How Small Businesses Can Get Found By AI Search Tools
Introduction: Marketing in a Whole New World
The digital marketing world is evolving at a breathtaking pace, and nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of search. On a recent episode of the Skutch Media Podcast, host Marnie Joseph sat down with Nick Tapp, founder of Taptico Solutions, for a deep dive into how AI-enhanced search is changing the game for small businesses, especially local businesses here in Atlanta, but with far-reaching implications everywhere.
What follows is an exploration of their insights: what’s changing, why it matters, and how your business can thrive in this new landscape.
The Rise of AI-Optimized Search
Gone are the simple days of stuffing blog posts with keywords and racking up clicks. As Nick explains, AI-driven platforms like Google Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT are quickly becoming the primary “answer engines” for users’ questions. Increasingly, consumers no longer click through to websites—instead, they rely on AI-generated summaries that pull answers from across the web.
This phenomenon, called “zero-click searches,” means your small business needs to orient its digital presence towards being understood by AI—not just seen by humans.
Key Takeaways:
Traffic is now a vanity metric; conversions matter most.
AI will only cite and surface your content if it’s clear, structured, and answers exactly what people are looking for.
Traditional SEO isn’t obsolete, but it’s evolving: clarity, structure, and semantic consistency are now more crucial than ever.
Structuring Your Content for AI Discovery
If your website content is a random jumble of tips, stories, and jargon, AI isn’t likely to know what your business actually does. Both Marnie and Nick emphasize that clarity and unified messaging across platforms are essential.
What does AI-optimized content require?
Clear hierarchy: Use H2 and H3 headings, concise schema markups, and structured data to “teach” AI what your business does.
Semantic consistency: Make sure your business, services, and expertise are described in the same way across your website, blog, newsletters, and social platforms.
Cross-platform alignment: Instagram, Reddit, newsletters—everywhere your brand appears needs to sing the same tune. This “semantic content web” ensures AI gets a clear signal about your business.
Nick offers a practical tip: check your AI visibility by searching for your business on Perplexity or similar tools. If you don’t show up, neither will your customers.
The End of the Click? The Importance of Brand Awareness
With fewer people actually visiting business websites, it’s natural to worry about declining traffic. But Nick reframes the issue: “Brand awareness is the crux of all of it.” If people—and AI—don’t know or trust you, it doesn’t matter how many site visits you get.
Brand Affinity is King
Trust and recognition fuel conversions, not pageviews.
Today’s brand awareness must stretch across multiple digital touchpoints, from podcasts to video, to maintain presence and credibility.
Being cited by reputable sources (publications, podcasts, etc.) still boosts both human and AI trust in your business.
Content Creation in 2025: Blogs, Podcasts, and AI Synergy
An eye-opening insight from the conversation: what blogs did for SEO in the past, podcasts and video are now set to do for AI searchability. Automated tools can turn a blog post into a podcast episode and then into social snippets—all reinforcing your business’s semantic signal across the web.
Actionable Approaches:
Integrate audio and video content to enhance discoverability.
Use tools (like Fireflies AI) to automate transcription and action-item capture from meetings and podcasts, streamlining the creation of searchable, structured content.
Getting Started: Action Steps for Small Businesses
Change can feel expensive, but Nick argues that “the wise businessperson spends money to save time.” For self-starters, there are free or low-cost resources—getting familiar with AI tools (and treating them as collaborators, not just instruments) is key.
Start Here:
Dedicate time to learning how platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity work.
Subscribe to AI industry updates and set alerts for the latest tools.
Audit your own business through AI search queries and adapt based on your visibility (or lack thereof).
Most importantly: don’t wait until this "trend" becomes unavoidable. Early adopters will have a significant advantage as AI search solidifies its dominance.
Conclusion: Embrace the Change, Stay Human
AI is changing how people find and engage with businesses, but it’s not about leaving humanity behind. As Nick and Marnie highlight, real success comes from blending human creativity and oversight (“human in the loop”) with the efficiency and reach of AI tools.
Now’s the time for small businesses to get curious, get structured, and get found, in Atlanta and everywhere.
Stay tuned for more insight from the Skutch Media Podcast and consider partnering with experts like Taptico Solutions to keep your business ahead of the AI curve.
Prefer Video?
Check out the episode on YouTube! [click here]
Timestamps:
00:00 From Radio to Entrepreneurship Journey
05:16 AI-Enhanced Marketing Support
09:15 AI Understanding Over Clicks
12:53 Optimizing Content Structure
15:59 "Brand Awareness: The Key"
16:57 "Rise of Zero Click Searches"
19:51 AI-Optimized Content Essentials
24:39 "AI: Collaborate, Don't Just Use"
27:50 Empowering Grads with AI Skills
31:15 Automation & AI: Set, Test, Verify
34:52 Excited About Fireflies Meeting Tool
36:33 "TaptiCode: AI Audits & Content"
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Marnie Joseph:
Everyone, welcome to the Skutch Media podcast. I think that's what we're calling it.
Nick Tapp:
It's very catchy.
Marnie Joseph:
I mean, it says what it is, right?
Nick Tapp:
Yeah, it's very in your face.
Marnie Joseph:
It's very in your face. So basically, yeah, this podcast is about bringing information on marketing to small businesses, particularly in the Atlanta area, as we are a small business in Atlanta ourselves. So we're using this podcast to bring you information on the things that you guys are wanting to know, the questions that you're asking about marketing today in 2025 and how that's different. And I'm excited about today because today I'm joined by Nick Tapp, who is the founder of Tico Solutions.
Nick Tapp:
That's right, ladies and gentlemen. And I'm doing this for free, so expect a download spike of maybe 12 to 13.
Marnie Joseph:
It's a lot, you know, it's a lot these days.
Nick Tapp:
What a windfall. You're welcome.
Marnie Joseph:
It's a lot these days. And actually that's one of the things we're going to get into. But before we dive in, because there's a number of things we want to talk about, why don't you tell everyone a little bit about yourself?
Nick Tapp:
Sure. So, born and raised in Atlanta, north side. Some people, you know, might say that's the suburbs. But I've been in in the marketing, media, PR brand game for close to 25 years at this point. Cut my teeth with Cox media over at 95. 5 the beat for those that represent and remember RIP. But then from there I went, launched 97, won the river with Dave Clapper, who is a partner in this current business along with. Which is awesome.
Nick Tapp:
He and I launched 971 the River. Then I got pulled over to 99X, which was my favorite station in the world growing up. So I took that chance and took that opportunity, did that for a while, got tired of paying some of my bills because radio is fun, so that means it doesn't pay anything. And got into sales, did some startups, started my own company a couple times and. And then fast forward. It's hard to encapsulate 20, 20 plus years, but my most recent marketing duties were I was working with gusto. Fresh bowls and wraps, which is love gusto. Phenomenal.
Nick Tapp:
Phenomenal.
Marnie Joseph:
Big fan of the lemon cookie.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah. Oh, me too. Oh, lemon butter cookie. Oh, so good. Yeah. So helping them, really, that was like. They approached me in 2019 to come on and I started as a, started as a consultant because they weren't sure they needed a full time marketing person yet worked there for about six weeks out of a three month contract. And they were like, we, we want you full time.
Nick Tapp:
So did that for close to five years. Grew them from basically three locations. Two, three locations up to 12, I believe is what we finished with. Stepped away from that. It, it was fantastic. The team is amazing there, but I wanted to do my own. Do my own deal, figure out what it was. And AI as a, you know, I was the director of marketing.
Nick Tapp:
I started working with a founder, Nate, and basically he and I were working on all the marketing stuff, he and I, you know, just together. But then we built out the team and it becomes management of the team and it becomes the meetings and then, and then all of a sudden you're in meetings and doing the admin work and not actually having enough time or bandwidth or energy to actually execute on stuff. And when I saw AI coming in, I was instructing my team. You guys need to learn this as much as possible. Yeah, we didn't have time that. We're just busy with our day jobs.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
So sets away from Gusto. All amicable is great. But really focused in on AI learning AI because I knew I would need to.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
To not only protect myself, but also because I'm kind of a tech nerd.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
So new technology.
Marnie Joseph:
So you wanted to get into it.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah.
Marnie Joseph:
You're like, I want to learn about that.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah. I mean, I was finding myself like going on and trying to learn tools but not knowing how I could implement them because incorporating a new tool into an existing company is so hard. Right. So, yeah, so I was learning them just kind of like for myself.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
So the more I learned, the more I was like, this has a big future. And then, you know, they say, if you want to start a successful business, solve your own problems.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
And I was like, I would hire someone that knew how to do this for marketing, to come in and be the change agent, as it were, to come in and kind of see how we could use it, what tools we needed specifically for our use case, you know, and restaurant in that case, and then implement it and build it out, build out the architecture and then train the team, you know, and this is how you're going to use it and then keep them updated. New tools come out every week and I'm not joking.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah, it seems like. It definitely seems like that for sure. Yeah. So it seems like more than that, actually.
Nick Tapp:
It is.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah, it is.
Nick Tapp:
So. So yeah, that's. I started doing this, you know, we obviously help small businesses that need marketing. We Help them execute on that. So we're kind of a, an AI enhanced marketing team that if one of our prospects right now that we're on the proposal stage with, they have, you know, over 20 locations and retail stores and they don't really have a marketing team. So a lot of the founder led companies, the founder retains that because it's their baby and I totally get it. But they would need people to come in and you know, execute on the marketing, not just the strategy. Help bring their vision to life and their goals to life.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
But figure out the most, the most precise, efficient way to execute the marketing. So myself, David Clapper and Trouble Reese, the three of us are kind of a marketing department for hire, for lack of a better term. So. But we all bring it. You know, we have an MBA between us. Tribble's got the envy.
Marnie Joseph:
You share it.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah, absolutely. And I've got the AI.
Marnie Joseph:
But who has it today?
Nick Tapp:
Right now? I do because I'm on camera. Okay, good. Microphone in my face.
Marnie Joseph:
Good.
Nick Tapp:
So yeah, we all have our different. You know, Dave started, started a, a company called Scamper Van, that one startup of the year a few years ago.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
He exited from that and the opportunity for us to work together came up and I was like absolutely. And he was like absolutely. And then Tribble and I didn't really know each other, but I've been a fan of his. He went through reality, he's been on a few reality shows. He's very charismatic, very enigmatic. And one of my major criteria for, for hiring or bringing people in is do I want to talk to this person every day?
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
Right. If the guy is a jackass.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
Or rude or not fun.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
He's not going to, we're not going to work. So yeah. Higher weakness. But also hire someone that, that, that you want to work with every day.
Marnie Joseph:
Personality over skills. Any day 100. You can train skills.
Nick Tapp:
Skills.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah, absolutely.
Nick Tapp:
Can't train experience either. So.
Marnie Joseph:
No, that's true.
Nick Tapp:
All these, all these people that back, you know, when social media first came out, they were saying, hey yeah, my nephew, my niece can do that. They'll do it. They have no idea about the intentionality that is, is needed for strategic things.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
And it's going to be the same thing with AI. You're going to start seeing a bunch of people saying, yeah, well my nephew knows how to use AI. He's a computer guy.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
But they don't have the experience and the perspective to really put it to good use.
Marnie Joseph:
Right. So exactly.
Nick Tapp:
That's the niche.
Marnie Joseph:
Exactly.
Nick Tapp:
We're trying to fill.
Marnie Joseph:
They know how to prompt AI to make a video that shows, you know, a bunch of puppies playing ping pong or something, but they don't. How does that translate to an actual business?
Nick Tapp:
Right. Is that going to help sell puppies?
Marnie Joseph:
Right, right, right.
Nick Tapp:
So.
Marnie Joseph:
Exactly. No, no. All right, well, congratulations on Tapptikov.
Nick Tapp:
Thank you.
Marnie Joseph:
One of the things I do want to talk about today, you know, we're going to get into a few different things, but first off is search and the, in the current kind of state of search right now, today, in 2025, as AI search becomes more and more of the norm. Right, right. You know, we're, we're seeing clients, you know, my traffic is down. And it's not just like local, small, local businesses that are seeing that, you know, you'll see on, you know, every day there's an article about how major publications, their traffic is down too, like by 50%. And so like what, what actually is going on.
Nick Tapp:
So, so hot take Traffic is a vanity metric.
Marnie Joseph:
I love it.
Nick Tapp:
The metric you should be paying attention to is conversions. Right. Because traffic is tire kickers. Traffic is, I accidentally, you know, put the wrong URL in.
Marnie Joseph:
Traffic is not human a lot.
Nick Tapp:
Right. Bots and web crawlers and all that stuff. So the change that's going to happen is, you know, tracking conversions is important, but with AI, if you know about Perplexity, you know about Google, Gemini, you know, you've seen Google, we've been doing this for a while. Wherever you show up on the Google, the, the search engine result pages, it doesn't really matter what is going to matter more? And obviously there's a, you know, we're on kind of a, a spectrum. Right. So we're early right now or the early adopters and then we're going to go to main mass and all that stuff. But as those things start to evolve, what's going to matter is not, not really impressing for clicks, but it is clarifying for AI to understand what you do.
Marnie Joseph:
It's gone from will they click to will AI cite it. Right?
Nick Tapp:
Yeah, absolutely. And understand what we do. So top of my head, like if, you know I'm a plumber in Atlanta, I say what's, what's a good, what's.
Marnie Joseph:
A good term for a plumber?
Nick Tapp:
Well, yeah, like so, you know, plumbers in Atlanta near me, right. As opposed to a plumber putting out a blog post saying, here's how to unclog a drain. Here's how an Atlanta plumber unclogs drains.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
You know, so it's that kind of thing where this, the, the schema or whatever on the back end really dumbs it down as much as possible to the, the very grain of exactly what you do and clarify exactly what it is so that I can find it and then, and then bring that into the search engines.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
The search results.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
So as we're all consumers of media and we're all consumers of the Internet, when we do our searches, I know myself for sure is I just read kind of the AI recap and I, whatever, whatever comes there, I don't scroll through the, the search results.
Marnie Joseph:
Not anymore. Right, right.
Nick Tapp:
So, and then that's on Google. Right. Perplexity, Grok, chatgpt, Gemini. All these different search tools are going to become the Google of the future.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
Right. So, and a lot of this can be voice, you know, hey, hey, Siri, how do I get my, my plumbing unclogged?
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
You know, this is how you can do it. Do you want to find some local plumbers?
Marnie Joseph:
Right, Absolutely. Right.
Nick Tapp:
So planning for that is, is really more about clarifying. Exactly. And being very literal so that the, so that the AI can understand and provide the best results to the people that are asking.
Marnie Joseph:
Right, right, right. It's. It's similar to sort of traditional SEO principles. Right, right. If you think about, you know, when, you know, kind of traditional SEO. Right. It's working the proper keywords into your content and thinking about exactly how people are typing them into a search engine and working them in that way. Right.
Marnie Joseph:
So AI, and correct me if I'm, if I'm saying anything out of, if I'm saying anything wrong here, but AI search is kind of similar, but to me, in my opinion, it almost seems like it's, it's, it's traditional SEO, almost like on crack.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah.
Marnie Joseph:
Right. It's got to be even more structured.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah.
Marnie Joseph:
More the things that matter. Right. The structure, the speed. Right. The performance of how things are loaded, that everything is that things are tagged properly, that you're using the proper, you know, H2 and H3 text. Right. So it's, it changes, I think, how a lot of business owners and creators need to think about how their content is structured when they put it out.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah.
Marnie Joseph:
And, and sort of the days of you can write a blog post on your website and stuff it full of all the keywords you want to stuff it full of, but if it's just a bunch of words on a page.
Nick Tapp:
Right. Yeah.
Marnie Joseph:
It's going to, just going to be Lost out there. It's. It, there's nothing.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah, it's just fluff.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
One of the main things with AI is also you have to make sure that everything is unified.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah. So exactly.
Nick Tapp:
All the same information across all the platforms because AI will pull from all of them.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
And when I say all of them, I mean your Instagram, if you have a Reddit page for your business, your blogs, newsletters, all of that stuff is going to be searchable. So you better be saying the same thing. Right.
Marnie Joseph:
We call it a semantic content web.
Nick Tapp:
Okay.
Marnie Joseph:
Semantic content, that's what we call it with our clients. Right. So that everything, your, your content is structured properly, cross platform and that's what's going to be, that's what's going to win in the AI search world. Yeah. Things like that matter. Things like being cited by major publications are still very important. Right. Like PR mentioned, those types of being quoted.
Marnie Joseph:
Right. In places, those are still very important for credibility. Exactly. In the AI search world. So. Yeah, yeah. Nick.
Nick Tapp:
Yes, ma' am.
Marnie Joseph:
I want to go back to what we were talking about, about traffic being down and businesses being scared about that. You talked about conversions and you know, traffic being a vanity metric, which I love. It's, it's about conversions. Where does, where do you think brand awareness plays in there as well? Like how important is brand awareness now with this sort of traffic situation?
Nick Tapp:
Brand awareness is the crux of all of it. You know, trust is a very big thing. If people a don't know about your brand, what do you have?
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
A step further for me is brand affinity. Right. So as a marketing person, I always say that my job as a marketing person is to establish a trust built relationship with any, anyone that might need to purchase my product or service.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
And that is a catch all for a million different things come off of that.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
But brand awareness, yeah. If they can't, if they can't find you, if they don't know about you, they're not going to buy from you. So brand awareness splinters out. I know you got some good thoughts on this too. Brand awareness is going to have to splinter out across the digital eco. Ecosphere, if that's the right word. But yeah. So brand awareness will always be king, obviously to me.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
And just the way that you become brand or your, your target clients or customers become brand aware is the marketing, the branding that you do.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah, right, yeah, exactly. And I think that's one of the things that we talk about a lot and that we really love about what we do and what we can offer from, from Scotch is video podcasting is a very powerful tool for both brand awareness and AI searchability.
Nick Tapp:
Right.
Marnie Joseph:
If it's done right.
Nick Tapp:
Right, yeah. So there's a term that we're going to start hearing a lot. It's called, it's called zero click. Let me get it right, because it's so fresh off the press, is zero click searches. Right. So, so think about it, and I kind of talked about it earlier, but that's the term that you're going to be hearing more of. Zero click searches means that people will ask AI for whatever their query is and AI will give them the feedback, give them the answer. Never going to your website.
Nick Tapp:
Your website, it needs to exist, but it's not being. That's not the end result. Right. So traffic will drop for everyone because of the, because of this. And the goal is to make sure that AI understands what you offer. Because if AI can't. If AI can't understand what you offer, then no one's going to find you anyway.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah. It's almost like these AI tools are mining what's out there for the right answers for everyone. Right?
Nick Tapp:
Absolutely.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
And might be jumping the gun a little bit, but this is. We just talked about this a little bit prior. What blogs used to be for SEO is what podcasts are going to be. Right. So, yeah, so think about that. If you're a business owner and I just spit everywhere, you're welcome.
Marnie Joseph:
Don't worry. We sanitize these things in between guests.
Nick Tapp:
Dang it. So think about podcasting, audio and visual as blogs.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
It's, you know, it's kind of a pivot of what blogging used to be. Blogs are still important because SEO still exists, but tying them all together, putting out, like we said earlier, unified content that says the same, says the same thing. There are tools that convert your blog into a podcast.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
And it does not take you sitting down and doing it.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
You can automate podcast for this. So all of those things are things that we do, and I'm sure a bunch of other teams and, and, and agencies. I hate that word because we're not really an agency, but a lot of people will start leaning into that. But we are in the very, very, very forefront or in the tip of the sphere of all that stuff. So, yeah, that's why our partnership made so much sense to us and, and to you guys.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah, for sure, for sure. So when we say. I know we, we touched on this a little bit before, but like when we say AI search, optimized content. What specifically, like what specifically does this change in how businesses create content?
Nick Tapp:
So the clarity. Right, so. And set it this part out. All right, so I've got a list here and I want to make sure I don't miss anything because this is super important. And I don't think that a lot of business owners, I mean, maybe small, small business owners are doing, doing their own SEO and all that stuff, but for the most part, SEO firms and agencies will need to look into this and this will make sense to them. But AI optimized content, it actually means clear H2S and H3S, the schema markup being completely clear and teaching the AI in a very first grade level exactly what the business does. Semantic linking and then consistency across platforms. Yeah, so it's about, it's about creating a content ecosystem where a blog post leads to a podcast, which leads to social snippet, which leads to the AI figuring it out.
Nick Tapp:
So a lot of the tools that we're developing at Tapptico will allow you to write a blog post that will instantly automate it in an automated fashion. Create a podcast. Obviously you need a video podcast, which is why you guys come into play, and then break that into snippets to be pushed out on your social media content. And then that's how the AI finds you. Because if you haven't heard of Perplexity yet, by God, please do. They had a Super bowl commercial last year. So if you haven't heard about it, Perplexity is amazing. I have an affiliate code that I can't say verbally because it's a bunch of X's and and O's and numbers and stuff.
Nick Tapp:
But go check out.
Marnie Joseph:
We can put it in the show notes.
Nick Tapp:
Okay, sweet. Go download Perplexity. They have an amazing app. They do amazing things. They are updating very quickly that will replace Google. I'm sure Google will probably just acquire them because that's what those big boys do.
Marnie Joseph:
Right?
Nick Tapp:
But you'll see, just do a quick search and you'll see that it will pull from dozens of sources and then it will link out to those sources if you want to do a deeper dive. And then not only that will, it will give you four to five next questions that the AI said, okay, if they're searching for this, they might also want to search for this. And it continues the conversation. And where you start with, you know, I'm looking for a new pair of boots in Atlanta. It can take you down a rabbit hole of what's in fashion for men. What size do you, do you have like, I have wide feet. So do they have special sizing and it will take you down and almost lead you to the perfect answer?
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
And in order for your company to show up in that, you have to make sure you have all the, all the T's, cross and the eyes dotted.
Marnie Joseph:
Right, right, right.
Nick Tapp:
You have to be findable and easily understandable.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah. And most small businesses, their content is not. Yeah, yeah, not at all.
Nick Tapp:
They think if it's done, it's good enough.
Marnie Joseph:
If it's done, it's good enough. If it's out there, it's good enough.
Nick Tapp:
Right. And you need to post today.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah, yeah. And if your content isn't structured like this now, it's just not going to show up.
Nick Tapp:
Absolutely.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah. And if you want to test and see if your business is, is AI friendly, go to Perplexity and put in a search that your clients or customers or prospects would, would put in trying to find you. And if you don't show up, you're not showing up.
Marnie Joseph:
Right. Now I would kind of want to talk about some common concerns that we've heard from clients. One potential client asked, like, what does this mean? This sounds expensive. Like, is this only. Like, I'm just a small business. Like, how much is this going to cost me to do now?
Nick Tapp:
Well, how much is it going to cost you to not do it? Just going to go ahead and put that out there.
Marnie Joseph:
There it is.
Nick Tapp:
The good thing about software and if you're, if you're not, everyone wants to learn this stuff. Right? Like, I know how to get a six pack. You know, I know how to get abs. Still really feeling. You know, I like pasta.
Marnie Joseph:
I just, you know, I just don't really want them.
Nick Tapp:
And so many people are that way about AI, A new tech. I just learned how to use Twitter. Yeah, it's not called Twitter anymore.
Marnie Joseph:
It's not.
Nick Tapp:
Right. Yeah. So they're still huge on MySpace, but that doesn't really help.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
So first thing I would address is, is it's, it is a, it's a must do for your business. If you're a learner and you understand you're a little bit savvy, you can go in and learn it. I would say just, just work with some tools, start getting an idea of how to incorporate it. The number one thing I would say to small business owners that want to do it themselves is don't treat it like a tool, treat it like a collaborator. Right. You are working with, and I'm not joking. The Smartest entity in the planet that has access to the highest level of information and data and all of it. So treat it as such and if you don't understand how to use it, ask it how to use it.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah, right. Say, hey, chat to bt. I'm trying to do, you know, I'm trying to do this, help me guide you. What's a good prompt for me to use to, to find the best results? So if you're a self starter and a self learner, it will cost you as much as the subscription fees, which is basically 20 bucks a month.
Marnie Joseph:
Right?
Nick Tapp:
Right. Or you can do the free version and cost you zero. It costs you time. But I'm a big proponent of saying a wise or a wise businessman spends money to save time, whereas poor businessman spends time to save money.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
Obviously we've got budgets, so take that with a grain of salt. But for someone like us, yes, we do, we do have, you know, we have a price tag associated with us and, and we're expensive, you know, but, but we're worth it.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
So I would say if you're a self starter, go in, learn it. It can be literally as little as under a hundred dollars a month to do this stuff. You just have to understand how to use also evolves very quickly so you got to stay on top of it. So the time cost of that would be great. The financial cost, not so much.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
Did that answer your question?
Marnie Joseph:
It does, I think, you know, the whole, what's the cost to not do it? I had clients saying that they just didn't believe this Internet thing was going to last and it was just a fad. And so like. Yeah, so don't, don't get like that with this. Right.
Nick Tapp:
Same with social media.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Nick Tapp:
The problem is, is once you be like, oh, this isn't a trend anymore, then you're behind.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
And then you can't catch it.
Marnie Joseph:
You're already behind. Right. Right.
Nick Tapp:
So we are, this is the early warning system. We are sending out notices to your phone at 3 alert to start paying attention now because it's going to have ramifications that ripple and I'm really worried about the, the kids that are in college and high school right now. Because I feel like a lot of those entry level jobs are going to be replaced.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
And I, I don't like it as much as anyone else does, but business is business, but it is what it is and bottom lines are bottom lines. And if you can, if you can build an AI agent to execute on your research for $20 a month as opposed to hiring someone and giving them insurance and all that stuff. It's, I mean, from a business.
Marnie Joseph:
What's going to be done?
Nick Tapp:
What's going to be done? So the next few years, when it comes to the, the new college grads going after white collar jobs in an entry level position, I'm worried about that and what that looks like. Maybe we should put together a learning course for recent college grads because there's an opportunity there for them. Sorry, off topic, but there's an opportunity there for college grads to learn AI. We can, they can learn the AI, we can work with them or they can learn the marketing and then very quickly leapfrog the people.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
That have been doing it for 20 plus years. Because they have access to this tool. No, they use this tool. Oh. And by the way, they have access to all the, the knowledge too. Right, Right. So. So we'll see how it evolves.
Nick Tapp:
I do think, you know, chat GPT5 should be coming out this month, if not next month.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
That's going to change the game again.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
So as it evolves, no one, anyone that says they know what's going to happen, they're a liar. So I'm not going to sit here and say that I, that I know what's going to happen. But we can set ourselves up appropriately and so can small business owners to be ready for what comes.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
And be adaptable.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
And be open to it.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah. So on that note, what are the things that you think a small business, what are a couple things that you think a small business can do to set themselves up to be ready? Now, what are some actionable steps?
Nick Tapp:
Um, actionable steps would be to get, to get comfortable with the tools. These companies understand that the learning curve is going to be pretty steep. So they are offering a ton of free, free courses, free software that OpenAI, which is the parent company of ChatGPT, Microsoft, Google. There are a lot of companies that put out free training for these things because they know that they're not going to have a viable business in a year or two if no one wants to learn how to use it. Right. So. So they are putting things out. I don't know if you do Google alerts, but set your Google alerts for that kind of stuff.
Nick Tapp:
I would subscribe to some AI periodicals. There are some amazing podcasts out there that do weekly updates on the new AI stuff, which is how I stay in touch. ChatGPT has a task feature which you can go in and I get daily Updates about. About massive AI updates that I might have missed just so that I can, you know, I want to be able to speak to everything. So every morning in my inbox, I get the top five things that happened in AI last, you know, yesterday. And that's something you can set up through ChatGPT. If you don't know how to do it, what do you do? Ask Chat gbt. How do I set up task.
Nick Tapp:
Task with you so that I. I want to get, you know, daily summaries of what happened and in my industry.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
And how people in my industry are using AI. It can do that. If you want to do it weekly, do it weekly. But the easiest thing to do is to ask ChatGPT how to use it.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
Because it's its own best tutor.
Marnie Joseph:
Right, right, right.
Nick Tapp:
So I love it. That's what I would say. I would say just familiarize yourself with the tools. Learn how to work. Work with them. I keep saying tools, but again, I'm going to emphasize that in your brain, you should position it as a, an assistant.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
As a collaborator.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
It's gonna change a lot of jobs, but it's also going to create a lot of jobs.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
So.
Marnie Joseph:
Right.
Nick Tapp:
I think with like automations and tying tools together, that's the kind of stuff where, where you set it, you test it and then you forget it, obviously go through every now and again and make sure everything's working. But with LLMs, in any sort of like a chat GPT or strategic AI, you always got to double check the work. There's a term called one shotting, which you probably know about, but that's the lazy part. Right. So one shot means you do your first prompt, whatever comes out, copy, paste, you're done. Another term is coming out called slop, which AI Slop is a thing that you'll start to see. You know, LinkedIn is, is the big place for it, but you'll start to see it in more social media content where this is slop. This is clearly just a copy and paste it.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
And human in the loop is where we, where we tap to go. That's why we're here, is because having a human in the loop, which is what you're just referring to, is having a human kind of check it. Right?
Marnie Joseph:
Yes.
Nick Tapp:
It's almost like having, you know, a football coach and AI agents and your AI tools and your LLMs and all that stuff for the football players, but you're making sure that they're doing their job right. You have the playbook. This is what we need to do on this play. Okay. The left tackle didn't do the right thing. Coach him up.
Marnie Joseph:
Right, Right.
Nick Tapp:
So having a human in the loop to. To maintain quality, because without good quality, it's going to die anyway. So I would always thoroughly recommend that a human stays in the loop as much as possible.
Marnie Joseph:
Great.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah.
Marnie Joseph:
Love it. Let's talk about what you got coming up next at Tapptica.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah. So fired up about our podcast.
Marnie Joseph:
I know.
Nick Tapp:
This is. This is. This is great. I'm excited about it myself. Dave and Tribble, we will be coming in here regularly to do some podcasting. And through that, Dave is. Is. He's my boy.
Nick Tapp:
I love him. He's my brother, but he is not tech savvy. He is actually one reason why. One of the many reasons why I want to bring him in is because he isn't tech savvy. So he really is the end user. So he's kind of our test, our guinea pig when it comes to communicating how to teach these things.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
So what we're going to be doing is this podcast. It's not named yet, but Dave will be interviewing Tribble and I probably alternating on that, on different tools and how to use them.
Marnie Joseph:
Cool.
Nick Tapp:
So he'll be coming from a very approachable. Probably the same way 99.9 of the world will be approaching AI.
Marnie Joseph:
Yeah.
Nick Tapp:
With the same questions. And we're going to be walking him through that and answering those questions. Tribble will be focused more on the. The content creation. So, you know, the imagery, the video, the. The 11 labs, the voice stuff, all of those things. Whereas I'll be coming more from the strategic side with. With Claude's Grox, the.
Nick Tapp:
The anything else, any of the tools from an operational standpoint, that would make sense for small business owners. And. And, yeah, we'll be doing some live demos for the video podcast, all that kind of stuff. And because things change so quickly, we're going to do these pretty rapidly and getting them out. But also we want to be searchable. So all this stuff we just talked about, we're doing that for our own Search engine optimization, which. Yeah. Answer engine optimization.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah.
Marnie Joseph:
So what do you think we're doing here?
Nick Tapp:
Exactly. Right.
Marnie Joseph:
We got to practice what we preach. Yeah, exactly.
Nick Tapp:
Yeah. One thing that I will say is I'm pretty fired up about. I use a tool to record all of our meetings, you know, live and virtual, called Fireflies. And Fireflies AI. It records everything. After the meeting, you can have it send out a summary, a full transcript, and action items based on the Speaker. So it's a full written copy of everything you just talked about. So you can remain in the meeting and in the task tension is what, what we call it, where you're like, yeah, and then we can do this and do this without having to stop and take notes.
Nick Tapp:
But then you can, I wish that.
Marnie Joseph:
Was around in my corporate career.
Nick Tapp:
It's insane. But then you can tie it into Google Docs or Slack and it will send those automated, automatedly send those into your internal task management plan for platforms. And then you can create asana tasks. So it assigns the asana task to the people like on. And this is all through, you know, a meeting recording, which is phenomenal. So there are a lot of really cool tools that will make life a lot easier for people.
Marnie Joseph:
That's super cool.
Nick Tapp:
Not just life easier, but also more productive and better follow through and execution. Yeah, thought up about that. So we'll probably be putting, putting together some of those workflows and putting those out there on our socials as kind of a, a free and easy way to level up your business if you can't quite afford us just yet.
Marnie Joseph:
Awesome. All right, so for businesses listening who want to, you know, learn more, how do they get in touch with you?
Nick Tapp:
So our website is tapticode co t a p t I c o dot co and you can follow us on Instagram, TikTok. We're just starting up the TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook. We're on, we're on all the spots. We will be putting out a lot more content. We're just now getting rolling. So a lot of the content is going to be helpful for small business owners that want to learn on their own. Or if you want to touch base with us, we can run an audit on your, on your business right now. An AI audit.
Nick Tapp:
You can hit me up directly. Nick@taptico.co or Dave@ Tapptico Co if you want to have a quick call, we can discuss and see if we're good fits.
Marnie Joseph:
Awesome. Well, thank you for coming in and hanging out with us. Thanks for having me.
Nick Tapp:
This has been great. I can do more if you want, like, but directly in the camera so it's even better.
Marnie Joseph:
Rubber baby boogie bumpers.
Nick Tapp:
You gotta loosen your face before you do these things vocal. You know, you need unique unite.
Marnie Joseph:
But that's good for like lymphatic drainage too.
Nick Tapp:
I don't know what that is, but it sounds gross.
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