If you ever ask yourself how to start with AI,
Oh, I don't want to learn Python. I don't want to learn coding. You don't need to. Today I have with me, Michael Walker. He's the CMO of SmithOS. And they actually have a solution where you just click your AI workflow together. Simple without coding. So let's look what's in it for you today. I think it will be an interesting episode. Welcome to the Beginner Sky to AI interview episode. Let's start.
Today we have Michael Walker from this Jesus TMO of SmithOS. And as the podcast is, you know, not about me, but about the person I interview, let's just give Michael the word and he can talk about who he is and how he came into AI first.
I appreciate you having me on. Thank you for the opportunity. As you mentioned, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at SmithOS. We're an operating system for what we say is an operating system for the future of work, at least as we see it. We're really the first operating system built for artificial intelligence.
What that means is you can bring any of your AI tools, all of your favorite current applications, like let's say CRMs or ESPs, email providers, combine those with any large language models, so your chat GPTs, your quads, and then build workflows or what are referred to as AI agents all within one place. And then you can share those agents with your team. You can build multi-agent systems together where multiple agents can work together.
You can chat and deploy your agents all from one system. So our goal is really to make AI adoption for individuals and business easier than ever before because our platform doesn't require coding experience or development experience. It's all drag and drop and visual. So we're about what we say is democratizing AI to the masses. Do you have a kind of case study or a story? How that works?
Yeah, we, the use cases we see are pretty unique across the board. We have everything from students who are trying to write, you know, write papers or do projects for first school up through in the business sense. We work with a large company called Halo, Halo Dog Colours. And what we do with them is we combine their order, what we have what we call an order agent.
So if you place an order with their company and you want to be able to track the order, ask questions about the order, chat with customer service, all of that is rolled up into one agent where the company can look at their inventory, look at their logistics and kind of supply chain.
look at their customer relationship management and understand who the customer is and that AI can answer questions in real time and just provide a much better customer service experience. There's no transferring to different departments or being put on hold for long periods of time or anything like that. So that's just one use case that we've seen.
So the thing is you don't have an avatar or so but you have like a system where you type something in and then it gives you the answer you need.
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, there's in really whatever agent you build it can you know, it's really It's a blank canvas your your your imagination is the only limitation But once you build the agent you can talk to it just in a chat interface So just like you're you know if you're communicating with slack to a co-worker or a messaging system with your co-worker. Hey, can you help me?
Do this, or can you get this completed? You can do the exact same thing with the agents that you build in real time. So we really try to make it as simple and intuitive as working with a coworker as today to be able to do that with your AI agents.
And it takes then, as you connect, basically the data of your firm, you connect it to it, and then it can access this and can work with it. That's the thing. Exactly. Yeah, we have two main deployment routes. One is via the cloud, and this is what 98% of businesses will use, but also for enterprise clients or companies that have to really be more careful with their data security.
Maybe they work with the government or in healthcare or finance or something. For those type of clients, we also have what's called a local runtime environment. So you can build the agent in our platform, but then you can essentially download it and run it locally on your own servers or on location, and then you don't have to release that data into a cloud environment and it keeps it much more secure. So there's two ways to do it.
That is really interesting. Like here in Germany, we have the European laws really hard on AI. So I think that's also an interesting solution. And many firms, they don't want to give the data to someone. They don't trust in any way. They can't control or so. Yeah, that's interesting. That leads to a thing.
If anybody in the firm can use AI, what skills do you think are necessary? I mean, it's like, do you need any skills or is it just doing? I think, and this is, to me, what the beautiful side of AI is, and this is the positive future that I see is AI will be a tool that we can use to automate the mundane and the repeatable.
Data analysis and interpretation, data entry, any repetitive tasks really, and it frees us up to do what we're really good at, which is creativity and empathy and innovation and critical thinking and problem solving.
In my opinion, the skills that'll be most valuable and kind of, you know, through the end of this year and into the next couple of years are actually the soft skills, right? The ability to have interpersonal conversations, the ability to think outside of the box, because all of the execution kind of level tasks can be augmented
with artificial intelligence and AI agents. So problem solving, creative thinking, creativity in general, those are the things that I think will really be in high demand moving forward. So a lot of people think it's the opposite, right? I need to learn how to code and become a developer and they kind of get stressed about that. But I think it's exactly the opposite. You don't need to be able to code. AI can even code.
You can ask chat GPT to write code for you and develop a program. You don't have to worry about that. It's really taking a step back and focusing on what we as human beings do the best and that's really being creative and stepping into the humanities side of the world. Change is the job profile but not the amount of jobs needed. It's just the tasks become different tasks.
Yeah, I think there will also be an element of job creation. So there will be some jobs that will likely be replaced or reduced in some way by artificial intelligence. But just like the invent of the internet did, right? And there's been many examples of this. But as that happens,
Many more jobs are created, right, to manage these systems and connect these systems and think through them. And in that regard, you know, becoming, so at Smith OS, we just launched an AI agent engineer certification program. It's very robust. It's like nine hours of video tutorials and quizzes and exams.
Anybody can go and take that. It's completely free and become a certified AI agent engineer. You don't have the code. You don't have to be a developer. It just teaches you how to think about AI agents, how to think about building solutions for artificial intelligence.
That sort of role is going to blow up, I think, over the next year or two, because companies are going to want to build AI agents, and they're going to need individuals who know how to build them. And if you can sit in front of a computer and drag and drop modules and think through critically how to solve problems, you can become an AI agent engineer.
Oh, that's interesting. It's all about AI literacy. One comes always back to that. What can one do? It's like, it's not a tool. I mean, a hammer, you can use it to hit nails or whatever. That's like, it's like, there's not much what you can do with a hammer besides that. But AI is so big a topic. So you have to give nine hour. Okay, that's...
Exactly. I should take it, but I always have to find that nine hours, but it's interesting. No, but really, I think it's all about logical thinking a little bit. The people have to learn that and the other thing is to see what other people do with it. I mean, I was at your block and you have lots of examples of how things work there.
Do people come to you and do they know what they want to do or are they lost at first? I would say to answer the question directly, most people are lost. But what they do know, same as any time in probably human history, they know what problem they're experiencing, right? And so when they come and say, here's the problem that I'm experiencing,
We have an entire team who can help them think through, you know, here's the best way to solve that problem. Here's how other customers are solving that problem. Here are the types of agents to do that. And we even have a pre-built template library of agents for a lot of the most common use cases, like
content creation and SEO and data analysis and that sort of thing. So we try to help people think through that in advance. But we also, you know, we have a lot of community efforts, you know, through Discord and other areas where people can come and share, hey, I was facing this problem. Here's the agent that I built to solve that. Here are the results on the backend. So yeah, just communicating those together. Because if you're experiencing a problem,
It's very rare that you're the only one experiencing it, right? If you're experiencing it, probably thousands of other people are as well. Yeah. And with such a new toy tool, that toy is also a toy, but it's such a new tool. I mean, people don't know and it's interesting to see someone uses it. And if you have a community, you can share it. It's also interesting. Yeah, that makes sense.
helping the others and it's really part of the business. I love that because I teach a lot and I like to take people from one step to the other so that they can solve their problems. It's really like something I live for and I see you have a lot of that and the AI skills people have to actually use them.
Absolutely. And it's more than just the professional side, right? Like AI can be very helpful in your personal life. You know, there are things like if you're planning a trip.
Hey, I can be great at helping you plan that trip. You tell it here are my interests and here are the things I like to do and you're going into a new city or a new country and it can help you think through, hey, here are some things that you can try or here's a sample itinerary and here are the costs for flights and hotels or whatever it may be. So I think and you mentioned this earlier, it's the
comfortability and the literacy around artificial intelligence because if you use it for good, it can make your life so much better in so many ways personally and professionally.
Do the people that use your platform are more like private, probably more business or like, or really business? How is it? Because you also have those communication tools. I think you get a good grasp of where the business community is just now. Do they do? Do they laugh? Do they do AI projects? Do they still search? Where are they?
It's like the gold rush right now. Everybody wants to be involved in AI. But again, even we work with some very large enterprise businesses, some of the biggest in the world. Even those companies have some anxiety and fear around AI. And it usually comes down to, I don't know how to get started. Where do I start?
Number two is there's often some knowledge gaps or skills gaps. Hey, we're set up like this now. How do we how do we solve these problems? And third is technology gaps, right? You've probably built a business or a system on certain technologies and now you need to integrate it into into a new one. But we also see a lot of
students who are looking to learn and really get educated as well as solopreneurs and entrepreneurs, right, who, you know, if you started a business 10 years ago, you may, if you didn't know how to do certain things, you have to either spend the time to learn it or hire somebody you did. Now you can deploy AI to help you do that. So people who have been, you know, I say that every individual has a thousand great ideas in their lifetime. And it's just a matter of, can you bring that to life and bring it to fruition?
AI can help you do that now. It can help you think through it, create business plans, tell you where to start, handle a lot of the skills that maybe you don't have and don't have expertise in. And now so many people who wouldn't be able to start a business and chase their dream previously can do that now thanks to AI. So we see those kind of use cases as well.
I love it because I come actually from entrepreneurship. That's what I studied. And there was the saying that an idea is worth nothing because it's what you have to put on. You have to put effort in to make it live. And so if that is easier and the idea becomes much more important, that is really, wow, for entrepreneurs, I have to research on that.
It's the most important. I also come from an entrepreneur background. I had my own business for eight years before I joined Smith OS and I've, you know,
My wife could tell you the amount of business ideas I've had that either never went anywhere or just failed completely, right? Never tell the wives. It's the same with me. There you go. That's maybe, maybe I'm learning that. But if I had the access to these kind of tools, then, you know, I only think of what, which one of those ideas I had maybe could have been successful because I wouldn't have made this mistake or AI could have helped me complete this task that was really a downfall for me.
I really think people should look at it from a hopeful perspective and look at it as just a really helpful tool and not as any sort of replacement or anything like that. It's kind of the idea, it's like leveraging the playing field. The smaller ones then have tools, the bigger ones had only in older times.
That's exactly it. We have a saying in Smith OS, uh, we democratize AI. So you have enterprise grade technology, but with the startup speed. So startups and entrepreneurs move fast. You don't have years to plan campaigns and get things out. So now you have the same technology that these big companies have had forever, but it's, uh, it's democratized and it's accessible to, to nearly anybody. I mean, our, we have free plans and then we have
plans where you can have agents running and out the door for $20 per month. So to the vast majority of entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs, it's affordable and it's accessible.
Notice really, I mean, the big ones, they have other possibilities, but it's how much can you take away from it? And that's really interesting. That leads me to a thing I wanted to ask you about what did you, how did you become interested in AI? What was your starting point?
Yeah, it's a great question. I've been in and around technology my whole career. So I worked in-house for around a decade or early stage technology companies, normally SaaS companies. Then I went out onto my own and I started two different agencies. The first one was a growth marketing agency where we worked with, again, those early stage kind of companies.
In one of the clients was a predecessor to what is now Smith OS. And so I was working with them in the Gen AI space. This was before chat GPT. And I said, you know what, I think there's really something here. And I started another marketing agency called the AI agency.
super creative name, right? It was just the AI agency. And this is what we did. We helped businesses adopt AI, utilize it for their marketing growth processes, like get more with less essentially was, was our goal. Through that, I met the founders of, of Smith OS and saw what they were working on. And I just said, man, this is, uh,
This is an opportunity to be a part of something where not only is it a business, but they, they really care about helping people and doing right, you know, and I look at AI like you used to analogy of a hammer earlier. When I'm holding a hammer, I can.
build a home for the homeless or I could hit you in the head with it, right? It's all about what's my intent with this tool and AI is a very powerful tool. So for me joining a company where I saw that they had good intentions, wanting to help people, wanting to make it accessible. I thought that was a really important mission to get behind.
that talking about you, how do you do your use chativity and code? Do you use them for your work? Do you use them privately? What do you do with those tools? Every day, all day, every day, all day. So even in my personal life, I use it for thinking up new date night ideas with the wife, right? What's something new and fun that we could do?
Like I mentioned, planning trips or another big one for me. I'm American, but I live in Sweden with my wife. And so when I want to see what's going on in the news, I'm not a very
politically motivated person and I like to kind of filter that out. So I'll use AI and say, hey, I want to know what's going on with this event. Can you go look at five or six different sources and then give me kind of an analysis of both sides? So I can really try to understand what's going on in the world and what that looks like. So, and then professionally, I don't think there's a moment. I have Claude and Chat TPT up on my screen right now, even preparing for this interview. So I'm using it 24-7 throughout the day.
Yeah, chat to be in cloud. I use them both. Yeah, it's like I didn't try Gemini yet, but I mean, it's like so much out there. No, it's like, do you have a business prompt or something user typically for the your most? I don't know the hammer energy, but what you do the most with it. Yeah, so I'll give you guys a
One of as a marketer so anyone who's who's in the marketing sales or commercial side.
I have a prompt where I train, whether it's Chachi BT or Claude, I train it to really think and analyze like Steve Jobs and Mark Cuban. Those are my two favorite business people. So anytime I'm about to write some marketing copy or think of a campaign idea, I'll run it through this prompt. It's like analyze it as if you were
Mark Cuban and Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs is obviously the visionary. He's great with positioning. Mark Cuban is a very good sales and growth minded person. So when I do that, I take my ideas, give it to the AI and then it'll give me feedback and say, hey, maybe you didn't consider this or think about rephrasing this or hey, you're missing the big picture of what you really have here. That's just one way that I use it very frequently.
Oh, that's great. It's like the perfect way of giving the AI assistant role, like in the sense of what it does, but also priming it with an assistant like Steve Jobs and Mark Cuban that that totally works. Yeah, I can see that I have to also try that. Yeah, it's like.
I kind of go Steve Jobs, it's like, but it has an interesting thing that I saw about those persons, because they are public, everything is public, what they say. The information is there, so it can take this and rearrange this for your topic. Yeah, that's great, that I love. Yeah, so the thing is actually, we talked about that already, like, Hema, how can you use it?
But we come to the last question of this interview, and this would be a terminator scenario or a matrix scenario. How do you think it's probable that the AI takes over? It's an interesting question. The direct answer is matrix scenario. And we actually show
When our founders were sitting and thinking of a name for this new technology. We were, you know, they were playing with a few different names and our co founder and CTO said, you know what, what we're building these agents who can work together.
be in all these different places at one time, be able to do multiple things at the same time. This is really like an agent Smith from the Matrix. And so that's where we came up with the name Smith, S-M-Y-T-H-O-S, because we said, hey, we're essentially building the modern version and the AI version of
of an agent Smith. So, I do think it's important though that we all, every one of us as individuals, takes up the responsibility to get more familiar with AI because over time, as it becomes more prominent, it's going to be used by governments, it's going to be used by large corporations, and we, the individuals, have to be able to
know enough about the technology and its implications to say, here's what's okay and here's what's not okay. Here's what we'll accept and what we won't accept because there are a lot of
ethical and moral considerations when it comes to AI at a large scale, right, especially from a societal point of view. So while I see nothing but a positive future for AI, I do think it's important that each and every person gets familiar with it, increase your understanding of it, and be a part of the public discourse because this is going to be an important topic for societies and governments in the years to come.
Yeah, that's good. Go out and talk to the people out there and learn about AI. They just think it could take away. Don't be afraid of it. That's the taste. Don't be afraid. Yeah, that's good. I love it. Yeah. So, Michael, tell us where we can find you, where we can find Smith OS and, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. Our website is smithos.com. That's S-M-Y-T-H-O-S.com. And if you're looking for a good starting point, as I mentioned, we just launched our agent engineer certification. Anybody can do it. You don't have to be a technical expert or a developer. It is some time. You know, it's about nine to 10 hours to complete, but
Our goal with that is to make sure that anyone who completes it, whether you use our platform or another platform, it doesn't matter. You'll understand the basics of what are AI agents, how do they work, how do you think about building them, and it's just a kind of an intro course to
AI agent building and development. So if anyone is looking to get started and unsure what that really means, it's completely free. It's a free resource that we've put out there to help people just start to get educated on the matter. That's good for everybody who listened now. I will put everything on the show notes and you can just go there and click on the stuff because yeah, it's a lot. But yeah. So I would say Michael, thank you for being here and answering those questions I had.
Yeah, we'll see how the agents and develop if they become agents Smith some at some point and do more for us than just connect our business data. And like you said, we have to be you have to know what happens. And if you everybody knows if you know what happens, then then you can control the stuff. So thank you for being here. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. So there was great. I learned a lot from Michael. The things I
did some Pascal programming in university, then long ago, and now I thought I do have to learn some Python or something, but programming is not my thing. I don't want to, yeah, search three days for one missing a comma or whatever, that the code is not working there. But if I can click everything together,
That's the solution. That is actually the eye. It should work for me. And I think Smith or Assistant, interesting alternative.
So try it out. And while you're doing stuff, follow the podcast. If you don't do it already, go to the newsletter website, argoberlin.com slash newsletter. You get all the new episodes and some information, sometimes some rebate courses for my classes. Hope to hear and see you next episode. Signing off, did my from Argo Berlin.
