Productivity

Embrace AI or Fall Behind

By Alan Boyd | Published on 03/23/2023

AI is transforming the way businesses operate, touching every profession from janitors to CEOs. The impact of AI can be grouped into two categories:

Total redundancy: Jobs that will potentially be entirely performed by AI.
Task redundancy: Jobs where parts of the role will be performed by AI.

No matter which category your profession falls into, avoidance is not the solution. Embracing and leveraging AI tools is the key to staying competitive in the modern business landscape.

To thrive in this new era, it’s crucial to understand AI capabilities and how similar businesses are utilizing them. When comparing two evenly matched businesses, the one that leverages AI will gain a significant competitive advantage through lower operating costs, improved efficiency, and increased ROI.

However, most information available on AI is unapproachable and geared toward enterprise use cases. As a specialist in helping SMBs in the $500k to $10MM range, I understand that the perspective on AI for smaller businesses is entirely different from that of $1B+ enterprises.

Recognizing this distinction and staying up to date with AI advancements is essential. That’s why we founded ‘The Bottom Line’ newsletter. Every Friday, you’ll receive a concise email featuring key points, real-world use cases, and a summary of how AI impacts you. In just 3-5 minutes per week, you’ll keep your finger on the pulse of this emerging market.

We’ll do the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to. Plus, we’re building a community, not just a newsletter. We welcome dialogue, topic suggestions, and questions to best serve our readers.

Join us on this journey to help you and your business stay ahead of the curve.

– Alan

Subscribe to The Bottom Line (it’s free):

Founder’s Letter

By Alan Boyd | Published on 03/21/2023

Dear Reader,

We’re excited to introduce you to The Bottom Line, a new newsletter designed to help small and medium business leaders stay ahead of the curve and stay informed about the biggest news in AI. Our goal is to help you learn how businesses like yours are using AI to grow and future-proof their businesses.

As leaders of small to medium businesses, you know how important it is to stay on top of the latest trends and technologies. However, we recognize that it can be challenging to keep up with the fast-paced world of AI, especially when much of the information out there is geared toward enterprise organizations with tons of first-party data.

That’s where The Bottom Line newsletter comes in.

Our newsletter distills down the most important and relevant information into easy-to-read, easy-to-understand content that speaks to you on your level. We provide a shining light as a guide to SMB leaders, highlighting major developments in the space, examples of how businesses are using AI to improve and grow, new AI tools that businesses are using, and helpful tips on mindset and overall a helping hand.

We want The Bottom Line to be more than just a newsletter. We want it to be a community of like-minded business leaders who are committed to using AI to drive growth and success. That’s why we’re asking for your feedback, questions, and suggestions for topics to cover in future newsletters. We want to hear from you, and we want to make this newsletter as helpful and relevant as possible.

So, after reading the newsletter, we have two requests: First, please refer 3 to 5 people to the newsletter who you think would greatly benefit from the information provided. And second, reach out and ask questions and suggest topics to cover in the following newsletters. Our communication lines are always open, and we’re excited to hear from you.

Thank you for joining us on this journey. We can’t wait to see how you use AI to grow and future-proof your business.

Looking forward,

Alan Boyd
https://www.thebottomline.ai/

AI in Marketing

By Alan Boyd | Published on 03/14/2023

Unleash your marketing superpowers – discover some of the ways generative AI tools are empowering marketers.

No theory here…this is a (partial) list of ways my team and I are *ACTUALLY* using AI tools today:

Content creation

Brainstorming content ideas
Performing research
Summarizing long documents
Proofreading and editing
Translating text into multiple languages
Drafting website disclaimers

Engineering

Coding website plugins
Coding excel formulas
Debugging code
Creating chatbots

Audio

Generating voiceovers and narration
Generating audio versions of text documents
Enhancing regular audio into studio-quality audio

Design

Designing custom illustrations
Designing banner ads
Designing user interfaces
Designing websites & apps
Designing memes
Designing PowerPoint presentations

Productivity

Creating content calendars
Scheduling & time tracking
Opportunity cost decision making
Taking and transcribing meeting notes
Transforming data to organized spreadsheets

There are many more ways they are being used but these are a few of our go-to’s.

Tome AI – Powerpoints in Minutes

By Alan Boyd | Published on 03/08/2023

Introducing a New Generative AI Presentation Generator Tool

I wanted to share with you an incredible new tool that I came across that I think you’ll find very valuable. It’s called Tome, and it’s a generative AI presentation generator that can help you create stunning presentations in a matter of minutes.

https://youtu.be/lUo4pvLKpGo

Tome’s generative storytelling feature enables creators to effortlessly craft entire stories, presentations, or outlines from scratch with the aid of intelligent titles, pagination, page layouts, and text, all paired with GPT-3 and AI-generated graphics. The result is a polished and professional output in no time.

With Tome, you can simply enter your content and let the AI take care of the design work, creating beautiful layouts and visualizations (created by DALL-E, DALL-E 2) that will captivate your audience. It’s perfect for busy professionals who need to create presentations quickly, but don’t have the time or design skills to do it themselves.

Try Tome for:

Business Presentations
Educational Presentations
Investor Presentations
Marketing Presentations

I’ve used it myself and I was blown away by how easy it was to use and how professional the results looked. I think you’ll find it incredibly helpful for your own work and projects.

Tome’s Top Features:

AI-Generated Presentations
AI-Generated Images from DALL-E
Add / Edit / Drag / Rearrange / Resizing
Simple drag-drop interface
Images / Video / Embeds
Plays nice with Figma Design Tool
Themes & customizations
Voice Narration Capability
Sharing & Collaboration
Web & Mobile friendly (with iOS app)
Inspiration showcase

Here’s a link to their getting started guide to familiarize yourself with the interface and a prompt guide to help you generate the best presentations from the command prompt.

Here’s a screen grab of the dashboard:

You can create custom presentations but by default, they have six boilerplate presentation template options:

Fundraising
Sales Pitch
Team Standup
Product Design Review
Company All Hands
Freelancer/Contractor About

If you click one of the default templates you can simply duplicate and edit the information.

For the example in the vide we created a presentation from scratch on why people should try Tome and some of its key features. Be sure to watch the video.

Now it’s your turn…

Try Tome Yourself

You can check it out for yourself at https://beta.tome.app/.

Let me know what you think.

See you next time,

Alan