|
|
|
|
Guests: Tim Kreytak, CEO and Co-Founder of Ironside, one of North America’s leading analytics and data consulting firms and a multiple Inc. 5000 honoree.
Jason Breazeale, Vice President of Technology at Burn Boot Camp, a rapidly growing fitness franchise with nearly 400 locations.
Overview: Yes, your company needs to be using AI. But before you start buying subscriptions and upgrading your tech stack, you need to understand what actually drives successful AI integrations: a bedrock of solid data. Without clean, accessible, and trusted data, even the most advanced AI tools will fail to deliver results.
On today’s show, Tim Kreytak and Jason Breazeale discuss why you need BIG data mastery before AI can help your company Make BIG Happen.
Jason Breazeale on moving from “renting” to “owning” your data:
“You spend so much time working with your POS and your CRM and all of these various solutions when you’re a smaller organization that growing up means taking ownership of the technology stacks and platforms that you use. That data ownership is really that key topic of conversation. How do you go from letting POS and CRM own your data to owning it yourself, enriching it yourself, and then starting to really be able to leverage it and use it and make it actionable?
“The key that we’re talking about with data ownership is having a trusted partner. But also, internally, that you understand the multiple data marts. It’s not one big data warehouse anymore. It’s multiple types of data. A data lake that we can just put all of our data in — we’re not sure if we’re going to use it, but we know we need to store it. How do we ensure that it’s not on somebody’s MacBook or that it’s not stored somewhere in Google Sheets that we don’t have access to? So mapping is a great exercise that can be led by strong data services partners like Tim and his team at Ironside. And then once you have that, now, how am I going to make it actionable?”
Tim Kreytak on the rise of “agentic AI”:
“Agents will have as much impact on your business as the internet or the cloud. We are moving from a world where you use software to a world where software works for you. The concept of an agent and the concept of agentic AI, I believe, starts to get into the conversation of, what is the killer app? The agents ultimately will have agency from each of us to go do things on our behalf while we go do something else, and that something else may be something more productive. It may be spending time with our family and a variety of different things. I do think that the foundations and the platforms are being developed and delivered by the major hyperscalers today. And that foundation will get built upon and then we can all share in that development and that evolution and leverage things like the data platform that Jason and his team have built and leverage all of the value and benefit for the curation and the organization of data and services. That’s where we think this is headed.”
Jason Breazeale on actionable use cases for AI:
“As a service, we provide the gym aspect, the fitness aspect. We’ve looked at what generative AI does to really improve marketing functions. I’ll never write another job description. We’ll never write another press release. Those are the cool things that can make people more efficient.
“Then there’s the ability to find information. Most of us who started out in startups, or even in large enterprise, we have all of our data locked behind these vaults of other systems, and there’s no one search engine. All of them have their own search engines and all of your members and users and franchise partners are tired of going to five different places to find their data. The killer app that we see is a large language model that has API access to all of those different systems so that we can identify the most important data and information. And then we allow our franchise partners, clients, and members to search and ask questions and be able to bring all of those data sources into one. They now have one source that they can ask a question, get a simple set of answers, but more importantly, get all access to their data. That’s a killer app for a franchise that wants to open potentially dozens of gyms a year. We have to be able to get faster with that. And so giving them access to that data in real time is a key thing.”
Links:
Why AI Is a Leadership Challenge, Not Just a Technology Project – CEO Coaching International’s Jose Vergara discusses how his 5-step AI roadmap for CEOs can help companies embrace AI and improve productivity.
The AI Imperative: Why CEOs Must Act Now to Harness Artificial Intelligence – At a recent Make BIG Happen Summit in Miami Beach, Peter Diamandis issued a stark warning to business leaders: “There are going to be two companies at the end of this decade: those that are fully utilizing AI, and those that are out of business.”
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, the firm has coached more than 1,500+ CEOs and entrepreneurs across 100+ industries and 60 countries. Its coaches—former CEOs, presidents, and executives—have led businesses ranging from startups to over $10 billion, driving double-digit sales and profit growth, many culminating in eight, nine, or ten-figure exits.
Companies that have worked with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have achieved an average revenue CAGR of 25.9%, nearly 3X the U.S. average, and an average EBITDA CAGR of 39.2%, more than 4X the national benchmark.
Discover how coaching can transform your leadership journey at ceocoachinginternational.com.
Learn more about executive coaching | Meet our world-class coaches
