How to use AI in your business without chasing every new tool

Who is Justin Day

Justin Day is the founder of SwarmSystem, which makes local service businesses the name that comes back when a customer asks Google, Maps or an AI assistant who to call. He has run his own agency for ten years and gave a TEDx talk on where AI is taking ordinary businesses. The day before the talk, Connor ran a problem in his own business past him. Thirty minutes later Justin sent back a five page report, with Connor's competitors in it.

How do you use AI without chasing every new tool?

Connor asked Justin to boil his TEDx talk down to one idea. It came out as one line: AI is already here, so get on the boat. Then he went straight to the trap he sees most. A new model comes out, a new command gets popular, and owners drop what is working to chase it.

Don't shoot over the moon. Focus on building small and impactful and amplify what matters. Don't just start building stuff that's just random.

He was honest that he fell into it himself. The first time he used Claude Code, he said, it felt like he could do anything, and he had to put guard rails in place to stay focused. Connor agreed. He had built an app in a day after watching a developer work, and he warned that every new tool can quietly turn into a new business that takes forty hours a week. The point of the business, he said, is still revenue.

What does good AI look like to a customer?

Connor praised Justin for turning hard ideas into something a client can use right away. He described Justin's free scan: put in your Google Business Profile and get a report on how visible you are next to your competitors in about seventeen seconds. He gave a second example from another group, a painting company that lets you upload a photo of your house and see it in every color in two minutes. No visit, no hard sell.

I think ultimately the power of AI where it's all at now is hyperpersonalization at massive scale at an extreme detail.

Justin said the easiest place to start is the lead magnet. Give people a way to upload a picture or some information and send back something built for them. Nobody wants to fill out a form and wait for a quote anymore, he said, and very few competitors are doing this yet.

Why ship a first version instead of a finished product?

The other trap is building too much before anyone has seen it. Justin pointed to tools like Lovable for speed, so you can test an idea before you take on the cost of building it the hard way.

Get out the V1, get it out to market and hyperpersonalize it, see what the feedback is, and continue to iterate.

Connor tied it to an old Gary Vaynerchuk idea: you cannot tell customers what they want to buy, they have to tell you. His example, made up on the spot, was a neighborhood dog walking service. Build the website, show it to the neighborhood, and if nobody bites, try a new street or a new idea.

What is a second brain for a business?

Asked what excites him most, Justin talked about Hive Mind, a system he built that pulls every data source in his business into one place so he can ask it questions. It points out where revenue is leaking and what to work on that day. He said he spent a couple of months building it after realizing he was making a lot of tools while his revenue stayed flat.

Data is king, but understanding what do I do with this data that's actionable.

Connor saw the same thing from the leadership side. The hardest part of running a company, he said, is getting people to see what is in your head. Tools like this could help a team see the flyer, or the plan, before anyone builds it.

Will AI replace the people on your team?

Connor asked the question a lot of owners are thinking. Justin said his company is about eighty percent agentic, and that the tool is there to make people faster, not to remove them.

I don't think AI is going to replace people. It will empower those. It will replace those that refuse.

Connor mentioned a conversation with Austin Distel, the former Jasper CMO, and his plan to teach teams at companies of 50 to 250 people that AI is there to speed them up. The job, Connor said, is helping people see it as more clients and better sales calls, not as a threat.

Where should a business owner start with AI?

Someone in the room asked for one daily habit. Justin's answer was a time study.

Throughout an entire week or two weeks, every 15 minutes, write down or put on your calendar what are you working on, so that you can start replacing what's actually keeping you busy.

If email eats your day, build an assistant that flags the messages that matter. For time on the computer he suggested recording your screen with Loom while you talk through what you are doing, then handing the transcript to an AI and asking what to change. For an owner who wants to build something they own, he pointed to Claude Code over keeping everything inside someone else's tool. Someone in the room added a recorder like Plaud for phone calls, and a story from a think tank: an agency owner told his team their work hours would be recorded, about 20 people quit, and he saved $1.3 million in salaries.

You want to use it with purpose to give you the peace, power, and clarity that you deserve.

Why Justin talks about AI with care

Connor asked Justin about his father, who is part of his TEDx talk. Justin answered in his own words.

About seven or eight years ago I lost my dad to cancer, and that really kind of woke me up as far as what I needed to do in business, and be a man and kind of grow up.

He said his fiancee lost her father six months later, and they went through it together. Both of his parents ran agencies, so marketing had been around him his whole life, and losing his dad was the spark that pushed him to act on it. His father was in hospice at the end, and Justin said his family sat with him for days. That is the part of the TEDx talk Connor was asking about.

A part of my TED talk is just wondering what if AI tools could have been a part of that process to help him pass more peacefully.

Is AI making it harder for local businesses to stand out?

The last question came from an owner worried that AI and ad tools make every company look the same, and that Google keeps pushing results further down the page. Justin said it will keep swinging back and forth. Younger buyers are looking for in-person experiences again, and the tools do not change who is behind the camera. Having them does not make anyone a million dollar company on its own. The brand and the person still have to show up.

Quotes are from the recording, trimmed of filler. Nothing is added.