[00:00:00.000] – David Maples

Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Bucks Stops Here. I am here with Shekhar Gupta on an episode, we’re entitled So You Think AI won’t Affect You. Shekhar, welcome to the show.

 

[00:00:23.190] – Shekhar Gupta

Well, thank you. Thank you very much for having me.

 

[00:00:25.340] – David Maples

Oh, I’m excited to be here with you. A few weeks back, we received an email from one of the fans of the show from a plumber in Florida. If you’re watching the show or listening to it right now, I’m speaking about your particular email, we received several others. The plumber said in no uncertain terms, Yeah, AI, David, good job. It’s never going to affect me. I said, Okay, we’re going to get some people on the show this season to talk about that. That’s one of the reasons I’m so excited to have you here. Shekhar, real quick, if you would just give us a rundown of who you are, where we can find you online, and your AI venture.

 

[00:01:04.590] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah, my name is Shekhar Gupte. I am a Founder and CEO of MyAnIML. I’m found pretty much everywhere on LinkedIn or Twitter. Look me up on LinkedIn, Shekhar Gupta 01, I think is what that is. In my company, MyAnIML, we developed an AI solution that analyzes a cattle’s face, a picture just, and is able to early predict the health symptoms of that cattle. Two to three days before, even the pen riders who are riding around and their whole job is to see what cattle, what cow is sick, we’re able to provide notifications 2-3 days before even they can tell.

 

[00:01:44.670] – David Maples

Okay. All right. Now, let me stop you just for a second there. Here’s what I’m trying to understand. I understand that when you raise cattle, it’s under USDA approval or you have certain things with the health of the animals that you put into the food supply. Right now, I’ve heard of a thing called downer cows and things like that. These are cows who get into the food supply that maybe you’re sick or showing symptoms. From what I understand, if you’re a cattle rancher, then that could, if you have an animal that’s sick, they could contaminate the entire herd or anyone they’re in the pens with right?.

 

[00:02:22.590] – Shekhar Gupta

That’s correct. That’s correct. That’s the biggest problem because in a pen, usually they have 300, 400 cattle. So if one cow gets sick, the disease spread very quickly in that herd, in that pen. And since these cattle are bought and sold very frequently, you may not know that you just sold a soon to be sick cow to another ranch and that cow goes to another ranch and where they start spreading the disease as well. And that’s why the outbreaks happen. And that’s why we get the recalls many times in the summertime when you have those recalls coming in.

 

[00:02:57.330] – David Maples

Okay, but the thing is that the thing that I want to underline here is that when you have bad food in the food supply, people die.

 

[00:03:05.730] – Shekhar Gupta

Absolutely.

 

[00:03:06.370] – David Maples

It’s very bad. Not just from that, not just from the health and safety of the food supply. If I’m a small family rancher, 300 cattle may be everything I have. So you’re telling me that I could get sick cattle in the herd, not know that there’s a disease animal in there, and I could have a completely botched… I mean, the entire year of income could be wiped out. Is that correct?

 

[00:03:30.250] – Shekhar Gupta

That’s correct. So just to treat an animal. I mean, a shot is about $30, so that’s not a big deal. But you got to bring that animal back in the shoot. That’s where the issue is because all that labor to bring the animal in the shoot and give that the shot, that costs about $30, $40, $50. So you’re looking at $80 or so per cattle, par incidents.

 

[00:03:54.380] – David Maples

Okay. Now this is the part I’m going to challenge you on. So you’re using artificial intelligence to make this happen. Tell me, how does that even work? Because I, as a plumber or someone else who maybe think that it doesn’t involve, sorry, I’m just talking to you, just taking a little shot at you. Just kidding. Look, everyone out there in business right now, realize that it’s going to impact your industry in the next 24-36 months, and you have to recognize it’s going to happen. Shekhar here is an example of how this is amazing and how it can work. I’d like to know a little bit more, Shekhar, about the technology. What did you do? Where did this come from? Where did you come with the idea to do this and how does the AI do this?

 

[00:04:37.010] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah, I know. I’m very passionate about this thing, David, especially post-COVID. I don’t know if you sawyou walked even at Sam’s and Costco’s type big wholesale, the food shelves were empty. And that’s just really very bad for us as a nation, as a first world new nation that we cannot even supply food to our own citizens. Baby formulas were out. Many of the infants were left with no baby powder. So biosecurity is a big deal. And then on top of it, when we get a bad quality of product, we consume it, and our human health, it’s degraded. We got to go to the hospital. We as human beings that when we get sick, we go to the hospital, we take medicine to get better or whatever, but we don’t care about where our food supply is coming from. So if we can make our food supply better, if we consume a better quality of product, our health is going to go up. And so what’s the best way to make our food supply better is to make our food source better. I live in Kansas City, surrounded by cattle all around, and we consume a lot of cattle products.

 

[00:05:57.640] – Shekhar Gupta

So let’s start off with cattle. My company that I named my company MyAnIML, is because I’ve got on roadmap other types of animals in the future as well, and cattle is just the beginning. It took me a while to go around. And I’m also a predictive modeling person because once you detect something, it’s already there. If it’s there already, then you’re just simply detecting it and the cattle is already sick. But if you can somehow predict something before the cattle get symptomatic, before it gets sick, that’s where you can have a real impact on lowering the cost, bringing the better quality of product bringing the product that has less antibiotics. That’s one of the the biggest good thing about my product is that the cattle owners, the ranchers can target the use of antibiotics versus giving the antibiotics to every single incoming calf.

 

[00:07:03.830] – David Maples

Okay. I’ve got, wow, I just have five questions that came out of this. The overuse of antibiotics in our food supply has been… People have talked about the problem with multivresistant strain, pathogens, etc, because of the overuse of antibiotics. Then the cow supply and then our animal supply for our food supply is one of the biggest places they’ve been worried about that, number one. You’ll see people all the time in the stores, they’ll talk about not treating the antibiotics. But that’s a more expensive process. Because your thing uses AI to scan the faces of these cows ahead of time before they’re symptomatic, you present symptoms in different ways. There are small symptoms, but the thing is, a lot of times there are symptoms that a machine or a computer could read, like vascular structure in their face, a high-definition scan of a face or things like that. With their cattle, they’re finding this days ahead of time before they would where a human would recognize that the cow was sick.

 

[00:08:02.840] – Shekhar Gupta

That’s correct.

 

[00:08:03.840] – David Maples

That also means from an interventionist medical standpoint, that you can intervene generally with lower level treatments.

 

[00:08:10.970] – Shekhar Gupta

That’s correct.

 

[00:08:11.540] – David Maples

If you’ve ever had the flu, they have a couple of different antivirals, tamiflu being one of them, for example. It’s usually these antivirals reduce viral load in your system very early on. What happens is you’re able to shorten the course of the disease, and you’re also able to shorten the contagion level of disease and passing on other people. Obviously, in the pandemic, had we had some of the more advanced treatments that have come out very early on, we could have had millions of people less infected with COVID, et cetera, because you could have treated and intervened earlier. What you’re saying is using AI technology. Because it’s AI, it’s learning from the different things. It’s fine, it may present symptoms. So it’s actually improving itself.

 

[00:08:51.830] – Shekhar Gupta

Over time. It’s actually doing what AI is supposed to be doing. Because many times you hear people saying that, Oh, I’ve got AI, but when they simply have machine learning product. There’s a difference between machine learning and AI. So our product is actually evolving more so than what we trained on it. So if it would just do what we trained on it, it’d be a machine learning product. But it’s evolving. It’s seeing the changes itself and it’s training itself. That’s where the AI part of it comes in. And that’s where I’m very, very glad that that’s what’s happening because that’s even progressing faster than I could possibly imagine.

 

[00:09:33.970] – David Maples

In theory, you could, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but you could, your product itself could have other beneficiary offshoots from it that will emerge perhaps in the next 3-6 months.

 

[00:09:46.920] – Shekhar Gupta

Is that correct? Yeah, no, absolutely. There is also a conversation going on in the world about methane emissions. Yes. And people say, Well, cows, cattle industry is one of the largest producer of methane gas.

 

[00:10:02.960] – David Maples

I’ve heard this.

 

[00:10:03.990] – Shekhar Gupta

Right. So a sick cow emits more methane because it’s belching more, it’s farting more. Yes. The longer it remains sick, the more methane it emits. The sooner you can grab that cow and cure it faster, the methane emission goes down. So there is a correlation there as well for the greenhouse emission to have an early prediction on that cattle, isolate that cattle, treat it faster, and thus having a real impact on methane emission.

 

[00:10:38.220] – David Maples

See, this is just blowing my mind right now. If you’re listening right now and you want to comment on this. How many of you listening to the podcast right now ever thought artificial intelligence? Two years ago. How many of you ever thought, Oh, it could revolutionize our food supply? A lot of us had these myths that we created about artificial intelligence because of what’s in movies and things like that. It’s like, Oh, it’s all going to be Skynet. The reality is very different. Ai, if used properly in the right hands like Shekhars, we could end up with a world where you could literally have a multiplicative effect. This could make the food things… We revolutionized food industry through genetic crop engineering and things like that in the ’80s and ’90s. We’ve increased food yield. We’ve been able to cross-pollinate plants and things like that. Then do actually genetic manipulation, not just from a cross-pollination and genetic diversity type standpoint, but we’re able to increase our yields on existing farmland. We could actually do this in a way that we’ve never seen before and help farmers, ranchers, and the humans at large, who we don’t really care always where the food came from, just how it gets there.

 

[00:11:51.070] – David Maples

But none of us want to have a recall which says, Oh, there’s a Listeria in your ice cream and 10 people have died. That is amazing.

 

[00:11:59.160] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah. IVF is one of the biggest thing in cattle industry.

 

[00:12:03.220] – David Maples

Really? Yeah. That’s in vitro fertilization for those of you who are not familiar with it. And a lot of humans will go through this process a lot of times if you’re having trouble conceiving and having a child, where they will actually take an egg and sperm and fertilize it and then implant it into the uterus of the mother to have a child.

 

[00:12:24.590] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah. So think about it. So if the mother is going to be sick over the next 2-3 days. Well, the test don’t show that she is sick today, so you do IVF. Will the mother gets sick, whether it’s uterus infection or something else. So all the procedure that you did there, all thousands of dollars you spent on it just goes to waste really fast.

 

[00:12:47.600] – David Maples

I had no idea IVF was being used in the cattle industry. That’s amazing. But it makes sense, right?

 

[00:12:52.770] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah. There was even a research done by, I want to say, U-PEN or something, that if you trace back the history of all these cattle, they go back to a handful of bulls back in early 1900s.

 

[00:13:09.380] – David Maples

Wow! That’s amazing. Now, I have another follow-up question for you. You said you’ve been looking at other industries, and I’ve been thinking about just in particular the poultry industry. A couple of things happened in the poultry industry over last fall. We had the egg prices went through the roof and there were a whole bunch of… It was a multivariate problem. There were multiple reasons this happened, but one of the big reasons was wholesale culling because of a bird flu, et cetera, being presented in the different animals. So what other industries have you been looking at?

 

[00:13:40.560] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah, no. So hogs is one of the other ones I’ve been reached by many people about hogs. And then as a matter of fact, somebody reached out to me from Middle East about camels.

 

[00:13:52.990] – David Maples

Really?

 

[00:13:53.660] – Shekhar Gupta

Because they raise camels for beauty pageants. I had no idea.

 

[00:13:59.530] – David Maples

Wow.

 

[00:14:00.880] – Shekhar Gupta

So yeah, I mean, camels is far out there, so I’m not putting that in there yet. Sure. But sheeps, goats, hogs. I mean, think about pets. Think about that. People love their pets, their dogs and cats, and they take pictures of them all day long to put them on their social media. Now, how cool would that be that you took a picture of your dog or cat and right there it shows that there’s something is happening with it. Okay.

 

[00:14:32.520] – David Maples

All right. Keep going. There’s so much here. But you’re talking about… So out of the application on you’re looking at using artificial intelligence and diagnostic imagery, and this is just photography of these animals. You’re talking about you could potentially revolutionize the entire veterinary and medicine industry in some way.

 

[00:14:53.760] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah, one of the example that I like to give you here, David, is that one of my customer stated to me that he had to adjust the feed. He wasn’t given a proper feed, so that was showing up on the cattle. And think about that. We’re kept picking up not just the physical pain, but also the mental pain because they’re eating a bad quality of feed, so it’s showing up. Now relate that mental issues to our humans. How easy of a leap would it be for me to get into a human world where we are having these mental issues a lot nowadays to predict that something is going to happen, that child or that person is prone to have some mental issues.

 

[00:15:49.500] – David Maples

It’s amazing to think about all these things can be done. And it reminds me of… And so in the AI, in the literature, and I know we’re in season three of the podcast now, and the three-part series I did in season two was pretty popular. I’ve been thinking about going back and revising it because I did it six or seven months ago now, I think, based on witness podcast is being recorded. If you’re listening to this next year, just pretend that I said that that was plus a year or whatever it is. But the point about it is that so much has changed. I think it was a five-year longitudinal study of it. It’s an oncology report. They were using AI to predict five-year survivorship outcomes based on the first intake with a patient before they’ve done any diagnostic imagery, before they’ve drawn the first milliliter of blood. What they discovered is that the AI models could accurately predict five-year outcomes based on the doctor intake. That made me think, diagnostically speaking, there are so many more data points there that we as humans just aren’t even observing. I’ve been thinking about your cattle example here.

 

[00:17:05.610] – David Maples

What’s being presented right now with the palour, the color of your face, whatever it is, versus some baseline when you show up. Doctors are diagnosis… I mean, they’re diagnosticians. They look at what happens and they look at you and they say, Oh, and you want a doctor to take a holistic approach. You come in and you’re not better and you’re short of breath and you’ve got a bad palour and you’re crampy and you’re not really presenting a fever yet. All these data points, if you have a machine learning or an artificially intelligent model, and for those of you in the show who are not sure what the distinction is, machine learning is basically the machine being programmed with a certain set of data points. It can make diagnostic things, but it’s not really learning on its own. It’s not generative. It can give you outcomes and humans directed. With AI, in theory, you can take an AI that doesn’t know how to play chess and have it play itself. By lunchtime, it can beat most players in the United States. By the end of the day, it can beat the grand champions of chess. It can learn from itself and figure out strategies.

 

[00:18:09.600] – David Maples

Google has a lab at DeepMind where they have robots are teaching themselves to play soccer. They don’t give them rules. They give them what the rules of the game are, but they give them the objective or the goal. They come up with entire strategies that we, as if you’re a soccer fan or a football fan, if you’re overseas, listening to this, they come up with strategies that the top teams in the world took decades to come up with, and they come up with it in a matter of weeks. I’ve just been thinking about how different this is. I want to shift gears for just a second. MyAnIML is an incredible, and we’ll have it in the show notes down there on the show if you’d like to know about that, and we’ll have information to get attached with Shekhar. If you are in one of these other animal industries, we would appreciate you reaching out to him because he’s going to be one of the people, one of these leading lights trying to revolutionize these industries. It could be a more optimistic view of the future in AI in particular. I want to talk to you a little bit about your personal background because this is the metal season of the Bucks Stops Here.

 

[00:19:09.630] – David Maples

We want to talk about courage and adversity and overcoming change. Ai is the big thing right now. In fact, I think this entire season is going to have a little bit of AI in every episode. But I want to know about your personal background and your journey. You are not just an AI technologist and you are not just my doing this, but you are somebody who’s a bit of a polymath. You’ve done a lot of different things at a very high level. You published on Web 3.0, which for those of you out there, it’s still coming.

 

[00:19:39.920] – Shekhar Gupta

Web 3, not 3.0..

 

[00:19:41.600] – David Maples

Not 3.0. Web 3.

 

[00:19:42.820] – Shekhar Gupta

Web 3. There’s a huge difference between 3 and 3.0.

 

[00:19:45.540] – David Maples

Got it. I’d like you to take a little bit a minute and would you share with the audience your personal journey in business? And if you would share with us just how you got to here.

 

[00:19:55.220] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah. No, I mean, I started out just as an engineer working for a large corporation and learning about things. And that’s one thing that I’ve always prided myself in is that I’ve never said that I’m a master of anything because as soon as you say you’re a master, then something else happens and you’re like, Well, I had never thought about it. Because one of the things that I’ve always known is that if you can think about something, there are a million other people who have not only thought about it but have done something about it before you even thought about it. So yeah, I mean, working in the technology field, I just absolutely love it, David. I mean, I moved here from India. If I hadn’t come here, I would probably be a doctor there because I was becoming an eye doctor there when I moved here and my medical background wasn’t really recognized here. So I would have to go back to school again and did all that thing. I’m like, Yeah, I’m too old to go back to the school now. So I did my electrical engineering. So it was a big switch from biology to physics and maths.

 

[00:21:13.940] – Shekhar Gupta

I sucked at it in my first semester. But technology is something that I fell in love with after I got introduced to it. And whether I worked for myself or worked for a company, I’ve always come up with newer and innovative ways to develop a technology. Companies as big as Motorola, I worked for them, and it was one of the largest corporations. But when I did. And I was managing their digital rights management product back in 2011, and that’s when I was constantly thinking, How do I secure this content that I have? And that’s when I was introduced to blockchain back then. I’ve been doing IoTs, Internet of Things since the mid to 2000, 2005 or so, I’ve been working in this AI field since about 2007, 2008. And it’s taking that long to come because there’s so many things you’ve got to do. All these concepts were there. It’s just the technology to make them a reality just wasn’t there yet. I’m a big proponent of blockchain still. And I think when people get to see what the real use for blockchain is, that’s not just an Excel sheet, it’s not just a database.

 

[00:22:49.290] – Shekhar Gupta

I mean, you can use IPFS all day long to do that thing. It’s not that. There are specific use cases for blockchain. Once you start developing products in there, then it would make sense for you to stay on blockchain. Same thing with AI. There are good or bad for everything because the tools that are available to good people, the same tools are available to bad people as well. But AI can do so many good things in the human world itself. In the human world, it can detect somebody’s going to have a heart attack, somebody’s going to be having a dementia 10 years, 15 years down the road. I mean, how cold would that be that you have that knowledge there so you can take preventative measures, help that person before they get dementia? I lost my mom just very recently to dementia. She didn’t know who I was. I mean, that’s a lady who gave me birth and brought me up and I loved her and she didn’t know who I was at the end. I’m so sorry to hear about that. Thank you. But these kinds of tools can really help lower those kinds of pains on not just a person who is suffering, but entire family that’s suffering with that as well.

 

[00:24:08.440] – Shekhar Gupta

So there are so much good that we could do. It’s not just “Terminator” coming, but there’s so many good things that you could do with the AI itself. In the sky is literally the limits out there.

 

[00:24:22.500] – David Maples

I want to ask you a couple of things. It sounds like you were really felt called to move into this AI world based on your background and history. Yeah. At what point- MyAnIML is a newer venture, correct? It’s in the past couple of years. That’s correct. I would like to know about some of the challenges you’ve had to overcome. What things, for the listeners out there right now, as we said, this is the metal season, what things you say, Man, I really have to have grit, determination. I got kicked in the teeth today. I got to pick myself up and do this. What things have you run into?

 

[00:24:53.880] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah. No, I mean, it’s just in MyAnIML itself. So when I take that proposition to a rancher, they’re like fifth, sixth, seventh generation. They’re like, We’ve never heard of anything like that. Oh, yeah. So this is not possible at all. So then I would then show them right there that, Hey, this is how it’s done. And I would take a picture of their animal with their permission, of course, and then do the analysis right there to show them what the system is seeing. And so it took me some time to convince some people, and that’s the biggest thing. I mean, you look at me, David, I don’t look like a rancher. I don’t talk like one either.

 

[00:25:36.280] – David Maples

No, sure, you’d be a cowboy. We put a hat on you.

 

[00:25:39.500] – Shekhar Gupta

So the credibility was a major issue for me in there as well. So I had to really go find a champion or two that could help me with this cause. And I was able to find a champion that could believe what I was doing because they saw the results as well. And there was another time where I was too early in the product as well. So that’s one thing that I would caution people, your listeners and everybody else is that make sure you’re not too early because if you are, no matter how good that product is, it’s not going to go anywhere.

 

[00:26:22.140] – David Maples

It’s something you said. I was thinking about it the other day about how AI is everywhere right now. And AI systems, I mean, at the original conference, I think in 1956 is where the term AI was born. Then there was an AI winner in the 1970s and a little bit of revitalization in the ’80s and a pullback. Now, I feel like this is like starting a fire. It’s like it takes so long before the logs catch. The heat’s building up, heat’s building up. Then all of a sudden, you have a roaring fire there. I feel like that’s the moment that AI is done. But without the growth, and this is a blockchain thing. Blockchain supercharged video card technology and the amount of investment in video, in particular, in TSMC, producing the chips, getting down to four nanometers and stuff like that. It’s just amazing stuff. But without blockchain, and I know it was a big villain for a while, I don’t think we would be here with the machines and the volume of them. The other thing I wanted to say on that, which is interesting and blockchain is coming, is that people don’t see the rational application of blockchain, and you’re an expert in blockchain.

 

[00:27:29.470] – David Maples

Something I thought about the other day was they were talking about… We’ve talked about the positive elements of AI a bit today and the possibly doing things. One of the negative things about it, possibly, is people have talked about disinformation and deep fakes and things like that. Having these AI machines do really amazing, virtually identical, fake pieces of content that people can’t discern. I was thinking about what about blockchain and using NFTs to fingerprint and identify those things so you could verify the source. I don’t know that it’s going to self-police. I’ve heard people say like, Oh, we won’t need that. But I think that would be a good application for blockchain, perhaps.

 

[00:28:04.520] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. You talk about NFTs. As soon as people think of NFTs, they think of a Bored Ape picture.

 

[00:28:11.870] – David Maples

Yeah, the Bored Ape thing, which is not… That’s not the practical application of it, right?

 

[00:28:16.200] – Shekhar Gupta

No, it’s not. Yeah, that’s the purpose of it. You’re absolutely right. Ai brings a lot of these deep fake-type concerns out there. And if we can roll that in the blockchain and the Web3 to provide that information because the systems that are creating deep fakes are also able to ascertain what is a deep fake anyways, what video is a deep fake. So it’s not that hard. And yeah, I mean, if we can use the NFTs blockchain thing in there to help decipher and provide that better information. I mean, even just in the pandemic time, we had gone through so much misinformation, and now even more so. There’s so much disinformation out there that it’s very hard to know what actually is going on. And having the AI work with the blockchain, that would be really cool, and we’re going to get there. I mean, there are companies out there that are using both of these to provide that information to you.

 

[00:29:23.990] – David Maples

Now, something I’ve thought about, your technology sounds like it would lend itself to VR or AR very shortly. You could eventually, just spinning this out into the future a little bit, you could have a potential application where you could develop an application where the Ranchers could… Because right now you’re bringing camera systems and putting them in the things, which you’d want. But you might have a diagnostic, a diagnostician thing where you could actually look at things on your phone in an AR type environment or something like that. Or maybe remotely, you could have somebody monitor what’s going on through VR. I don’t know. What future things do you see maybe not on your roadmap, but what would you see as other applications or similar applications?

 

[00:30:05.890] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. VR is one of the biggest thing that I’m looking at. For VR to actually happen, a lot of things have to change in that VR headset. Right now, the processing happens on the device itself, and that’s why the device is so darn heavy and it requires a big amount of battery. I hope and I’m wondering and I’m wishing more than that as we continue with our telecom roadmap and providing the 5G capabilities and 6G beyond it, we can reach to the cloud much faster no matter where we are, and that would take away the processing power from the VR headset to the cloud.

 

[00:30:50.710] – David Maples

We would just have to communicate with it, but in a faster way, because 5G communication series, it is as fast and many… It’s not as fast as fiber, but it’s as fast as most terrestrial copper connections, etc, or Ethernet, Cat5, not Cat6 quite yet. As these technologies become more available and the price is driven down, as these things become available, this is something that… What your technology is, your technology and MyAnIML, am I wrong? This is something accessible to the smaller farmer or smaller rancher. They don’t just have to be a giant multinational conglomerate.

 

[00:31:29.900] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah, no, that’s correct. Think about that also. The labor cost itself. So you have to hire a penwriter, you have to teach that person, and then after some time, that penwriter is able to go out and start producing. That time frame and then hiring a labor is very, very hard nowadays. So you not only save money on the labor cost because my system is able to start producing right away, but in a smaller range, smaller farms where the profits are already low for them to hire somebody else just so that person can ride around, drive around, walk around, that becomes very expensive proposition for them as well. It can help in that scenario.

 

[00:32:19.470] – David Maples

This brings me to the no BS segment of the show. For those of you out there listening and watching right now, what you need to understand is no bullshit people. Ai is here. It’s going to be available in every industry. We’ve even talked about knowledge work. In the next 24 months in America, there’s 100 million people who are employed in the knowledge, working, or related industries. It’s going to be integrated in most of those industries within the next 24-36 months. But if you’re outside that realm, if you’re outside what you traditionally say is knowledge work, let’s say hypothetically, the cattle ranching industry or the food production industry, if you’re involved in any of these other related industries, you’re going to run into an area where AI is also going to be involved in them. So CEOs out there and captains of industry and the small business owner, if you are not looking at AI today and saying, How can I put it in here? And you’re not looking at this before the end of 2023, you’re going to find yourself woefully behind second quarter of 2024. And that’s your no BS segment for today.

 

[00:33:27.330] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah, you’re absolutely right, sir. Think about back in 1910, 1920s, people were riding around in their buggy cars, and all of a sudden, cars started coming up. That buggy car industry evaporated just literally overnight.

 

[00:33:42.410] – David Maples

I want to take that a little bit further. Think about the down channel industry things that happen. Paved roads were required. These things in a lot of times were a lot heavier than the existing bug. There were challenges with that. But think about the entire thing, the interstate highway system that happens in the 1950s in the US. All these corollary industries. I know there’s a big question mark right now about AI wiping out jobs, and undoubtedly it will remove some jobs, but there are a whole bunch of other corollary industries that could be created throughout this. What are other things, Shekhar, as a futurist, because I’m putting you in that category right now, Shekhar. Okay. As a futurist, what other industries do you think this is going to change just downstream?

 

[00:34:26.100] – Shekhar Gupta

Yeah, as you mentioned, AI is going to just be in every single industry. I don’t know if there is any industry, any business that isn’t going to be affected by it. Everything will be. So the best advice that I would say is start looking at how this AI, how this technology is going to change your industry because you should be able to disrupt your own industry versus somebody coming in from outside disrupting yours. And if you can disrupt your own business, if you can cannibalize your own revenue yourself, then you’ll be in a much better shape than somebody else coming in and cannibalizing your business for you. So looking at in that prism and saying, How do I make my process, my work, my company, more accessible to the users, to the end users out there. And by the way, I’ve got this AI here that I can use to make that happen. So you may have cashier’s job may be gone in a retail industry with the iPads and things like that, but there are still people that are needed to then assess, make sure that the entire infrastructure works as well. There may be robots in the warehouses that are getting this stuff from the shelves to you on the conveyor belt, but there are still going to be people needed who are going to have to make sure that everything works in that fashion the way it’s supposed to be.

 

[00:36:03.620] – Shekhar Gupta

We talked about biases in AI being a major hurdle to it. Well, right now we’re relying on humans to provide to label the data set to train the system. And that’s going to have to continue happen for some time before the AI takes over, because I’m thinking about that. If we have a bias AI and then we let the bias AI to start providing data sets and start building it, that’s not going to be all that good as well. So having the regulatory committees and that’s where really we talked about having the blockchain integration with AI. Think about DAO, which is a part of Web3, right? Dao working in that regulatory industry to have that opportunities where you can then train the AI based on what is the right information versus what your personal beliefs are. So Fetarch is another one of the… It’s a voting-based, it’s a democratic, voting-based system where you can actually have the consensus of a democracy, provide that inputs to you, then you can create a DAO based on that, that can help you build an AI system. I mean, those kinds of things are just coming up.

 

[00:37:28.930] – David Maples

For my listeners out there, there’s a lot here, and I know we’re talking at a very high level in some respects. But for those of you out there who are worried about, and we’ll just use this, for example, factory jobs with a machine coming in and picking and pulling issue or even having automated driving cars, the number one determining factor of carwrecks is the idiot behind the wheel. The number one determining factor is how many of you guys have been driving late at night and you’re like, I can close one eye. I’m tired, but I’m not going to pull. I’m going to close one eye. Let me turn the ear on high. The fact of the matter is that the machines, they don’t get tired. When they make mistakes, it’s generally speaking, it’s because they’ve been programmed and there’s a human error involved in it. But statistically speaking, they’re able to do the rote things that we use fleshy bags of mostly water. At some time at the end of the day, you get tired. I do not make the best decisions. How many of you guys talk about being hangry? That is an emotional response to being hungry.

 

[00:38:33.850] – David Maples

We all talk about that. The machines don’t do that. They’re not going to get mad at somebody just because I haven’t eaten lunch at 12. What you have to think about is the overall flow through. Because I want to go and make this very apparent. I think we should work with these machines, but recognize we should be servants of humanity. In the long run, my thoughts on this, and I have to quantificate on it, is that think about the benefits. Think about what Shekhar is doing here to change the cattle industry, how that benefits your kids at home who are eating those happy meals. At the end of the day, if we can reduce the number of errors, we can reduce the amount of excess human deaths from these things, and that means that your kids get to grow up and go to college and get to contribute to these things in the long run. There’s a big, bright, beautiful tomorrow if we do the right things of this. I think Shekhar is one of those people leading the way on it.

 

[00:39:26.570] – Shekhar Gupta

Well, thank you for the kind words there, David. There’s just so much to be done before we can finally say that we’re getting there where we want to be. I’m not sure that we’ll ever get there because it will continue to evolve in the ways that we probably would have never thought about it. But the tools are there and they’re becoming more accessible. And as they become more accessible, we can develop things for the betterment of humankind much faster than what we could have before.

 

[00:39:58.250] – David Maples

I want to say a couple of things, and I think that’s a good note to end on. But, Shekhar, I want to say a couple of things. I want to say, first of all, I thank you so much for being on the show today. It was really humbling, and it’s really going to let us know about people in the plumbing industry understand that AI will affect things there. I’m just teasing. Look, in all good humor, keep sending those responses to the podcast. It’s very important to get your impact. That changes the guests we get on the show. If you want to see people, more people like Shekhar, more people that are changing the industry and using business to be a great force for good, let us know in the comments. Let us know about that to show. Your three takeaways for today, because we always promise these. Number one, AI is here. It needs to be involved in your industry. As a business owner, it is incumbent upon you to start pushing the envelope and challenging yourself and saying, Hey, how can I make this work in my business? Think outside the box. Think about things you haven’t thought about.

 

[00:40:56.500] – David Maples

If you’re a hairstylist, I’m just using an industry, I was like, Could it ever affect hair? Think about how AR could show… Using augmented reality, you could show different hairstyles to people. But using an AI data set, it could make predictive models based on what you would look best in. That’s just an example. Thing number two to remember here is it doesn’t all have to be Terminator, it’s not all Skynet. It is a challenging technology. It is here, but there is a big, bright, beautiful future that we can achieve together by using AI if we use it responsibly. But it’s important for you to be involved in the legislation and the regulation creation around these technologies as they become apparent. The third thing is to remember that it is going to be challenging. You need to focus on the medal of yourself in your business, that ability to face adversity and change and do it with a glad heart and understand that we’re all beginners again. Another thing about it that Shekhar said earlier is remember, sometimes it hurts to be too early, but right now, if you’re not working on AI, it’s going to be very easy to be too late.

 

[00:42:03.570] – David Maples

With that, thank you again for coming to another episode of The Buck Stops Here. If you liked what you heard here, please give us a good review and rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to great podcasts. Let us know what you’d like to hear more of in the comments. Thank you so much to our guest, Shekhar.

 

[00:42:20.050] – Shekhar Gupta

Thank you.

 

[00:42:20.760] – David Maples

Everyone out there, go out there, be awesome, and make it a great week.