Dale Beaumont was sitting on an airplane thinking about how to scale his business-coaching business: Although he was making an impact on thousands of entrepreneurs, he knew there were many, many more he could never reach through one-on-one coaching or even large-scale conferences. In that moment, Dale realized that to truly scale his business and help hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs all at the same time, he needed technology.

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Dale's on-board revelation led him to start his latest venture, BRiN, a business adviser powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Dale's aim in creating BRiN was to provide personalized education and human-like support to entrepreneurs at scale—a difficult proposition when relying on finite human resources.

I invited Dale to Marketing Smarts to talk about how AI is already having an impact on business and what changes we'll see in the coming decade. We also discussed his approach to work and leisure, which has enabled him to visit 70+ countries with his family and still keep his businesses running.

Here are just a few highlights from my conversation with Dale:

Unless you're a blacksmith at a living history museum, AI will impact your industry (09:44): "[AI] is now impacting every industry.... Stock market traders and brokers are now at the risk of being eliminated by far, far cheaper and more efficient robot advisors that are now starting to enter the financial-planning world. Every industry is now being disrupted by artificial intelligence. Even the healthcare industry and what we do in terms of...marketing and automation. [AI is] already having an impact and will continue to do so over the next five years."

The way people study marketing (and everything else) will change radically (15:36): "The way that university works is you study something for four years and you would assume that you'll be in that career for maybe the next 20-30 years, and after 10 years you'll be able to pay off that debt you've accumulated. But now there is a lot of research that says that most people will have somewhere between seven to ten different careers over their working life. That is completely different to the current education system....

"Certainly smaller degrees that are more niche will go online, or they'll be taught through hologram lecturers, for example, maybe in a small room of five and ten people. Or there will be these online universities where you might only have 20 people in a certain area that want to study something, and maybe you have another 20 over here. You put them all together and you have maybe a couple of hundred students that can then tune in online for these type of lectures. That's what you'll see for a lot of the smaller degree programs....

"You're either going to be the disruptor—or the disrupted. [AI] is coming, we can't avoid it, and it's going to affect every industry."

To learn more, visit BRiN.ai or follow Dale on Twitter: @Dale_Beaumont. 

Dale and I talked about much more, including the potential treasure trove of customer data that AI personal assistants could result in, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

Music credit: Noam Weinstein.

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Published on April 12, 2017