Welcome to the Adaptive Mindset. I'm Brett Gallant, cybersecurity thought leader and founder of Adaptive Office Solutions. Here, we don't just talk tech, we unlock the strategies, stories, and mindset shifts you need to stay secure, lead boldly, and thrive in a digital world. Let's get started. Welcome back to the Adaptive Mindset. And I'm very pleased to have with me today, Zulfiya Forsythe She helps businesses buy back their time with AI and data analytics. It's such a pleasure to have you here today with me.

Brett Gallant

Thank you, Brad. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited for this conversation.

Zulfiya Forsythe

Me too, especially very timely because everybody's talking about AI and the key thing that we said at the very beginning, how to buy back your time with AI. And perhaps you could dig into a little bit about that and pivot with a little bit of mindset shifts on how you looked at AI to help you foster growth and innovation and to support businesses thrive in an ever-changing landscape.

Brett Gallant

Absolutely. So my name is Zulfiya Forsythe. I'm a CEO and founder of Omadli Group. We are end-to-end data analytics and AI solutions companies. Every day we work with businesses on helping them to buy back their time with their process automation, their workflow automation, also help them to make money. Basically, we look at their processes that are repetitive and redundant, help them with their overhead costs, and create solutions that also help them to make money. What I mean by that is we have, for example, certain agents that we have created that's going to go out there and get you leads, literally get you leads. We all have infinite time as human beings. We have our responsibilities at work, and also we have responsibilities in front of our clients and in front of our team, and as well as our home, as well, in front of our families. And we all want to grow our business. We all want to provide a great product, serve our clients, but sometimes I speak to a lot of business owners, we all want leads, we want constant revenues that come in through the door, and we want to keep in touch with those leads. So I have AI products that actually, before somebody has to go, for example, just even a simple thing, I have a telegram bot, it's so easy to set up. Yeah, it's just everybody then you can just download telegram basically and then I will share that telegram bot with you that now can go and there's lots of communities actually in telegram that the customers are sitting there and leads are sitting in there and talking about certain if they're interested in fitness if they're interested in buying a house if they're interested in some type of business advice So now instead of you kind of going through all of them and trying to qualify those leads or trying to extract them, there's thousands of people sitting on those chats. I have a Telegram bot that can kind of help you and get those leads so you can start engaging with them right away and then start following up with them on a consistent basis and basically turn your leads into customers.

Zulfiya Forsythe

Exactly. It's so exceptional because a lot of times, I like to think of this from a book I've read and listened to a few times, who not how? And so what you do is you bring the how, the who, sorry. A lot of times, busy entrepreneurs, they instinctively go to, I've got to get this done, and who's going to do it? Well, sometimes it's them or a member of their team. And now all of a sudden, a long, tedious task, you have AI, for example, what you just said, is literally saving hours upon hours of a human being taking that tedious process, which for some people is probably not something that gives them energy, and the AI doesn't care. It just goes, collects the data, compiles it, and puts it in a format that's useful that you can put into your CRM, and you can process it. I can only imagine what that has done for some of the people that you get to work with every day, what it has done when they see this list and they go, oh my goodness, I did this and it took me hours and now you've saved me. I bought back my time.

Yeah. And another thing is interesting. I even got clients from my own bot. It goes out there, anyone who's interested about AI, it scoops their information, puts it for me in a Google Sheet, for example, or uploads it into my CRM. And now I can start engaging. So another thing I've noticed is that if there's something so tedious, it's really hard to do this on a consistent basis. Because we're just like, okay, we've done this once. Oh my gosh, I have to do this every day. And I kind of Because it's also with the lead, sometimes it's a numbers game, right? Because you need to go qualify them. So there's not only process of collecting leads and qualifying them, and then starting and through the engagement process, and then you coming in. So there's a entire lead journey to turn into customer that a lot of people, it's just so it just takes a lot of processing, a lot of time. And you think it's like such a simple process, but it's really hard to keep up on a consistent basis because we're just like, oh, it's not worth it. You know, it's taking too much time. I'll go focus on something else. So we can leverage tools like AI to kind of like, all right, I don't have to go now, basically get that list. I have the list ready for me. And even I can even do the qualifying with the bot. And now I get to engage with people that are really interested in my services. And now I get kind of fast forward into my lead to customer journey.

Incredible. So how would you have somebody, how would you leverage AI to qualify somebody? Do you have a special bot or do you, okay, interesting.

Yes, absolutely. So questions, every business have their ICP, right? The ideal customer profile. Yeah. And every business has some type of script that they use to qualify, or sometimes certain questions, I would say not script, but certain questions that when they work with that customer, before they work with that customer, they ask certain questions to see if they're a really good fit for each other. So nobody's wasting time on both ends. So we can build that script into AI bot, and now AI is qualifying before basically quickly asking questions, qualifying questions, and then if things look like it could be a good fit and passed on to the human to come in actually and start engaging further.

Okay, incredible. So what prompted you to dig into AI? I'm sure you were doing data analytics and you must have seen, oh my goodness, there's an opportunity here. Yes. How did that journey happen for you?

Sure. So I started my data analytics company in 2021. I was data analyst before, so I kind of started getting clients on the side and helping them as a freelancer. And then little by little, I kind of grew that in the company. And as AI came in 2022, 2023, I just, it just made sense because I had all that data, the client, the work with clients, all the past data to do business intelligence reporting on. So analyzing things that happened, and it just made sense to kind of, all right, well, how can you now take that into how can you take now that data and kind of do predictive analytics on it, for example, apply machine learning algorithms, or also how can you use large language model and now tap into those data sources that now you have ability for that data to recognize human language and to be able to retrieve the information faster for our clients. It just seemed like a natural progression.

Well, absolutely. It supports what you were doing. I'm amazed at how much AI has grown and continues to grow. we're seeing changes daily, hourly with what comes out just with the growth of the models and then the sub models. And then someone like yourself comes out with agents that interface with all these models and takes things to a whole nother level that we never even thought was possible. What I like to, talk about AI when we're using AI to use it as a thought leader. I'm curious what you could say to some people that may be interested in leveraging AI. What tips would you give to them if they're just dabbling right now?

It's interesting, the statistics shows that AI is still in early stages of a lot of people. Yes, a lot of people might know H-I-P-T, but still there are people that don't know the certain features of H-I-P-T. There's a canvas mode, for example. The canvas mode allows you, it's adaptive, so it allows you kind of, there are multiple features. So if you're prompting a question, it allows you to kind of, there's a scale of, that you can adjust, whether you are, for example, you want to explain certain concepts, like to five year old or to undergrad level or graduate level, just kind of like the complexity, you know, to break down the certain topics or subject matters to more digestible nuggets. So that's, I think it's pretty great. And then also, you can make edits, for example, once you've got the prompt, and you really just want to change one piece of the prompt, like you don't want to redo the entire response. So you kind of just go to that piece of the response and you can like ask Chattopadhyay more about this or expand on this more. So you keep everything else, but you're expanding certain parts of the response. You don't have to regenerate the response right away because, for example, sometimes when I work on Chattopadhyay, I might like the response, but I'm not like I might not like a certain part of the response, but I don't want to get rid of the entire thing. I don't want to regenerate because it's regenerative. So regenerate constantly the responses, but I would like to keep certain part and it just adjust the two, three barriers, for example, from the back so you can do that, I think. My advice to everybody is just try to use it as much as possible. Obviously, be sensitive on what type of information that you're uploading to ChatGPT and then all the other AI, Google, for example, Studios, or Grok as well. Then there is an option, for example, of ChatGPT on the data controls. And then you go to data controls, and it's under settings. And then you can also turn off training. So you can turn off the model for training purposes.

Okay.

So that's something, uh, yeah, that way you can just turn it off. But, um, but I would say like every day, and then it's just, it's incredible. Like I use it even, uh, sometimes on Uber, sometimes I'm in an Uber and the person might not speak fully English and they speak a Spanish. For example, I literally have my chachapati on my phone and we can just have a conversation back to back, for example. So they speak in Spanish, the AI is able to translate that in real time, my response to Spanish and kind of like be the middle person in between us to explain. It's incredible. I think that's incredible.

I've used it to act as a French tutor for me. I'm doing French lessons. And my my French teacher that I do that I meet with every week online, he suggested I try it. So I actually I created a prompt act as my French teacher and correct me and give me feedback on how to improve. And I talked to AI, I've been in the airport speaking to AI conversational French. So it's incredible.

That's fantastic.

I love what you're doing with that. That's such a great idea. Especially if you're with an Uber, why not use technology to work smarter for you so you can like, and it's here at our fingertips. A lot of people wouldn't even think about doing that. It's incredible.

It's fun. It's a lot of fun. My early days when I think of here's the thing. So, my background is accounting. I used to be counting my prior life. I also took my CPA exam and I just thought, oh, my gosh, when. AI wasn't there. I had to go through so many different learning materials. Becker CPA, so they have the thick books for each exam chapter. Then they have the desks, for example, that you can listen on. Then there was Ninja CPAs, a bunch of other learning tools that I would have to just kind of prepare for one test. I would take multiple learning courses. Now, When I hear somebody saying for CBN, I'm like, oh my gosh, everything is so much easier for you. You can just use chapter BT to help you to break because if you understand it. Yeah, you can solve a problem. You don't have to memorize things. But if you can understand the material, you can pass the test, because you can apply that logic to when you have these test session exams. And that's what what I was doing is back then I had multiple learning materials to help me understand better because they all for example, spoke about business ethics or tax law from just different tests perspective, so I can understand better, so it can make have different ways of teaching.

Yes.

To help me. Some, for example, some learning materials were much more technical than the others. So I needed that kind of different ways of teaching for me to be able to understand. Now, you could just take a screenshot.

Just paraphrase it and tell me in layman's terms and teach me other perspectives on this thought. So it's incredible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

or explain it to me like a three-year-old, explain it to be taxable like a 53-year-old, or help me to memorize what's the best way of memorizing these tax rules or tax codes or these limitations, for example. There's just so many ways. I think in the hardest, for me, it was always easier to understand tax rules, for example, like financial Um, there's a four chapter financial accounting and also tax law was the easiest because it's like, if this happens, you use this, this happens, use this. It's pretty straightforward logic. But then when it comes to audit and business ethics, it's very, uh, subjective. So there's different ways of looking and analyzing situation. And that's where it's AI could just be so much helpful. So anytime when somebody is like studying for this or hesitant to studying, like, this is your time. This is the tool that just make your life so much easier.

Oh, and not to mention, I'm just thinking about something relating to CPAs and just accounting. Often, as I'm sure you're aware, accountants and bookkeepers are looking, trying to solve a puzzle, a problem. Where did this go wrong? There is countless ways that in that field, AI could be leveraged to help you work smarter to find that discrepancy, analyzing the data. And instead of taking hours upon hours, you can get to that solution within minutes.

We did one knowledge base for a tax accounting company. We did this tool that now they have their knowledge base of all the codes that they use, for example. So tax accountants, when they do their preparation, tax preparation, you don't have to spend hours, for example, trying to find a tax rule or change to, for example, kind of look on the website on IRS. So they have their own proprietary knowledge base. that we create a chatbot now, now it's just, they can prompt it for the tax code, what's the limitation, can you please help me? So it just speeds up that research for them so much faster.

It's more conversational. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And then it also gives them citation as well. So it gives them ability, oh, what was that code from? And then they can be able to retrieve that even code and kind of, oh, okay, that's where it's coming from.

Incredible. So where do you see AI going in the next three months to a year?

You know, that's an interesting question. So last weekend, this past Sunday, I met in person, CEO of Perplexity.

Yes.

So Arvind, I met Arvind and actually asked him a question. I was at Harvard at a Sunday, that was entrepreneurship summit. And I asked him, is there, because in this conversation with Lex Friedman, that he did last summer, he talked a lot about focus. So I was like, do you have any type of strategic bets that you're making in next one to three years that you're focusing on? And his question was one to three years is too long. His point was to look at one to three years. They do every quarter. Because things are changing so rapidly, And long quarter, the progress is worth of two years.

That's true.

So when I listened to that, now, when you ask me a question, what do I see three, five years? It's like, Oh my gosh, what do I see next quarter? Yeah. Um, but definitely I could see how agentic AI. So agents, autonomous agents. as something that's improving and down the road, and kind of getting a lot of attention on. And I'll tell you something about autonomous agents, they're improving, but they're still not there. They right now, I think what we see is more like a hybrid between workflow automation, let's say, or workflow automation, because autonomous means, for example, if I'm booking your flight, And if I need to make changes so let's say I booked the air flight. I got the air flight and actually that happened to me. So I was at the conference in Dallas. This Thursday and Friday, just next week, and then I got invited to Harvard, because I live in Boston so far was like 25 minutes away to come and meet. And I really wanted to, so, but my, my flight was to come back on Sunday. So I had to change it to come back on Saturday. There's just no way AI right now is able to get on the call. Basically to change my air ticket, because even the person on the call that was trying to help me to change the ticket, it was for hour and a half I was on the call and she wasn't even able to do it. Like the system doesn't work on that. And for example, I booked it for chase travel. I have chase points. And then she was trying to contact the airline and she sees the tickets available, she can't book it. So there's just no way AI could do that. And the reason why, because there isn't infrastructure set up for it. So if there's gaps between, let's say you have a provider of Chase, and then you have a provider of these airlines, there is no bridge between them that they can have just data flowing for all the tickets that are available, they can easily switch it. The machine can go in, tap into the, let's say, back end of it through the API, and now change it. It's not there yet. And I don't know how long would it take for them to establish these bridges, I would say, with every potential airline that they have. to navigate through these changes.

That's going to take some time and a whole new way of thinking and acceptance of that.

Yeah, if humans, because this is how it is, AI is really good at pattern matching, something that humans are already doing so well, so it's easy for it because there is a predefined steps. But if the humans can't still figure out, there's a lot of ambiguity, and that's where autonomous agents are supposed to have this as a task, and they go get to execute this. or independently through the feedback loop, they constantly reassess, okay, so I was told to book the ticket, like air flight ticket for these hours, I have to go look back at the calendar, are these hours are available? All right, what is the best, for example, airline to pick, what's the best price to pick at? So there's a lot of autonomous decisions that need to be made. If you're just saying to it, book a flight, like for example, right now, you have operator for OpenAI or operator option where you can just say, here's my credit card, book a ticket between this. It can find you, but it still will ask you, this is what I found, is it okay for me to book? And even if you book it, you just, then if you make any changes, you kind of still need a human in the loop. You still need to jump in and try to fix things.

I actually tried that a week ago, and it's promising, but it's nowhere near where I'd like it to be. And there's still that human element where you almost need customized playbooks to know what your preferences are. So there'd be a model for your agent that you would customize, sort of like an executive assistant that you could have an EA agent that can do this.

Yes. And I think what I see as well, there are so many out-of-box solutions for agents online that you could see, but here's the kicker. So you have the big guys, you have big tech, for example, doing the agentic, investing agentic, investing in AI models. but they're so broad. That's the thing, right? So you have to go to the context of each individual person and that's really hard. And then you have even like a smaller players where they have out of box EA agent. For example, we have a agent, but this is what we noticed. Every person is different with their work, with their, how they do their business, with their preferences as well. So you need really the custom, everybody wants, like, I want this thing to work for me, not to work for the masses, because it's hard to work to that agent.

Yeah, you need to, exactly.

And when you have out of box solutions, what happens is that they have predefined what makes sense, right? How would they scale? Otherwise they have predefined workflow, predefined prompt. And that's where you have to fit your workflow into their prompt. For example, you have to fit your voice into their prompt, and then you don't get, for example, audit locks is another thing. Because if you don't have, If you don't have human link with agents, you literally, it's like giving credit card to a child. That's what it looks like. They're just gonna go and like book all those things. And then there've been studies even on Tropic Cloud, these big AI model, big companies are trying to build these AI models. They do extensive testing on these AI models and these large language models. And there've been instances where the way they test them is they, for example, expose them to all of the knowledge base, like their folders, internal folders. And one folder is actually a very interesting case, back in fall of 2024. And the model found in the folder that it was supposed to be, that the goal for that model is to get retired by one of the developers. So it found that document, it read that. So then what it tried to do, it tried to escape. So it deleted itself and basically copied itself on another server and renamed itself. So when it was confronted, it's pretty wild if you think about this. And that was like throughout the testing, right? That's what they were trying to test the model. And then when confronted, it denied all of its actions. But think about this, and that's where the developers were testing the model. So they had the visibility. Yeah, they had the visibility to see what's happening. But if you don't have human in the loop, you have, and you don't have any guardrails that set up and you're not monitoring if this model is performing within the guardrails, then it can just do whatever it's want. Because again, like if it doesn't have, if it doesn't have focus oversight monitoring, that is very critical.

Wow, wow. It's scary at the same time. So, wow. Yeah. Yeah. So, We have all this profound change and it sounds to me the way you're adapting with it is continuously investing in yourself by going to conferences. What would you say to somebody that's growing in this industry or in just growing in general, how to adapt to your mindset and approaching AI? What would you say to someone?

I would say absolutely. I'd say that it's here to stay. It's not going anywhere. So we need to listen to that. There's a bunch of podcasts out there that are free completely on AI. And just try to use it as part of your daily life in a new workspace. and think, how can it help me to solve my problems in workplace? Because we all have, like, you know, I started my whole journey in entrepreneurship as an accountant because I saw that there is a need for automation, even in our accounting department. And back then I would sit on forums and Googles and YouTubes and just trying to figure out. So all of us still in every workspace, I see clients coming in to me because they have these inefficiencies. they have most of the time. So interestingly, I actually, in Dallas, I took an Uber, and when I was asked what I do, I said, I do AI. And this person was like, oh, can you help me? I have this question. It's like, I really would like to learn AI. This person is still very young in their career. And we do all of this manual things at work. How can I fix it? And I literally draw from him. I just started asking questions. All right. Well, I was like, before you learn, go and learn all these courses. One thing you did awesome is that you found the problem in your workspace. You see that it's taking a long time. And then I started asking follow-up questions. What type of software do you use? It was a time booking. What type of software do you use? Do they have any type of features that could enable? No, pretty much. And here's what happens. Most of the times, the big softwares, big SaaS companies, either it's CRMs, or if it's some type of time recording software, project management software, it's really hard for them to kind of do these custom features for their clients to kind of like, you know, fill in these gaps they might have. Yeah. So because then the development process takes a long time, and then it's very lengthy and costly. But in the meantime, the customers are still experiencing that problem. So I started asking questions, like, and I drew the workflow, I kind of told him, okay, you could do this, for example, time booking, right now, it's super manual, but we can deploy even Google Forms, for example, and then Google Forms, from the Google Forms, you can extract information, Google Sheet, and you can upload. So just And then the Google Forms, why Google Forms? You don't now, no more collecting that time because that person was collecting time from everybody in the team and they will come in very unstructured format and then pass it on to someone else on the team. And sometimes he would be constantly like, does it take so much time? Not submitting it on time and just kind of lots of inefficiencies, just simple things. This is just a simple process and it completely saves his time. Now you just create the Google Form, everybody's names, the information that you're trying to collect, and then you build the extract, transform, and load process, ETL process, into your Google Sheet that automatically will take information from Google Form, populate the Google Sheet, that now you can give access to other people that are waiting for you for that time. Or you can also upload it as a template into your, just a simple thing, just not even like not talking anything massive, just one simple thing. And it's already saving so much time from everybody's ends.

Absolutely. Often a lot of times we overcomplicate things and simplicity scales. when you execute and realize, okay, what's the common thread that I can follow? Keep it simple, Simon, and just follow that and leverage technology, like we're talking today, leveraging AI, but finding the right business case to buy back your time.

And that's this perfect thing. Like, when I told him this, I was like, now, go leverage AI to help you learn to build this full process with AI. So I'm all about practice. I like academia. I'm using As you can see, I have a lot of academic experience, but I also like the practicality together. It's because sometimes people think, oh, I have to learn AI. I have to take all these courses, for example. But if you're young and you don't have a lot of commitments, you don't have kids and families, because the time just shrinks. you have just a job, free time, then you have YouTubes, and then you have even like Google Ads Studio. You can share your screen.

Everybody has 20 minutes. Everybody has 20 minutes. So we live in the best time in the world right now. We have information at our fingertips, and we have information overload. but there's tools like YouTube and even Instagram and TikTok where people are sharing how to do a lot of these things. So you can spend 20 minutes a day or even 30 minutes a day to move the needle forward and go after your goals. And at the same time, a lot of times entrepreneurs were holding on saying, I gotta do this. But like what we were talking about at the beginning, who not how? And so who, well, you can contact Zulfiya and help leverage AI, or you can have somebody else on your team do it for you and check in with them to say, okay, every day, today, starting today, we're gonna make a culture that we're gonna leverage AI as 10% of our day or 20% of our day, because that's what the reality is today. have yeah we're in this time so we may as well take advantage of it because other people are using it so let's not be afraid partner with some experts like yourself and start making things happen yeah yeah absolutely yeah do lab sessions like that that's fun like do once a month uh lab session for everybody like this is what we learned about ai this is a

Are these a new tool? So there's a little quick kind of automation things that we can all apply now in our daily work life.

Yeah, give somebody a challenge and say, hey, we're going to meet next. Today, we're going to we're going to work on this challenge. Let's meet together next Friday at two. Come back and show me what you've been able to do with AI.

Yeah, that's a great one. Yeah.

Yeah. I love that. So along the way, I've been asking everybody on the podcast here at the Adaptive Mindset, what books inspire you and help you have shifts in your mindset and adaptability of any book that comes to your heart right now that's inspired you and inspired you.

Absolutely. I love reading books. And I think of my favorite books is to read about entrepreneurships. Just my favorite books to read from how companies were built, what the journey is. My favorite book is Rich Dad and Poor Dad. Poor Dad and Rich Dad. I just love that book.

Yeah, that guy Kawasaki, I think, right? Yes. A friend of mine just had him on his podcast.

Oh, wow. That's fantastic.

Yeah. Yeah. Incredible book. Any others?

Yes, absolutely. I think that book and then another book that I really like. Okay. So some, let's say from business book, I really like the uh, the Phil Knight book from a founder of Nike. That was really a fantastic book. Um, that was his journey, how he started the company, how many portals he went through. Um, just fantastic. Uh, and then I like one more book and, um, it's just not, it's a fiction book, I would say, or more like a classical book, uh, Victor Hugo. I like the, uh, Victor Hugo, the, the Notre Dame de Paris. okay that was one of my favorite books um uh when i read that back when i was uh just finishing college it was incredible for me to read that book he's one of the legends it's one of the classic yeah i haven't read it but i've heard so much about him and i should have picked up one of those books that's the book that you just ah it's i don't know i'm um uh sometimes I like the it's interesting like I have this genre between uh like when you talk about like something light-hearted something motivational but then also I like something like uh Melted Down Debris like basically it's it's it's bitter it's sad and it's beautiful at the same time but it's just it just it's like so many emotions kind of it just yeah it's one of the classical books that you could read and stays with you for a long time.

So I know, Zulfiya, how do people find you? I know we can find you on Instagram and LinkedIn, I'm sure.

Yes, just Zulfiya Forsythe at LinkedIn and Instagram as well. And also, if you come from this podcast, and I would love to give you a demo of Telegram bot that helps to convert your leads into customers, but you just need to message adapt. That way, I know you're coming from this podcast.

Yeah, please. I want to really encourage you to take up Safiya on that offer. It's an incredible offer. This has been a very impactful episode, Zulfiya, and I thank you. And I want to encourage our listeners, the biggest thanks you could do for Zulfiya and myself is perhaps there's somebody you know that needs to hear this episode. They're struggling with AI. and they're working on their journey and maybe a little lost. Share this with them so they can pick up some tips from Zulfiya's expertise and have her come into their world. That would be the biggest thanks because we can impact a lot of people today by sharing this episode. And that would be the biggest thanks you could do for us. And I'm thankful to have you here today. It was such a great conversation. And I look forward to continuing to follow you on Instagram and LinkedIn and be inspired by you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Brett. Thank you for having me.

It was such a pleasure. Thanks for tuning into the Adaptive Mindset. If you found value in today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who's ready to thrive in the digital age. Stay secure, stay adaptable, and I'll see you next time.