Dennis Yu, the mastermind behind BlitzMetrics, has led an illustrious career in marketing, mainly drawing on his ability to strategically harness and integrate technology into his workflow, particularly the use of artificial intelligence (AI). He has seen the need for businesses to judiciously use AI as an augmentation tool to streamline processes, rather than a magic wand to solve systemic issues.
Starting off, Dennis emphasized how every business has a different marketing flow and varied funnels. However, where they tend to converge is the misuse of AI. Many people, he noted, often view AI as a shiny new toy, endeavoring to use it for an expansive range of tasks, even those they’ve never attempted previously.
Dennis Yu’s approach is different. He pioneers the practice of leveraging AI to optimize existing processes that are already performing well. The idea is not simply to jump on the AI bandwagon for the sake of it, but to use it as a tool to amplify what’s already working well in the business.
For instance, he speaks about a business acquaintance in Vegas who runs a $13 million plumbing HVAC company. This businessman employs AI to enhance content quality for better Google ranking, respond promptly to incoming leads, and handle customer reviews more effectively. Thus, AI becomes an amplifier and an augmentation of what’s already working, rather than an experimental prospect-ridden tool.
It is apparent that Yu’s vision for AI emphasizes the tool’s potential to supplement and enhance ongoing processes. He sternly warns against trying to fix broken processes using AI or expecting AI suddenly to render a poor business profitable.
Yu believes that the key to wielding AI successfully lies in mapping, systematizing, and optimizing manual processes first. Through the meticulous documentation of their processes, businesses have invaluable data that can be fed into AI systems. So instead of trying to automate unproven strategies, businesses should first manually execute a successful process and then incorporate AI to automate it.
Moreover, Yu has expressed that the initial process a business owner needs to engage with is not the learning of AI but the documentation of how their business operates. He suggests that businesses extract evidence of customer acquisition, delivery, and fulfillment processes and present it to AI for systematizing using established techniques.
Yu also emphasizes the criticality of making processes public. He suggests ‘playing several steps ahead’ by providing AI with extensive data about business operations. He captures business processes and interactions through loom or zoom calls, which can then be translated by the AI into operational SOPs—without the need for complex programming or learning new techniques.
In Dennis’s view, significant possibilities are unlocked by using AI to automate human-driven tasks that follow an SOP. This capability, coupled with the repetitive capabilities of AI, marks a turning point in how businesses can delegate responsibilities and operations to technology.
Dennis Yu’s innovative approach to integrating AI into business processes underlines the importance of understanding how AI can and should be utilized in a business context. AI in itself is not the solution, rather it is a tool in the wider process of streamlining and optimizing business operations. For businesses to take full advantage of what AI can offer, they need to start by understanding and refining their own manual processes.
