ZenBusiness Velo Prime Brings Agentic AI to Small Business Creation

ai Leadership Insight series. I'm your host, Mike Vizard. Today we're with Ross Buhrdorf, who's the CEO of Zen Business, and we're having a little chat about well, do small businesses really need their own AI platform, something that's unique to them, or can they just use every other tool that everybody else in the universe is sitting there trying to master?

Ross, welcome to the show. Thanks, Mike. I'm glad to be here.

Excited. So walk us through the reasoning here. You guys have launched a platform for small businesses that need to use AI, but what's the reasoning behind that?

What drives that, and what did you hear from customers? Yeah. We launched our co-founder, just a few weeks ago.

It's called Velo Prime, and it's a fully agentic solution, Mike, that gets the customer to their first dollar. And so to answer your question directly, what small business owners want and what they're asking us, and we're at a million customers now. They want something that does it for them.

They don't care if it's AI. They don't care what it is. They just want the job done.

And so to answer your question, I think there's so much AI hype out there that when you ask the question, do they need AI? They could care less. What they need is a successful business, and especially with our segment, Mike, they need all the help they can.

And so our product, our AI solution is called Velo Prime, and it is a agentic co-founder. So what our customers need is a co-founder that guides them through the process, specifically based on a decade of experience that we have. And specifically with our agent, we have two and a half million interactions with our customers to date via our agent, and that's us being able to refine our models and provide a more customized solution for our customer base.

To answer your question, the generic models don't do that. They're probably never going to do that. Our specific solution solves problems that are specific and does it for the customer.

So I think that's the heart of the answer is our customers deserve a trusted co-founder. That's what we do. That's what we do with Velo Prime is give them a trusted co-founder.

So how does that relationship manifest itself as if this agent is a trusted co-founder per se? Are the leaders of these companies are engaging in these agents with some sort of ongoing conversation and then maybe, I don't know, are there maybe worker agents that go get assigned specific tasks, or how does all this manifest? It's funny you should call them worker agents.

We call them a development team. So when you come in, Mike, to the Velo Prime product, you sign in with your name, email, your business idea, and then you get presented with the Velo Prime dashboard, and you want to think of it as a builder, an agentic builder. That it goes off and takes the information that you've given it to start with, and it starts building a business, for you.

And it follows specifically what kind of business, whether it's a consulting business, whether it's a service business. It follows what we call a workflow for that specific business. Now, that workflow can be modified by you as the customer.

And our design principle has always been, we want to push you forward. We want to push you into success. We want to do it for you.

And you always have the option to edit anything that we've done for you to change it. We present it to you. We ask for approval.

We say we want you to move forward. So it's a forward-moving solution. We show everything's transparent, but we also don't want to be a crazy robot that goes off and does wacky stuff that you didn't approve or you're not okay with or you're uncomfortable with.

So you can always modify it. So to answer that question in generic terms or general terms, Mike, is it's a builder for your business, but it gets you with the goal of getting to your first dollar of revenue. How do I govern this?

And I ask the question because as Wagwan said, it's one thing to be wrong, it's another thing to be wrong at scale. So if this thing is operating at machine speed, how do I, as the business executive, kind of wrap my arms around it so that if something is going off the rails, I can kind of insert myself into that process? So our dashboard, and I invite you to use it, Mike, shows you exactly what we're doing, what we're building for you.

It has editable pieces that we break down the building of your business into. So if you see the price, we propose a price list, for example, for your product or service. We propose a target market for you.

We build a website for you. We hook up all of that infrastructure and architecture for a small business, all of that plumbing. You can go and edit any of those pieces.

So even down to, hey, I want to change the name of the company or change the name of the business. You can edit that. It'll change that throughout the entire build of your business.

Go back and modify everything, modify the blog posts, et cetera. So you always have that opportunity to modify and change what we think are the building blocks of the business. And using that, what we call, I forgot the term you used, but we call it the development team.

So that development team of agents, what it builds and for you, you can go back and modify those pieces. And that's a fundamental design principle, Mike. We didn't want something that just went out and went off the leash.

So this thing it does it for you, but it's always within your control for you to approve. For example, we made a design to give you really at the heart. We use Stripe Connect for the e-commerce piece of it for these businesses need to collect money.

We don't go off and create a Stripe Connect account. You need to do that. But once you've done that, then we connect it up with everything.

We'll do the invoicing then for you, where it's fully agentic. So, we get you involved where you'd need to be involved. " You need to go do that.

And that's just sense. That's just common sense. And we don't want to make it science fiction where it's taking your credit card and gone off and bought a Tesla.

There you go. Small businesses, of course, are the lifeblood of the economy, and they tend to drive most of the economic activity much more so collectively than large corporations. How does this kind of change the relationship that exists between the executives of those and the owners of those companies and the people they hire, and how does that all work out in your mind?

Well, it's a good question, and I think, Mike, companies are still run by people. Their customers are still people. And ZenBusiness is a AI-driven company, and we have 500-plus employees, and we are deeply AI, and our customers interact with our agents and our AI.

And at any point when we discover and we constantly monitor it We have our AI turn it over to a human being because we want that to be a good experience for our customer. So I still think that those are human decisions, those are management decisions. I'm not turning the reins over to some uncontrolled robot.

And so my answer is, I think that those are great exaggerations. I think those are exaggerations that the model builders want us to think about because it hypes up their models. We are still very much a-- And it's all about our brand.

I'm a technology guy from day one. I'm a CTO gone CEO. I have a computer science degree from one of the most prestigious universities, and I'm very involved in technology.

So I use AI. It's great. It's fantastic.

It is revolutionary, but it's a tool. And so people are still involved in that. And so when you say about small businesses, when we survey them, Mike, what they need is more time, they need more support, they need more help.

And so what we've done with Velo Prime is created that support help that does all of the easy things. Or our brand promise is we turn chaos into calm because we handle those things that robots and that AI should be able to handle. And we do them very effectively, and we ask for your permission, and we allow you to modify those along the way.

And I just think that's fundamental. And we didn't have this revolt. You seem like you're old enough.

We didn't have this reaction to graphical user interfaces when they came out, where you would type in the-- which is most of the web right now. But we seem to be having some kind of organ rejection to the robots are going to take over because they have a lot of data and they make some very good educated decisions to move forward in your task. So it's just a different interface.

It's just a different interaction. It's an advanced interaction, but there still needs to be stopping points, approval points, interactions with the human being for it to truly be effective. Somebody has to ultimately attach their name to something to sign off on it and take responsibility for it.

That's right. Let me ask you this. How do you think this will change the way small businesses compete?

Because most of them that I know are always competing with some larger entity, and they're trying to make up for the fact that the larger entity simply has more labor resources to throw at things. But does this in some way start to level the playing field between smaller and larger companies? It absolutely does, Mike.

I think it does level the playing field. And I think now small business owners that have a skill, whether they're a plumber or they're some kind of a consultant, a designer, whatever, painter, electrician. Those folks that maybe work for a bigger company and they want to break out and do it on their own and become hyper-local, I think they can become more competitive because they've got AI, they've got tools like that we provide, that other folks provide that really do level the playing field, and in many cases, give them an advantage.

They can probably offer more customized solution, more customized service, better service and potentially at a lower cost with lower overhead as long as they've got a co-founder AI, all of this infrastructure that's becoming more and more available to small businesses. And we're seeing that, Mike. More and more small businesses are being formed.

There's really literally a tidal wave. We saw one when COVID. I think AI is driving or we see the numbers as driving more and more small businesses formations and creation.

And I think that's just growing either because people have been displaced at bigger companies and they don't have an alternative, or this is a viable alternative now. One of the things that I'm putting out as a pundit, we're seeing a little bit of it in our business is think about this, Mike. So you can go in and use Velo Prime to create a business and you're still guiding it.

It's a co-founder. It's not a mad robot. It's a co-founder.

What stops me from creating two, three, four, five of these things that really does scale up my business, that really does scale up my knowledge, my interest in a specific market, in a specific segment, tailored to a specific customer base? That gets pretty exciting because as a side hustle, you can create a lot of these other ideas when the cost of entry is much, much lower, and you can be guaranteed that you don't have to worry about, how do I do payments? How do I do a website?

How do I do accounting and taxes? All of that stuff. How do I get legal so I don't get sued?

That really opens things up. So do you think that as we go forward, there will be a lot more small business entrepreneurs? Because a lot of people that I know at least start something, but it generally fails because they run into some sort of hiccup around one of these issues.

But will there ultimately be more of these thriving small businesses and maybe we're not going to be as dependent upon large companies to employ people because people will employ themselves? Exactly. That's the hope.

And I guess Mike, if I get a choice, I'm choosing that as the future as opposed to a dystopian Terminator future. All right. And that's what we're focused on as a company.

And I think that's what gets me up and going. I'm the founder of Zen Business. We encourage all of our employees to have side hustles.

With Velo Prime, we actually give cash awards to people that get their side hustles making money. So have you ever seen a company that encourages their employees to go off and do other things than work on the business? Now, they're very focused on the business because we're a hard-driven organization, but a lot of people have side hustles.

It's a common thing. And I encourage people, if they can make a side hustle work, let me be an investor. Let's get it going.

There you go. Well, let me ask you this question then. What do you see small business owners and leaders doing that just makes you shake your head a little bit going, "Folks, I wish we could be a little bit smarter than that"?

Well, I think the biggest thing is, as you said early in the program here, is that small businesses are an engine that drives the economy. I'm not sure that all of our policies are aligned with that, and that we're really supporting small businesses the way we could. And then I also think that a mentality of a scarcity model, and you touched on it, which I think is if I could choose, I would want policies and I would want businesses to support more small businesses because if everyone's an entrepreneur, that just creates more wealth.

That creates more commerce, that creates more jobs. And so I think we should be leaning into this as much as we possibly can. And when I put my money where my mouth is, like I'm saying, it would be great if all of our employees had a side hustle.

That means they're generating more revenue, they're generating more commerce, they're generating more jobs. They're generating more of what's driving this economy. And that's not bad.

It's a positive thing. And so I think we need to encourage it. I'd like to see it at school.

My grandson goes to a school where it's fundamental to their education is entrepreneurship, and it's threaded throughout their education. So I think it starts there. And I also will say, Mike, everything's changing in the world.

You can't not read the news and not see that it's changing. Small business is the great equalizer. People are happier.

They can generate more wealth. They're more in control of their destiny. And so I would just think it's a fundamental piece of the future and we need to lean into it.

And that's why we're doing what we're doing. All right, folks, I don't think anybody would disagree that there's going to be disruption, but it may not all be bad. In fact, most of it might end up being good.

That's right. Hey, Ross, thanks for being on the show. Thanks, Mike.

Thank you all for watching the latest episode of the Techstrong Leadership Insight series. You can find this video and others on our website. We invite you to check all those out.

Until then, we'll see you next time.