Episode 3 -AI is Accelerating. Are You?

In Episode 3 of AI in Business,

What you’ll learn:

In this episode of AI in Business: Use Cases From the Real World, we explore how high-stakes organizations—from venture capital funds to tech startups—are using AI to filter through massive amounts of information to find the “signal in the noise.”

We dive into how AI is redefining the hiring process through the metric of revenue per employee, acting as a “due diligence” partner for elite university programs, and even helping attorneys redline vendor contracts. The common thread? Using AI not just to do more work, but to make sure the work being done is the most impactful.

Key takeaways for business owners and teams

  1. AI as a Filter for High-Volume Decisions When you have 3,800 applications for only 20 spots, AI can’t pick the winner (that’s for humans), but it can help you understand the “deal flow” and research candidates faster than any manual process.
  2. The New Productivity Metric: Revenue Per Employee Modern startups are using AI agents to delay hiring. By asking “Can a tool do this?” before “Who can we hire?”, businesses are maintaining leaner teams with significantly higher output.
  3. Signal vs. Noise in Big Data For enterprise clients, AI is the ultimate storyteller. It can ingest massive datasets and, within minutes, extract the specific KPIs and trends that matter to investors and prospects.

Episode highlights

  • VC Due Diligence: How Berkeley Skydeck uses AI to manage 3,800+ applications.
  • The “Hiring Second” Mentality: Using AI agents for entry-level tasks to keep team sizes small.
  • Custom LLMs: Why building in-house, “on-prem” models provides higher confidence and data security.
  • Legal Efficiency: How a seasoned attorney used AI to generate 70% of a contract redline, saving hours of manual drafting.
  • SEO & Content Strategy: Using Perplexity and Gemini to find the “catchy” titles that actually rank.

Quotes worth repeating

“We use AI to help us better understand the deal flow… but at the end of the day, to pick a startup to invest in, it’s humans talking to humans.” — Caroline

“A new metric we follow is revenue per employee. Can we find a tool that can do that person’s job… or do we need to make this hire?” — Braydan Young

“AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. You can fine-tune to a granular level on what is important to your outcome versus what’s just noise.” — Clint Lotz

FAQs

How is AI used in the venture capital selection process? In this episode, guests explain that AI is used for “diligence”—researching applicants and their digital footprints (LinkedIn, podcasts, etc.) to create a profile for human interviewers to review.

What is “Signal vs. Noise” in AI data analysis? It refers to the ability of AI to ignore irrelevant data points and focus strictly on the metrics that predict future trends or client impact, which is especially useful for large enterprise data sets.

Can AI actually help with legal work like contracts? Yes. Host Richard Gearhart shares a use case where AI provided a 70% accurate redline of a vendor contract, identifying issues that might have been missed manually and significantly reducing drafting time.

Which AI tools are recommended for SEO and marketing? The hosts discuss using a combination of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini to compare answers and refine titles for maximum SEO value.

AI in Business | Episode 3: Data Crunching & Deal Flow

Hosts: Elizabeth Gearhart, Ph.D. & Richard Gearhart, Esq.

Guests: Caroline (Berkeley Skydeck), Braydan Young, and Clint Lotz (Trackstar AI)

Introduction: The “Revenue Per Employee” Era The roundtable kicks off with a shift in business philosophy: using AI to maximize the value of every human team member. Braydan Young highlights how his startup tracks revenue per employee to decide whether to hire a new person or deploy an AI agent.

Diligence at Scale Caroline from Berkeley Skydeck shares how they manage the “top of the funnel” for their accelerator. With nearly 4,000 applications, AI helps the team understand the data and perform deep research on candidates’ online presence before the human-to-human interview takes place.

The Power of Custom Data Clint Lotz of Trackstar AI explains the transition to “on-prem” or specialized LLMs. By training AI on specific, high-quality data sets rather than the general internet, businesses can achieve much higher confidence in the output and predictive accuracy.

Marketing and Legal Workflows Richard and Elizabeth wrap up with personal workflows: Richard using AI as a “first-pass” legal reviewer for vendor agreements, and Elizabeth using it to ensure her podcast content is optimized for search engines and audience engagement.

Meet the Hosts

Elizabeth Gearhart, Ph.D. is a marketing executive, podcast host, and AI strategy speaker focused on how businesses are actually using AI today. She is Chief Marketing Officer at Gearhart Law and co-host of the nationally syndicated radio show and podcast Passage to Profit.

Richard Gearhart, Esq. is a life sciences intellectual property attorney and founding partner of Gearhart Law. He advises biotech and pharma companies on patents, licensing, and IP-driven commercialization strategy, and co-hosts Passage to Profit and AI in Business.+1