Chris Parker: Welcome back to the Business Simplicity Podcast. I’m Chris Parker from Ebullient, and today I’m having a conversation with Walid Boulanouar, founder of AY Automate, based in Paris but working globally. We’re both members of the Gen AI Circle, and we’ll talk more about that later. Before I have Walid jump in, I want to share something I really appreciate about him. I’ve done several intro to AI courses for nontechnical people, mostly because people in my network were fearful or confused about AI. At the end of one of these courses, I wanted to do a full agentic experience, and Walid was kind enough to guide me through it. He helped me understand the paradigm of a stacked prompt, painted the patterns for me, and then let me finish on my own. I was so thankful for that. That story really represents Walid well.

Today, we’re going to unpack what Gen AI is, how we should look at it differently, and bring in the concepts of simplicity and acceleration. Hopefully, we’ll share some practical tips for anyone on this journey.

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): Thank you very much, Chris, for inviting me. It’s a pleasure. We’ve talked a lot about the Gen AI Circle and the great people in the community. When I joined, I was working a full-time job at a company called CoPay and building side projects in AI on my own. Joining a community where people share and discover the latest in AI gave me a push to share more. I got a lot of value from the community that I didn’t find elsewhere. That’s where many conversations started, and people reached out to work with me. I didn’t have a formal way to work with them, so I created AY Automate to provide my services to everyone. That’s how I started.

Chris Parker: The Gen AI Circle is a community with a small monthly payment and about three or four hundred people. There are subcircles for tools, technical implementation, sales and marketing, adoption and strategy, and implementation. I focus on adoption and strategy and am part of the leadership of that subcircle. Each stream has monthly meetups. Just yesterday, there was a general meetup with several implementation leaders sharing incredible insights. If you’re hungry and curious, the Gen AI Circle could be invaluable. I’ll put the link in the show notes.

For the average business person who wants to bring AI into their organization, how do you support that journey from awareness to adoption and then scale? What are your recommendations for safety, simplicity, and speed?

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): That’s an interesting topic. The hardest part of implementation isn’t the tech—it’s the adoption phase. People need to understand both the weaknesses and strengths of AI. There are two types of people: those who have a rough idea of what AI can do and start thinking about use cases that aren’t feasible, and those who have no idea and are afraid to test it. The best way to handle this is not to start with the tech. First, understand the pains—what’s eating up their day. We give them a checklist or form to fill out about their daily tasks. We screen their answers, and then an AI specialized in this helps us understand where their time is going. We then propose solutions, check feasibility, and create a proposal with options, like an AI agent for customer support. They choose what they want, and we start implementation. The most successful projects start small and build on top of that. People shouldn’t be afraid—start small and test in a real environment.

Chris Parker: I’ve been advising people not to worry too much about the tech stack. Assume it’s disposable—this isn’t enterprise tech like SAP that you’ll have for 20 years. You might have it for 20 months. Is that your feeling too?

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): Yes. My tip is to choose what’s popular, because if many people use it, there are lots of reviews. Search for the best tech for a specific task, go with it, and see what’s possible. If you hear about a good tool, test it yourself and decide the pros and cons. People shouldn’t care too much about the tools—they should care about their pains. The tech is available for everyone.

Chris Parker: When you’re talking about chat and voice agents for support or sales, you build these solutions for clients, but there are also solutions they can buy. How do you advise people on the buy versus build dilemma?

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): I advise people to buy first. If there’s a solution you can buy, test it in a real environment. Once you understand the workflow and see it works, hire someone to build a custom version to optimize costs. For many clients, I build something in Clay or Notion to prove it works, then turn it into code and deploy it as a serverless function. That’s the most impactful approach.

Chris Parker: I’m developing a playbook for non-technical leadership coaches, chunked into three parts: basic manual but AI-powered, medium, and advanced premium. I advise them to manually use Gen AI for individual steps, get comfortable, then start automating workflows. I love the idea of buying first, then optimizing.

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): If you start building from scratch, you lose time and money because you don’t know if it will work. Always start from the pain, solve it, then optimize the tech. If you can’t show value in five days, you’re building something over-engineered. Try to build something usable within a week.

Chris Parker: This is a new world compared to 15-20 years ago, with waterfall and heavy engineering. Then we had agile, but still big projects. Now, you’re suggesting a small team can make real impact and deploy in a week. How is that achievable?

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): Even in a big company, start with a small team—maybe two people. Build something small, and if it works, showcase it to other departments. AI agents can now do things that previously required humans. Automation is cool because you can validate steps with AI. The pain you solve should be small enough for a small team, then you can scale.

Chris Parker: You mention “pain” a lot. What should people think about when they consider automatable pain that can be resolved within a week?

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): For me, a pain is something that wastes your time or money. For example, when people book meetings, there’s a lot of back and forth to clarify needs. Instead of meetings, use a form to capture questions, or an AI agent to have a conversation and log information in your CRM. This saves days and money, and you won’t lose leads.

Chris Parker: Are you comfortable talking about your lead qualification process? You have an automated lead engagement system that pre-qualifies and sets up leads. What does that process look like?

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): I used to do all meetings myself and lost a lot of time and opportunities. Now, when someone books a meeting, an AI agent screens their LinkedIn to see if they’re in our ICP. If qualified, we send them a form about their project. Another AI agent screens the form, creates a persona, and an AI agent calls them based on their LinkedIn and form info. We use Call for Booking and VAP for the AI agent calls. We notify them by email, and if they don’t want a call, they can opt out. Most approve, and the AI agent has a personalized conversation. This cuts 90% of our work. If we build a solution for them, we automate the proposal using PandaDoc. Each step is a small automation. If I tried to do all this at once, I’d get stuck. I started with the AI that sends the form, then added more steps as needed. Now, many meetings are canceled because we don’t need anything from them, and clients are happy.

Chris Parker: Over what time period did you automate this process to where it is now?

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): Each week or month, we add two AI automations. We analyze where we lose time or opportunities. When I started in February, I noticed many unqualified bookings, so I added the clarification step. Then I noticed people didn’t fill out the form, so I added follow-ups. Each step is just a small node or model. When we implement successful use cases for clients, we ask how we can benefit from the same technology. It’s about connecting the dots and solving pains as they arise. The tech part is easy—there are plenty of solutions.

Chris Parker: You recently released a V3 campaign that exploded. Can you tell us about that experiment, your goal, and the outcome?

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): Everything I implement has a story. Some friends played with V3 and gained over 20k TikTok followers in a week. Their pain was spending $6 per video and not posting many because they weren’t good. I thought we could automate this. I met with them, learned the API, and created a storyboard. For each 8-second segment, we created prompts for V3, generated videos, connected them, and published. From one message, you get validated videos ready to post. We doubled followers from 20k to 40k in a short time.

Chris Parker: I understand continuity is a problem when stringing together multiple AI-generated videos. Was that an issue for you?

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): It’s all about prompting and orchestration. You need to create a persona and stick with it. For us, it was Bigfoot, a gorilla-like human character. We created a storyboard, divided it into 8-second segments, and prompted accordingly. Once you tell the LLMs the limitations, you get good results. It took one day to implement, and the results were immediate.

Chris Parker: Thank you, Walid. The link to your LinkedIn and AY Automate will be in the show notes. We’re currently pitching to an organization to bring simplicity to their business strategy, find pain points, and then bring in your work to execute and automate. If anyone wants our help simplifying strategy and operations and linking up to automation, reach out to us. The Gen AI Circle is an amazing place, and Walid is one of the superstars there. Thank you so much.

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): Thank you, Chris. It was a pleasure, and hopefully we can have another conversation soon.

Chris Parker: Every day this stuff changes, so maybe next week we could have a whole new conversation. Thanks, Walid.

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): If it’s not an AI of yourself and an AI itself.

Chris Parker: How do you know this is me now? I might be my avatar, so our avatars are talking to each other.

Walid Boulanouar (AY Automate): Yes, we are multiple avatars. Thank you for listening.

Chris Parker: Visit ebullient.com. Don’t forget to like and subscribe to the podcast on your favorite player.