Ahh . . . missed that. Then I think the bias there might be “let someone else give the answer”. 
If you want your bottom line to improve, you will either need to reduce expenses or increase revenue. Looking at how you are using it, what do you think your proportion is?
Mythos (“Fable”) is finally out. Good time to get your name on a famous math problem.
Seems like it might be good use at drug design. Or, you know, bioterrorism. Because of that they added some guardrails that make it less intelligent on specific topics.
Also, holy crap there are a lot of benchmarks these days.
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Reducing head count via normal turnover (retirement, job leavers etc) while augmenting your existing workforce via AI is what is happening.
You end up doing more with less people. Productivity goes up.
Of course, this might not work everywhere. Stretching your workforce can also come with its own set of problems.
A whole pile of both. I can replace a developer and a marketing person, at a minimum.
And I’m expecting, perhaps hoping , to increase revenue substantially. both by completely optimizing my current process - mo money, and adding in new products also mo money.
2026 is shaping up to be a very exciting year for me.
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I understand replacing two people and how that can reduce expenses.
I’m not so clear how “optimizing processes” increases revenue. I can see that “new products” might.
I’m looking at it from the perspective of the broad stock market. If Pepsi and Coca Cola can both cut staff, that reduces expenses and improves the bottom line for both.
If they both think they are going to increase revenue with AI, I think they will have problems. They can’t both increase market share and I don’t think AI will mean that people will spend higher fractions of their incomes on beverages.
You bring up an interesting wild card. Maybe AI will make small companies relatively more competitive. I think that the 20th century growth in the stock market was partially big companies replacing small companies – McDonald’s put thousands of mom & pop diners out of business. Are you thinking that your growth will come at the expense of publicly traded corporations?
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You’re voting for mostly lower expenses, not increased revenue, correct?
Yes. In the short-term, thats the behavior that I am seeing.
I advertise on Google. Consumers land on my website, some convert into contacts, some convert into sales.
I am this close to ‘closing the loop’ on all this, optimizing every step. AI will suggest variations on ads, we will ab test that and I’ll have inhouse software to track that. When they land on my website, we will ab test the content on the page, and track that - whether they bounce, do something else, or convert to a contact. When they convert to a sale, that info is fed back to google so google can show my ads to more people with whatever attributes that sale had, thus showing my ads to a more targeted audience. I’m in the midst of generating software to handle this whole route, from working on ads, to measuring the sales, to integrating the tracking on my website along with tracking the info that comes to my site from Google.
Once that’s done, we’re going to increase our advertising scope, adding in a lot more niche terms because I can develope custom ads and pages for very specialized terms that maybe only show up once a day. But 50 search terms like that, where I’m the only biz optimized for that search term…
Along with setting up niche websites for specialized areas, with their own specialized ads and all the tracking in the above, all merged together.
I knew all this needed to be done. It’s impossible for a small biz to actually do it. I’m almost there and it’s taken me almost no time to do it.
Here’s where the money is, and why the concept of the sales funnel (sort of the circle I mentioned above) becomes of primary importance. I advertise to 10k people. 5% click on my ad. 10% become a contact. 10% become a sale. So I make 5 sales.
If I tweak my landing page so that 15% become a contact, I just increased my sales by 50%. That time of increase is not hypothetical. And I can make those kinds of tweaks at a variety of places in the process. I won’t be surprised if sales double or triple when I’m done, just from optimization. And I didn’t even start to play around with what ads I’m spending money on.
As you can imagine, it just wasn’t feasible for me to have that level of software and data monitoring before - it was either unaffordable or unable to be developed.
At the same time as I’m building all this out, I’m restructing the technical architecture of my website and making what I think are going to be some huge gains in search engine optimization. Again, just due to technical stuff I really couldn’t implement by myself. Now it’s being implemented, along with a growth strategy.
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Assuming that the changes being made will result in some increased revenue, getting it to market faster will get those increased revenues realized sooner.
That helps a lot. I can see where optimizing advertising efficiency increases revenue. You have a really interesting story.
I can also see where this is suddenly possible for a small business.
I’m still left with “Do you have competitors who will lose sales to you?” and “Are those competitors big enough to be publicly traded?”
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There’s really two big startups that I think are well funded. One I heard went to y combinator and got 10’s of millions. I’ve also heard inside the industry that their sales are absolute crap (they’ve had companies’ cancel contracts on them) and I don’t think they’re doing as many sales as they’d like to portray. Or more specifically, they do a lot more sales than me, but overall revenue difference isn’t likely as big as you might expect. I suspect my average sale is worth about 10X theirs. So, the two big players, I think are just bleeding money, burning venture capital money while paying them a paycheque. THey’re the big bois, but eh, I’m not overly concerned.
Then there’s a couple smaller players I keep seeing kicking around. Not sure how they’re hanging on, maybe they aren’t. One of their life insurance sales reps just bought life insurance from me lol.
So I’m a bit unique, sort of in the middle right now. My useage of AI is going to open up some interesting opportunities in the next 6-18 months I think, like can I optimize enough to overwhelm how much I can sell, thus bringing on other advisors and starting to scale. Or not - I dunno. I do know that I can sell enough insurance just between myself and my spouse doing wfh to make the kind of money that would embarrass an actuary.
Too bad its all in CAD.
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Actually that’s quite fine, most Canadians aren’t having any US envy anymore.We’re quite happy with how things are up here these days, for the most part.
I know some life insurance advisors, not me, are making 7 figures, wfh, and doing a lot of golfing. Not my market, but it exists.
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Thanks. I’ve avoided asking you about your business because I figured you didn’t want to out yourself. I guessed you were providing services to marketing organizations.
Looks more like direct sale via internet. So your closest competitors are others trying to do the same thing. You say they are VC funded and stumbling. It sounds like they are the biggest losers if you are successful. Then there would be traditional FTF marketing firms. They would typically be too small to be publicly traded. Then the sales divisions of big insurance companies. Some of them are publicly traded (I don’t know anything about Canadian market shares).
So, back to my first thought. Your additional revenue comes mostly from gaining market share. But, the primary losers aren’t publicly traded.
I could imagine this as a typical scenario for one or two person + AI shops. They might not be in a business that dominated by really big companies, but they can cause problems for the 20-50 person firms.
Remember though life insurance isn’t bought it’s sold. Higher sales for one advisor don’t necessarily cannibalize other advisors, can just increase size of market.
lol conversation this morning with claude. It gave me a firm answer on statistically significance. I went back with a wtf, excuse me? and it responded, oh,well, yes you’re technically correct, the best kind, and actually, also correct in this case.
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