Most businesses don't have a tech problem. They have a system problem. Chris Bryce shows SMBs how to audit, adapt, and build AI that actually works for them.
GROWTH PILLAR: AI & Automation
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Growing teams / Leaders building systems
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A clear framework for auditing your tech stack, a plain-language breakdown of vibe coding and agentic AI, and a smarter way to decide what tools stay and what goes.
Most businesses aren't behind because they have the wrong tools. They're behind because they never stopped to ask if the tools they have are actually solving anything.
Chris Bryce, CEO of DotFusion and Crew CMS, returns to Knack 4 Business for Season 4 Episode 118. He's been guiding organizations through digital transformation for over 20 years — working with names like Cirque du Soleil, Intuit Canada, Mitsubishi, and Brookfield Properties. He knows what a broken tech stack looks like. And he knows how to fix it without burning everything down.
In this conversation, Chris breaks down how to tell the difference between a system problem and a tool problem, why vibe coding is worth trying even if you're not technical, how agentic AI is changing the way teams operate, and why data sovereignty is a question more SMBs need to be asking right now.
He also shares a moment that stopped him cold — when his own AI pushed back on something he was about to post, told him it didn't match his ICP, and flagged two other tools he should probably drop. That's the difference between AI as an assistant and AI as a real business partner.
Key topics covered:
Connect with Chris Bryce:
LinkedIn | DotFusion | DotFusion on LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Blog | Beyond the CMS Podcast | Gnarly Spoke Blog
Mentioned in this episode:
— PARTNERS ON THIS EPISODE —
Gentry Learning — Real estate education built for people who want practical knowledge, not theory. Fred Crouch's education platform and the home of the Property Wizard Podcast.
Canada Growth Network — A business community with a full automation suite built in. CRM, pipelines, follow-up, and real referral-based connections for $47 CAD a month.
Sterling Grace Technologies — Cybersecurity, IT support, and business continuity for Canadian SMBs. Real people. Real protection.
NEXT STEPS
Bernie (00:18)
question of the audience: how can you build a digital platform that actually scales, adapts, and feels human in an AI-driven world?
Our guest will break down how startups and growing businesses can modernize their websites and apps with headlines and closable tech, use AI to personalize and automate content, and design digital experiences that put people first. If you're ready to future proof your brand and make technology work for you instead of against you, tune in and let's learn a little bit more about the complex digital challenges into growth engines. Our guest today is Chris Bryce.
From Dot Fusion. He's a returning guest. He's also the CEO of Dot Fusion, a certified B Corp, and Crew CMS, leading global teams in Canada and Cambodia to design human-centered high-performance platforms. With over 20 years of experience guiding organizations like Cirque de Soleil, Intuit Canada, Mitsubishi, and Brookfield Properties through digital transformation, it bridges strategy and execution to deliver measurable impact.
His expertise spans AI-driven automation, digital modernization, and channel marketing platforms. As a speaker, Chris shares practical insights on leveraging AI and digital solutions to amplify human potential, scale growth, and drive purposeful innovation. He's also a returning guest from this season from episode 26. Chris, it's an absolute pleasure having you back. And hey, how are you? And what's been happening? What's your favorite quote, sir?
Chris (01:43)
Well, thanks for having me back. I my body almost went into Olympic heart mode. I've been spending so much time watching curling, figure skating, ski jumping, and just kind of really stoked to see folks who commit to something so early in life kind of like really hold on to that and and have careers that kind of span multiple Olympics and really getting a lot of inspiration about around that. So
Yeah, my my quotes are just believe and stay focused. You know, you can do a lot of things in this world if you put your mind to it.
Bernie (02:17)
Absolutely. And I hear you about the Olympics. Who knew that you could have controversy in curling? All with a finger. without getting into the dynamics of it and right or wrong of it. Wow. It's like, okay, well, you know what? Life's good if that's if that's the worst outcome that's happening, right?
Chris (02:33)
That's true. I am totally with you. Life is good if yeah finger grazing is is the big issue. But yeah. So happy to join you. love sharing ideas with you and you seem to ask some really great questions and really ke keeps me on my toes and thinking a lot about things. So yeah, anywhere you wanna start, I I'd love to have a great chat with you.
Bernie (02:52)
Awesome. So I've I've discovered it myself after a while. I look at, you know, as as I'm building out the podcast and doing different things, I look at my tech stock. And I'm going, you know, am I am I leveraging it? Do I have too much tech stock? In which case I'm replicating, or am I about to ready to jump to another evolution of the tech stock? How do you figure out whether you're, you know, the same old, same old is still good and strong?
Right, tried and proven versus, you know what? If you do this, you you'll be able to leverage more from it and have a higher yield. How do you how do you assess that? So that when you're looking at at somebody and they come up and they say, I'm not I'm not I think I'm not getting more traction or I seem to be holding status quo, but I I it should be better.
Chris (03:35)
Yeah, I th I think there's a lot going on right now with the emergence of hyper niche tools. I mean you can build any little widget or application using Replit or Bolt or or kind of whatever now. So there's a lot of small companies that are vibe coding tools that do one thing particularly well, and those are popping up on your radar and you look at your suite of whatever the stack is, and maybe let's break those down. It could be your your sales.
stack, your marketing stack, your content stack, your CRM stack, and whatever all that stuff is. and it's hard not to have a slight feeling that you're missing out on something. so funny anecdote to sort of answer your question, I I was looking at my credit card statement the other day and I noticed two withdrawals on my credit card from a company that I completely forgotten about.
So I called them up and I said, Hey, like, please don't charge me anymore for for this service. I don't like I don't even know how I signed up or what it was for. And they sent me an email back out of a tool called MixMax or something like that. So I'm like, what's Mixmax? And I'm looking on there and it's like, all your CRM powered by AI, all in one space. So this is exactly what you were talking about. I stumbled upon something that was, you know, managing some commerce and CRM.
So I was went on their site, signed up for a 14-day demo. I'm like, is this gonna like replace R stack, which is like pipe drive, Apollo, Smart Leads, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, I got the feeling of anxiety that I'm now really aware of. And it kind of triggered me to like, what am I actually trying to do? Am I just enthusiastic about checking stuff out? Or am I
Solving a system problem, and I think that may be the key, where your operation should be systematized. So, does your stack make the system more easy to repeat, or does it create new nodes in the system, which is ultimately frustration and kind of more feature fancy kind of stuff? What I did actually, so our AI stack, which is another stack to deal with.
Is Replet, MANIS, Dojo AI, and just normal GTP. So we have some custom GTPs. So went into Manus and said, hey man, okay, I gotta deal with this like fear of missing out on this MixMax stuff. What should I do? And it's getting to the point now where it's so well trained it said, look, you have a system in place for CRM and for outreach. This does absolutely nothing to help your system.
Focus. And by the way, you might want to get rid of these other two tools you're using because a spreadsheet would work just perfect for your kind of company. All that to say, you it we're in this neat time where if you have an idea, you can build an app for that. So it's fun to go exploring and chasing shiny things, but if you're running a business that needs to be powered by systems,
That's kind of where you can sort of have your filter. Like, is this helping me do something that is maybe boring, but repetition is how to move business forward? Or am I getting distracted? So you need to, I think, have a, you know, you keep an eye on things, try some stuff out. Like I go immediately to reviews and and chat is really great now at helping vet a new product and whether it should enter your stack or not. Yeah.
Bernie (06:51)
I I totally agree. I ran into a problem with when I do the editing of these podcasts. Platform I was using previously, great platform. I loved it. It just worked great. but they changed their pricing model. And so their AI resource, and I I g I get it, they have to they catch up with their AI costs, but all of a sudden it was like three podcasts in and I've used up the month's quota of tokens. Okay. I I edit four podcasts a week and I'm like,
so I'm looking around, you know, I started scanning went through Chat GPT and had a quick question. This is what I got. Can what can I what can I leverage with what I have? I ended up going with something else, Riverside FM. and just think, okay, it's you know perfect. And if I need to, you know, leverage other elements of Riverside FM, I'm I'm squared away. But that was through a conversation with Chat GPT. Do you you you
you reach out to Chat GPT to get some of the particulars, but do you also have community that you reach out to to going, so my dear colleague over in, you know, in the finance department or or a bank or my dear colleague over in, you know, pick a pick an area, right? Do you do you commiserate and going, you know, this was a real pain or like what are you using now? Do you have those type of dialogues with people?
Chris (08:03)
Yeah, dude, that's super important too. That's kind of the thing. Like, got a bunch of Slack channels going with folks from all different communities, like, hey, who's doing what? Can someone help me short circuit assessing value and onboarding with tool A, B, or C and how well does it fit into your world? And a great example of that might be this whole open cloud.
Mult claw, open claw, whatever they're calling it now. There was that kind of hype cycle three or four weeks ago where everyone was running out and buying IMAX and installing the first version. it and then the security stuff came out around it. So people were offloading to IMAX or going onto virtual servers. So what happens is the the buzz was, hey, anyone can set this up. In reality, it's like
It's kind of like a Raspberry Pi. You can set it up, but there's gonna be like seven things that take you four days to figure out. And if you know what you're doing, you bypass that. But for normal people, you're gonna get really frustrated. So instead of going through the frustration cycle, actually I went out to our founderlink community. That's where we met originally. Yep. And just a little bit like, you know, I'm kind of proficient at this stuff, but has anyone got a hack for getting open class set up?
And this dude goes, Here's a link, I set up a thing that installs it on digital ocean and creates a droplet, and you just press a button. Here you go. So, like there's a great example of community helping out. We have other friends that have spent like two weeks now trying to get this thing to work and there's a frustration level. so community is really important and and kind of having folks try stuff. And we're kind of I'm separating enterprise applications from kind of normal daily business ops, let's say, because enterprise stuff
is a whole different set of circumstances and activities to move new things into the loop. But yeah.
Bernie (09:46)
Yeah, I just I think we should do a quick shout out to Graham Barlow because that's part of the founder link space. So just kudos to Graham and that's how we cross paths here in the in the Ottawa area when you're up from Toronto. So those just want to say thanks to Graham. Mentioned something earlier and I just want to touch back on it because some of the audience might not know what it means. What's vibe coding?
Chris (10:09)
vibe coding is essentially where you pick a vibe coding platform and in very plain lane language you enter into a text field what you want your application or idea to do. So an example of that, and it's kind of the most common example, is I would like a daily planner that helps me organize.
The things I do in a day and the schedule with my kids. And I want it to flash green if it's something that I need to do now, and flash red if it's something I can wait till later. Whatever your idea for a little tool or a little application is, you just say that into a text box and you hit enter. And the vibe coding platform does its best on your minimal input to know what you're talking about and make your app. And
Publish it to a website. Super easy, no technical skills required. So it's a lot of fun. It's like a Lego box for Hugh for adults, I guess. Like, let's make you spend your afternoon with your friend and make a chess game that has like all these different rules to it. Or we have one. I'm a Sale Canada teaching instructor, and one of the things that I find frustrating.
Is the quality of the Sale Canada learning materials because it's currently in just a little bit of a state of evolution that isn't quite so digitally optimized. So I vibe coded the entire course curriculum into question and answers and true false things and little illustrations so I could give to my students. Go to the site, here's all of the information you need to know, and go do it. So vibe coded a Sale Canada basic sailing app.
I did that in an afternoon. It was pretty awesome. so one of the benefits of this concept is let's say five years ago you had an idea for an app. Let's say the app was to, I don't know, find connect people that make apple pie together all over the world. And there's different categories of Apple Pie. Well, you'd have to hire some developers, a UX person, a designer, you have to pay for hosting, you gotta kind of build all this infrastructure. And it was
To the point where there was enough friction there that a lot of cool ideas didn't make it out into the wild. So now you can sit down, and in the I don't know, better part of a couple hours, you can get your Apple Pie community app out there. And with a little bit more sophistication and prompt engineering, you can actually build a fairly robust app. Let's say Uber is kind of the best example of an app.
It was a simple idea to start. We want to connect people with a car to people who want to go somewhere. And that kind of grew from there. So now there's cars running around, people who want to take the car. So that was an idea one day before vibe coding. But you can kind of vibe code an app that does that to a certain degree right now. The challenge right now is that your average person.
Doesn't have the prompt engineering or computer science experience to really vastly tell the vibe coding tool what to do. So the results are unexpected. It's like you have a bunch of ingredients that are sort of what goes in an apple pie. You throw it in the oven and you get whatever that temperature setting and that mixture puts out. It's apple pie, but it may not be what you expected.
Bernie (13:15)
add a lot more ice cream to make it palatable. I hear it.
Chris (13:18)
Make it palatable. But but it's cool though, because if you had an idea, you can get it, let's say 75% baked, maybe go out and get some VC to do it right. Cool. So then you deconstruct it and build it, and it depends on if it's an enterprise app which requires a lot more security, or one that you're just having fun with. I think the main idea is that although vibe coding isn't getting your product.
All the way to the finish line in a perfectly polished, stable, secure, enterprise ready state. The acceleration from where we were two years ago to where we are now indicates that it is going to get you to that fully polished state sometime in the future. Like we're going to be able to put enough reference into an AI accepting bot.
And it'll ask you the right questions and it'll polish off your project. So I guess at the end of the day it's really fun. get out there and g and vibe code something. Have an idea, tell it what to make and and check it out.
Bernie (14:18)
As you're explaining that it and I'm thinking from a business perspective. So someone goes, I have an idea, you know, I've I've got a moment of free time, and which which is good for a business owner because they can sit back, reflect, what do I got to do next? What what's the next what's the next adventure that'll help promote the business or you know make everything prosper more? Is the sandbox. So we you just kind of describe the sandbox state, all right, and you go play with it a bit, okay, this is the shakedown trial.
sea travel so to speak if if if you're building a new sailboat and then you go, okay, here it's leaking here, let's fix that. But for a business, if if I'm if I'm getting a a series of AI components together or my tech stack and I'm bringing them together or I'm using or you know using a chat and then another AI a platform, you know, just you know that has a more unique feature. How do I go from okay, sandbox? What do I do then to measure that
Yeah, okay, we're we're we're good and tight to go. Like we're we're everything's where it should be. It's not gonna fall apart, you know, two clicks down. You know, having the mast fall down as you're sailing out is never gonna be a cool thing, you're like, Yep, that's not gonna help. mayday, mayday. How do you how do you set yourself up so that you have that you're sure that what you got is is gonna hold together, you know, and run with you, you know, f in the next year or two.
Till the next iteration comes along.
Chris (15:37)
Yeah. great point. so there's challenges right now. One is that vibe coding results in a black box product. So let's say take the real simple example. I want to vibe code a website. Probably the easiest thing to do. You can tell it I want it to have a hero image of a sailboat.
Underneath I want it to have an updated weather forecast widget and I want to tell everyone about how much I love sailing. Do it. It'll build that in ten seconds. The problem is you don't know really how it built it. It's very hard to then get a developer to go in a week from now and go and change that picture. They'd have to figure out how to put it into a git, kind of download it. It's
And and that's a very simple application. It's like a black box. I could go back into my vibe coding tool and say, change that picture. But the relationship is me and this tool. Hard to get anyone else in there. And when you're building an enterprise application, you need teams to mature it and extend it and continue to develop it. So it doesn't play nice with teams. So right now we're still we're getting the most out of AI.
When we build products in the traditional way, which is building a feature and function set, system architecture, wireframes, components, and stitching it all together. But we're using AI in all of those tools to make the old school process much faster because vibe coding doesn't really help you with process and an end product that can be worked on as a team with the robots and the developers.
That's our biggest challenge. So we'll make something. It's like, how to do that? Like, I don't know. It's like cool though. But to go detangle it. So we find right now AI is best used as kind of developer tools as like cursor, copilot, or whatever you're using, Cloud Code is pretty good. yeah, that's not to say you don't vibe code. Definitely everyone should go make something, you know, it's like having toys. Yeah.
Bernie (17:39)
And you won't step on them too easily, like you can with like
Chris (17:42)
Yeah,
you you won't sell. No, but you will pull your hair out at some point in time. You will go into a loop of like, I said I wanted a boat that was blue and it like we'll keep giving you a yellow boat. And it's like though it's just kind of it's just enough to be satisfyingly annoying right now. Yeah.
Bernie (17:59)
Do you foresee this or is it is there something already out there where we had a a device like a Roomba is a good example, right? just off off the races. imagine this programming is run into all, stop, back up, twist, or you know, look, my canister is full. Do you also see that coming into into play where robotics or other
Other devices, you know, not not necessarily something that wanders around. The robot can be something that's attached to a a fixed asset, like your fridge, your stove, right? And becomes robotic not in the sense of movement. but do you see that kind of interplaying with interfacing other than leaky sib because I know I know that if I call out the name of the device in my room right now, it's always listening. It's always listening. Right?
Chris (18:48)
yeah, I mean like that that you can see where AI is kind of getting into the Arduino kind of system or Raspberry Pi connected things, internet of of stuff happening. and I think that's that's great for the maker community too. Like robots are really the next gen of this AI business, and that's all something that we need to deal with on a on a separate level. but yeah, I mean I you can see how there's the advancement of like
the connected home kind of idea, like you're talking about. There's speakers everywhere and lighting and heating and stuff. It's still pretty basic, but we're not far away. Like Google's still having a bit of trouble launching Gemini into its NES kind of speaker system. It's but that next wave of, I don't know, make it 33 degrees and turn the lights down low, throw on the replay of the hockey game from yesterday and get the what would be cool actually is if the fridge was connected with the stove.
I think there's like the next breakthrough. Like, why is that form factor of the thing that keeps something cold all like it's kind of like content and websites? Like we have these content management platforms where the content's made in Google Docs or Word, and inevitably it's cut and pasted into the CMS. Like either we don't need the CMS or we should be creating it in the CMS. We have this and same thing with a refrige. I've got meatballs in the fridge.
Why can't it just move it into the heating device when I ask it and then I go grab it hot? There's there's still that maybe we should talk more about this fridge stove combo idea.
Bernie (20:18)
Well no, actually well a as you're describing it, I'm sitting there going, so from a business perspective, you're s you're sitting there and you're going, you know, I've got a fridge, I've got a stove, you know, why aren't these two things communing one way or another? Yeah.
Chris (20:31)
Does it even?
Bernie (20:32)
Does it it still have to have the same shape and design? Is there some sort of design, you know, that that has its own has its own box of bolts to deal with? But as a business, if you're coming along and you're going, you know, wouldn't it be nice if right? And you know, you've you've seen that with say geofencing, someone comes into the area, they're a customer, and you go, Well, I have a special, you know, if you're so interested. Yeah, well without being intrusive, but you know, with permission and all that stuff.
How does a business quickly look at what they've got and then, you know, leverage because it it it sounds like it's underutilized resources, right? You you're paying for something to be there. You either have bricks and mortar or you have a product and you know it it's not at a hundred percent capacity. I I'm I had a guy one time ask me for the business that I was running. He says, What's your what's your capacity? We were taking in accommodations for people. What what's your goal? Said 100%. Yeah, yeah, but you know.
At the end of the day, you know, what's your real number? I said, Well, the real number might be eighty percent, but it's always a hundred percent. I always want a hundred percent because that's you know th throughput. And I know I have to allow for downtime. So from a business perspective, or even a golf course, right? They'll never want to be fully maxed out because then they'll never be able to service the grounds during the daylight hours, right? But they look at ways to improve and enhance. So what should a business do to sit back and going, okay, here are all the assets in play, whether it's tech.
product, people.
How should they kinda kinda revisit and review? Is that something you do monthly, weekly? You're in the shower once in a while in the blue moon moment and you have that epiphany? Like what what's the what what have you found is a formula of success?
Chris (22:06)
Yeah, I think it comes from tension from like finance kind of accounting folks, like what what's the budget for stuff? So that's gonna pare down what you're using. we audit. So we should do this quarterly, but once a year, especially around AI, we're re auditing the team. Cause we've been we've been using AI tooling for five years now for kind of code co pilot stuff.
so we audit and we're just like, what's your comfort with AI right now? what tools are you using? What tools would you like to use that you're not? You know, and that that gives us feedback and it's mostly around comfort because my comfort is different than a junior software developer. They may be freaked out about it because they're not sure what's gonna happen with their job. And there's like all kinds of different things that we we used to assume but don't want to. so auditing is important. and just staying kind of
All right, we're gonna use these for this period of time. So don't look anywhere else right now. Or like look, but don't like we're not entertaining anything else. And sure keep it in the stash. We have a Slack channel just called AI ideas. Okay, dump it there. It's not going away. At least you feel that it's been contained somewhere, especially around the AI for created for creative stuff. We're a UX shop as well. So how things look is really important. So a lot of our content is
it what's the right word? Impacted by AI somehow, right? We still want to be the idea generators, but if we can make 50 videos in 10 minutes instead of three days, we're gonna leverage that. So there's so much change going on right now with AI and video and quality. So we just kind of know we got to keep our eyes a little more open in that department because it's changing so quickly. The price is coming down, the quality is going up. So like you said,
Don't wanna be stuck in this old system that costs a lot 'cause we weren't paying attention. But it's not like ten years ago you get Adobe Premiere and After Effects and that's your sweeten, just don't worry about it. Like that's what you use for like the next five years kind of thing, or you know, or gotta stay a little bit more nimble, I guess.
Bernie (24:02)
Yeah. Do you do you assign like it I this would depend on the size of the business. So if you're a solopreneur, you're it. But if it say you had a team of five, ten, or twenty people, do you assign one person, you know, that goes out and you know, if you're doing the apple pie, well try that apple, all right? That's a different variant. Or try this type of flavored or not flavor, but type of sugar or a source of sucrose.
Right, and try this spice. like for for example, I came across a beverage and it's it's a whiskey and it has peanut butter infused in it. And I'm looking
Chris (24:39)
The other day, actually. It's funny you're reminding me of that. It was like, what? I kind of said that.
Bernie (24:44)
It has a sheep on it, right? And I'm sitting there and Buddy handed it to me as as a Christmas gift. And God bless Fred Crouch. just like, Bertie, you should try it. And you know what I did? And it's the peanut butter is off putting by itself in inside that inside that fluid, but it actually tastes good. And so my wife doesn't my wife doesn't partake in in spirits and so she actually took a
a a a shot glass and consumed it. So there's there's some other flavored drinks out there that have a certain sweetness to and it's and it's and and doesn't leave a hole in the back of the head type thing if you if you get into it too heavily. So that said I went in a way way off off course and I'm gonna bring us right back here. Do you have somebody, do you sign somebody to kind of go, what about that? And e even it's like you know sometimes it's hidden in place
plain sight and you d and you're looking at something going, you know, I wonder if we add this, we add this component to the to recipe. Do you find that in the AI that you have that kind of researcher out there going, What's happening?
Chris (25:44)
Yeah, for us it's departmental wise, like we're fifteen people, so not that many. but so let's say we break it down into ops, creative rev RevOps, like kind of sales and marketing stuff, and then dev and platforms. So it's kind of like if you're kind of the lead in that area, bring stuff to the table, throw it into Slack, get your team to try it.
if you and and lobby for it. Like if you can make a case that it's good cost, great quality, easy to adopt, replaces this thing, cool. we kind of operate on 90 day decision making cycles, so to speak. So we meet weekly about things, we stash a list of it, we're kind of an EOS shop as well. So we got a list of issues that are long term, those get cleared out for sure every 90 days. So that's where those things resonate. It's like we just swap.
We switched from CLUD over to Menace. Just in our opinion, we do things with more stacks of agents than just asking a question. So we get Gemini with our Google account. So we don't even pay for that. That's our like just ask a question, get some feedback. Manaus gives us a stack of agents overseeing agents overseeing agents. So we're kind of we have a team version of that. So we just kind of make those 90-day decisions on these things because it is happening quick.
And you gotta stay sane. but you can even see with the main guys like Anthropic, OpenAI, even Grokken there, with the OpenAI guys buying OpenClaw, Beta Botmanis, they realize that this kind of one-to-one chat thing is not the real future of kind of commercialized AI stuff. They need agentic suites of systems doing things, and the
kind of knowledge gap is getting pretty big. Like my dad finally kind of uses chat for everything while he's driving around and talking to it, but he has no idea about how to create a stack of agents that reference themselves and go do heavy lifting. And that's kind of where I think enterprise is getting ready. Like Salesforce is pretty quick to the market with agent force, although like it's super janky, but they're they're they are leading with that enterprise thinking.
And that's gonna mature really quickly into that their ecosystem of things. And more enterprise products are introducing AI as well, to the extent that it won't mess up your business too much.
Bernie (27:58)
Well, th this actually brings up a question and you you mentioned it, I want something in blue and it shows up in yellow and it just it just won't let the yellow go for whatever lover money, right? And sometimes it's some people attribute it to hallucination or whatever, or you've the prompt you've even written, right, is pointing one way and you're asking for the other direction. Whatever the case might be. How do you ensure that you're having that quality product at your baseline?
You know, if and if you're having an anomaly, it's not it's not gonna impair either the the business or the results. It just it might it might make a good funny story later on. You know, you just ordered three rubber duckies. Yeah. Yeah. Out out of the blue, but you know, assuming not, but because you wouldn't want to do that too large a scale. How do you ensure you're you're bang on? Like you you you found a new a new platform, you've tried it out, and the results are consistent where you expect them to be.
Chris (28:49)
Yeah, I think first you want a platform that will isolate what it's learning about you so it can reference everything that you've done up until this point. I think that's really important. you need to build kind of your your ecosystem to the extent that it is not it's working as an advisor for you, not a
Assistant. And I think there's a difference there. We use Dojo AI as our CMO suite. And I think I I was replying to LinkedIn posts the other day with a bunch of friends, and I wanted to like see what AI would like. Hey, here's my friend's post. What would you comment on the post? Like what I'm curious, right? And it just happened to be that my friend had a a personal coaching business, and our AI said.
Well, you shouldn't be posting there. Your ICP are enterprise, commercial, real estate organizations, manufacturers, and large nonprofits. This does you no good if that is your mission. Interesting, it was the first time because we programmed that that marketing suite to hold us to financial and marketing goals for the company over the next three to five years.
It's dialed, and it was the first experience I had with AI as a real partner, then do this, or you know, i it's like it has tight rails. So to answer that part of your question, that's where you want your AI to be to be guiding you or acting as a resource beyond what you have. Because just getting it to say yes to whatever you want isn't necessarily the best.
Bernie (30:21)
The AI, there they're different people that are making AI countrywise. And not not not as in state sponsored and sometimes maybe it is state sponsored. And then we hear about a chat from certain parts of the world, certain continents going, you know what? We don't want we don't want the tail wagging the dog moment, right? Do you find that where the the platform resides, the AI platform?
Ready the software platforms reside. Is that is that a risk both from as a user and who your clients are? Because if if there's some places in the world, no, no, or you're not permitted. Like, you know, there there's stuff that's manufactured or made here in North America, you cannot go to other countries with it right now. It's dust is verboten, right?
Does that also play a role in decision making? Like do I use this and how leaky is that information? I I know like a HIPAA compliance and all that part, but you know, if if if it resides depending where the data sits in the country, which country it sits in, then it's kind of data like sovereignty for lack of better words. Is that an issue?
Chris (31:26)
Yeah, for sure an issue. And the bigger the company, the bigger the issue is. I think it's one of the cooler aspects of OpenClaw, where it's the first time that I've seen a kind of an environment for a non-technical user to run their own LLM. Sitting on your machine, you can train it with how you want, you can bring in Llama, like you don't need
Open AI or Enthropy, you don't need the commercial LLMs. You can go open source in there. and that's good. Larger organizations are running their own LLMs. So, and that's just the way it is, which is why it's a bit frustrating right now for folks a little bit more on the marketing communication side. It's kind of like the old days where the marketing department needed to kind of smuggle in their own Mac.
So they could look at websites properly because everyone else had PCs because that's how the IT team worked. So we're dealing with marketing folks that are like, Well, we only use Microsoft Copilot, because that's what our IT guys say. Well, you're falling behind. so there's there's th that's the two part of the enterprise play. One is they're locking everything down, which is good. You need your own LLM. You don't want to be training the world or giving access to your info or querying it. But at the same time, you need to be using the other tools so you know what's going on.
There's a little bit of friction in there. but yeah, so I think have having ownership of of how you're training things is important or at least important to recognize. Like I don't care if Gemini is being trained on me asking it questions on like baseball stats or you know who what are the chances of the Cambodians winning the curling Olympics ever. Like I don't know.
Bernie (32:58)
Well, you never know, you know, Jamaican bobsledding team made it through the
Chris (33:02)
I know, I've got hope. It's a long shot.
Bernie (33:05)
Ha ha you have to get ice there first though. So where do you f where do you see the future? because we're kind of coming to a close in this on this on this call. Where do you see the future? Where you know, in the next maybe two, three years, what do you th you know, if you had a crystal ball or kind of a dead dead reckoning guess, where would the wind blow next? What where do you think the next chunks are? And I think you've alluded to it in a in a couple previous comments in the past about having the
The agentic AI components, right?
Chris (33:35)
Yeah, so I think it's gonna be a couple more years before AI is predictable enough for enterprise operational integration. It's gonna start with marketing. Go ahead, make some images for us. It's gonna take some time, but it's coming. The robots are coming. So we wanna figure out how to deal psychologically and physical physiolog physical.
Bernie (33:58)
Physiologically?
Chris (33:59)
with that kind of other form of being around us, that'll be pretty interesting. the maker tools will get better, easier, more predictable for people to build stuff. So anything to do with software is really or mathematics, I think for life sciences and health and and research, AI is amazing and will will get better. I think it is an interesting
Thing to ponder like where are jobs in the future? What can we do with our hands? Like I grabbed dinner last night, and to get to the restaurant, I had to cross through a movie set. I really thought about there's like a hundred people running around carrying a backdrop or a cable or a light. Like, it's not a bad industry to be a part of. AI is not taking those jobs.
Until you just don't need to shoot the scene anymore and then it's all of a sudden gone. But so big picture, I think it's like maybe having a trade, like learning to do something that's that's a bit digital and also a bit crafty. and you like don't like really embrace stuff because the knowledge gap's already expanding from like how you use AI and there's
Like kind of maybe four tiers. There's like chat with your chat thing. There's build agenc stacks. There's kind of build complex stacks. And then there's writing and being a kind of deep AI engineer and building what those platforms are using to give us all this consumer great stuff. But find your comfort zone and know what's going on and yeah, build stuff with your friends. Pick someone to follow on YouTube that
Tells you what's new in AI every day and watch that once a week. Like do a little bit to to stay in touch and don't worry too much.
Bernie (35:41)
So Chris, if someone wanted to get a hold of you and say, hey, Chris, I I I kind of wanna I want to understand more and you know, maybe capitalize on dot fusion, how do they find you and reach you?
Chris (35:52)
LinkedIn is probably ideal, which is I think just C Bryce on LinkedIn somewhere. email me, cBrice at dot fusion dot com. Visit dot fusions website, which is more just to see what we do over there. but yeah, generally findable.
Bernie (36:07)
Any books or podcasts other than sailing sailing boats?
Chris (36:10)
I've got a great blog at gnarly spoke.com if you want to learn about fun sailing adventures. and I do a podcast that is incredibly exciting, all about content management platforms called Beyond the CMS. So if you're in content ops, that might be your cup of tea. But something that I've spent my life learning and sharing about is anything to do with content operations. and
Yeah, that's that's me.
Bernie (36:35)
Chris Bryce, I want to say thank you so much for your time today. I I've learned a whole bunch of new things. And so thank you. And I'm feeling I'm on I'm on the riding the wave of the edge going forward. to you, the Knack 4 Business listeners. So listen, you know, content management is what Chris works on, but obviously there's more to it, way more under the hood. you know, if you need to know how to do sailing, then you know, there's you know there's a podcast.
And if you want to know more about AI. And thank you for being our guests today and and thank you for being our listeners. you can reach us at infoccreativeinsight.com. Website is creativeinsight.com. We also have a Knack 4 Business website. the word knack, like knock except an A, the number four in business dot com. We have a little chat bot in there, web indexer, and you can ask it about past podcasts and we can go from there. And thank you so much.