ļ»æGood morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Wherever you're signing in from, this is Kumar Dattatreyan with Agile Meridian, and we have another episode of the Meridian Point here for you. And today, we're going to be interviewing Youssef Tawfik. I'm not sure if I said the last name right. I'm sure he will correct me. So Youssef is from Cairo, Egypt, and he's a software engineer with a bachelor's degree from Coventry University. He has experience working at Fortune Fifty Companies. His expertise is mostly in web development and AI automation, and now he's founded his own company. He's the founder of Rivi Agency, and he has embraced AI automation. One of the missions of his company is to bring the raw power of AI to small and medium-sized businesses to help the business side grow and be more efficient. So, without further ado, I'm going to welcome Youssef to the stage here. I hope I did that justice.
Youssef: Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for your time today. Thank you. How do you say your last name?
Kumar: Tawfik. Is that right?
Youssef: Yeah. It could go. Yeah. All right. Awesome.
Kumar: So, you know, we've been hearing a lot, especially in the last year or so, about AI. AI has been around for a long time. We just didn't think of it as such, right? The auto text complete on your phones and browsers and, you know, the ability to generate and make sense of lists, and, of course, in all the business intelligence software that's out there to help humans do their work better. But AI really sort of took a different turn over the last with the release of chat GPT and all of the variants, the generative AI variants that are out there right now for our use. And most of the companies that benefit from that have been the large companies, right? The mega caps, if you will, the Microsofts, the Apples - maybe not Apple so much. They're kind of lagging behind, but definitely Microsoft and OpenAI and, you know, all these companies that have invested money to improve how they work and the work products that they deliver to their consumers, the customers. And largely, it's left small businesses out to fend for themselves, trying to learn how to use chat GPT and these other tools. And that's where I think what you do is really intriguing. So you help small businesses use these tools. So maybe you can start out by describing the services you offer and what it is that you provide small businesses.
Youssef: Absolutely. So, honestly, the way I see it, the small and medium guys are getting pushed by or bombarded by the SaaS tools, their AI tool. Is it like an AI sales tool or an AI marketing tool? Which is really superficial, honestly. And that's what I do. It's really superficial if you're only using it for sales and marketing, right? You haven't really used it correctly. Therefore, within any business, there are a lot of operational inefficiencies. Let's be honest, people writing papers, people going through Excel sheets, people auditing, people doing redundant work. There's a lot of human error involved, right?
And I value human intelligence so much that when I see something that is redundant, you would want to automate that so the human can do something that is way more productive, that can embrace the intelligence and the complexity of the human brain. Right? So that's where I see AI really shining, and automation is not only about AI. It's also about automating the business in an overall sense. Right?
So some of the basic tasks, or not even the complex tasks, tasks within a business, I call them operational inefficiencies. We basically try to help business owners and businesses optimize their operational inefficiencies through automations and AI automations. It's never only AI. The technology is new, technically. It's not there yet. Therefore, you would have to pair it with some sort of automation to support the AI system and to make it make better decisions, I would assume. Right?
So definitely helping businesses automate using AI, take it to the next level, be more efficient, save on labor costs, free up their minds, delegate to AI. We seek a lot of CEOs having problems with delegation, delegation of tasks. You know, it's amazing. So think of AI as your intern. How can you really make it do the busy work for you? Helping businesses automate their operational inefficiencies using automations and AI.
Kumar: So you made a distinction between automation and AI, and maybe you can dive into that with some examples. What's, you know, if that's a sort of a stepping stone message - you automate certain parts of your business, and that leads to being able to use AI to do something with that? Or are these two always intricately linked together?
Youssef: What I like to say is that they are linked together. They might not be, but in our approach, when approaching anything, we connect them together. For example, we just worked with a contractor, and in the contracting world, there's a huge problem, which is quoting. Right? Getting a quote. I'm sure you reached out to a contractor. It took them weeks to get back to you with a quote. And sometimes they even forget.
So we basically helped them using automation and software, bringing their quoting process and digitalizing it into an automated flow using code or using software. We brought the math, we automated the input by the user. We did the processing in the backend and we come up with an answer. So that's the automating piece of it, just using code to automate an input process and output. Right? That's automation.
But then, how do you really take it to the next step with AI? With this specific client, we're in the R&D space right now to look to take it to the next level. Imagine a kitchen plan or a bathroom plan. You have a vanity in the middle. It's 50 by 25. There's a sink there, and it's all planned out. We want AI to be able to go in and recognize all of the data in that picture, extract the numbers, do the math to calculate the square footage and the linear footage of that vanity, and then use those outputs, I would assume, put them in variables, and then put it in our automation that we created.
So you'll see here AI extracting the data, processing data somehow, and then passing it by to our automation to generate that quote just using a picture or a plan.
Kumar: That's really quite amazing. So you're replicating what the human would do. A human would go through a series of steps to generate a quote and apply their intelligence to, you know, sort of calculate the dimensions of whatever they're preparing. In this case, the dimensions of the countertop or whatever it might be. And then do the math and then fill in the quote details with what it would cost the consumer to install that piece of countertop or whatever it might be. But what you're doing is pretty amazing. You're having the automation replicate the repetitive steps of the human and the AI apply the intelligence to basically extract the dimensions from the picture, do the math, and generate a quote. Wonderful. So what happens then? This saves the human all that time. How does it affect the business?
Youssef: We are expecting that this automation would save that business $250,000 yearly, just on labor costs. They used to spend around 7 hours calculating a quote, just the calculation part. It's a labor-intensive process. There's a lot of human error that used to get a lot of mistakes. So 7 hours to get a quote. With this process, we brought it down to 1 hour for them to sign. Not even to get the quote. To sign.
Kumar: My goodness. You know, there's a lot of what I do. In my role as a business coach and an executive coach is help leaders and managers look at how value flows through their part of the organization. It's sort of a lean process flow. Right? We sort of decide, you know, decipher what it typically takes, the time it typically takes when an order comes in the door and how long it takes for that order to process and get shipped out the door. And then we start to analyze all the inefficiencies and all the steps in between those processes. And so it seems like what I do could really blend well with someone like you to sort of give that template to someone like you to automate all those steps or as many of those steps as possible and apply intelligence wherever it's needed to take that process that may be several days or maybe longer and compress that time to a fraction of what it used to take.
It's amazing that, I don't know to what extent you can do this. I'm sure that AI is being applied to supply chain logistics and through automations and all sorts of industries. And there's already tons of that out there. I'd love to hear maybe some other examples of use cases where you've helped small businesses with their AI, their business needs, if you will.
Youssef: Absolutely. Let's think of an audit-heavy process within a business. Let's think of a business where their job is to go into a business, give them a questionnaire for them to fill, like a business coach, something like you do, for example. You go in, you give them a questionnaire, right? They fill in the questionnaire. It's a really intensive questionnaire. Maybe 100 questions or something. Then you take those questions. You sit down, you read all the answers, you generate a report, and then you bring it back to the client.
I would assume a process like this would take a minimum of 2 weeks of them filling the hundred questions and then you sitting down, reading everything, processing the information, writing your thoughts, writing your ideas, formatting the report, and sending it to the client.
So what we're thinking about doing with those heavy or audit-intensive businesses is, why not automate that data crunching part of it using your information and your ways? People think of AI as the all-knowing god of everything. It's not. It's really not. The way AI works is it only knows the data you give it. If you tell it the sky is red and you ask what the color of the sky is, it will tell you it's red. Therefore, we work closely with those small businesses in collecting their knowledge and how they actually interact with the business or how they deal with any incoming business. What are their processes? How do they think? How do they process the data? What do they do? What is the expected outcome? What is the expected input coming from the business?
We cross-solve the information and pull it in a knowledge base, and then we allow someone like you - we first of all, then here comes the automation part. We automate and digitalize the data collection part from the client. So we create a form. We automate it. We call it the data collection from the client, and then we pass it to an AI model that knows every single thing about what you do and how you do it so that the outcome will be just like you want it.
So we're bringing in a reporting-intensive process where you sit down and you read everything, and you do it, and it's really - we take you 90 percent of the way there. We use your knowledge implemented in an AI model to go through the information collected by the client, and the AI model generates a report like you do it, and it thinks like you think, and it gets you 90% of the way. All you need to do is just go in, review what it's spit out, what needs to be adjusted, and you send it to the client. Therefore, it will reflect in your business more hours. You'll be able to take in way more clients. You'll be way more efficient in your processes. You'll have way more time to think of business development, and it will reflect in a lot of spaces in your business.
Kumar: It seems like a paradigm shift in how small businesses can really become more efficient and more effective in delivering value to their customers. What's been your experience in terms of demand for these types of services?
Youssef: It's still fresh. That's the thing. People don't really know how to use AI and what the actual possibilities are. What we are doing today is educating people, just giving them a nudge, something that is really small that would just open up their minds. We want the light bulb to light up, basically.
It has been since 2024, you know, 3 months in, 4 months in, if you'd assume. The way I've been doing it, I've been educating people, just giving them those examples. And it usually turns into a light bulb. "I have this great idea. Can it do this one?" But people are not educated enough. They only limit themselves to ChatGPT and the sales and marketing tools that are just bombarded on social media. No one really thinks operationally. How can it affect my business in its core, rather than just the outskirts?
Kumar: That's a really good point. You know, I'm thinking about my business as a business coach, agile coach. And I think where AI can be so useful is with the unstructured data, being able to make sense of it. And what you're saying is you can train AI with your data, and it becomes truly an assistant that knows about you, knows about your business, knows about your clients, knows about everything that you know, as long as it's in some form of data. It can learn and it can even mimic the way you communicate with them if you give it enough samples of data to train it on to say, "Okay. This is what I sound like. These are what my quotes look like. These are what my communications look like." And anything that's unstructured, it can make sense of. Am I on the right track?
Youssef: Yes. Absolutely. The core way of how AI works - and that really brings us back to why AI came up now. You said at the beginning, yeah, it has been here for years and years. Why now? Why did it explode now? It's just because of the vast information that is out there, the greatest library in human history, which is the internet. It's accessible by everyone. To everyone. That's what made AI just boom. It's the vast information. AI only works when you give it data.
Therefore, the internet has so much data. We were able to train it to that humongous amount up there. Therefore, that boom happened, that nudge happened. That's why it exploded. And also the commercialization of the tool or the commercialization of the technology, it played a huge role in small businesses adapting to and hearing about it, trying to play with it, getting around using it. So commercialization and data, that's why.
Kumar: Would you say that generative AI is where this boom started? Because before that, yes, we had AI, but it was relegated to more automation tasks and things like that and maybe some of the tools that are out there. I remember I was using this tool before ChatGPT came out. What was it called? Jasper or something? It was a tool that helped you write content, basically marketing content.
Now, I still have something similar to that, but I hardly ever use it. I just go to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever my favorite tool is. But would you say, back to my question, that it was the release of these generative AI tools that was the difference, if you will?
Youssef: Yep. I would say that because in 2022, we saw a huge boom of technology from 2020 to 2022, which was, for example, crypto. It is an amazing technology at its core. It has a lot of use cases within any business just because of the redundancy and how they store data on a lot of things. But why didn't it continue? Why did it kind of fall off? It didn't fall off. Obviously, crypto is still alive. A lot of people are using blockchain, obviously, but let's be honest, AI took over, and it fell off the public's eye, I would assume. It was because it was too complex. The normal person that did not understand technology did not get it, and it was not commercialized. No one really understood what was happening. But at its core, it was a beautiful piece of technology.
But then AI came in, the normal person can just go into ChatGPT and ask for a recipe, ask how to log in on Facebook or something. It became a personal assistant for everyone. That's why - boom. That's why, in my opinion, especially on the small and medium businesses side.
Kumar: So what should, you know, if you were to give advice to a small business owner, what would you tell them? What would you have them do if they're interested? Like, "My God, I want to get in on this AI thing." Or if they're completely uneducated, what should they do to get more educated and see if it's something that they can use to improve their business?
Youssef: For the beginner, I would just say go into ChatGPT. Talk to it. Talk to it and ask it some writing questions. Think of it as the new Google. The new phase of Google. People go in and just ask it a bunch of questions, ask it to do something for you, and test the power. No one really knows the limit. I think the limit is being tested every single day. What Nvidia and the other big companies are doing, the limit is just being tested every single day.
So test the limit and then think, "How can that help me in my business? Do I think I need - is there something that I'm just doing and it's just so annoying? We're spending so much time doing this, and it's so redundant." And think, can AI help me in reference to the examples that I talked about at the beginning? I found them to be inspiring to a lot of people, into figuring out ways to use AI in their business.
I can never tell you how to use AI in your business. You're the only person that will tell me how you run your business. Absolutely. You're right about that. Every business is unique. Every business
