Introduction
Ryan: Welcome everyone to the AiFounders podcast show.
Our podcast is dedicated to celebrating the remarkable accomplishments of AI innovators, entrepreneurs, and visionary founders and the captivating stories behind the movements they have built. I’m your host, Ryan Davies, and I have the honor of hosting today’s inaugural edition with our special guest, Naren Arulrajah. Naren, Thank you so much for being here and kicking this off with us.
Naren: Thank you, Ryan. I’m really looking forward to this inaugural edition and this introduction to what Aifounders is and what this podcast is all about.
Ryan: I’m very excited, too. I know the guests we’ve got lined up and the topics we’re covering in the days and weeks to come here. But first, I want to talk a little bit about you so people can get to know you.
Naren is a serial entrepreneur. He had a lifelong love of learning, and it’s clearly evident. He’s the CEO of Ekwa Marketing and has been a podcast host and expert on many different topics, notably around business growth, marketing, and emerging tech trends. So, what better place than here to have him kick this off with us with the rapid growth and adoption of AI? It’s no wonder that Naren took an immediate, deep-rooted interest in this space and wanted to bring together amazing founders in the AI space to share their experiences and knowledge. So we’re here today to learn all about the AI space, what he’s created, why he’s created it, and what listeners can expect when they keep coming back, day after day, week after week, for all the episodes to come. So, Naren, kicking it off, let’s start right there. What is Aifounders.net?
What is AiFounders.net?
Naren: It’s a community for people who are founders of AI companies. So that’s just like the name suggests. The reason we feel like this is a valuable endeavor is because AI, as everyone knows, is the next thing. But we are still in the early days, right? Imagine when the internet was first created back in 94, 95, 96, like really early days. So, this is the early days of AI. Looking back 25 years, Google was created in 1998. So many things have changed in terms of the internet and mobile devices. Using the internet has become so much part of our lives; from watching movies to grabbing a ride to paying bills, we do most of it on our phones today. We don’t go into offices to rent a movie. We don’t go to the street to hail a cab; we don’t go to the bank. So, I believe that AI is going to do the same thing. It’s going to fundamentally change us as a species, what we do, what kind of jobs we have. I think we are just in the beginning stages. So, being an entrepreneur, and somebody who likes to bet on the future, I believe that us being part of this community and helping grow this community is a good thing. So that’s what we are all about. Also, as you alluded to, I’m the founder and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, which is a digital marketing agency for doctors’ healthcare practices, mostly small practices. We are also working very actively on leveraging AI for the benefit of our clients. So, of course, the other interest is how everything we learn on the AI front, in general, can be applied to the healthcare space. So I’m looking forward to it as an individual just to learn. I think my company would benefit from it because AI is going to change the world. At the same time, I feel like we can also contribute by being part of this community.
Ryan: Yeah, I think, absolutely perfectly said. And I think that’s for a lot of our listeners; that’s exactly what they’re going to find here as well in terms of what’s in it for them, for their businesses, how can they apply what they’re hearing? What lessons can they take from the guests that we’re interviewing, and with that in mind, what type of people will we be interviewing on the podcast?
Types of People Interviewed
Naren: We want people who are pushing the envelope. And, of course, AI means a lot of things for a lot of people, but in general, the idea is that you can have machines that can learn, that can evolve, that can figure things out on their own. That’s a kind of artificial intelligence, just like how humans learn and figure things out. There’s no manual on how to walk for a child; he or she falls, learns how to stand and then little by little starts walking and then starts walking fast and eventually running and doing all kinds of wonderful things. We were not born with the ability to write. Somebody teaches the alphabet; we learn how to write, we learn how to read, we start using writing to communicate, to do all kinds of stuff. So, AI is kind of the same thing but doing it with machines.
Now, the good news is there’s a lot of work that we do even today as human beings that are kind of rookies. You do the same thing again and again; of course, automation, what it did is anything repetitive, it made it automated. So, for example, you’re going to send an email to people. So, instead of the old days, you might go to the post office and find envelopes and stuff those envelopes and send them manually. Now, there is technology that can send the same information to 10,000 people. It’s automation. AI is going a step further and even customizing what’s being said because now the machine can start understanding what happened with this person and that person. So maybe adding a couple of custom lines on what’s being communicated.
So, in the healthcare setting, if you are talking to patients, perhaps what happened in the last visit can be leveraged and provided as a summary for the doctor. Like a lot of doctors today, they spent tons and tons of time taking notes, writing notes, taking notes, writing notes, up until AI came along. Now, AI can listen to your conversation with the patient and give you a summary of what happened. Of course, you have to review it to make sure that AI didn’t get anything wrong, and then you can add it to your patient chart. It’s a classic example of AI. So, I’m really curious about how people are applying AI to solve real-world problems in business and day-to-day life.
Also, I’m curious about how these companies are going about building a brand because, at the end of the day, humans are the ones making purchase decisions. And how are they becoming relevant? Of course, we all know about chat GPT. They did an awesome job in building a brand very quickly. They came up with an app that everybody fell in love with. It’s not necessarily the AI part that was interesting; it’s also the user interface. Like any one of us could use ChatGPT; it’s just you chat with it, you talk to it, and it will start talking back to you. And that was fascinating. It’s something that humans have never seen and wow, that just became so I’m very fascinated about like these companies and helping these companies. That’s what we’re trying to do here.
AiFounders Podcast Focus
Ryan: Absolutely perfect. You just mentioned the walk, and then there’s the crawling and the walking and the running and AI, and it’s really staged. As a parent, I can tell you part of that crawling, walking, and running is also falling and getting banged up and things like that I’ve cleared many tears, cleaned up a little bit of blood, and gone through countless bandages from those falls. I think that’s a lot of what we’re going to get here from guests. I know that you’re interested in that as well as learning the best practices and celebrating the success stories, the not-so-successful stories and how people can take away from that and how to apply it. I know you’ve got a genuine interest in a lot of this and a lot of what people can expect. But, do you have, like, almost impossible? There are so many, and they’re moving so fast, but is there a variety of topics, is there a focus, or is it really going to be around how people can apply this to their business, whether you’re a beginner in this space or advanced in this space to be able to to get the most out of it.
Naren: Absolutely. We are trying to help two types of audiences: those who are trying to figure out how we leverage AI for our own businesses. Right? Could be a healthcare practice, could be a bank, could be anybody who’s trying to figure out how we leverage AI? So we’ll have people like that from these AI tech companies that are saying, hey guys, we have this tech that does XYZ, and perhaps you can use that to save time and money and do things you couldn’t do before. So that’s one type of episode we will do. The other type is to support the community of founders. Being a founder is tough because you are trying to push against the status quo. You’re trying to do something that nobody else has done before. So how do they build a brand, how do they build a community, how do they build a product? How do they find the right price? So those types of conversations with actual founders. So other founders can also learn, share, and grow from it. Those that are going to be a focus. So it’s going to be focused on helping people, as a population, learn about AI and also helping founders learn and grow about how they become better entrepreneurs and how they become more successful as Aifounders.
Ryan: Absolutely perfect. I think that’s going to be invaluable for so many listeners, and they can take so much away from this. With that said, how do people find the podcast? How do people find the community, and how do people get involved?
How to Access the Podcast and Get Involved
Naren: The simplest thing to do is to bookmark Aifounders.net. It’s our website that’s where everything is going to be housed. We’re just starting with the podcast, but over time, we’ll build a community element where there will be members, and they’ll have benefits. They can log in and access certain information only available to members. But the other thing we’ll also do is we’ll publish this podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, and pretty much all the top platforms, and the idea is that anywhere you can listen to it. So we want to do it once a week. So it’ll be like a short form of podcast, maybe 30 minutes or so. You will have some front-row seats to some of the latest and the greatest innovations in AI and how these companies are being built. So if you’re a fan, like if you are somebody who is a fan of the internet and really is on the internet or you plan on being part of it, then this is a great place to start.
Ryan: Perfect. You’re absolutely right. This is going to be a great place to be. So, of course, make sure that you go to Aifounders.net, get all the information there, look at all the episodes that we’ve got going up and what’s coming up, and become involved in the community. That’s how the AI community is growing already. That is sort of where this is at, is this kind of crowdsourcing of ideas, understanding where there are gaps, understanding what the market is dictating and what better place than joining peers and other people who have a true passion for the AI space in this area, listening and learning from that sense. So, with that, I think it’s a great introduction to Aifounders.net and the podcast, what people can expect.
I want to thank you for joining us on this enlightening journey through AI innovation today, the introduction to it. I hope you’ve been inspired so far by what’s to come in the podcast and are excited to learn more and listen more. So, remember, the future is driven by pioneers like our guest, Naren Arulrajah, who is a serial entrepreneur and has really created an amazing space for all of us to gather and be a part of this and understand the limitless possibilities of AI. So, I want to thank you, Naren, for being here and introducing us to this space.
Naren: Thank you, Ryan. I really appreciate your interest in AI, and I know you work with healthcare clients a lot. And yeah, there’s so much going on in general in healthcare and everywhere else around AI. So thank you for everything you do. I appreciate it. I also want to take a moment to thank the community. I think this is a community we are building together. So this is not me or us versus you. It’s all of us together, building this community, and hopefully, we can all look back 10 years from now and 15 years from now and say, hey, we were there once upon a time when this was just an idea and nothing more than just an idea and a hope.
Ryan: I’m excited to go and look back 10 years from now at the first few episodes and go, boy, remember what those ideas were. Remember when that was the bar? That was the possibility we thought. And I mean, as you said, look back to where Google was and where we’re at, and no one could have seen this coming, right? And this is how we grow a community through this. So, with that, I will say to everybody, stay curious, stay innovative, and keep exploring the boundless horizons of technology. Before we sign off a request for our dedicated listeners to come here, if you’ve enjoyed this podcast, if you’re going to enjoy this podcast, if this is something of interest to you, please take a moment to subscribe to the show on your favourite platform and tell friends and family about it. Leave feedback; the feedback and support are what’s going to help us bring more amazing content and more amazing guests forward. And with that, this is Ryan Davies signing off until episode 02. Can’t wait to get started on this journey, Naren. Thanks again. Thank you. Take care everybody.
Naren: Thank you.