I recently came across an interesting use of AI in the pool industry.

Pool builders in the US are now using AI to scan satellite images to find homes that don’t have a pool, but do have backyard big enough for one. They then use generative AI to produce a cinematic time-lapse video showing a pool being constructed, with a beautiful finished pool at the end.

They send a personalised postcard to the homeowner with a photo of the pool, a QR code to watch the video, and an invitation to contact the pool company for a quote. The whole process is fully automated, sends postcards and videos to thousands of homeowners, and has been extremely successful.

This is an example of businesses using AI to do something that no human would have done, because it would be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive.

Most businesses are still thinking about AI as a tool to help them do tasks they would have done anyway - write emails, summarise meetings, answer questions. These are fine, but they miss an important point: AI is a highly scalable resource that can do large amounts of knowledge work extremely quickly. It can turn work that was previously not economically viable into something that generates a positive ROI.

Here’s a simple experiment you can try within your own business: Write down five tasks you wish you could do, that would really help you to grow the business, but that are currently too time consuming to be feasible.

Then go to ChatGPT or Claude. Ask them to help you sharpen the idea into a concrete task, and to figure out whether it’s (a) a job they can do for you, (b) a tool you could vibe code (ie. build yourself using AI tools), or (c) a process you could get someone to automate for you.

I did this in my own business, and it resulted in a totally new product. I run Startup Onramp, a coaching and mentoring business that works with entrepreneurs building high-growth startups. Over the last nine years, we’ve worked with over 2,000 founders.

I’d love to be able to do a deep dive on every business, become an expert on their product, their industry, their competitors, and have a deep understanding of the business's current situation. It would enable me to give the founder high-value advice, because I'd have so much context. But it would take me days to do this, it wouldn’t be economically viable, and there’s a limit to the number of companies I could do this for.

So I built an AI tool that does this work. The AI Founder Coach reads everything the business owner uploads about their company, reads their website, finds all their competitors and reads their websites, analyses pricing, positioning and customer feedback, and looks at industry research. It then interviews the business owner using a conversational AI voice agent, and uses all this knowledge to produce a detailed strategy report. The conversational agent then talks through it with the business owner like an experienced startup coach would, and helps them create a 30-day action plan.

This all gets done in an hour, and there’s no upper limit on the number of businesses it can help.

If you're interested in experiencing an AI voice coach for the first time, you can try it at coach.startuponramp.com.

On 28 October, I’ll be running a free webinar for The Business Show Australia delegates and exhibitors on the subject of Using AI to grow your business. Register here!

Colin Kinner - Founder, Startup Onramp