Molly Ruland:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Camp Content where we dive into the nexus of content marketing and the revenue stream shaping 2,000 and 24. Today, we’re joined by a leader and innovator in digital transformation, Kyle Murphy. Kyle spent over 15 years guiding organizations like Grant Thornton, the USPTO, and Newmark Group through significant technological shifts. He’s particularly focused on the applications of artificial intelligence, web 3, and data analytics. Kyle is the founder of Alpha Advisor, a consultant that’s a hard word. A consultancy that distinctively combines data and emerging tech tech expertise to serve small to medium sized businesses, including sectors like finance and health care. They are pioneers in employing AI to drive business growth and improvement. So today, we’re gonna explore topics such as integrating AI into your business, utilizing tools like ChatJPT, and understanding the pivotal role of data and AI.

Molly Ruland:

So without further ado, we’re gonna get right into it. And so thanks for coming on the show today, Kyle.

Kyle Murphy:

Thanks for having me, Molly. Really excited to be here today.

Molly Ruland:

Yeah, man. I am too. Thank you.

Kyle Murphy:

Awesome. Thanks for the very warm intro and looking forward to the conversation.

Molly Ruland:

Yeah, man. Well, yeah. Well, the audience doesn’t know this, but we have known each other for a couple of years now, I guess, if you can believe that. So, it’s always nice to see you back and to get to spend some time with you. So I’ve Yeah.

Kyle Murphy:

Very excited.

Molly Ruland:

Right on. So everybody’s talking a lot about AI, so we’re gonna get into, like, a little bit more niche in how you’re serving some of your clients. But before we get into all of that, let’s do, like, a Shark Tank style snapshot of your business. Can you tell me, like, how many employees, how many clients, where are you located, that kind of a thing?

Kyle Murphy:

Yep. So, Alpha Advisors, I’m based out of Washington DC, but we have partners in Atlanta and West Palm Beach, Florida. We’re about 6 people right now, but have a network of about 12 that we use across our projects. Our clients, as we mentioned, are small and medium sized businesses with a few larger clients. We have about 8 to 10 clients at the moment that we’re serving across all different aspects of AI like you’re talking about. So we are fully remote and we’ll travel to where those clients are. So we’re kind of spread out. But it’s been a fantastic, fantastic journey growing the company over the last 2, almost 2 years now.

Molly Ruland:

Yeah. It’s a pretty new company, but, you know, you’re coming with 15 years of experience in digital transformation. So how are you seeing the similarities in the work that you were doing 10 years ago to the work now? Is it moving faster? You know, to me, I would imagine so. But

Kyle Murphy:

So, you know, when I started my career, you know, everything was around, you know, cloud transformation. Then we got into intelligent automation, Right? And ran huge groups and deployed automation bots and all those fun stuff and building products. And now with the emergence of AI or generative AI specifically, everyone is talking, asking about it and seeing where they need to be to stay competitive in the environment. So I’d say things are moving quickly in the sense that AI or generative AI is developing comically fast. However, a lot of companies are still trying to understand how to leverage it, how to use it, and how to do it safely. So while the technology is rapidly advancing, companies are still trying to figure out, like, what makes the most sense for them on the back half of knowing that we need to use it in some way, shape or form. So where intelligent automation kind of took away those jobs that were monotonous and repetitive and standardized. Right.

Kyle Murphy:

Jenny is a much different animal in that it’s writing things, it’s predicting things. It’s pseudo making conclusions for people. So companies are not only wanting to adopt it, but they’re also very wary of it at the same time.

Molly Ruland:

I mean, rightfully so. I mean, AI has definitely sent me down, like, right off of some clips. It’s like Apple Maps. You know what I mean? It’s like, what just happened? Where am I? You know? So I can, you know, it needs so much quality control, and you really have to train it? Right? And I have very limited experience with AI, but, the more pedestrian platforms, if you will, are even harder to manipulate. You know, I couldn’t help but laugh at myself, but I was getting legitimately irritated at my AI tool because it kept putting emojis. And I’m like, in all caps, but no emojis. And I said, oh, it’s like when I’m getting mad at my Roomba. You know what I mean? I’m like, who’s the real idiot here? You know? It’s me.

Molly Ruland:

But it can be really frustrating, and so it would be hard to just assume that your team is gonna be able to use it the right way if they’re not also constantly maintaining it. So is that something that you’re doing to help keep you on track?

Kyle Murphy:

Absolutely. So one of the big things we found is there’s a big opportunity for training as you move forward. Right? How to use, you know, one company we’re working with wanted to use enterprise chat gpt, for example. So with that, that keeps your data protected. You get your own instance, all that good stuff. So they felt comfortable however, for folks out there, never put your Social Security number or addresses in, like, stuff in there. Just like, don’t do it. Like, come on.

Kyle Murphy:

But I digress. So teaching them prompt engineering. Right? What are the actual capabilities of it? Right? Can I put a massive spreadsheet in there and it gives me charts and graphs? How to identify if it’s hallucinating, how to make sure they’re asking for sources and references when they get a response. Because a lot of times, chat gpt, all it wants to do is answer you. It’s predicting the next word that’s coming up. And so we asked it for quotes about AI just as a test, and it gave us references to websites. It pulled it from out of the 5 quotes it gave us. 2 of the websites didn’t exist.

Kyle Murphy:

It just made it up. Yeah. Right? So adding custom instructions, like, to your point, Molly, if, like, you don’t want emojis, in the back end, you can give it instructions to never use emojis. Give it writing. I gave it writing samples that I like that were in my tone of voice. So it can then write in my tone of voice. So training and putting those guardrails around it is a big part of what we’re doing and working with companies on how to strategize the best way to do that.

Molly Ruland:

So out of the companies that you’re working with, who is your, like, sweet spot? I know we were just talking about CPAs. Like, how would a CPA benefit from these types of models? I would imagine there’s a lot of repetitive tasks and redundancy, you know, all of that. So how would you build a CPA?

Kyle Murphy:

Exactly. So, 2 parts to it, right? There’s a lot of things that AI is good at, but there’s a lot of software and things out there that exist today that are better than AI currently. So for CPA firms, when we talk to them, you know, month end close using automation like the Power Automate Suite where we automate those repetitive tasks. Right? That’s one side of it. Then on the other side for a CPA firm, for example, we built an AI tool that could analyze all their QuickBooks data and find anomalies that get highlighted to, you know, either the team lead or someone that is looking at the financials of a company. Meaning, let’s say this month, like on average over the last 2 years, this line item was always within this range. This month, for some reason, it’s higher. Here’s a you know, we market red and then you can ask the AI tool questions.

Kyle Murphy:

Well, are there assumptions or something in the underlying data that turned it red? Well, this person was late on payments or they overdrafted their account. So you can start interacting with that data and asking it questions in that closed loop that’s very, very focused.

Molly Ruland:

Fascinating. So I would imagine the better the CPA and the more organized they are and the more experienced they are so they know what to look for, the more effective these tools will be. And then I would imagine you’re probably building up quite the arsenal of knowing some of those things that maybe the CPAs don’t even realize that they could automate.

Kyle Murphy:

Yeah. So we have, you know, accelerators specifically towards them. Right? We can ingest thousands of documents in hours and understand their tone of voice. Let’s say they do a month end summary report for their clients, train the AI on here’s the salient points for this type of business and this side so they can get much faster to that first draft or that first output to allow them to move into thinking mode instead of starting from a blank screen or doing some of the monotonous stuff, which then eats up their time, and they can’t be doing the value act value added activities.

Molly Ruland:

Yeah. Because I would imagine there’s so much redundancy in CPA businesses. I mean, just the bookkeeping and, yeah, just a lot of repetitive tasks. Pretty interesting. So, you know you know, I’ve been working on this project that, like, involves a lot of AI, but it also has, like, a human component to it. How do you think these things are gonna merge? You know? You know, where’s the line between going too far into the AI world and making sure that quality control is there? Like, how do you build that? Because I would imagine. Right? Because sometimes, you know, it’s like self -driving Tesla cars. Right? Like, a lot of people would probably be hesitant to take their hands off the wheel.

Molly Ruland:

So Yep. How do you build fail safes for those kinds of things?

Kyle Murphy:

So we design everything with humans in the loop. Meaning, each stage of a process or step. Right? A human being still needs to review, understand, and bring their years of expertise to whatever that output is. Right? Another company we’re working with, we’re designing a tool to respond to RFPs. Right? And that takes a lot of thought, a lot of knowledge base from historical things, what your service offerings are. So we’re building a tool that actually walks them through the process, can take their entire dataset, and make suggestions for the 1st draft with different options, different pieces. So then you get to understand, okay, this one makes sense. It thinks this one doesn’t make sense or it thinks this one makes sense.

Kyle Murphy:

But I know that’s not correct because I actually know the client. Then you get to eliminate it from the basis of writing that proposal. So everything has that human check-in the loop, and then that allows you to accelerate everything that you’re doing. So we’re not a proponent of set it and forget it like I like to run this. Here’s my answer. Paste it and off. Right? Like, the guy that got in trouble, the lawyer in New York’s the classic example who cited a legal case that didn’t exist because he just used chat chat gpt to say, give me some legal briefs or whatever. I’m not a lawyer.

Kyle Murphy:

I don’t know, I’m not. But he just made something up using a I and then lost the case or got disbarred. I don’t know what happened to it, but you

Molly Ruland:

know, hopefully both. Yeah.

Kyle Murphy:

But you don’t want to do that. So humans in the loop right now are really, really important. Maybe we’ll get there in the future, right, which would be great. But today, that’s just not not it.

Molly Ruland:

What do you think the biggest hurdle is in people wanting to create something like this? Is it a lack of knowledge? Is it lack of funding? Like, where do you think, where do you think the Yeah. The hesitancy or the, you know not hesitancy, I should say, but, like, you know, why aren’t more people doing this, I guess.

Kyle Murphy:

So what I’ve heard and seen from clients, the most important thing to understand is why you want to do it right. There needs to be a business case and an understanding, and it needs to solve a problem. Just like any tool that’s come across the market in forever. Right? It’s the shiny key factor. Right now, AI is the shiny keys, which it’s better and can do a lot of things. But if you don’t understand the problem it’s trying to solve, you’re going to waste a bunch of time and money. So right now, there’s a big study on it. 90% of AI proof of concepts aren’t making it to production.

Kyle Murphy:

90% because they’re not thinking about the why in the strategy and what problem it’s trying to solve. And when you really dig into that problem, a lot of times it may not be the best use case for AI right now, But you have to identify what that is. And then the long term costs are getting cheaper by the day. But it’s not cheap, frankly, to build a custom product. It’s cheaper to use something off the shelf.

Molly Ruland:

Makes sense. I mean, I feel like there’s a big knowledge gap too. Right? Like, people of a certain generation are gonna know less about these kinds of tools and the availability of them. Can you give me, like, a case study, of a client that you’ve worked with and you created something for them?

Kyle Murphy:

Yes. So the RFP tool, for example, we’re working on, we built what we call an AI accounting assistant. So what the tool does for a, you know, 300 person CPA firm is every month they do, let’s say, outsourced accounting, which is fairly simplistic. They do this, this and this, but they wanted to be able to send them summaries and value added things and things we notice, but they don’t have time to write 300 things from scratch. Right. And at the associate level, senior associate level, they don’t have, let’s say, the experience to write some of those things. So what the tool can do is it absorbs all the historical information from this, you know, company ABC when we built this model. That one is completely secure.

Kyle Murphy:

The data is not going anywhere doing any of that stuff. And then examples from their CFO of how some of these things need to be written. What are the important data points? Maybe this expense is trending the wrong way, all of that stuff. So as they finish their monthly outsourced accounting, it can actually make that first draft of a 2 pager to the client, which they’ve gotten feedback has been really, really helpful because then they can read that, know what I need to go look at, and it became a value added activity that didn’t create much overhead, but then turned into a more expensive subscription model for them because they’re like, hey. Help me fix this.

Molly Ruland:

Right. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Alright. I have a wild card question for you. If you had an I know. Get hang on to your hat. If you had unlimited resources and technological capabilities at your disposal, what dream project would you initiate to revolutionize why can’t I say this? Small and medium sized businesses.

Molly Ruland:

That’s actually boring. What would you create to make the world a better place with emerging technology? That’s a better

Kyle Murphy:

question. Man, that’s a loaded question,

Molly Ruland:

I know. I know.

Kyle Murphy:

What would I do? So from my I guess it draws a lot of my background and things that I’ve done. So I think I would create the ultimate back office AI persona. Right. In my experience as an entrepreneur, like dealing with admin accounting or like I wear like, I spin my like, I’ll spin my chair around, and now I have to deal with setting up a new tax ID in Montana. And, like, what all those wild things. Like, I think I would create, like, the ultimate AI thing that would have that knowledge base where I could say, hey, I’m getting a new employee in New York and I don’t have a tax ID. Like, what do I do? And it tells me what to do. Hey, can you run my accounting this year? Make the fund transfers and all of that where I could have, like, this awesome, like, you know, caller, you know, Steve or Debbie AI where I go, hey, Debbie, here’s what we need to accomplish today.

Kyle Murphy:

And they just do it. It would save me, and I’m sure so many people in small, medium size, so many hours of monotonous things that we hate doing.

Molly Ruland:

Well and, like, you know, all these things that you’re supposed to pay and do that you don’t know about, and then Yeah. States and different governments aren’t the best at telling you when they’re due. And then you’re like, wait. What was late? What clean hands. What? Like, I who and they’re like, well, we told you that on the website under this tab that you never even read. And so things like that, notifying it, hey. It’s time to file your taxes, or it’s time to file an extension or, like

Kyle Murphy:

I mean,

Molly Ruland:

That’s obvious.

Kyle Murphy:

But Yeah. Like, I live in DC, but I’m not an employee of the company, right? Because I’m the owner. But D. C, every quarter sends me a letter saying I didn’t file my, you know, employment tax, unemployment taxes or whatever the weird thing is I go. And then every quarter I call them and say, I’m not an employee. They’re like, Oh, okay. And then they waive it.

Kyle Murphy:

And it’s happened for 18 months, which is how many quarters? Like having someone to know to do that or could file something so they just stop would be like an amazing thing for me to help run my business that takes care of the noise, I think would be the most ultimate thing for me.

Molly Ruland:

Now you should build that, like, little bit by bit and then put it together later because I

Kyle Murphy:

I think you could do it. We eat our own dog food. Like, we just rolled out this cool, our first campaign around AI maturity assessment. Right? So it’s this cool thing that you can click on. It’s in my LinkedIn bio. But it’s, like, 15 questions and it, you know, asks you, you know, where do you think you are with AI, blah blah blah, and you just click really fast. But we use a combination of tools and AI. So AI, we train to write the responses to the survey based on where the rankings are, our knowledge of where other companies are in the industry.

Kyle Murphy:

And you get it writes this really cool summary of, hey. Here’s kind of you know, are you at an introductory level to AI? Here’s some suggestions of how to move forward, things like that. So we leverage it wherever we can.

Molly Ruland:

I love it. That’s great. Yeah. Well, we’ll make sure that we have all your links and stuff here at the bottom of the show so people can check out that assessment tool and everything else. We’ll make sure to include that

Kyle Murphy:

for sure. Very

Molly Ruland:

cool. Alright. So now we’re moving on to our real or fake segment of the show.

Kyle Murphy:

Alright. Let’s do it.

Molly Ruland:

Get ready. Real or fake. Whoo. We even have a little cool graphic. Alright. So, I’m gonna list up some podcast names, and you’re gonna tell me if you think they are real or fake. Alright. The first one I

Kyle Murphy:

won’t Google it or Google it or anything.

Molly Ruland:

Yeah. No. You have no time to Google it. This is a speed round. Yeah. You gotta keep your hands in the air at all times so I know you’re not good at it. Alright. The first one, smart passive income.

Kyle Murphy:

God. With all the stuff that sucked on my Instagram feed, that’s gotta be real.

Molly Ruland:

It is. It doesn’t sound very fake either. I should have picked a better one. AI Horizon, the future of tech.

Kyle Murphy:

That could be any of 50 podcasts.

Molly Ruland:

There’s probably 100 of them.

Kyle Murphy:

There are 100 of them. I’m gonna say real.

Molly Ruland:

It’s fake. Ugh. Shockingly enough. Yeah. Okay. Hurry slowly.

Kyle Murphy:

I don’t wanna keep saying real, but that definitely sounds like a very podcasty name, but I’m gonna go fake.

Molly Ruland:

It’s real. Yes. I love it when I win this game because the last couple of guests got everyone right, and I was like, man, I think I need to ante up a little bit. Okay. And then I have a couple more questions for you. Sure. Number 1, what’s the most influential book that you’ve read in your life that impacted, like, your business career or your ethos as a leader or whatever had the most impact?

Kyle Murphy:

I’m gonna cop out. I’m gonna say 2 because they’re 2 different things. 1, Atomic Habits

Molly Ruland:

Good one.

Kyle Murphy:

And Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek.

Molly Ruland:

You know, I can’t stand that guy. I tried to listen to the y one, and I, like, couldn’t listen to his voice. I I wanted to run out of the room, but I’ll give it a shot.

Kyle Murphy:

Starting with y is unbelievable. I love that one. And an old one that I always loved was the 10 minute, the 10 minute monkey meets the manager.

Molly Ruland:

Oh, okay.

Kyle Murphy:

That one’s fantastic about how you as a leader, your employees have a monkey on their back to solve a problem. And if you agree to help them, the monkey moves to your back, right? Because they feel like they no longer have the responsibility. So it’s how to deal with that as a leader. Yeah, it’s like 70 pages, and it’s old, but it’s awesome.

Molly Ruland:

You know, I read the one page marketing plan by Alan Dibb, like, once a year, and it’s, like, and also a very old book, but it and it’s short, but it’s, like, every time I listen to it, I’m like, yeah. I’m glad I did that. It’s like some things are tried and true. You know?

Kyle Murphy:

It’s so good. And, I unfortunately used the monkey analogy with my wife one day, and that did not work. I

Molly Ruland:

lost why.

Kyle Murphy:

Yeah. I tried, and I didn’t do it very well. And, yeah, I lost all my husband points for that one.

Molly Ruland:

You’re like she’s like, I’m a monkey now?

Kyle Murphy:

Yeah. Yeah.

Molly Ruland:

Genius guy. That’s hilarious. And then the last question is, what is your favorite, like, tech tool in your tech stack? What’s your favorite?

Kyle Murphy:

Oh, I use chat g p t every day, all the time.

Molly Ruland:

Really? So you don’t you’re you’re not using, like, Bard or whatever the other, like, options are? You’re a GPT dude?

Kyle Murphy:

I’m a GPT guy. I will use Claude, if I need to, the writing styles are wildly different. So

Molly Ruland:

Okay.

Kyle Murphy:

So gpt, I use a lot for very business centric writing.

Molly Ruland:

Mhmm.

Kyle Murphy:

Or, if I’m programming something, Power Automate or Python or something, it can help me in some ways with code that, in my opinion, is a lot more interesting, a lot more efficient. Like here, you know, I suggest setting this up this way versus this way. You know, I’m starting to build an app just for fun because I wanted to build something, and it, like, knows the Swift programming language, which I forgot 8 years ago when I built my last app. So I like it for that, but Claude can be very more conversational and sounds a little more human. So if you’re writing a LinkedIn post, I’ll go to Claude. If I’m doing presentations or very formal readouts or using code, I use chat gpt.

Molly Ruland:

That’s really helpful. I haven’t checked out Claude. I use team gpt because I can share it with my team, and then we can have threads and stuff.

Kyle Murphy:

What we have. Yeah. Yeah.

Molly Ruland:

And I find that to be pretty helpful, and then I can go back and build upon it and stuff. Although it still puts emojis in everything I do, which I’m like Go.

Kyle Murphy:

I’ll tell you. Go into the on in the options. I forget where it is. Under your profile, there’s something called custom instructions.

Molly Ruland:

Oh, yeah. I saw that.

Kyle Murphy:

Literally put if you don’t want emojis, put it in there, and it will never use emojis again.

Molly Ruland:

Thank god. Because I was getting so irritated last week, and I was, like, half irritated at chat gpt and, like, half irritated at myself for being irritated at AI because I was

Kyle Murphy:

you know? And you can tell now if someone uses chat gpt to write something because they love the highlighted word, colon, and then 2 sentences, and it just does that over and over again.

Molly Ruland:

Yeah.

Kyle Murphy:

So I put it all, like, don’t do that.

Molly Ruland:

Yeah. There’s a bunch of things I repeat all the time. So I thank you for that tip. I’m gonna go in there and adjust that because then I won’t have to get mad at my computer anymore. But, Exactly. Well, listen. I’m excited to keep chatting with you about some stuff, to do some stuff with Heart Cast Media because I see a real opportunity there. And thank you for coming on the show.

Molly Ruland:

And before we go, where can people find you? We’re gonna have all your links and stuff, but where can people find you if they wanna get connected?

Kyle Murphy:

Yeah. Find me on LinkedIn. Email me. You know, mainly LinkedIn. I’m there all the time. We have, Caitlin helps me. We have social media. I’m not a social media guy, but we have Instagram, Twitter, all those fun things.

Kyle Murphy:

But, yeah, reach out on LinkedIn. Email’s just kyle@alphadvisors.com. Any questions, just wanna learn more about AI, please reach out.

Molly Ruland:

Awesome. That’s fantastic. So, thank you all for tuning in today. I think, you know, high level takeaways if you’re a CPO CPO? CPA. I was like, that doesn’t sound right. Or you’re in the health care business or you have a business where you are finding yourself doing a lot of redundant tasks and you’ve been thinking to yourself, I bet you there’s a way to get AI to do this. Sounds like you need to call Kyle. Get on that call, take one of those assessment tools, see where you’re at, see what he can create for you because whatever you’ve imagined up to, he could actually do it and do it 10 times better.

Molly Ruland:

So, I think it’s always good to arm yourself with the knowledge on how to move forward with your business. And what Kyle is doing is 100% the future of business as we know it. And so I think it’s good to get on board sooner than later, especially over the summertime. You got some time. Get ready for the fall and and come out swinging. So on that note, thank you for tuning in to Camp Content. Kyle, thanks for coming on the show, and, until next time, be excellent to each other. Alright.

Molly Ruland:

Thanks, everybody.

Kyle Murphy:

Thank you.

Molly Ruland:

Alright. Alright. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of Camp Content. This is Molly.

Kyle Murphy:

And this is Matt.

Molly Ruland:

And we are Heartcast Media, AKA Camp Content, and we appreciate all of your support. If you found this content valuable, please comment on social media, LinkedIn, wherever you find us and we’ll make sure to comment back.

Kyle Murphy:

And be sure to go on and subscribe and like on your favorite platforms, Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, you name it. Leave us that subscription, leave us that good review.

Molly Ruland:

We’ll love you forever. So until next time, be excellent to each other, and we’ll see you next week.

Molly Ruland:

Thank you for tuning in to Camp Content hosted by Heart Cast Media. We are a digital content agency focused on content marketing for businesses and brands. If you’re looking to save time and be more consistent with your marketing and need a little guidance on what to say and how to say it and where to say it, we got your back. Book a discovery call today, and let’s talk.

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