Elizabeth Gearhart, Ph.D.: Welcome to AI in Business. I’m Elizabeth Gearhart, podcast consultant, marketing expert, and Ph.D. researcher using AI every day.

Richard Gearhart: And I’m Richard Gearhart, entrepreneur, seasoned business owner, and intellectual property attorney specializing in innovation. Here’s how real companies are using AI right now.

Elizabeth: The purpose of this segment is to spread the word and give people ideas about how they can use AI in their business. Caroline, I’ll start with you — what’s one way you’re using AI in your business?

Caroline Winnett – Diligence at Berkeley SkyDeck: We’re talking about the business of Berkeley SkyDeck, a university accelerator program, and we use AI for diligence the way any good investor would. We get about 3,800 applications for 20 spots, so we’re increasingly using AI to help us understand that deal flow — not to pick the companies, that’s still done by humans in interviews, but to help our team do research once a company is selected for an interview. At the end of the day, picking a startup to invest in is humans talking to humans. You can’t substitute that. One thing worth flagging for entrepreneurs: AI looks at everything about you online — every podcast, every transcript, your LinkedIn. The more consistent your message is across those, the better your profile looks to AI.

Elizabeth: That’s a new way of thinking about it that I hadn’t heard before. Braydan, what’s one way you’re using AI in your business?

Braydan Young – Revenue Per Employee: This is my third startup — I like the pain of zero to ten. A metric we track now that we didn’t track before is revenue per employee. Before we make a hire, we ask: is it necessary? Can an AI or an agent do that person’s job — say, entry-level sales — instead of hiring for it? If it can’t, then we go hire somebody. It’s become a mantra internally to make sure we’re only hiring when it’s truly necessary, since every hire affects that revenue-per-employee number. It’s become a metric our board asks for now, and it’s one a lot of AI-native companies talk about — small teams generating outsized revenue.

Elizabeth: Clint, what’s one way you’re using AI in your own company?

Clint Lotz – Data Analysis at Trackstar AI: Within our own company, probably the most beneficial use case is data crunching — data analysis. As we’ve grown and pivoted to large enterprise clients, we ingest much larger data sets daily. We crunch that data not just for accuracy and performance, but to understand how consumers are being impacted and what KPIs we’re driving for clients and lenders. AI is really good at summarizing massive data sets — within minutes it can tell me exactly what we’re doing for a client and how it’s affecting their consumers. That’s what helps us tell the story to prospects and investors.

Elizabeth: What’s your level of confidence in that output?

Clint: AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on, and it depends where you start. Over the last four or five years the technology has matured enough that people can build their own small or on-prem LLMs — you can fine-tune to a granular level on what matters to your outcome versus what’s just noise. Signal versus noise, as they call it. Once you have that kind of deep, controlled understanding of your own AI, that’s what gives us the most confidence.

Richard: A lot of companies are developing their own in-house LLMs now — feeding it their own data, making it searchable, having new employees learn the company from it.

Elizabeth: What about you, Richard?

Richard – AI for Contract Review: My most recent use of AI was reviewing a vendor contract — not a client contract, since I wouldn’t put confidential client information into an AI tool — and having it generate a redline. About 70% of the changes it suggested were ones I agreed with. I had to refine it, but it saved me a lot of time and caught a few things I’m not sure I’d have caught otherwise.

Elizabeth – AI for SEO and Content: I help people start podcasts, including my own, and I think of a podcast as a digital marketing tool that can drive people to your business. I put marketing in from day one, because that’s what you have to do these days, especially with a podcast for business. I use ChatGPT, Perplexity, and sometimes Google Gemini, mainly to figure out the SEO value of what I’m creating — starting with the title. I used to get pretty different answers from Perplexity and ChatGPT; lately their answers have been converging, like they’re drawing from more of the same data.

Closing: You’ve been listening to AI in Business: Use Cases From the Real World. We hope you found this valuable — join us again for more stories, because the future of business is driven by AI.