The AI Panel: how to use AI to make money, cut costs and stop errors

Why this panel, and why now

Connor opened with the story of the room. The first Network of Directors drew about 20 people from the building, who wrote and filmed elevator pitches. The next month 30 came, then 35. When the room got too big for introductions, he started interviewing founders instead. A year later he looked out at a crowd that had not been planned for.

This event was not supposed to be 130 RSVPs. It was supposed to be smaller.

He said he built the panel because most AI talks put people to sleep or sell a product. This one had one job.

We built a panel that is designed to fulfill one foundation level, which is increase your revenue, decrease your cost, and reduce errors.

Why does a website need to be built for AI now?

Micah Burgess said he ran a home service business for four years before building websites and automations for service companies. A site has two jobs now, he said. It has to tell a story that makes a person want to buy. And it has to answer questions for the AI agents and search engines that decide who gets found.

If I'm not answering questions or feeding information to AI agents or algorithms that are looking for certain information to get you found, then you're not going to be visible to anybody, and your story will end up on an island of one.

Connor admitted the guide he built for the night on a do-it-yourself AI builder did not show up anywhere when Micah checked it. Micah said tools like that only build the visual layer. The part that gets you found, the code and files behind the page, is missing.

A website is nothing more than a folder with a bunch of files and images inside of it.

How is Google search changing?

Justin Day said his company helps local service businesses show up no matter how homeowners search. Across his clients, he said, impressions are going down and clicks are going up as Google returns fewer results, and the next step is agents that visit your site, read your prices and FAQs, and book the job without the customer ever leaving Google.

We are in the era of optimizing for agents, no longer humans, because you can be the best at what you do, but if an agent can't find you, then it doesn't matter.

His answer is a site that learns. It reads the data a business already has, like analytics, search data and heat maps, and suggests changes for a human to approve. And it publishes things nobody else has. For trade clients, he described turning each finished job, with before and after photos, into its own page that his team reviews before it goes live.

Uniqueness is the key, and there's no reason we can't do that now.

What is a company brain?

CT and Isaiah Zimmerman took the deeper end. The idea is an AI that knows the whole business: every document, conversation and decision, connected so it can find the right answer instead of an old one that just sounds close. CT said it starts with context. Tell the AI who the customer is, what the brand looks like and what the goal is before you ask it to build anything.

CT also walked the room through a skill he built called EBI, for even better if. It reviews a piece of work, lists what is good and what could be better, and ranks each idea by impact and effort, then runs again. One suggestion from the stage was to run it on a meeting transcript, over and over, until the plan holds up.

How do you trust AI with your customers?

Isaiah asked the room who used AI only inside the business. Quite a few hands went up. The reason, he said, is fear of the horror stories, and the fix is governance: every action an agent takes is tracked and logged, so when something goes wrong you know why and can stop it happening again.

When we deploy agents inside of businesses, these agents have to earn autonomy.

He warned that most teams already use AI with no rules, often on personal accounts, and owners do not know. The right question, he said, is not how fast you can hand the business to AI, but how to bring it in so the work gets done better and nobody is nervous about it.

I think the execution of process is the thing that leads to profit.

How do you get a whole team using AI?

Austin Distel told how he grew Jasper as CMO in its early years. What he remembered most was the people. When the customer success team started using AI tools, the founder celebrated it. On Taco Tuesday they rolled a TV up to the lunch table and everyone shared how they were using AI.

What gets recognized and rewarded gets repeated.

When someone in accounting starts using AI, he said, it inspires the most technical person on the team too.

What does a company built around AI look like?

Connor closed with two unscripted guests from Firefly, the Austin space company: Tom, its founder and former CEO, and Pete, its former CIO. They are starting a new company to build a plane that can reach space, and they want it built around AI from the start. Asked for the biggest lesson from Firefly, Tom said it was the character of your partners and managing cash flow.

Every single employee in the company is an app developer. So how can I create an infrastructure that allows me to say yes?

Tom said he would keep people on the engineering, building and flying, and lean hard on AI for the corporate and back office work, where it cuts overhead. Connor left the room with that picture: AI that makes a team faster, and rules strong enough to trust it.

Quotes are from the recording, trimmed of filler. Nothing is added. The captions are automatic and do not name speakers, so a quote is credited only where the speaker is clear.