has access to your data or it has access to, you know, your email or whatever that is. And I think you're right. I think that's definitely coming.
[00:17:11] Philip Brown:
Yeah. That's that's definitely gonna make it a lot easier on, you know, the smaller the businesses that are between the 2 to 15,000,000, 2 to 20,000,000 that are are trying to grow, but they don't have the the resources behind them to actually implement a large team of people to do everything for them. So it's gonna give them, a way to level the playing field and kinda play with the larger corporations, and hopefully, kinda Even even a playing field a little bit.
[00:17:40] Matt Rouse:
Absolutely. And, you know, if if your company does not have any AI policy or Framework at this point. Talking to somebody like Phil might be a good idea. Like, look at where can we do some automation and implementation. If you know maybe something like a deep learning system or or, you know, everybody's AI doesn't have to be chat gbt. Right. I mean, there's lots of other AI systems that do lots of other things that are completely secure. They're they work privately with your data, Can be compliant for a number of applications like HIPAA and stuff like that. So there's lots of other ways to integrate AI and automation into, you know, into your company.
And they could save you piles of money, like, just gobs and gobs of money. If there was not automation, my company would go broke in, like, a month because we would we'd have to hire, like, 10 more people. Phil, if somebody wants to reach out to you, where can they do that? They can reach out to me at, automate.bluepit.
[00:18:41] Philip Brown:
That's blupitt.com. And, when they go to that, they'll be able to grab a a free ebook that I put together on how to automate it like a pro. And then, once they grab that, they can schedule an appointment with me, and we can have a chat for 30, 45 minutes about what their needs are.
[00:19:03] Matt Rouse:
Perfect. And, man, I think everything automation has already been a big thing over the last, you know, 20, 25 years, And it's just getting better all the time, but AI is gonna take it up a notch. And, you know, it's gonna be a new world out there, and I firmly believe That if your company is not getting into this stuff now, then you're gonna have a real hard time catching up to your competitors who did it later. And once you get into it, it's super exciting. Lots of possibilities. Perfect. Well, Phil, thanks for being on the show. I hope you feel better. I know your voice is a little rough, but thanks for coming on anyway.
[00:19:36] Philip Brown:
Appreciate it, Matt.
[00:19:38] Narrator AI:
Alright. Have a good day. I hope you enjoy digital marketing masters. Check out our back catalog of episodes for more than 200 interviews with Top digital marketers, authors, and productivity experts. Stay tuned for the next episode where we talk about more AI tactics and
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Masters podcast with your host, Matt Rouse.
[00:00:10] Matt Rouse:
Welcome everybody to digital marketing masters. I'm your host, Matt Rouse. And today, I have Philip Brown. Phil, how are you? Great. How are you doing, Matt? I am doing pretty good. Actually, it's a pretty fun day out on, the farm here today. We just got a whole bunch of baby chicks From the incubator. So I have, like, walked out into my little mudroom today, and I just heard this chipping noise, and there's just a box there full of baby chickens. And I'm like, wow. That doesn't happen every day even here. But, anyway, we're not here to talk about chickens as much as fun as that would be.
I wanted to talk today about we're talking about project management and automation of, you know, project management systems. And you work with Bluepit, right, as your company?
[00:00:57] Philip Brown:
Correct.
[00:00:59] Matt Rouse:
I think, You know, I I know we we already read your bio, but, do you wanna give us the quick kinda elevator pitch about what you guys do?
[00:01:07] Philip Brown:
Blue pit works with companies helping them automate their project management. Automation can be anything from, You know, making something work programmatically that you do day to day, or it can be, You know, something that has artificial intelligence intertwined into it that actually has some kind of a thought process behind it that the software does for you.
[00:01:34] Matt Rouse:
So if you're working with a company to automate some project management I mean, we do some automation of project management of my company. Like, we have tasks that are recurring that the system will automatically put them in, you know, just very basic automation. Sure. What kind of automation are you guys talking about?
[00:01:54] Philip Brown:
So a lot of the automation that I do is, companies will bring in a specific software project managers' Management software like, say, Asana, maybe Trello, maybe something more enterprise level by like Microsoft Project or Clarity from Broadcom. And first thing they wanna do is they wanna integrate their systems. So they wanna automate How information gets from their HR system into that project management system so that they can build teams. So they need to know who works for the company, and they build a team based off of that. So I'll integrate in Something like PeopleSoft can integrate the into that. Deltek, which is another timekeeping system Mhmm. So you can actually track time in the project management system, or they'll want to integrate with a financial system like SAP.
Right. So they wanna bring in whatever their financial system may be so that they can look at how much money have I spent so far on This project, how much money do I have left to spend based on the budget that I've estimated? And then On the back end, they may automate the deployment of that to whoever their client is or to their production based Systems so that their customers can use that new system once it's been launched.
[00:03:25] Matt Rouse:
Right. And, Phil, I know your voice is a little sore from From being sick there, so I'm glad you actually made it on the show. All these systems I used to use when I was an IT contractor, like, You know, we we used SAP at Nike and, you know, I you used to use a Microsoft project for a while at Intel, and then they were switching over to, you know, some other base system. I can't remember what it's called now. And, man, you're kinda taking me back. Well Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, kind of smaller enterprise. You know? Sure. I know you're talking about enterprise, Smaller kinda mid sized business. You know that 2 to 15, $20,000,000 range kinda revenue company. They've jumped jumped the hurdle of, you know, getting over the the founders plus 1 or 2 assistants kind of thing, and now they actually have, You know, teams and silos and HR systems and sales and all this kind of stuff. What's the advantages for This type of automation for those midsize companies.
[00:04:27] Philip Brown:
Well so the midsize companies, they're they're just getting into that Chaotic situation where they want to scale. Right? They wanted they actually are having more more pains because they've got More clients, they need possibly a bigger team, they need to understand how to separate their their team into specific roles within each one of the projects that they want to work on. So even though they may not have some of these enterprise level systems yet, They are most likely using some of the smaller systems, but they may not yet have a project management system. They may be using Excel. Right. They may be writing everything out on a Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet and trying to keep track of it that way. So with that, they oftentimes don't have Any insight into how much budget have I actually used, you know, how much money is in the bank now, and how much of that money is from Project x or project y. Right? So this is this is where they they get into that phase of really needing to start keeping track So that they can operate more efficiently and and understand if I'm if I'm a company of 3 or 4 people, Do I need to bring on additional hires so that they can accomplish the 5 projects that I've got slated for this year, Or can I do that with the 3 people that are here and and just spread that out over, you know, 3 months each or 4 months each? Right?
[00:06:01] Matt Rouse:
Right. So a lot of this is, you know, cost and time projecting and Gotcha. You know, being able to Keep all your ducks in a row when you have all the projects on the go. Honestly, you know, this kinda reminds me of we just do a bunch of work in the construction world And, you know, helping with marketing for construction companies, but also, you know, they needed some IT help usually, and we would, I mean, nowadays, we find somebody else to help them, but, you know, we used to do that back in the day. 8, 10 construction projects on the go. Each one Has its own staff resources. Some of them are shared between them that, you know, stuff you gotta order that's gotta be there Before the next thing can happen, if there's anything yeah. You can't you can't bring in the roofers Before the roof goes on the building and the roof needs to be delivered before you can put it up, and then the crane needs to be there to lift the pieces on the roof, and all this kind of stuff goes on. And, Man, I was seeing some of the world's most complicated spreadsheets.
Like, you can just imagine, and I'm like, come on, people. We gotta get some K. This project management in there.
[00:07:11] Philip Brown:
And the sad part about that is that the spreadsheets are usually only managed by 1 person. Right. And if other people need to operate on those spreadsheets, a lot of people don't have that capability in their company yet for Multiple people that work on the same spreadsheet. Right? Right. So they're just transferring it to, like, a Google Sheet or something. And
[00:07:33] Matt Rouse:
Yep. Oh my god. What a mess. You know how many times I've had somebody call me and they're like, I know this is not what you do, But, you know, Jim from accounting deleted our project sheet or Yeah. So
[00:07:50] Philip Brown:
The other thing that's common is you get the you get the CEO that comes down here. You know? In this case, the, You know, general contract attorney is like, hey. Where are we at on the build? What's it look like? Right. Takes you An hour
[00:08:05] Matt Rouse:
to compile the spreadsheets and figure that out. Right? You know, time savings is what this is all about. Right? It's it's Exactly. Saving saving time and money and also stress. You know? There's so much stress involved when you don't have any idea what's happening with your business. Yes. Definitely. One thing I think, you know, talking from the AI point of view since we're on this season of AI here, I think that it It really comes down to productivity. Right? And and I know there's there's types of automation that are AI and there's types that are not. And I don't wanna give people the impression that automation is equal to AI. Right? Because they're not the same thing. Yes.
What do you think is maybe an example of something that's a non AI automation and something that isn't Automation that has some kind of AI involved in it.
[00:09:01] Philip Brown:
So a non AI automation would be Something you know, in the in the corporate world, they call it integrations. Right? So you you have an automation that brings in Information from another source, and that happens daily. Like, you could bring in all of your financial information To your project management software once a day from your banking or your your financial system, You can bring in all of the, you know, current employees and the time that they've spent on projects From your HR system once a day or from a spreadsheet once a day. And that's kind of something that happens automatically. Right? So that's an automation.
[00:09:49] Matt Rouse:
Right. There's no no thought process that goes into that. Right. It just says, hey. Get this data from this source and put it into this, You know, project management tool in this place.
[00:10:00] Philip Brown:
Exactly. If you want to bring in something like You know, the buzzword is AI, but something that's more like a machine learning, which is a a facet of AI. You can train it To say, look at your emails and determine which ones you need to respond to and which ones need to go to a certain place. For instance, if you get emails where bills are due, you can train it to take those emails And put them in a specific spot, alerts you that these emails are in place and that it's going to pay the following bills today Unless you have any other thoughts that go into that. Right? So that gives a little bit of context.
[00:10:46] Matt Rouse:
Search through the accounts receivable or accounts payable emails. Put those into the right bucket in your system, and then, you know, check if you have money in the bank and make sure that, you know, you can have some kind of threshold to say we need the x amount of dollars in the bank, but if we have more, just pay everything out. Or And the cool thing about
[00:11:05] Philip Brown:
The the machine learning and the artificial intelligence portion of that is the more times you do that, the more answers you give it, The more it knows what your behavior is like, the less you have to interact with it. So over a course of 6 months, You may not have to interact with it at all except for once a month, you know? Right. And it can do everything else for you with, And you'll have a confidence level in that. That's 90 95% plus.
[00:11:36] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. And there's some cool automation stuff that's Becoming available for even, like, you know, the very small or the single entrepreneur business nowadays. Like, one example that we've been looking at is having a system that can check inventory, you know, whether that's WooCommerce or Shopify or whatever. You can check the inventory on the project products and say, okay. If we have more than x of a product, Then I want you to create a coupon for it and send an email and create an ad, you know, so it can automate some of the sales systems. And that's something that I think is technology wise is a real leap for the average, You know, business owner. Totally.
But if you're, you know, an IT person, right, like us, and you're familiar with these systems, I mean, some of the things that you can automate are relatively simple automations that take very little management once they're set up, if any. Well, I was gonna say, what is the average kind of engagement look like? Is it is it a one time thing you go in and you Set up all the stuff for somebody and then you're done, or is it more like, we set it all up and then there's a certain amount of maintenance and ongoing work that be done. Normally, the process is we'll go in, we'll set it up, we'll do an assessment,
[00:12:58] Philip Brown:
we'll run through a framework that I have. And then in the end, once once everything is has been assessed, what we once we've done, like, the culture change because we have to make sure Everybody understands what changes are coming. We do the integrations and training, implement systems, and then Once they're in a maintenance phase, we'll go back periodically. But what I really like to do is I like to train The company that I'm working for, how to do it themselves. Right. You know? It it really gives them that that ability to own What we've just done for them, and then if they need additional training, we can come back later on, or we can have some kind of plan that we work with them and do a quarterly assessment. So we come in. We take a look at everything. We make sure everybody's still on track. We see what issues they've had that that possibly they couldn't solve, and we help them solve those, and we go on until the next quarter. I like to I like to make the companies, self sufficient so that they they feel like they really own
[00:14:06] Matt Rouse:
what, what we did for them and what their automations are doing for them. Right. And, I mean, a lot of companies already have either, you know, outsourced IT or help desk or something like that that they can Fall back on if they need assistance with those things after the fact or they can, you know, call you back or whatever. Right? If you're a smaller business, you know, maybe you're, you run an ecommerce shop or something. You only have a few people in the warehouse working with you. I still think there's some very simple automations you could do. I mean, the step one, Besides, you know, as Holly from our business builder throwdown show says is is you gotta get a damn CRM first.
But once you've you've got a CRM, your next step is project management system. Right? Definitely. And It could be something like Asana, you know, that's pretty simple. I'm a big fan of Monday. I like using that. We used to use it before. It was called Monday. I don't remember what it's Zoho project is really good if you need something like a little more complex. And and you had mentioned another one that we have used also, but I can't remember it was now. Oh, a Microsoft Project, of course. Right. Yep. You know, a lot of shops are like a all Microsoft shop. You know, they have they have Exchange email, and they have Office on every machine, and they're using SharePoint for their Internet or, you know, whatever the latest iteration is. And, You know, you might as well use the Microsoft Project because you get a break on the price if you have all the other things, and it integrates with your security and,
[00:15:31] Philip Brown:
You know? Yeah. It does. Microsoft directory. Microsoft Project does really good at helping you manage your projects With regards to resources and time management
[00:15:42] Matt Rouse:
and understanding who's working on what, when, and and when it's gonna be finished. Alright. So, Phil, I got 1 last question for you on the AI side. Where do you think that AI is headed In the automation world, what do you think is coming in the kind of near future?
[00:16:01] Philip Brown:
I think that that AI is gonna be headed to a direction where you can, talk to it, give it information verbally, and it will be able to stack the automations for you and implement them for you. So I mean, that's that's where I think that's headed. So not only will you be able to automate using AI, but, AI will be able to automate for you. So it will be able to set up all those basic automations we talked about that aren't really AI Right. Because it can Take your system and understand how to do those connections.
[00:16:38] Matt Rouse:
Once your company goes in and you set up all these connections and stuff, I think it's gonna be a matter of kind of giving your we, like, call them autonomous agents. You give your autonomous agent, your AI agent Access to the integrations, right, which is basically just another system you're integrating. Right. But then you'll be able to ask it To do things for you, and it can go do it because it has access to your data or it has access to, you know, your email or whatever that is. And I think you're right. I think that's definitely coming.
[00:17:11] Philip Brown:
Yeah. That's that's definitely gonna make it a lot easier on, you know, the smaller the businesses that are between the 2 to 15,000,000, 2 to 20,000,000 that are are trying to grow, but they don't have the the resources behind them to actually implement a large team of people to do everything for them. So it's gonna give them, a way to level the playing field and kinda play with the larger corporations, and hopefully, kinda Even even a playing field a little bit.
[00:17:40] Matt Rouse:
Absolutely. And, you know, if if your company does not have any AI policy or Framework at this point. Talking to somebody like Phil might be a good idea. Like, look at where can we do some automation and implementation. If you know maybe something like a deep learning system or or, you know, everybody's AI doesn't have to be chat gbt. Right. I mean, there's lots of other AI systems that do lots of other things that are completely secure. They're they work privately with your data, Can be compliant for a number of applications like HIPAA and stuff like that. So there's lots of other ways to integrate AI and automation into, you know, into your company.
And they could save you piles of money, like, just gobs and gobs of money. If there was not automation, my company would go broke in, like, a month because we would we'd have to hire, like, 10 more people. Phil, if somebody wants to reach out to you, where can they do that? They can reach out to me at, automate.bluepit.
[00:18:41] Philip Brown:
That's blupitt.com. And, when they go to that, they'll be able to grab a a free ebook that I put together on how to automate it like a pro. And then, once they grab that, they can schedule an appointment with me, and we can have a chat for 30, 45 minutes about what their needs are.
[00:19:03] Matt Rouse:
Perfect. And, man, I think everything automation has already been a big thing over the last, you know, 20, 25 years, And it's just getting better all the time, but AI is gonna take it up a notch. And, you know, it's gonna be a new world out there, and I firmly believe That if your company is not getting into this stuff now, then you're gonna have a real hard time catching up to your competitors who did it later. And once you get into it, it's super exciting. Lots of possibilities. Perfect. Well, Phil, thanks for being on the show. I hope you feel better. I know your voice is a little rough, but thanks for coming on anyway.
[00:19:36] Philip Brown:
Appreciate it, Matt.
[00:19:38] Narrator AI:
Alright. Have a good day. I hope you enjoy digital marketing masters. Check out our back catalog of episodes for more than 200 interviews with Top digital marketers, authors, and productivity experts. Stay tuned for the next episode where we talk about more AI tactics and
Introduction to project management and automation
Integration of systems in project management automation
Automation for midsize companies
Productivity and different types of automation
Engagement and maintenance of automation systems
The future of AI in automation
