The AI opportunity hiding in a chaotic golf shop | Clive Mayhew

Clive: the next day I spend a quarter million dollars on a domain called golf ai As an entrepreneur, as a founder, you do not need a tech team It'll be the best $200 you've ever spent use what you already know to build what comes next I founded golf AI at 60 years old. I'm 63 now, and I'm having the time of my life building in this world we are just at the absolute beginning, like day one of this journey Dave: Welcome to AI Operators and our operator stories segment. This is where I sit down with operators that are in the world of ai. They're building products, they're building businesses, and they're generally trying to innovate using these new technologies. And we sit down and hear their stories. And today I'm, uh, glad to be joined by Clive Mayhew, who's, uh, gonna take us through his story. So welcome to the show, Clive. Clive: Yeah, welcome Dave. Great to be here. Thank you. Dave: And, uh, you, um, in a beautiful, sunlit water backed scene. I mean, I talked to a lot of people from around the world and America and Europe and other places, but, but you're a little bit closer to home, aren't you? Clive: Yeah, I'm in, I'm in wonderful Sydney. Um, I'm here at Barangaroo with a view behind me. Uh, so yeah, it's good. It's great. And I've actually just returned from America. I've been, I've been working in America for 12 months and I'm so thankful to be home. This is by far the best city in the world. Dave: Nice, nice. I should, we should, should have, uh, line ducks up and I should have come and sat out there on the balcony with you live. It looks like a, a great spot to be. Um, but anyway, we're not here to talk about, uh, your real estate and your balcony and your beautiful view. Uh, what, what is it that you do, Clive? What, what's brought you onto the AI operators show and, uh, what are your business ventures and the clients you're seeking to serve with ai? Clive: Yeah, so a couple of things. Uh, I'm the CEO co-founder and ma majority investor in a company called Golf ai. Mm-hmm. Uh, will the, we're the world's leading AI company in the golf industry, um, and most people go AI and golf. Yeah. They always sort of have a giggle. So I'm gonna talk about golf.ai, uh, and naturally, uh, next week I launch my first book, which is called Vertical ai. Um, changing the game based obviously on my experience of, of creating golf, ai ai over the last two years. So let's, let's start, I'm gonna ask you a question, Dave, to start with. What do you think golf.ai does? Dave: Uh, I, I briefly looked at the website, so I cheated a little bit. Um, but I'm imagining it's helping answer people's questions about golf, where to play, how to play. Maybe there's some video capture and monitoring swings and other bits and pieces that you could go down that path with a golf AI app. But as I'm not a particularly avid golfer and the closest I've got to golf lately was watching, uh, will Ferrell's the Hawk TV show. Um, I'm probably not the, not your Target demo, Clive: I have to say. I really love that TV show. I mean, he, he is just so funny and the way he is, uh, the way he sort, you know, got golf into, into just his sense of humour was really good. So I watched that too. Um, so I, I'm a very, I'm obviously a visionary, I think, I think it's gonna be everything, right? Mm-hmm. Now, not, not so much just golf, that ai our business is very, is actually a little bit more focused on that. But AI for the sport of golf will become everything. Um, and we're starting to see that right now. Golf, ai, my business is actually, we actually are very simple. Dave: Mm-hmm. Clive: We enter the telephone and we do, we do bookings for tee times. Dave: Okay? Clive: Yeah. So think of it in terms of a booking platform for tee times, for the, uh, the golf courses. We answer the telephone, they're pro shop. We take it, you can literally talk to our AI rather than talking to someone in the pro shop. Um, and we'll do the bookings and the cancellations and all the member inquiries over ai. Um, on the back of that, we also, the number one with our AI caddy, okay? So the AI Caddy is, uh, as you walk around a golf course, the caddy talks to you in 27 different languages about what the next shot, your next shot is on the golf course. Um, they're our first two services. We have many more coming and I honestly believe that AI will be used for everything, for everything, including golf. So that, that's the, uh, the little intro to golf today. I, Dave: nice. I mean, that's certainly the dream. If you watch, uh, like the open AI dev day launch of Dots is that ambient ai, that it's there everywhere. It's kinda that Iron Man Jarvis sort of technology, right? Where it's just there again, talk to you and advise you around what's going on. Clive: Yeah, definitely. And I think that what we're starting to see now, you know, versus two years ago is a huge difference that, you know, I, I was a great believer and one of the reasons I actually created this business, and I founded it originally, it was just over two years ago, we were playing around with an Excel spreadsheet. Mm-hmm. This is so good to say this. It was an Excel spreadsheet that this guy developed over seven years. We all about the rules of golf. Yeah. He's a wonderful, a wonderful man in Scotland, a little bit crazy around his, his, uh, his spreadsheets. So he built this, he's built this spreadsheet and he and I met him in London. He says, Clive, you know what? I could do this over a spreadsheet. I can answer any rules are golf. It's so good. So we, we took his spreadsheet, we made it into this vector database, which is how, how AI works. Yeah. And we literally started to play around with just asking, you know, through prompts, golf rules questions. Dave: Mm-hmm. Clive: We got to, it was interesting. We got to about a 75% accuracy based on his dataset. Right. Yeah. 'cause he spent se seven years building his dataset. Dave: Yeah, yeah. Clive: But we could, we could never get it any more than 75%. And the reason was the whole way that you and I talk and the way we say things is very different. Mm-hmm. Now, in, in the AI world, we call that reasoning. Okay. So how you reason about a golf rule question, how I reason over the golf? 'cause very different perspectives. And before reasoning was actually introduced by the LLMs, I can say we got about 75%, uh, accuracy. Dave: Yep. Clive: O overnight, overnight chat. GBT was the first to, to actually launch reasoning, um, into its LLM and we went from 75% to 99% accuracy. Dave: Wow. Clive: Um, Dave: yeah, because 'cause for for then, for the people that aren't sure, reasoning is when you see the AI say thinking and you, you look at the traces and it sort of says, oh, the user looks like they're asking about putting on a green and I need to make sure that I'm looking at that versus just like, oh, keyword search bang response. Right. Clive: Exactly. Yeah. So it's an element of ai, which is actually, it actually quite, quite detailed, you know, the actual intelligence behind how they did that from a programming perspective. Yeah. But the bottom line, the bottom line for our, for our audience and ourselves is it's just an element of what reasoning and it actually answered the questions and it, and it took it from 75 to 99%. Wow. So literally the next day, and I, and I'm not exaggerating that, the next day I spend a quarter million dollars on a domain called golf ai. And I, and I bought that domain, and this was over two years ago. So I, at, at that point in time, I was so convinced, and now I'm maybe more convinced, but I was so convinced at that point in time that I, that I put a big check on the table to buy a domain name. And then we started to add data sets in golf to make, you know, golf ai. And the first data set obviously was we're the number one in the, in the world with golf rules. Mm-hmm. So you'd ask it anything on golf rules and we'll answer you in 27 different languages. Um, you know, U-S-G-A-R-N-A rules, we have all of that. And the number one, we have tens of thousands of questions every month on golf rules in, into our platform. Wow. Um, so that was really, and that's really where we, that's really what, why I wanted to do it initially. Right. And then the second one, the second data set was quite interesting. It was the AI caddy. So the caddy then helped you around the golf course. We, we have, um, in, uh, in the golf world, we have all the GPS locations of bunkers, of fairways, of tees. All of those are mapped for four, 2000 golf courses around the world. And you can get that data set. So we got that data set. We started to work with that data set and we put an LLM model over the top of it with the reasoning and the, and the golf rules at the same time. And that was our AI caddy. So again, we have thousands of users around the world who use our caddy every, every day to play golf on different golf courses. So they were our two consumer services. But you know, you probably, when you speak to operators and founders and ai, first companies, where's the money in that? Right? Because both of those were, were free services for golfers, right. Um, and what, what, what actually happened about a year ago, just just over a year ago now, we got a phone call from a golf course. And they said to us, fly, this is great what you're doing the rules. This is great what you're doing, Kenny's, but is there any way you can help my golf course? Um, and why don't you come in and have a chat with her? So I went in and, and I've been, obviously I've, I've been a big golfer for a long time. Dave: Mm-hmm. Clive: This is the, this is what I saw when I went to see him. The pro shop, which is if, if you're a golfer, you'll know the pro shop is where you go in and you, and you registered for the golf, for the round of golf. Dave: Yeah. Clive: But the golf, the pro shop is also where the telephone rings for their customers to book their tee times over the telephone. So I walked into this golf course and it was like chaos. It was Friday, there was 16 people shopping in the pro shop. The phone was ringing continually. And I'm going, oh my goodness. And it was a public golf course, and it was like, this is just chaos. So the guy behind the pro shop, you know, the, the, the, the guy who you know is actually a golf, a golf professional by nature, was answering the call like this, putting the phone here and saying, yeah, $2 50 mate for the balls, $2, $54 for that. Yes mate, hold on for the booking. Hold on. For the booking. Ah, and, and, and he'd be like, he'd be 10 minutes of this guy holding to, to serve these customers. He said, now what do you want? What t time do you want? And then he'd go into his t sheet management system and, and literally take the details on the phone and enter that into the system. And he'd have a hundred phone calls a day. That's a lot. And literally it's a lot. So, you know, I, I went away from that and I, I sort of thought like literally an hour just observing this. And I went to the general manager and he said, Clive, how can we, what can we do in, in the, as a golf course? I said, well, the first thing is your pro shop is what I would call the front door to your business is in, is in it's chaotic. Mm. And it's, that's, it says, yeah, we, we, we, we put two people on this days, but one of them didn't turn up today. So you saw one person, I said, tomorrow you'll have two people, so it won't be as chaotic. So they accepted that chaos was actually completely acceptable to their customers, both the customers coming into the, the physically to play golf and the customers on the, on the, uh, the telephone. Um, and we said, well, look, actually, why don't we, why don't we build an AI concierge service Yeah. Where we can actually enter the telephone, take away all the, all the complexity of that telephone, it can enter and do the bookings link into the backend systems. We'll build that. Then your pro shop will just be an actual place or opportunity for you to actually talk to your customers and upsell them around all this wonderful equipment and, uh, merchandise you have. Um, and now really that's where we started with our AI concierge service. That probably was the moment that I as say, also started to think in my own way about my book. Because in my book, vertical ai, it's all built around this concept called the pro shop moment, which is what I believe is the front door to golf. But it, when you say that across, across any industry, it's a front door to any industry. Yeah. How do they operate their front door to, to their industries today? 99% of them, and I, I don't think that's an exaggeration, still work in chaos mode. They're still reacting and building workflows and processes with people that are pretty much chaotic. Hmm. Um, you know, so anywhere where you've got queuing anywhere, where you've got telephony anywhere, you've got multiple workflows coming in, addressed by the same set of human resources, it becomes incredibly chaotic. And, and the way typically that, that, that, uh, owners of businesses have solved, that it's just by increasing the number of people serving the customer. Um, and so there's a cost of that, the cost of that, the efficiency of that, and just the chaotic nature of having multiple things going on. And, you know, the pro shop moment I think happens in every industry. Sort of led my thinking to critical ai, which talks a lot more from the pro shop moment all the way through about building AI workflows into your businesses, replacing or upgrading these chaotic processes you have today. Dave: Yeah. That's, that's, uh, that's all too true. And, and you've got people that have the cash flow to put on extra staff, and then you've got the founders and the small business owners that just don't even have that cash flow. So they're just so busy working in the business, they never have time to step back and work on it. They're just constantly themselves in personal chaos mode. And I've seen that as well. Clive: Yeah. And so, and what's happened since then, so this is going back, like I said, this is over a year ago. Mm-hmm. What's happened since then is the AI tools have become so good. So now let, let's talk about that. The small business owner that the, you know, literally the person who runs the business by themself, they in the past have bought websites, they've bought das products to help them do what they can. They've been taught how to use the software. You know, IE follow the website, do the menus, do this and do that, and your data's here, but how do I access the data? And eventually they have all these systems and processes and apps and they get restricted in terms of what they can and can't do with the technology. So what you have is you have now a generation of founders who've been with tech for 20 years and they are just bewildered by the fact they can't do the basic stuff. AI has come along, particularly with these, with the agents and we'll talk more about that specifically, but the, these AI agents, now, if you link it to your Gmails, into your email systems, your Apple email, whatever email you have, yep. It'll give you a summary of all of your emails and tell you the actions of what you do going forward. Very simple, very simple workflow re-engineering of how you do things. Typically, people like founders get up in the morning, 10 o'clock, they check the email, they do two hours in the email, they'll work through it, whatever that may be. That is still a front door to your business, by the way. So when I say front doors to, to the pro shop, a physical one, think about your front door of what you do as a founder or a business owner. Email is typically the, is the largest front door that you are actually, you know, you're actually concerned with. Yeah. Now AI and the AI workflow, you can create, replaces all of that and you'll have this AI agent. Literally checking everything, actually presenting it to you in a meaningful way. Filtering all of the spam, filtering all of the rubbish, but telling you, Clive, you need to address this issue today with this customer, or you need to talk to your employee about this today. Whatever those, whatever that is. But not in the a in the email format, which we've been used to for the last 20 years, but in a conversation element like you and I are having right now, Dave. Mm-hmm. Where this becomes meaningful and it's all action orientated. This is the, the huge change that's happening with AI and in particular, vertical ai. It's all about actions and outcomes. There's no, there's no middle ground, there's no stupid websites or apps you have to go through and learn. It's literally a conversation element about outcomes, which I believe will fundamentally help entrepreneurs and even small business owners become so much more efficient. So, you know, not only a day, a week on email, you can save just by using, setting up your email to use an AI agent as a day, a week of your time. Yeah. Think about that in terms of operational things you do. Think about all the other stuff you can be saving more time with your family, more time where it matters less time on these mundane, your administration and process stuff, which we've been conditioned to believe that te that's what technology is. It is simply not that anymore. Dave: It's, it's funny you talk about the pro shop moment and how the gm, it just sort of, it's, um, the chaos is expected. That expected level of chaos is okay. And I've, I've definitely spoken to prospect and, and clients as well where they just justify the chaos. They justify the time expenditure. Oh, it's not that bad. It's only 10 minutes here and five minutes there, or 15 minutes there, but you add that up over days, weeks, months, and you go, that's, that's hundreds of hours, uh, a year. That's, that's like half a day a week. You couldn't do something better with half a day a week. That when you Yeah. When you do the maths and on that, but they just sort of justify it and go, no, it's, it's okay. It's not a big problem. And I think this is a, I, I dunno what you are seeing with, with talking to prospects and things, but just there seems to be that fear of change, uh, and yeah, this is scary. It's just easier to just do it the way we've always done it. Like are you seeing that? Clive: Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and we're absolutely at that position right now where I think that we, and I, I blame mainstream media for this, to be honest. Mainstream media, you know, you, you listen to a, b, c, you listen to any of the, of the, um, the, the major, uh Yep. Media channels of all of them are putting this huge amount of fear into the, into consumers and into businesses and, you know, it's like AI is gonna take away everything. Well, what you just said in terms of AI replacing, you know, 20, 30, 20 5% of your own personal time to make that more productive. Now why, why are we not hearing that on the radio? Right? Why are we not actually hearing about all the, the successes that are happening going on and doing that? And for the first time ever. As an entrepreneur, as a founder, you do not need a tech team. Dave: Yeah. Clive: You do not need your CTO. You do not need that SaaS provider. You do not need the hosting provider. You don't need a a company to build a website for you. You don't need anybody to do your creative content anymore. AI can literally do all of that. And I wanna just share with you, like I, I don't know if you've started to use some of these AI agents, these personal AI agents yet Dave, but I have become, uh, I've just literally replaced what I will classify as being my chief, chief operating officer, my chief, chief of staff, whatever those big titles are Yeah. With, with these agents. And they literally are doing so much for me personally with my portfolio, but also in my business. And it's to the point where it is literally, you know, everybody should start to use take, go from chat CHATT PT pay $200, become chatt BT Pro, get the dot, which is their AI assistant, and give it tasks to do. Mm-hmm. It'll be the best $200 you've ever spent. Dave: Alright. Clive: And I'll say that, I'll set it from my experience of doing Dave: it. We'll, we'll loop, we'll loop back in here a bit more about, about your experience with the dot 'cause I'm keen to, to discuss that. But, but just on, on the, um, engaging with customers and the time spent, uh, and so on and so forth. So you mentioned the, started with golf AI and you had that sort of brainwave moment through golf ai and, and now you've, you've written a book 'cause you see these principles going more broadly than that. And, and, um, you, you mentioned before we started the call, there's, there's some other things you're now looking to pivot off from a business and client point of view off the back of that. Right. Clive: Yeah, definitely. So my, my core business is golf today, ai, it's a global business. We're serving golf courses around the world. We're serving tens of thousands of golfers around the world. Um, and so we're investing in that, that very early in golf 'cause it's a quite conservative industry. Dave: Yep. Clive: Um, but like I say, about six months ago I started to focus on apply my learnings in, in the golf sector, which is a, which is a very vertical across what I believe is the future of AI is all these verticals. So whether you're in hospitality, whether you are, you know, let's say an electrician, electrician's a good vertical, right? Um, I think in Australia the numbers like 17% of all SMEs are builders or electricians. So it's a, it's a huge sector. Yeah. Um, you know, something like 170,000, you know, um, small businesses are electricians or builders and they are what I call a, a wonderful vertical ai because they literally, they go to a bus, they'll go to a, uh, an office, or they'll go to a house, they'll do a job, they'll check their time, and then, you know, how do they invoice that customer? How do they collect the money? And then over the time they've built these systems and there's some SaaS providers who cater just for that sector. Well now they literally, you can go in and build an or an electrician, you can go and build an AI agent that does all that for them. Does the administration of not only their time management, the administration of actually collecting the money, even collecting the money front directly from themselves with the custom they're going through based on the telephone known name. Mm-hmm. Telephone number on the name. They can do all of that. So we're starting to see a lot of what I call these, you know, I call it changing the game, right? Because it's obviously, I come from the, the golf background, but it's use what you already know to build what comes next. Dave: Yeah. Clive: That's what I'm trying to, I'm trying to educate people in my book, book to do that. Use what you already know to build what comes next and you personally build this yourself. You don't go out and you don't, you know, you don't go out and you buy a off the shelf software product. You don't subscribe to a service, you build it yourself. You are that. You actually in your own business know more about your workflow than anybody else. No one knows the workflow of your electrical business better than yourself. You can talk to an AI engine mm-hmm. And just tell the engine what you're doing and what you want to be done, and see what comes back. This is the magic of this technology. For the first time, it actually opens up a new, a new way of doing things that we'd never thought were possible for small businesses, for people who want to do things for themselves, and they want to be able to own that and control it. I, I, I came up with this terminology, I call it the, um, the AI selfie era because it's literally we're going to just like we did with photography, where we all take photos when we have mobile phones mm-hmm. Changed that world. Now with the AI engines, we actually had the capability to, to to, to build our own AI apps and websites and services for our businesses. Now, they may not be scalable to hundreds of thousands of customers mm-hmm. But most businesses aren't scalable to hundred thousands of customers. They're looking after 200 customers. Yeah. Maybe, maybe, maybe less. Right. And they are certainly scalable to those sorts of numbers. So yeah, it we're going into the AI selfie era vertical ai and taking ownership and building yourself. Dave: So, so does that mean software as a service is dead? People don't need to buy apps anymore? Well, I mean, is what, what does that mean for, for golf ai? Does that mean golf courses should not buy golf ai? They should just go and, uh, Claude code their own, uh, golf services. I'm just curious. Like, 'cause 'cause there is, there's, there's a spectrum, right? And, and building. I, I highly advocate for people innovating and inventing and building stuff. But there's also the timeline. Maybe it's a scale question. You mentioned that scale point of view where you want that team that's actually building that thing. 'cause it's critical to your business and you wanna manage and looked after and, and operational. Right. It's finding that balance. Clive: Yeah. I, I, and I honestly think there's a role for both. Yeah. So take down what you just said about the scale. I think that's a good example. So the electrician who typically has subscribed to those services in the past and, and never really understand how to use them. Dave: Yeah. Clive: He could do, he or she could do this for themselves. There's, there's the opportunity there to become the AI selfie, you know, provider. And they'll keep it small because they just wanna do the stuff they want to do. Now, take my industry where you have golf courses and you have, you know, employed people, you know, typically a golf course has about 20 people. It has food and beverage, it has the maintenance of the golf course, it has the actual membership and all of that. You have people there who are, what I would call, are like managers of those areas. And they don't manage the whole, the whole entity in itself. Mm-hmm. So they possibly, and I think that I, I still think it's a possibility they could build it themselves, but as a team of 20 people, they may find it a little bit harder because they have to go across functions and across workflows. Yeah. So using an, using a, a golf AI that does that for many golf courses may make sense and be sustainable. But I honestly, I am, I am still saying that in the next two to five years, I honestly believe the opportunity for vertical AI owned by the people who are on the workflow, building it themselves, will be the biggest part of this market. It won't be the SaaS, it won't be the SaaS providers, it won't be the tech providers into those markets. It'll be the workflow owners, which will be the individual in predominantly, you know, the owners of those businesses. Dave: And that is part of the challenge for anyone who's building software. I mean, I, I've launched a software application. You've launched a software application. It's, what is the moat like, like what is our product differentiator? What are we doing that is too hard for regulars, like regular people to go and vibe, code and, and self create, right? Like, what is that differentiation value that you're provide? And for you, you're saying it's that complexity that, that that level of multiple different business units within an organisation, things like that. So, um, yeah, I think, I think there's room, room for a bit of everything at the moment. And, but I, I love what you're saying around just experimenting and getting in there and, and doing stuff. 12, 12 months ago when I started doing some consulting, I did what everyone else did and went and bought a Squarespace website, because that's how you built websites 12 months ago. And then three months later, as, as Claude Code and Google Antigravity and all these sort of things started really rolling along, I was like. That's a sunk cost. 'cause I bought that a year upfront and I don't care because I can publish my own better website, cheaper somewhere else and actually have the thing I want, not that thing. Right. And it's that, you know, just people have to understand that sunk cost fallacy. I think there's gonna be a little bit of that transit transition as well, right? Clive: Yeah, I think so. So I think, and again, now take CRM systems as a great example, right? So people have invested a lot of time and a lot of their own, you know, energy and, and financially, you know, to run those services. Yeah, yeah. Now they, I don't think they will ever go away. They will, they will be the database engine which you integrate into for the front end to be able to use that data in ways you've never used it before. So, but they become not so much the front end, which they've been trying to own for a long time. They become the backend database and the logic and the, the actual, uh, workflow is developed at the front end by the, by the people actually doing it and using it. So their, their services will become commoditized. They'll become database services, you know, and then we'll link into them and we'll add all the value at the front end by the employees or by the, the owners of those businesses. Yeah. So, yeah, we're gonna go through a huge transition. I, you know, I, I I, I was, I was just amazed when they, they call it the SaaS, SaaS apocalypse. Yeah, yeah. When the, they, they literally took off 50% market valuations in America of some of the largest SaaS providers, some of the largest CRM providers. And, you know, I thought it was a huge overreaction at the time. Now some of it's come back, but as this technology is developing, and as we're seeing these agents become more and more like action orientated, you know, workflow and outcomes driven, I actually think those, those devaluations were actually less than what they're going to be. I can't, I can't see those companies playing in this space. At the level that they used to play in the space. Yeah. So I think it's gonna be a really interesting change over the next few years. Dave: Even even my former employer, Salesforce, they've, uh, recently, um, making some waves because they've gone with their whole AI force or they've rebranded to SI force already to jump on that bandwagon. But they're now looking at charging people for connecting their agents to their, to their logins. And so you're already paying for a seat, but they seem to think that the, the data load of these agents talking through that login licence is gonna be more extreme. So they're like, ah, it's okay if a human, you paid for a human seat, you didn't pay for a robot seat. We're gonna charge you extra to connect a robot through your human seat. Um, which it's a whole new place. Like we, we always used to say, oh, you're gonna have an API to a backend system like an SAP or something. Give that its own user. 'cause then you can restrict the login and the profile and just the SAP connection is, is locked in and its own thing, and you turn off the ui, no UI for that particular user. It used to be a security thing. But now if I'm a sales rep or a customer service rep or a customer service manager, and I want to connect my agent to interrogate my business, that, that should just be through my login. But they're like, no, we want to charge extra money. So yeah, I think you're right. Things like tools like MCP and, and all this sort of stuff, other than the computer use and letting the agents use the applications is the future. Um, and, and having that secured managed data source is, is a great service. It's, it's, it's a wild world we we're going into for the next couple of years. Right? Clive: It really is. And, and, and when I hear that about Salesforce and I hear that they changed their pricing to try to compensate for the agents versus the humans, it's just, it's, it, it's a reflection on how quickly this stuff is changing. They really don't know, right? Mm. So they don't know what value they can provide, where their value is. Now, when they were from start to finish, they had, they had the value chain, right? Um, those customers that are start to finish, they will want to use their services. There's no question. So I don't think they'll disappear. It's just which bit of those services will they use and what is the value proposition for those parts of the services? And I think nobody knows right now. So everyone's playing around with different pricing models. Everyone's playing around with how this can, how this will end up and who gets what. Um, but I, I honestly think it, it's gonna be, you know, it's just as for the entrepreneurs on the users of technology, there's never been a better time to build. Yeah. There's never been a better time to play with this technology. And, you know, you know what's I find interesting, everyone who I talk to about these AI agents and start using them, they get so excited. They get excited for the first time, probably for most of their time they've been running this business about understanding their workflows. Again. You know, they've almost gave up on changing workflows because it was so hard. Now they go, so I can do this, this, and this by just saying this to an agent and I can actually do this, and if I get that right, therefore this will happen. It's like they get this huge amount of excitement in every industry, in anything they're doing, because it's for the first time, it's waking them up to, they are the technologists themselves. They understand the workflows, and suddenly they've got tools where they can actually do stuff with outcomes. And it, it's, it's, it's very, very exciting to be a part of. Dave: So, so that's, um, it is that, that's a huge thing. And so maybe that starts a, a good lead in to sort of, how did you go from what you were doing before into golf ai? Like, like, like were you always in technology and ai, like what was your, your bridging from going in from your previous life into now this new AI focused life? Clive: Yeah, so I was originally, I was the, uh, the first employee, uh, for Netscape, uh, in Asia. Dave: Wow. Clive: So I, I was, that's, let's go back a while, Dave. So that was, I, I Dave: was an original Netscape user. I'm old enough, don't worry. Clive: Okay, good. So a lot of, a lot of your audience won, remember who they actually are. Uh, but the original, the original internet company. So it was all about, they developed the whole of the standards, which we use today, how the internet works, T-C-P-I-P, you know, a lot of the, you know, JavaScript, all of that was invented by these engineers on Netscape and came through the browser to begin with, uh, back in 96, believe it or not. Dave: Yeah, Clive: I did, I did. Before, Dave: before Internet Explorer, before Chrome, there was Netscape. That was, that was the goat. Clive: Yep. And, uh, at the time, you know, I was there, I was the managing director for Asia. Um, I had that job, so I did that from nine, six to 99. It was interesting, that era was, I saw at the beginning of the internet, right? So I was there right at the beginning how corporates got so excited about that and what they were doing, what they were trying to do with the, the internet right at the beginning. Um, and then after that, I, I became a, um, a bit of an investor in, in some of my own startups. Mm-hmm. I, I'd done reasonably well. I retired and started to just play golf, so I was very lucky. Hold on. I had a tech background, retired early. I played a lot of golf. Um, I played 85 of the top 100 golf courses in the world. I still have 15 to play. Um, and then literally COVID came, I was stuck in my house playing a bit of golf in the back garden, and I just started to dabble with some golf tech at the time. Mm-hmm. Um, got to know Greg Novin pretty well. I did a, a metaverse for live golf as a, as a project for, for, for Greg. That evolved into this, uh, scotsman's, you know, the, yeah, the rules, you know, the, uh, the scotsman's for the rules. And then literally as soon as I saw that, I thought, wow, this is gonna be really interesting. Very bored just playing golf. So I came back and said, I'm gonna create a new startup. So that, I did that sort of like three years ago. So I'd been an investor be, although previous 10 years, and I'd been on the chair and running some of these, some of these companies which I'd invested in, in the tech space. So for me, it's like doing the full circle back. And, you know, I'll say to to, to the, our older, our older audience, there's no better time to build your business than right now with ai. And I am a great example of that. I founded golf AI at 60 years old. I'm 63 now, and I'm having the time of my life building in this world. And, you know, there's, I love it. 'cause you know, everyone, all these kids are there, you know, and they think everyone, everyone has to be young to be able to enjoy this technology. It actually is, the more this technology is suited to the older person who doesn't need to know that and can just use their experiences to build this stuff. So I'm a great believer in experience and workflows, and that's what's going to fundamentally change businesses. Dave: Yeah, no, I, I agree. Uh, I think being able to apply industry and knowledge, expertise and just, you know, you've just seen stuff, you know how businesses work, you know how things work. You, you have that to leverage on because the AI is the average of everyone's knowledge, but doesn't have your specific knowledge. It doesn't have your specific expertise. And so when you augment this generic AI with your specific knowledge, that's where the superpowers happen. If you just say, yeah, make me the best golf app you'll get probably something that's rubbish. But when you say, Hey, I won the golf app that does this and this and this, and covers these and thinks about this and does that, and then you start getting good results, right? Clive: Yeah. And I think that now with the technology which has personalised memory, personalised intent, it's actually even, it goes even better, even deeper. So a lot of that I don't think will go across, as you say, the horizontal, horizontal tools. Yeah. They will never really, they'll never take a little bit of learning in my vertical and my workflow and apply that to everything else. 'cause it just doesn't fit. So the example of the electrician is a great example that electrician understands his area of business, right? Where he works, what he does there, who his customers are so much better than anyone will ever el anyone else will ever understand, and now apply that. Use AI to build your own memory, build your own intent so you can do that more efficiently. And that's where this technology becomes incredibly interesting. So I call it vertical ai, the book called Vertical ai. It's all about being very, very focused around the workflows and the vertical elements of the, of, of how you do things. Dave: Brilliant. Brilliant. Uh, well that's, um, that's really interesting and exciting now, writing a book. Congratulations. Well done that, that, that's a huge thing in itself, uh, let alone the success of golf ai. So let's, let's get back to the dot. So you're obviously a chat gp, t OpenAI, uh, user, uh, and you've been using a dot, what have you, have you given your dot a name, have you personalised it? Clive: Yep. I have Clive, Dave: Clive, Clive: Clive. That's my nickname. People call me Clive. So all my mates call me Clive. So my, my.is called Clive. Um, I have, uh, I have a great story. I, I, I introduced someone else to her dot, um, I think she calls it Val. She's, she's a entrepreneur herself, and she's, she's become the most obsessed dot person I've ever known. And she now does everything, everything. She was shopping on the other day and she was telling me that how she's got these best dresses for 25% off, and, and it goes on and on and on. So it was like, it was so funny. But I said to her, I said, why would you talk to the dot? Why are you so nice? 'cause she says things like, oh, thank you so much. Oh, that was so helpful, and, oh, that's so nice of you to do that. I said, do you realise you, you actually, you don't need to say that. She said, well, I actually really like it. And do you know that, do you know that the Dot actually calls me now? My name Chris, and, and Dot also knows your name, Clive, because I told, I told Dot about you. So she says, how's Clive today? And I'm going like, what? What is going on? So she's gone to a level where it has literally become her. Best friend. Wow. And I think that when you start to think about that, I mean, I'm just using it for, you know, efficiency of my time. She's actually using it as a real helper in many different parts of her, of her, of her life. And that's where this technology's gonna go. It's gonna be, it's gonna be everything for everything, doing everything. And we are, we are just at the absolute beginning, like day one of this journey. And when you think about that and how we react to voice and how we react to conversations, we, we, we, we react to conversations like this over zoom, but conversational is to, to a, to a piece of software will be a big part of our lives. For sure. For sure. Dave: Yeah. Yeah. No, uh, any regulars on the show, uh, watches of the show would know. I often go for walks and I'll go into voice mode with chat GBT before the dot, uh, and just talk through ideas and soundboard and uh, get it to extend and challenge me. Uh, I think the voice, your brain operates differently when you are using voice, but the, these, these dots are amazing. TE technology. I'm also deep in with the Grock Botts as well. Um, which, which you, you speak of verticals, the Grock Botts have the advantage. You can have multiple of them so you can really target them for specific either vertical projects stuff or I've got horizontal ones that like a communications expert. So any of my fleet refer like copy questions back to the, to the marketing person that covers across all of them. But, uh, like I recently, I've got multiple email accounts like everyone else and I had it hooked up to my sort of business and podcast oriented ones. And the other day I realised, oh, I should really hook this up to my personal one. I think that's useful 'cause you know, you've got all your personal errands that you gotta make time for and it proactively went. Just so you know, I see this email from the school about your daughter's field trip and you've gotta get there 15 minutes earlier because they've changed the time to make sure they can catch the buses and make sure you fill out the permission form and just proactively just search, search through and said, oh, your house insurance, you've gotta make sure you renew that. That's due next week. And this is amazing that it proactively goes and finds these ignores all the spam, but actually just found the actual real nuggets in, amongst all the emails to go, these look actually personally relevant and important. Uh, and it does that on the business side. But I just hooked out the personal one yesterday and got all these like fresh alert, so that's pretty wild. Clive: Yeah, I, I, you know, I ask, when I, when I sort of hear these stories, I say, why are we using email? So what's, what's gonna happen to email? I mean, seriously. I mean, I, how are we gonna, how are we gonna replace that form of communication when this, when this, when this form of communication summarises it so well, so maybe, maybe it doesn't change the messaging and the, and the mass information, which we get given and sent to us just gets filtered down. An email continues for another a hundred years. I, I, I keep thinking about that, right? When instant messaging came along, when WhatsApp started, it's that I thought that was the end of email. It never was, right. It just, it just became a more, a more personalised small group of people who you, you WhatsApped with, and now this technology is sort of gonna take you to another level. So it was sort of all the time these technology waves come in and, you know, I, I don't think anything disappears. It just makes it better and better and better and better. Um, I don't realise, I mean, some of your listeners today, if they're dot users dot, had an outage today. Dave: I did it, I didn't notice it. I must have been using it around the adage 'cause it, it didn't just specifically affect me. Clive: So it's, it's, I think you'll, I think there'll, there'll be a big article on it around the world tomorrow, but the, they, um, now that's interesting. So I now already at this stage in my life is I'm pretty dependent upon do dot, right? Yeah. And then when dot does, when.site just disappears, you go, okay, what's gonna happen if dot really disappears? Mm-hmm. Right? So we, and, and yeah, you can say this same by email or WhatsApp or whatever, but the, but the, the point is that it, we are gonna be in this world where you, you, you, we are gonna be, become incredibly, be dependent upon this technology very quickly. And then it's gonna be like, okay, so what really, you know, what, what is our backup to all of this? Yeah. And I think when we still live in a world today where we do have a backup outside of the tech, um, but possibly going forward, we, we may not do as all this stuff again, more robots, more automation, more more of these Yeah. You know, everything being done for us. So half of me is incredibly excited and half of me is like, oh, I just, I'm glad I'm as old as I am. Dave: And, and, and, uh, arguably the wor the worst case isn't that it goes away, is that they like quadruple the price and it becomes uneconomical. You built your, all your business processes around this tool that all of a sudden they go, oh, actually we need to jack the prices up on this. And all of a sudden you go, well that doesn't make economic sense for me anymore. I better go hire those people back. And so it, it's a strange time, but the dot of the moment is basically unlimited. And I've been, I've been building video games with it. And so I go to bed and go Big sprint tonight, fix this, change that, implement that, add this new feature, do this, do this. I'll see you in the morning and like eight o'clock in the morning goes, here you go Dave. Here's the latest repo. Pull it down, do some play testing. It's just phenomenal the productivity you can get when you just hand big jobs to these tools. Um, Clive: that's Dave: great. Clive: Yeah. Yeah. And like you say, I mean, I think the, the building of anything is now down to an individual that you can build anything. Like, great example, your passion is building these video games, you know, but you can build anything so, you know, anyone can build anything and it, it's pretty much zero cost. Yeah. It's literally, it, it really is zero cost. Uh, you know, and that changes everything in the tech space. So it is very, very exciting place to be at the moment. Dave: Yeah. I mean, I mean, just micro apps. I, I shared the story on, on one of the, the episodes a few weeks ago where I had to get up and present some stuff at church and in five minutes and build me a little cue cards out with little flick out cards that I could just flick through with one thumb on my phone, uh, in minutes. I didn't have to go looking for free trials and which service did this and sign up to anything. I just said, rock bob, build me this thing. And it just bang, built it. Clive: Alright. Are you literally, you were just thinking about that that morning, right? So that Dave: was, yeah. Yeah. I was just, just going through all the things I had to say in order, in what order to do them in. I'm like, I need an app for this. Like, build me the app. Bang. Clive: Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. That's a wonderful, a wonderful application. Dave: Yep. Brilliant. Well, um, thank you so much for joining me, Clive. I really appreciate your time taking time to tell us all around what you're doing and then dive deep into, into sort of the how businesses and how you see AI being this, this lever, this lever, lever, I dunno about accent, uh, for, for business productivity. Um, you said you're launching the book next week. Where can people find more about you, find more about the book, um, golf.ai. So next? Clive: Yep. So next week, uh, we're vertical AI will be on pre-release on Amazon. So there'll be, I think it, it's pre-released next week. It, it's officially, I think available from the middle of November. Um, um, it $35. I mean, it's nothing. Um, the, the message and the thing behind the book is changing the game is obviously because of the golf background. Yeah. And the, there's a big parallel in the book to golf and, but golf is just a, is just for you to understand. It's so simple as an industry, but the, the key and I wanna leave people is, is this, this, this concept, right? This is not, we are moving now to this world where no, what you already use, what you already know to build what comes next for you and for your business and for your friends or your community, your church. Mm-hmm. You know, your family. And that's the opportunity of this. That's the era we're going in. That, you know, the, the AI selfie era, and it's gonna be, it's gonna be whatever you make it, but you have to take ownership yourself. It's not about using people like Dave or myself anymore. It's, you've gotta take ownership of this yourself and just have fun playing with this technology because you'll, you'll love it. I'll tell you right now, everybody I know, no one who uses this doesn't love this technology. Dave: Brilliant. Great way to wrap things up. Thank you so much, Clive. Uh, if you like these kinds of stories, make sure you like and subscribe, follow the channel, drop a comment in there. Uh, if you wanna follow up with Clive, we'll put all the links to him and how to access him in his book in the description, uh, down there. Um, you know where that is. Um, but, uh, yeah, we've got the operator stories that we publish on Mondays. We've got our live panel show where we discuss things in real time on Wednesdays, and the field notes are on Fridays. So lots of content for different people, depending what you are looking to consume and learn. But all the time we're here not to hype things, but just to give you these real stories around AI and the real world and how it's having real impacts for people. So thank you for joining me today, Clive. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. Uh, and, uh, thank you to everyone for, uh, watching this, and we'll see you next time.