S1. Ep18 - How a Dancing with the Stars Pro Uses AI Automation

Katie: Welcome to the AI Automations for Business Podcasts. We're your hosts, Katie and Null, and we'll be discussing how you can use AI for your business along with the latest news, updates and automations to help you stay ahead of the curve, allowing you to grow and scale your business more efficiently. Please be sure to subscribe and I hope you enjoy this

Corky Ballas: episode.

Katie: Hello, welcome back to another episode. Hello, hi, I'm Katie and I've got Nol here. with me as well. Hi Noel.

Noel: Hello.

Katie: How are you doing?

Noel: Oh, again, amazing as always.

Katie: That is going to be your catchphrase, Noel. Well, this week, we are joined by a special guest. Our guest this week holds multiple dance championship titles. It's a former professional on Dancing with the And he's even been

Corky Ballas: mentioned on

Katie: a Gilmore Girls episode, which is where I first heard about our guest. It's Mr. Corky Ballas. Hi, how are you guys?

Corky Ballas: How are you? We're doing down there.

Katie: We're good. How are you?

Corky Ballas: We're doing good, beautiful weather over here. And all is good. You know, like they say, first wealth is health.

Katie: Absolutely, Corky. I'm with you on that one. Corky, we are so thrilled that you are our guest this week. But people might be thinking, why is a professional dancer on a podcast by AI Automation? Well,

Corky Ballas: I have to say, as much as I was a dancing nerd, back in high school and college, I did some coding. So I say the language was back then was, I don't know if you've got to. guys have heard of this language, Pascal and C. Sharp. So I was coding in there. And then as I was back in those days, I was a beta tester for Microsoft. Then I became a beta tester for Apple. And so as much as I love dancing, I loved anything technology. So, you know, I guess as long, running parallel with my dancing, I've been really a, um, We're very interested in computers, programming, and just basically technology. You know, when I was a young gun, you know, the Internet was the big thing. You all remember AOL.com?

Katie: Yeah.

Corky Ballas: And I don't know if you remember Prodigy. A prodigy was kind of before it. I don't know. A little second. You know, I was doing the old coupler on the, you know, when you put your phone on the coupler and it went, the BBSs is, the Jerry did you know? with the RJ-11 that you'd have to plug in to the side of the modem

Katie: they're talking. Yes,

Corky Ballas: so I've always been interested. Like this is, for me, when the Internet finally took off, that's kind of where we are now with AI. Yeah, I agree with you. I love building industries. That's basically the, and I was tuned into it because of Nvidia. And then when I was, I would watch, I would see these, these streams. teaching automations and so you know without without the the invidia stuff this is making it for the end user easy making life easier now no is a little way more advanced than me i was i'm using make dot com now is that right no

Noel: i'm a big make dot com fanboy i i always get told off for mention them on the podcast

Katie: oh you don't get told of is just Noel loves make.com and they always seem to get a mention every episode.

Corky Ballas: Wonderful. Well, I do too. I like them too. I haven't I haven't ventured out to the N8N yet. But yeah. So and then what the next thing. I joined I joined a group and this is how I met Noel and he helped me a lot in my AI automation's journey. and this is why we're here now. I think one and I've known each other almost a year, over a year now. Every year, yeah. Do you believe that? That's what we were just talking about. I can't believe that. That is amazing. Let me ask you a quick question. In your opinion, as you've got your ear more closer to the ground than I do, how much has it improved in the last 12 months,

Noel: in your opinion? Huge. Absolutely. The language models are, you know, exceptional compared to what they were. when we first started out back in the day.

Corky Ballas: Do you find make.com a little easier to use now than, because remember it was really buggy when we were first using it?

Noel: Yes, yeah, it's a lot better. Yeah, there's a lot more features. But yeah, with like the advancements in tech are everywhere. I mean, I know you'd love to do your image generations, Corky.

Corky Ballas: Oh, yeah, I love it.

Noel: You're always there as Superman or Batman, you know. And that in video, you know, like, yeah, it's going crazy, isn't it, at the minute?

Corky Ballas: So you see Make continually upgrading, keeping up with the time, you don't see it getting left behind by N8N or anything like that? No,

Noel: no, they keep up at the moment, yeah.

Corky Ballas: I think, didn't you go to a conference in Germany out with that to see that, or am I wrong about that? Yeah, no, no, yeah,

Noel: we went to the, Mike conference last year, yeah. What was the big thing that? I can't remember, something about they had announced, it was something called the grid which i have access to so it gives you like an overview of how all your automations connect together so yeah it's pretty cool but yeah not many people have access to it yeah

Corky Ballas: right and then they had something called about the third man or the what was it the make man or i can't maybe i'm

Noel: saying human in the loop that was it human in loop yeah

Corky Ballas: i've got access to that as well is that developed is that proprietary or is it still in a beta

Noel: I think it's still in beta, yeah, but it's really handy because what it does is, it will break your automation, send you an email and say, well, look, AI's done this, you're happy with it, and then you can go, yes, I'm happy with it, and then that triggers the next automation. So it's really, it's really clever.

Corky Ballas: Now, do you have any tutorials on how to use this?

Noel: Not yet, no.

Corky Ballas: I shouldn't do. How about any tutorials on me? Do you have any tutorials on me? Yes, I've got two courses at the moment, yeah. Wonderful. Three courses, sorry.

Noel: Yeah.

Corky Ballas: Wow. So what platform is that on? I'd like to maybe go check those out.

Noel: So they're on Udeme. And then one's on Katie's platform, but yeah. They're on Udeme. Yeah.

Katie: But they're on our website.

Noel: They are, yes.

Katie: Makeautomations.a.m.

Corky Ballas: Oh, makeautomations.aI. Is that the website?

Katie: Yeah.

Corky Ballas: Wonderful. See, I learned something new today. That's the other thing I love about this. It is a never-ending learning. it's like it is amazing every day there's something i mean i think now clod.a i is kind of shot over chat gpt i don't think chat gpt i don't think chat gpts going to take this lying down i think they're going to

Noel: it's good yeah yeah it's really good

Katie: okay i would love for you to tell us how you're using AI automations in in the dance world because i think how how you're using it is really interesting. And I think a lot of people listening to this will get a lot of value from it as well.

Corky Ballas: Okay, well, I'm coming out with a children's book that teaches, that will teach you how to dance, you know, one little step. And the book has, it's for children, but it's for interaction and engagement with your mom or dad or maybe your brother or sister. And it exposes you a little bit to, you know, learning to dance if that's something that somebody would be interested in. Because dancing is fun. It's a great exercise without, you know, like I don't personally like to go to the gym anymore. I think that's boring. I'd rather dance for 30 minutes.

Katie: I agree.

Corky Ballas: And, you know, I'm kind of sweating. And, yeah, it's a fun. You don't even know the 30 minutes has gone by. So that's what I love about dancing at my age. It just keeps the heart rate going. It's really, there are a lot of health benefits. So the AI I'm using that once I finally launched the book and my, I'm going to create a school where you can come in to learn online dances. So I'm going to advertise online. And once, if somebody was to purchase the book, it's called Chloe Chachas in London, actually, in London. Not about that. So it's called Chloe Chavez in London. If they were to purchase the book, the automation would then send them a welcome email, also send them a welcome of the dance that's in that book, a free dance lesson on how to do that and explaining it. And that's what I'm using the automations for, is to automatically take care of the customer. And that's my main thing. Send an email, send a video, send a follow-up email. Well, you know, these things are not new. I mean, there's companies that have been doing that for years, but it's just getting a lot easier to do it. And you don't need to have 10 different applications to do this. You can do this under one roof. Absolutely.

Katie: Yeah. I think that's such a fun way to get people involved in dancing because you've got the physical product, but at the same time, you've got the tech behind it.

Corky Ballas: Yes, that's fun. Yeah.

Katie: Really great.

Corky Ballas: You know, I'm actually thinking about that if I, once I get the school open, I might have a little tech section for it just in case somebody's interested, you know, just nothing fancy. But I'll have a health section that talks about, you know, how, you know, how we should eat, you know, a little bit about intermittent fasting. That's very healthy for you. And so, yeah, it'll be, it'll be dancing. You know, the dance business has got a lot of industry. inside of it. It's got the airline industry, the hair and makeup industry, the dress design industry, shoe industry, exercise, physical strength, vitamin industry. So there are so many, there are so many things that dancing has in it. So all those spinoffs are actually relevant to dancing. And obviously, if you're a beginner and you came to the school and that's all you want to do fine, but if you wanted to, okay, let's hear about the health. Let's hear about the hair and makeup. My goal is to get my wife, Carolina, to give a hair and makeup lesson. How do you get ready for your first competition? You know, what's wonderful about the dance business is every age can compete.

Katie: Yep.

Corky Ballas: I just judged a competition. We had a man turning 99. He's going to be 100 years old in August.

Katie: Oh, my goodness. That is incredible. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable.

Corky Ballas: And, you know, I mean, bless his heart, he could barely walk, but he was enjoying himself.

Katie: Oh, and that's what it's all about, isn't it, Koki?

Corky Ballas: Well, that's what he says if it wasn't for dancing, that he wouldn't have made it this far, because he's been doing it 20 years. So that's amazing. Good for him. That's what's great about it. There's competition at every, so there was not any other 99-year-olds against him, but there is a 90-to-100 group, an 80 to 90, so you compete against each other. You can compete with an amateur, like yourself and Noel could dance together, or you could dance with an instructor. Hey, I'm a professional.

Noel: Come on.

Corky Ballas: Well, maybe we can get them. How about we could make some footprints that make it print out for us and we could just step on the footprints. That could be kind of fun. Yeah. Yeah.

Noel: But we could tell them on Etsy. It could automate that. Right.

Katie: Amazing. Sounds great. And then you're using AI automation as well, Corky, for your dance studio.

Corky Ballas: Right. Another way is, you know, I'm working with chatbot at the moment, you know, answer calls and give people information. And the system I'm using is the H-Gen API, which means H-E-Y-G-E-N. And the voices have gotten a lot, a lot more human-like. So it doesn't sound like you're talking to a machine. And so it just will answer questions. So let's say I was to scan the dance studio of their website. It would take all that information of the website. So if you don't have a good website, then there's no information. But literally you have to feed. You have to feed the website, I mean the automation with all the information. And if the person asks any questions about the dance school, if it's on the website, which it should be under their FAQ section, it will have an answer for you. So that's pretty awesome, actually.

Noel: Yeah, that sounds really exciting.

Corky Ballas: Think about hiring someone and having to train them, all this information, right? And then the guy, the girl, quits next week or the month after. Now you have to train somebody all over again. So that's the wonderful thing about this, is it knows the answers, it sounds, human. And, you know, on the chatbot I'm working on, it says, the first thing it says, you know, I am, you're speaking to a chatbot, press yes to continue or no, not to continue, and you can leave a message. That way you know up front, I'm not trying to fool you. So I like that. I prefer that. So you have got, you prefer that rather than, you know, pretending to be a human and you're not. So I give it. them, I actually give them the option. So if you want to talk to, to our studio chatbot, press one. If you want to just leave a message and wait for a human to call, you press two. However, we know all the answers over here. Yeah.

Katie: Yeah. And are you finding that many people are leaving messages to be called back?

Corky Ballas: No, I'm not. I'd say, you know what, to be honest, if it's a real, if it's an elderly person, they leave the message.

Katie: Yeah.

Corky Ballas: They did good to call the number on their cell phone.

Katie: That's... Yeah.

Corky Ballas: Said you a letter.

Katie: Yeah.

Noel: You know,

Corky Ballas: my mother's no longer with me, but bless her heart. She couldn't use a phone. I was like, I don't see that.

Noel: They're big

Corky Ballas: buttons.

Noel: You just push.

Corky Ballas: You know what, to be honest, she didn't want to know how to use it. That's the bottom line. That's true. It's like people that don't. They say, oh, I can't dance. I have two leffi. They don't really want to learn. That's the bottom line. Yeah. The mind is like a parachute. It functions best when open. Yes.

Katie: Absolutely, Corky. It's when I try to make Noel dance with me in the kitchen while I'm waiting for something to boil or cook. I'm like, less dance. And he's like, I can't, I can't. And so then I end up just kind of like using him. and he's just like, oh.

Corky Ballas: You know what, no, I'm going to send you guys a seven-minute dance lesson, and I want you to try it out and give me some feedback, what you liked and what you didn't like. But it's pretty easy to teach you to dance in seven minutes. And if you can walk forward and side, you can dance.

Katie: Okay, but I'm really looking forward to that. Challenge accepted, Kourke.

Corky Ballas: Hey, I will send that to you. When we hang up, I will send that to you. It'll be a loom video also. Oh, nice.

Noel: We'll see you at the next championship. Well,

Corky Ballas: there is one for your age bracket. Careful what you wish for, a note.

Noel: I know, yeah.

Katie: How long have we got to practice, Korky, before the next dance competition for our age group?

Corky Ballas: Well, you know, there's a dance. And I don't know what it is in England, but in America, there's a dance competition every weekend. somewhere in the United States every weekend somewhere it's unbelievable so

Katie: you could do a dance competition every weekend if you wanted to I

Corky Ballas: would not do that but yes if you wanted to yes why you know I just finished at the dance competition it had 20,000 entries in seven days 20 thousand in seven days and the judges this is what I told this is what I tried to tell no when you leave, like literally our day starts at 7 in the morning, a little bit of breaks, but it ends at 1 o'clock in the morning and starts again at 7 because you have to get through all those entries. So when I said, I'd rather do it now because once I go, you know, for the next, I'm going to Canada, so I'll be out of pocket for the next two weeks, really. I'm not exaggerating. Yeah. You get an hour break, but you don't want to, you don't want to, you just want to,

Katie: you know. Yeah, you just want to chill. Yeah.

Corky Ballas: You know, to be honest, when there's 20, 30 couples on a dance floor and you have, you have a minute and a half to judge them, you divide 20 couples by that minute. You're looking at these people two to three seconds to whittle it down.

Katie: Why?

Noel: Why?

Corky Ballas: So your brain is on fire. It's like making make automation that keeps getting stuck and giving you error 404 or whatever the error in the messaging.

Noel: What you need is a corky AI. so it would be a camera that watches the dance floor and then just it understands how you judge or you look for and then just does it for you and yeah, you can be sat back drinking a coffee having a good time going yet.

Corky Ballas: Well, the organizers would love that they wouldn't have to pay for airfare, hotel, food, all that stuff. Wow.

Katie: And you could know it all from him, Korky. Yeah.

Corky Ballas: That's kind of scary. It actually is very possible.

Katie: Yeah.

Corky Ballas: I don't know if you guys makes you wonder what people will do for a living you've replaced by all these machines, though. Yeah,

Katie: we were having a conversation with Liam, who came on our podcast a couple of months ago about this.

Corky Ballas: What do you have to say about this?

Katie: So we were kind of having like the joint conversation that there will still need to be a human to like press the button to be able to do things or, you know, where some empathy or maybe emotion is needed and also you're still need people to kind of like do the prompts and the prompt engineering and things like that that's that was kind of like what we were saying wasn't it no

Noel: yeah yeah we're still going to need some sort of human touch very light touch you know what the robot does all the heavy lifting but it's only one human not 10 12

Corky Ballas: people that's yeah yeah we're

Noel: safe for now

Corky Ballas: amazing to see what you know how are we all how it evolves it's

Katie: yeah it really is

Noel: yeah it's exciting times yeah

Katie: Noel if you've got any questions that you would like to ask corkey oh so many

Noel: oh yeah I could I could go I could talk to you all day to go on I's corkey but I guess like for people that are just getting into AI automations like how did you find it getting started like what was your what was kind of the catalyst that got you going and thinking actually I could do this you know I was watching streams video streams

Corky Ballas: and that's kind of how I got into it I was watching I can't think of the names now of these guys that are teaching AI automations but there was quite a few of them teaching make.com and that's what I would type in. I would type make.com and just watch the tutorials. And yeah, that's how I got started. I thought, well, I can do that. That's not just plugging this module into that. That's not a big deal.

Noel: Yeah. Yeah, it's quite easy once you get going, is it? It's just getting going. It's like dancing, I guess. As soon as I start, as soon as I start dancing, you won't get me stopped.

Corky Ballas: Yes, no. Now that's, you know what? See, that's a mental, like I said, mine is like a parachute and functions best when open.

Noel: I have to remember that.

Corky Ballas: Yeah, you just have to really have to stay open-minded. What bugs me about make is when it has an error and you can't really figure out how to do it. And, you know, I hope that gets better. You can ask that thing, the beta, what is it, the robot, the AI bot, how to fix it. But that thing is. yeah it's not great at the minute yeah i wish they would improve that you would think that imagine i it's just like i tell you about these bots you can upload everything about the website and it knows the answer right for example i had this indicator that i wanted built in think script and think script is a trading platform and so i put this chart i took a picture of a chart and put it in uh it was chat gpt and i said can you write me a script for this chart and it wrote me the script and it actually worked. That was amazing. So why can't it do that with all of the errors? Like they know all their errors. Why can't they feed all those errors into their language model and have it say, well, try this, try this. Like why haven't they figured that out yet?

Noel: I mean,

Corky Ballas: they're seeing all the errors, right? That's such a good point. Yeah, what are you doing? What's your problem? Let's go.

Noel: Exactly. Yeah.

Corky Ballas: I mean, literally, I take those modules. I take a screenshot of the module, put it into Chad GPT, and he tells me the answer. Why don't they do that? Yeah. Exactly. I mean, you could even tell. Why do you have to chat GPT for them to tell? Why don't you know your own? They're getting the error. They know the number one errors firsthand, right? I'm sure there's a lot of all that. Hello?

Noel: What is he going over there? We'll have to let them know when we see them in October.

Corky Ballas: No, but I'm saying,

Noel: I'm speaking.

Corky Ballas: know this. I mean, if you uploaded an error to chat GP

Noel: to your

Corky Ballas: body and it gives you the answer.

Noel: So why can't they do that?

Corky Ballas: That's what I don't understand. Yeah.

Noel: We'll get there one day.

Corky Ballas: Hopefully it'll get there, yeah. Why is this?

Katie: No, any more questions for Korky?

Corky Ballas: We've gotten kind of all over the place with this conversation.

Katie: Brilliant. Yeah. Yeah.

Noel: I've covered a lot. It's been interesting to understand how you started, how you're using it. And like your chatbot that you've got in your studio, that's brilliant. You know, I'd love to have one of those myself.

Corky Ballas: You know, it's not perfect, but you know, like we said,

Katie: it's all the time.

Noel: Yeah, definitely, yeah.

Corky Ballas: And I guess what you feed into it is important. Yeah.

Katie: How much time do you think that chatbot in your studio? You know, it saves you, Corky.

Corky Ballas: Well, I would say that it, well, the nice thing is that it doesn't miss a phone call. That's what's nice about it.

Katie: Yeah.

Corky Ballas: Nothing slips through the cracks.

Katie: So that's what... That's a customer service.

Corky Ballas: I think so. And if people don't like it, they have the... You know, we have a few people that don't even want to leave a message. Okay, well, how do you know that they didn't dial the wrong number?

Katie: Yeah, true.

Corky Ballas: But the great part about it is

Noel: nothing slips through the

Corky Ballas: cracks.

Noel: That's what's great about it.

Corky Ballas: Because you even have the number that called you. Why? Right.

Noel: That's good. So you can keep the calling

Corky Ballas: back and say, hey, this is, you know, if you call us for a lesson, and they go, yeah, I did. Okay. So, you know, you still, it's still, still beats the humans that are, those people are teaching all day. They don't really have a lot of time to, you know, to answer phone calls because they have to teach. Yeah.

Katie: Well, the last thing they want to do when they finish teaching is. to then, you know, go and call a load of people back when they've been talking all day.

Corky Ballas: Well, and the other thing, they've, most dance schools close at 10 o'clock at night, you can't call potential students at 10 o'clock at night.

Katie: No.

Noel: Too late. Yeah.

Katie: Fantastic. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Corky, for coming to talk with us today. It's been having you. Enjoyed it. Yeah, it's been really great. Thank you so very much.

Corky Ballas: So I'm going to leave you two with one last statement, dance and automate with passion.

Katie: I like it, cooking. And I'm going to take that challenge on. Thank you so much for listening to this week's podcast. It has been a blast, and we will catch you on another episode very soon.