S2. Ep24 - How to Keep Your Business Running While You Take the Summer Off

Katie (00:26)

Hello and welcome back to another episode. Hi, hello, I'm Katie and as always I've got Noel here with me. Hi Noel, how are you doing?

Noel (00:36)

Yeah, doing really good, thank you. Just a little bit warm this week.

Katie (00:40)

Yeah, we've currently got a heatwave here in the south of England. As any Brit would know, us Brits don't do well in the heat, mainly because we don't have aircon in our houses and we have about eighty percent humidity.

Noel (00:58)

Yeah. I think our listeners in the US and Australia would laugh at us really.

Katie (01:03)

Yeah. Noel, are there any AI or automation updates? If you're new listening to this podcast, before we get into the main part of the podcast, we always talk about if there's any new updates, whether that's in the AI world or in the automations world. Noel usually runs through them quite quickly, but any updates that we need to be aware of this week?

Noel (01:37)

So yeah, there's a couple. There's been a bit more information with the Fable and Mythos models from Anthropic. Obviously we talked about...

Katie (01:48)

Because they came and then they went.

Noel (01:51)

Yeah, the US government shut it down. Spoil sports. So it's been two weeks now and they're still not back. But they're looking, I think there's some sort of regulatory compliance that Anthropic and other platforms have got to do soon. On the eighth of July they're going to start bringing in ID checks and things when people create accounts. So that's potentially going to be an opening to allow people with verified ID to access Fable, so they can keep track of you. If you do something naughty they know where to find you, I guess.

But the reason why it really got shut down is there's been some circulating reports that the Mythos model found workarounds in the NSA's security network. So yeah, they weren't particularly pleased about that. But lots of cybersecurity people are actually saying, well we want this model back because it's helping us out a hell of a lot to combat security issues. So can we have it back please? But anyway, as of yet, no sign of it coming back, which is really annoying.

Katie (02:54)

Yeah. I mean for the very few hours that I used it, I thought it was great.

Noel (03:09)

Yeah, I loved it. Loved every minute. I used it lots. So the next bit of update is there's a new model from ZAI from China, called GLM 5.2. This isn't a completely open source model. I think it comes in about seventy percent cheaper than Opus 4.8, but it has Opus 4.8 kind of power. So yeah, it's a pretty awesome model for anyone that's looking to do stuff in bulk, have some intelligence and not pay all the money. You can also host that locally as well, which is something we talked about last week. It's quite a beefy model, but yeah, it could be done.

And there's something that's slightly off topic, but also quite interesting, and that's Midjourney. For those that don't know, if you're new to the AI space you may not have heard much of Midjourney, but they were a huge...

Katie (04:13)

I feel like we haven't mentioned Midjourney for a long time. Months and months and months.

Noel (04:19)

I know. Yeah, because they were the leading image model for ages and ages. But looking back at it now they were pretty terrible compared to the image models we have today. But they've done a different tack and basically they're going to be creating Midjourney spas. So there's going to be one in San Francisco in a couple of years. But basically they're replacing MRI technology that you would have at a hospital. They've worked out a way to use sound and images to create an MRI type scan of your body without the radiation. So it's still images, it's still AI, but yeah, I thought it was really interesting.

Katie (05:13)

I think that's so interesting.

Noel (05:15)

Yeah, especially without the radiation. So people that are pregnant and things, that's a bit of a concern having an MRI. But yeah, really interesting. I would hate to see what price it would be. I don't think it would be cheap.

Katie (05:24)

Yeah. Well, to start with, like most things. When MRI first came out it was horrendously expensive for hospitals. But yeah, wow, okay. That's super cool.

Noel (05:45)

Yeah. Awesome.

Katie (05:53)

Okay, so let's go into our topic for this week's podcast. It's all about how to keep your business running over the summer. Maybe you want to reduce your hours for work, for your business. Maybe you actually just want to take some time off over the summer. For whatever reason, spend time with your loved ones, enjoy the weather, go away. Whatever you want to do, it tends to be that people just want to work less over the summer.

So this is for our northern hemisphere people. Sorry if you're currently in the southern hemisphere where obviously you're in midwinter. But maybe take some notes for the next summer and you can implement them when summer does come around for you. It doesn't have to be summer. It could be if you want to just take a break from your business at any time and you don't want to drop the ball. Because for a lot of people, if you don't work, you don't get paid, or if there's not someone answering the emails, then things really slow down. And sometimes that's fine, but sometimes you don't want to take your foot off the pedal.

So we thought we would talk about how to keep your business running when you want to take a break, whether that is the summer, whether it is going on holiday, or whether it is juggling having children off of school.

So do you want to start us off with one of the first things that we can do to keep our business running whilst we want to take that break?

Noel (07:58)

Yeah, I guess the first thing while people are taking time off. I used to work with a guy and he would go on holiday for two weeks and come back with two hundred emails in his inbox. So the first thing we want to talk about is how to automate and maybe even customise out of office responses in your inbox.

It's great you can have that out of office and just go, hey, I'm not here, talk to this person, maybe look at this link. But there's probably going to be some edge cases which AI and automations can help you out with. They could be asking a question about a particular service. So then you could customise the response with AI to say, well, this service, that's the link for it. We'll get back to you in a couple of weeks, but you can find the information here. So your customers aren't just getting that plain old "I'm not around, I'll be back in two weeks, see you then" kind of out of office response.

It kind of gives a better experience for anyone emailing into your business account. So yeah, that's really easy to set up in things like Make.com or n8n or Zapier. Really straightforward to do. They connect to all the main email accounts, so Gmail and Outlook.

But obviously you can also use AI to categorise these emails as well. You don't really want to be sending a customised out of office for a cold email. So you could have AI in there to categorise it and say, well, don't bother with this one, just send the generic response back. Really awesome little addition that'll keep things ticking.

Katie (10:02)

Yeah, and kind of prevent that overwhelm when you do come back to work and you're not drowning.

Noel (10:16)

Exactly. You could come in on the Monday and you would have to be responding to all of these emails and go, well, no, here's the links. That's already been done. You've just got to get back in touch and go, hey, I'm back, how was that information. Really awesome little automation.

Katie (10:33)

Yeah, I love that. So what else might we be able to do to keep our businesses running whilst taking a break?

Noel (10:53)

So another thing, if anyone has specific services that need support whilst you're not there and people might be creating tickets, there might be community members raising support queries for whatever services you provide. What we could do is have an AI agent which can go through your knowledge base, have access to all kinds of information about the services you provide and basically go through and start classifying and responding to all of your support requests.

You're not coming back off holiday to two hundred requests and having to go through manually and figure them out yourself. At least with an AI agent it can go off and figure all of this out for you and give those clients the support they need.

Katie (11:51)

Yeah, I think that's really great. Being able to still have that customer support whilst you're not here. And you don't have to be worried about it because I feel like that is quite a stressor. Almost you can't quite switch off knowing that people are going to be contacting you for customer support. If you've got something that can help people with even the frequently asked questions, which there will be many of, whether it's logging in, payments, cancelling memberships, things like that. Yeah, I feel like that would take quite a lot of stress away and allow you to actually enjoy the break that you want to take.

Noel (12:54)

Yeah, enjoying that cool cocktail on a beach somewhere. Because the last thing you need is to be seeing these emails and thinking, I've got to get back to that person to help them out. You've been in those situations with those sort of emails. I just want to turn off and forget about it.

Katie (13:16)

Yeah. Right, and what else can we do now?

Noel (13:24)

I guess one thing is you could have, and it doesn't have to be while you're on holiday or vacation. This could be something you put in your business now, and that is to automatically chase invoices that are overdue. A lot of online accounting software these days have API access. So we can use automation tools like Make.com to basically every day have a look. Do you have any overdue invoices? Yes or no? If yes, then you can send it through a pipeline. So you say, this is now one day overdue, maybe I'll send them an email just to chase them up and see when it's due.

I mean, I've been on a beach chasing invoices before. It's not particularly pleasant. I'd rather just not worry about it. So at least with this sort of automation you can just let it go off and do its thing. You could also link in your email account as well. So if they do respond, let's say it's not paid and it's seven days later, you could have your automation go and check your inbox and go, well, did that person actually respond to the email? And they said, really sorry, but you'll get it in ten days. Then you could have an automation leg that says, well, don't do anything. Let's wait until they've done ten days and see if it's been paid. So you're not chasing something twice when they've already told you when you're going to get it.

Katie (14:59)

Yeah. And realistically, how easy would that be to set up?

Noel (15:06)

Within Make it could be, I'd put a number of modules to it, but probably five or six to do something basic. It would go and get the information from your accounting software. You would then go through AI to create an email. It would then go through an email module to send it. But then there could also be little routes just to triple check. So if you have chased them, that sort of route round to see if you do need to chase them again. So it doesn't have to be super complicated, but it depends on what you want to do.

Katie (15:48)

Yeah. And do you think someone who is a beginner would be able to set something up like this, or do you think it's someone who has a bit more knowledge with AI and automations?

Noel (16:03)

I would say for this one, it's in the middle of beginner and intermediate. In Make.com there's zero code you need to worry about. You just basically link data from one module to another module. That's all you've got to worry about. You don't need to understand the technicals on the API calls that are going on. You're just saying I need to find this invoice and once I have that information, where am I going to send it? So I'm going to link that into an AI module, give it that data.

With the AI module, you do need maybe a little bit of experience with prompt engineering, but ChatGPT, Claude, anything that can help you with system prompts and all that sort of stuff. And they're really good at that these days. They used to be terrible. But actually now they're pretty good at that.

So yeah, I would say a bit higher than beginner, but with anything with Make.com, just give it a go. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. They always make it really clear where there's errors and where things have gone wrong. So it does make it a lot easier.

And I'm not sure when they're going to release it. I mean, we can't be that far off the release of Maia, which...

Katie (17:20)

Yeah, I was just about to say they can't be far off. I think August, did they say around August?

Noel (17:31)

Yeah, I would say July, August, because that's kind of when most of the big stuff comes out.

Katie (17:44)

Pretty soon.

Noel (17:46)

Yeah, but essentially what that does is it's a chatbot which you can describe your automation to within the platform and it will go off and build it for you. So if you've never connected these tools together, you never connected anything into Make, you could have a fresh account as an example. It would say, right, these are the steps we need to do to connect, I don't know, Xero into your Make account and it will take you through all that step by step.

And then it will link all the data and once it's done it should be up and running and working first time, fingers crossed. But that's kind of a cheap way around it. Obviously to learn it I would go in and pick it apart and then see what's happened, see what's done, so you can learn how to do that in the future.

Katie (18:35)

Yeah. I mean some people will want to know how it works and other people won't care how it works as long as it does work.

Noel (18:40)

Yeah. I think you're probably in that camp, aren't you?

Katie (18:48)

Yeah, for me it's just like if it works, it works great. I don't need to know exactly how it works and why it works. As long as it works, great. And if it doesn't work, I just want to know exactly why it's not working, which Make does tell you.

Noel (18:58)

Yeah. And with Maia as well, it'll also help you with those errors. So if you do get any, it will help you out with that. So that's a really cool thing that's coming.

Katie (19:14)

Yeah.

Noel (19:20)

There is one other automation which would be really awesome while you're away on holiday. This is something we covered in last season of the podcast. I believe it was episode nineteen with Corky Ballas. He has a dance studio business and he was talking to us about an AI voice agent that he has. It's essentially his receptionist.

People phone up for his dance studio and they could be enquiring about when to book in or maybe they're new customers. So it can help and guide them down that process. It can answer those questions, it can maybe book them in. But he also has that really awesome feature where some people aren't comfortable talking to AI agents. Not everyone likes it. So he also had that option where you can just press two and leave a voice message and we'll get back to you. I thought that was a really cool little automation.

If you do have a phone system with your business and you don't want people calling you when you're on holiday, you could set something like that up and get those questions answered when people call. That's probably not so beginner friendly, but there's loads of information online on how to set those sort of things up.

Katie (20:37)

Yeah. I really liked that episode with Corky. I feel like it was really informative about what you could actually do. We'll leave the link to that episode below. If anyone wants to go and check it out, it's from our season one podcast. But yeah, Corky was a brilliant guest, very lively, very entertaining, as you would expect for a dancer, a performer, a TV personality. Really great. Loved him.

Noel (21:11)

Yeah, that is awesome.

Katie (21:13)

Okay. So we would love to know how are you planning on automating your business while you take a break, whether that's for the summer, whether it's just because you're going on holiday, vacation, or because you just want to take a break from your business. No excuse needed.

We would love for you to let us know, either by email, hello@makeautomations.ai, or over in our free LinkedIn group, which is called AI Automations for Business. Anyone is welcome to join that group. It's completely free. We don't pitch to you in it, it's just a really lovely community of people who are interested in AI and automations for their business.

Thank you so much for listening to this week's podcast episode. We hope you've enjoyed it. We hope it has maybe sparked some ideas for you about what you could do whilst you take a break in your business. And we will catch you next time for another episode very soon.