Category: workforce development

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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Our guest for this episode is Craig Turner. Craig is the visionary Founder and President of Momentum, the Business Growth Agency, Momentum for Chambers and Momentum AI. Momentum excels at driving ROI for companies through their innovative approach to chambers of commerce, memberships and sponsorships. Additionally, the agency offers top tier consulting services, Ambassador training and comprehensive member benefit programs for chambers a trailblazer in the field of AI. Craig is a sought after consultant providing cutting edge AI training and solutions to chambers and small businesses. His expertise in AI has made him a prominent speaker on the subject, captivating audiences with eye opening but practical educational insights before launching momentum, Craig spent eight years with the Buffalo Niagara partnership, the Regional Chamber of Commerce, where he led governmental affairs and business development. Currently, Craig chairs the Niagara USA Chamber of Commerce board of directors and also the chambers Advocacy Committee, embodying the ethos of I’m not just a president also I’m also a client. Momentum is an active member in chambers of commerce across western and central New York, Southern Ontario, Central Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh. But Craig, I’m excited to have you on the podcast today. I’d love to give you a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening, and to tell us something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better. Well,

Craig Turner 2:43
this is fantastic. Bryn, I really appreciate you having me on and the opportunity to chat about all the stuff that we do with the chambers, and especially you mentioned we’re going to talk about. AI, yeah, you had asked me to kind of think of something interesting to talk about, and I want to, let’s see if I can hold this up for the video. So this is a novel. I’m a novelist. I’ve written eight novels, and I got another one coming out soon that I think chamber professionals are gonna like. I’m holding up a novel called The campaign. And if you can see the cover, if you’re listening on audio, it’s CA, MP, and then AI is capitalized in the middle of the word campaign. And I wrote this book in 2020 and 2021 and I published it in early 2022 This was before open act. Open AI made chassis, PT, accessible to the world. So this is when AI was still kind of hidden behind the curtain. So the book is about mankind’s first foray into running an AI for political office, which, interestingly enough, a story came out earlier this year that someone in Colorado is trying to do that, because I’m so steeped in Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce is woven throughout the story. And in fact, the pinnacle event in the book is a Chamber of Commerce event, which I love to tell this story. What the interesting thing is that what I didn’t realize is that when I was writing this book, was that, you know, two, three years later, I would be steeped in AI and training and speaking and sitting on the chamber podcast talking about AI. So it’s kind of a full circle thing that I, that I, you know, personally, I appreciate myself.

Brandon Burton 4:19
Yeah, very meta, right? Writing about it now you’re in it, right? That’s that’s cool. Well, tell us a little bit more about momentum, just all the different facets of it, what you do, how you work with chambers, what you offer, just to kind of, you know, put it in a nutshell, so people who are hearing about momentum for the first time can have an idea of what you

Craig Turner 4:40
do, absolutely. So I’ll go back. I’ll go back to the mid 2000s actually, when I started working for the chamber. So I ran government affairs. That’s what I was hired to do. I was a lobbyist, and, you know, ran the committee. About halfway through my tenure at the Chamber was the great recession. So 2008 2009 2000 10 and I gave our board a lot of credit at the time, because they said, Look, people are going to hit harder Financial Times. They’re going to start coming back to us and saying, Why am I giving you $1,500 what am I? What am I getting for this money like they never have before? That was always the good community citizen before. That was your chamber member. So we put together teams, seven people. We met with 400 companies during the during the Great Recession, and the goal was to we had a six page survey. Now you weren’t supposed to give the six page survey. You were supposed to be conversational, but you were supposed to come back to the office and find three to five things to help that company with based on your conversation and the stuff we on Earth was unbelievable. We never would have had done some of the things we did. One of my favorite things, I talk about a warehouse on the east side of Buffalo. We said, You know what can we help you with? And he goes, You know what? He goes, there’s a bus stop right in front of my front door, and people gather around it. My clients complain that they can’t get in and out of the building. Can you do something about it? And we said, I don’t know. We’ll see. We’ll try. So we called the right people, and next thing you know, they moved the bus stop 15 feet down the sidewalk. I’m like, have we How could we possibly have known that? But think about it, that guy’s a chamber member for life, because we were able to do that for him. And to this day, I still drive over there, and I’m like, Yeah, we did that. Look at that bus stop. Um, but that being said, we had an 88% retention, membership retention rate during the recession, when I went to the ACCE conference that blew everybody away. So eventually, when I left the chamber, I’m like, This is my business. I’m going to help, except I’m going to flip it my clients at momentum. What we do is we help them build a strategy for their chambers of commerce, and we manage it throughout the year, because we know that most companies do not have someone on staff doing this every day. So it works in primarily two ways. Take here in Buffalo Niagara Falls, where I am, a company a client might be involved with four or five chambers I manage. We manage all those relationships. We tell them what events to attend. We tell them where to put sponsorship dollars. It’s part of the, you know, the kind of the holistic view at their their chamber membership. It also works for market entry. The client can say, hey, we’re opening in a warehouse in Kansas City. Well, I know the people at the Kansas City Chamber, we can walk right in and start to do business on day one. Because, you know, I spend most of my time building relationships, like I’m doing today with chambers of commerce across the US and Canada. So I’m rolling this out on LinkedIn, and all of a sudden the chamber started to come and say, Hey, we really like what you’re saying about member value. Can you come consult with us? Now? What’s neat, I never saw that coming. I had to go back. I had to redesign the website. I had to change everything. But yes, now we have a full suite of services for chambers that include Ambassador training. Is probably the one we’re most well known for. We do you know, strategic planning, consulting and those kind of things too. And then the third part of it is enter AI, which we started to talk about earlier, about two years ago, when open AI made chatgpt available to the public. I said, I’m in. We’re gonna we’re gonna dive as deep as we can into this for ourselves, for our own company, so we can use it to grow our company. But what I said was, look, I know the my audiences, the chambers themselves, and typically, small and medium sized businesses do not have time to do that. So I’m going to learn everything I can. I’m going to curate the best stuff, and I’m going to share it with the community, which has turned into trainings and everything. Well, that turned into trainings, it turned into speaking, it turned into programming. I mean, that’s the big one that I didn’t again. I did not see this coming, and just a few months ago, we launched our AI platform for Chambers of Commerce. So now, if you look at like my business card, we’ve got momentum for business, momentum for chambers and momentum AI all represented on there, and they all tie together.

Brandon Burton 8:50
Yeah, fascinating. Well, I’m, I’m excited to get into the conversation today. I know AI is a hot topic. There’s Buzz, as he said, for the last couple of years, since ChatGPT rolled out the or I guess when open AI rolled out ChatGPT, it’s really kind of taken the world by storm and been a huge adoption rate for ChatGPT, but also AI in general, and I’m excited to dive in and really get into demystifying. Ai, as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Craig, we’re back. So as I mentioned before, the break today, we’re going to be diving in about how to demystify AI and I know you and I have been connected through LinkedIn and just knowing each other for some time now, and back and forth. So I see these things that you’re rolling out, these experiments that you’re doing with AI and and some cool things, like you did an experiment where you had aI talking to AI and just having a full on debate and really interesting things. Not that it’s necessarily the practical thing you know that you’re going to instill at your chamber, but it shows what some some of these capabilities are. But as you, as you’ve been, as you’ve jumped into AI, you know, with both feet, what are some of the things that stand out to you? And then as a chamber, to help a chamber wrap their head around how to apply AI and really demystify it

Craig Turner 11:59
absolutely, and I’m glad you’re using the word demystify, because that’s, as I’ve learned over the past two years, that is a big part of the process. There’s two ways to look at this. One is the training and the tools and teaching people how to prompt that stuff’s easy. I mean that that’s our bread and butter. We’re trying to spread it as far and wide as we can, and really, we give people a few a few prompts, they can accomplish an awful lot, but it’s that other piece of it. It’s the real world attitudes towards it. So I always say that when you’re teaching somebody AI, you’re teaching them the practical application, but you have to overcome fear, you have to overcome indecision, you have to overcome doubt, and you have to overcome bad press. And it happens, I will post things on LinkedIn, and I’ll get people to push back and say, was that AI or, you know, I don’t know that. I trust that if it’s AI. And the thing is, and I emphasize this all the time, AI is a tool, right? It needs the human input in order to work, I can take a nail and whack it with my hand as much as I possibly can. It’s not going to go into the piece of wood. But if I take a hammer and I pound it in, the nail is going to go into the piece of wood. And this is all AI is, are there bad actors out there? Yes, absolutely. There are, same as, you know, 25 years ago, when the internet started to get in everybody’s hands. Maybe that was longer ago, but, but when the you know, there were bad actors, and they’re still bad actors, does that affect us? Yes, you know, on some levels, it does. But is it a tool that I can use on a daily basis to really save time and money and resources? To be truthful, I say it all the time at momentum, we are now saving 25 to 30 hours a month. I mean, that’s huge that I get that time back. I took a process just earlier this week. I took a process that typically took me three hours. I had it down, I had my systems in place and everything, and it got me down to three hours. I used AI earlier this week, and I got it down to 30 minutes. Wow, I am. You see on LinkedIn how busy I am. For me to buy two and a half hours back into my calendar is absolutely unbelievable. It’s like gold. So, so this is where, you know, yes, I understand people think I start all my presentations with with a picture of the Terminator, and I say, before we get into anything, AI is not taking over the world, all right, AI is a tool that you can use. It’s like any machine that’s ever been created in the history of mankind. It needs a human to put good input into it to get good results. And working together, we’ll save time, save money, save energy, save frustration, and you know, for to take it now, as you, as you said to the chambers, I think it’s critically important for the chambers to know this, the audiences for the chambers are, you know, getting younger. Some millennials, the Gen z’s, are coming next. These are tech savvy people that are going to look to their chamber to say, you know. As I’m growing my business, how can I incorporate tech or I already am I expect you to also know. As much as I do, this is going to be critically important for for chambers to know. And most of, most of the the people that go through our training chambers or businesses otherwise are typically. They haven’t really done anything with AI at all, or they’re dabbling. That’s what most of it is. I’ve done it. I used it to write some tweets, or I used it to, well, I like to show them. And again, you pointed out my LinkedIn, and I share everything I’m thinking on LinkedIn. There’s it’s so much more powerful than just writing tweets, and we’re trying to encourage people to do that.

Brandon Burton 15:39
Yeah, I think one of the LinkedIn posts you’re talking about going on a hike, and you’re writing a book as you hike, because you’re giving these prompts and thoughts into your the I’m not sure exactly which tool you’re using, if it’s chat GPT or something else, but

Craig Turner 15:53
yeah, chat GPT voice is probably the most important tool I’ve ever acquired as A professional, I do a lot of road trips. I’m in the car all the time that, you know, I’m in Pittsburgh. My son goes to school in Pittsburgh. I belong to the chamber at the airport in Pittsburgh, and I spent a lot of time going back and forth. That’s a three and a half hour drive for me. It used to be listening to music and staring out the window. Now it is literally three and a half hours of continuing to do work, and it’s, you know, you get feedback on things. I say it all the time. My favorite prompt is, I have an idea for X, Y and Z, all right. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I have ideas coming all the time. I have an idea for X, Y and Z. What do you think? So? Chat, GPT, voice will take that and it will return me a thought on it, if I like, you know, some feedback on what I said. If I like it, I’ll say, Okay, make me a three month plan to roll that out, and it will lay out the strategy for me to roll the whole thing out. I might not use it tomorrow. I might not use it till next year, but like any brainstorming, it’s out of my head. It’s on paper. Well, on paper in quotes, but and I have a plan to go forward on how to do it. So this is what I spend my time in the car or on walks, and it’s just been, it’s just such an incredible tool. And that time is not I’m one of these guys that works all the time. I work too much. I work at work incessantly. And there would be times when I want to go take a five mile walk, you know, and on a sunny day in the afternoon, well, I would feel too guilty just leaving the office and going and walking for five miles, even on a sunny day in Buffalo and but now I don’t feel guilty. I The one day I had a meeting in Niagara Falls. I checked out. I walked around Niagara Falls for like three hours. I put had my earbuds in, and I probably got more work done walking around Niagara Falls than I would have sitting in my laptop.

Brandon Burton 17:49
Yeah. I love how you say, AI is a tool, right? And the example that the nail, and, you know, the hammer, the nail, the hand, yeah, I think of when, when Google rolled out, yeah, you said somebody might say that they don’t trust AI. If this is AI generated, I don’t trust AI. That’s like saying 2025, years ago. Well, if you got this result from Google, I don’t know that I trust it. I want to pull out the encyclopedias and do all the research myself. You know, like that’s and it seems archaic to say that now, knowing that we see, you know how effective Google is in a search. Well, AI is like Google on on steroids. You know, there’s

Craig Turner 18:27
a meme, there’s a meme I use that I posted fairly often. I actually put in my training recently. Is a because your question, it goes a little to what you’re saying. Goes a little towards the boss employee relationship too, because there are bosses that don’t trust AI, and they are actually handcuffing their their employees to be as productive as they possibly can be. And the meme that I use, it’s a picture of a model, model T I have an antiquated it’s in sepia tones and everything. And there’s a kid standing next to it dressed in 1901 garb, and he’s got a briefcase, and the caption, or the post that I put with it is okay. I want you to take these papers over to the next turn, the next town, but I want you to walk. I don’t want you to take one of those newfangled horseless carriage automobiles, because that would take you a half hour to get there back. This is going to take you six hours to get there back, but I want you to take that route instead, and that’s what we’re doing when you’re telling your employees you can’t use AI. And you know, when people worry about the, you know, the the authenticity of it is, if you’re, you’re, you know, you’re, you’re writing something. You’re putting your name on something you didn’t write. I always tell people, don’t put anything, don’t put your name on anything you didn’t write, whether it’s AI or elsewhere. But the reality is, what they’re forgetting is, it’s the engineering, it’s the prompt engineering. So I may create a piece of output. That, you know, a white paper is a good example. I may do a white paper. I hate writing white papers, and for me, to be honest, most white papers are for SEO. They’re for Google clicks. All right, so if I’m going to write a white paper, I don’t need my name on it. It’s just, it’s a product. I write the white paper, I put it on there, and it starts to get the it starts to get the SEO. Now, is there an ethical piece there that I wrote a white paper with AI and put it out there? No, I’m a prompt engineer. I used prompt engineering. I used AI, and I wrote a really good instruction for the AI to come out with a worthwhile piece of information at the end. That’s what it is, whether I wrote it or myself or not. You know, I’m an author. It was, it was a tough hill for me to climb, to yield any writing to AI, even even tweets and things. But the reality is, I had an epiphany one day. I’m like, Look my books, my blogs and my LinkedIn posts, all me, all human. I said, That’s what I want to put my name on. I said, all that other stuff I have to write press releases and tweets and again, white papers and things like that, website, copy, turn it over to AI, just, let’s be an engineer instead of a writer. And what really got me there, and this back to the boss employee relationship is, you know, in my case, it’s my clients. What did my clients hire me to do? Did they hire me because I’m an author, or did they hire me to find solutions to help grow their business? And that’s what it is. And if you’re an employee and your boss is kind of not letting you do this, this is when you go back to your boss and say, Hey, okay, I have this task that I have to do. It took me an hour last week. If I use AI, it can take me 30 seconds, instead of an hour, that’s 59 and a half minutes, that I can go do other stuff, including calling our members and seeing they’re okay, go and get new members. And that’s where the differenti the differentiator comes in, is that it’s not you have to get out of this mindset that it’s plagiarism or it’s unethical. It you’re an engineer. You weren’t hired to be a writer. You were hired to find solutions. My solution is I can do something in 30 seconds that it used to take an hour to do,

Brandon Burton 22:08
right? But, and with the prompt engineering, you get results, and then you can always adjust it. And just a couple examples, is I had a marketing campaign recently I was putting together, and I told chat GPD, this is what I’m trying to do. And can you give me a marketing plan to roll this out? And it sent me a, you know, several bullet points, you know, this stage of this, and this stage of that. And said, Okay, this is great. Can you put it in an Excel format so then I can track it as I do each thing and then, and I didn’t like everything in it, so I took some things out, I moved some things around, change the order a little bit, so I made it mine. And then another example, just earlier this week, had a need for a contract. Went to chatgpt and said, you know, here’s what I need, and and it spits it right back out. Now, am I going to use that just exactly how they gave it to, how chatgpt gave me? No, I’m going to look at I’m going to adjust it for me, and I’m going to have an attorney review it before handing it over to the other party. But it’s a starting point. And had I just gone to an attorney and said, Here, make a contract for this, that fee is going to be way higher than having a starting point already with what chat GPT provided

Craig Turner 23:15
and it and it, you know, you have to think about your own personal brand when you do it too. A great example is LinkedIn, because people are getting more savvy about what is written by AI. Because most people don’t train their AI, I will tell you that my AI, if I ask it to write like me, it’d be pretty close. Now most people don’t do that. So on LinkedIn, people will write their post with AI. Well, people now know what’s what’s AI and not so you have to think about your personal brand. If you want to put something out there and Brandon, I’m sure you’ve seen it. You you ask chatgpt to write you a LinkedIn post. It puts these ridiculous emojis all through it, right? Everywhere? Yeah, people just cut and paste and put it in well, does your is that good for your brand? Do you want people reading your posts and saying, Oh, he just did AI, that’s a decision you have to make yourself, or is it just about getting the post up every day to for the consistency and everything that’s that’s something that that people have to figure out. I I’m not a fan of just posting LinkedIn, if it like I said, my LinkedIn post, I write my own post intentionally. But, you know, you can see it. You can see it, and

Brandon Burton 24:20
depending on the purposes, it may be very appropriate to write it with AI so your followers can see, wow, Greg knows how to use AI. So there is a time for that. Now, as we put the focus on chambers, what would be some real world applications for a chamber to kind of help them wrap their head around again, demystifying AI, they see it. This is a tool. How can a chamber apply AI, beyond putting out your social media posts or maybe writing your newsletter? What? What are some ways that AI can be incorporated?

Craig Turner 24:53
Sure, I’ll give you, I’ll give you a couple examples, the first of which is, I will confide to you. And all of your listeners,

Brandon Burton 25:02
just don’t tell anybody else, right? Yeah. So

Craig Turner 25:05
at the Niagara County, Niagara USA chamber, we are running a massive small business expo in November. We’re really excited about it’s the first of its kind, and we’ve got, we’ve just got a lot of buzz around it right now. The entire thing was created with AI. Again, I’m, you know, and I steered it, and I’m the Chair, I’m not the staff, so I don’t have time to sit around doing events and stuff. So the program was created with AI, the marketing materials was created with AI. I’m doing an AI presentation there. It was, like, every everything we did that to get started now, like you pointed out, was that the final was that the final product? No, of course, it wasn’t. And then, of course, us humans had to go book all the speakers and everything. But, but to instead of, you know, sitting around and brainstorming, we got something on paper first. We we eliminated the blank page. Got something on paper first, and now we have this beautiful event that we’re putting together that we’re really excited about. So that’s a good one. That’s a great example, because it was one of the things I see with AI is people are afraid to ask for too much. All right, it’s not your executive assistant who’s going to go home and complain about you. Ask whatever you need, and ask for a lot of it. So we give us the whole event design, the whole event for us. And we got outside the box, thinking in there and everything. It’s incredible. So like I said, it’s in that case, the example to the answer your question, What can a chamber use it for? It’s attack that blank page. The blank page is the hardest thing to overcome. You would take the blank page now you’ve got something to give to your team and say, What do you think? So that’s huge. Second example I give you so chat GPT now, Google just released their version of it earlier this week. Is called gpts. Okay? Chat GPT has what they call gpts, which are bots, basically. And what it is is you train you. If you have a process that you do over and over and over again, you can take a chunk of that process and have aI create a system so that all you have to do is, like, enter the most pertinent information and it does it. You don’t have to prompt it every time. So as a great example, and this is free in the GPT store. You can, you can use it if you want to. I’d love it if you did. I created a GPT that does meeting minutes. You can input your your rough notes, and it will create as close to publishable meeting minutes as you’re going to get. You’re still going to edit everything, obviously, but, but it gives you the formatting and everything. And I tried to do that because, again, with chambers, how many meetings do you have a month that you have to do meeting minutes for? If I can, if I can save you a half hour every single time, imagine how much you can get done with that time. But what’s cool about this is, if your writings need enough, you don’t even have to type the notes in. You could take a picture of your page and it’ll do the meeting notes for you. So that’s in the that’s called the minutes maker. I think it’s in the GPT store. We can, we can share that information later, and anybody, anybody can use it. It’s free. But think about your processes that you have at the chamber, and how you can create a bot or a GPT to take some of the sting out of those processes. The other one, the other one I created, I call it networking follow up connector. And basically what it is is I come back from a networking event. Because we all know that the toughest part of networking is follow up. Come back from a networking event. I do a quick I can do a list or a database of the person I met their company. And then it asks for a, you know, one fact about something you talked about, you know, they like rock music, or, you know, they ride in the charity bicycle race. So you put those in, you hit submit, and it gives you the whole list. It gives you a quick blurb that you can cut and paste into LinkedIn for a connection request based on your conversation and everything. It takes 15 seconds, right? And that’s, that’s, that’s in the the in the in the the GPT store too, as well. So, so then, you know, then you get into higher level applications such as data analysis. And, you know, once you and there’s an important piece here, all right, chatgpt and AI, okay, you could do a lot of stuff with it, just the way it is. All right, you can get insights. You can get it’s all based on the internet. All right, the real power of this is when you put data into it, because then you can, you know, then you can manipulate that. And I like and part of the back to that fear conversation. One of the things that I always point out is is we’ve all been using AI all this time, and I’m, if I’m writing a text on my iPhone, and AI is suggesting what the next word should be, that’s AI, the auto complete is the next word, and basically all it is to. Get over that fear of it. All it is is using the data available to predict the next step. That’s what AI is, using the data available to predict the next step. If you don’t input any data, it uses the world’s data the internet. If you input your own data as like on an iPhone, or, you know, on your phone as you’re texting, it’s predicting based on your behavior, your activity, what the next word is? The next, the power of AI for chambers and for businesses is, you can input your own data. You could put your member list and, say, extract this information. You could, you do that. So this is, this is teeing up to where, where we’ve gone. Is momentum, which back several weeks ago we launched the momentum AI platform. And basically what that does is we have an AI that you can send to new members. And basically when a chamber subscribes, we have we train the chamber on 2/3 we train the AI in two things. We train it on your chamber. So your mission, your vision, your committees, your events, everything, and then we train it on what we call the momentum way of doing businesses, which is whatever everything that I described at the at the beginning, when your member puts their information in, which is, you know, what are you trying to accomplish? What do you need to meet? And they hit, submit, it returns to them automatically based on those three databases together a customized strategy to make the most of their chamber membership. So it’s everything we do at momentum, but put into an AI format to make sure more people can do it. What’s cool about it beyond that? First of all, there’s a wow factor there. Nobody’s nobody’s joining their chamber expecting to get an AI strategy on the first day that they joined. But what’s cool about it, for the Chamber’s perspective, is because we’re giving them an AI, we’ve gotten them to now fill out a form that that form goes to the chamber, so now you’re able to collect all this data on your on your new members that you might not otherwise be able be able to get. So So that’s like taking what your question, what can chambers do with AI to the next level? That’s not something we can do just in chatgpt, that required programming and everything, but, but it’s, we’re excited, and it’s, it’s taken off,

Brandon Burton 32:15
and that really gives, puts the credibility of the chamber through the roof, too. As you mentioned earlier, these millennials and Gen X, you know, these that are coming into our Gen Z, I guess, that are coming into the workforce now that have these expectations of I’m already using tech. I’m already using AI in my business. I expect you to as well. And then their first interaction with the chamber, they’re interacting with AI and getting custom information back, and then for the chamber to collect that data. And, like I said, like having data to give back to AI is huge, and being able to leverage it. So, I mean, you sold me, Craig, you sold me.

Craig Turner 32:54
And that’s and that’s critically important, because, and here’s the way I break it down. I give tough love. Actually, I posted on LinkedIn this morning. In fact, you ever see that meme with the guys with his girlfriend and he’s looking back? Okay? So I posted that, and I said, this is my worry with chambers. And basically what it is is this is so important right now. AI is so important. I even tell people I think it’s more important than workforce at this point right now, but it’s so important that businesses are looking for the information. All right, if I’m a chamber and I I have companies that are my members, the last thing I want right now is that business going somewhere else to get AI training and get AI information and thought leadership, because you know what, if I’m paying $350 for my chamber membership over here, but I just paid 30 bucks to go to an AI training, I can guarantee you, the AI training is going to change their operations. It’s going to change their lives and make it easier. And I’m going to start going, why didn’t I get that from my chamber where I’m a member over here? I’m telling every chamber run an AI program, right if you haven’t run one already, run one right now. And it can be thought leadership. It could be practical application, whatever you want to do, just make sure that you’ve attached your chamber name to AI right now. However, you can before someone else in the community picks up the picks it up and runs with it. You know. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 34:18
great advice. If you don’t mind. I’d like to lean into that just a little bit more. Your comment. About AI being more important than workforce, that stands out to me. I just finished, you know, wrapping up the chamber of the year finalist series that I do here on the podcast. And almost every chamber of the year finalist has some sort of a workforce initiative, and to say AI is more important than workforce, I wanted to hear more of your thoughts on that, and have chambers, really, you know, tune in as you explain what you mean by that,

Craig Turner 34:48
absolutely. And I don’t get me wrong. I don’t deny the importance of workforce. And I, and I the chambers that you, that you’ve interviewed and work with, I’m familiar with a lot of some of their workforce program I’ve. Steven workforce here in western New York for the last 25 years. But there are realities in workforce, right? There’s only so many people to do these things, and companies I think, really need to start just, just this morning, I had a conversation with a guy in logistics and warehousing, a colleague, and he was talking about, we’ve got demand, we’ve got space, we’ve got we got technology, we just we don’t have the people to do it. So when a company comes, and it’s a great example, because he’s not even talking about, he’s not even talking about new business, he’s talking about a company that’s already a client growing saying, Okay, I need another 30,000 square feet of warehouse space. I have the space, I have everything unique, except I can’t take care of that space for you because I don’t have the people. So the reality is there, and again, I’m not, we’re not talking about technology stealing jobs, all right, this is something we’ve been talking about for 20 years with the travel agents and whatnot, but, but the reality is, there are jobs that if nobody wants to do them, they still need to get done. And you know, the cost of running a small business continues to rise. You know, even minimum wages are rising, so that’s driving up your cost of personnel and everything. There are lots of solutions you can do with AI. AI will change your your operation. I was at a chamber event last week in Pennsylvania, and it was a joint chamber event between a between a few chambers. Two of the of the chambers came up and told me that my training changed their life. I mean, that’s huge. I’m not saying that to pump us up or drive people to our training. I’m just saying it blows my mind, because people are consistently coming up and saying that I’m not really teaching them anything, that in the end, if they, if they took some time and got on and just played with chatgpt themselves, that that they couldn’t figure out on their own. But sometimes it takes somebody like me to open their eyes to say, you know, with a few My training is typically a lot of practicality. But of course, I throw a few wow factor things in there, where people are like, Wow. I didn’t realize you could do that. Well, yeah, well, try it. You can. So, so that’s where I am. I think the workforce programs are absolutely critical. We need to continue to train the work for the workforce of the future, to match the jobs of the future. But AI is a solution for many, many businesses, if not all businesses and the chambers to tackle some of these workforce challenges in a meaningful way. And it’s not again, we’re not replacing jobs, but if I got this, I’ve got this task, and I could take 50% of it and turn it over to AI, how much time does that buy me back in the day to continue to to add to other things? So yeah, I know that’s a bold statement, because, you know, workforce chambers bread and butter, but, but the good thing is, I’ve been involved with workforce initiatives, and they go for years and years and years and years. AI, you run a three part webinar series, you’re in the mix?

Brandon Burton 38:03
Yeah, no, I appreciate the clarification on that. I figured it was going to be somewhere in that direction. But I think if any, if the pandemic taught us anything, is it really revealed those jobs that people don’t want to do, and chambers across the country now are seeing that shortage in workforce in certain segments, and that’s where AI can come in and be the answer to so many of these things in regards to workforce so

Craig Turner 38:29
and I believe I understand it’s a lot to keep up with. That’s why I said my I’ve taken on the role of curating all this. I mean, you see AI everywhere you go. I mean, everybody knows chatgpt and Gemini and co pilot and Claude is another one that people use and meta and act, or meta and x. So those are like the big six that people use for day to day prompting. But if I open, you know, when we finish the Zoom call, you’re going to get an AI output. When I open a PDF, it says, Do you want an AI? An AI summary of the PDF. It’s every time you, everybody’s using it, and it’s every time you open a thing. I mean, the the images. I mean, you’ve seen my LinkedIn. You know, I don’t post about an AI generated image. But what I love about that is I could do whatever I want. I use this image of a I have a lot of clients in logistics and supply chain. I use an image of the prompt was, give me a picture of a of a bustling port, ocean port, from the perspective of the stevedore. All right, it’s beautiful. It’s this picture. It’s from the inside of the crane. The port is a giant ship, sunny day. It’s a beautiful picture. And when I do, when I do the training on image generation, I say, look, here’s the thing. Stevedores, when they’re in the crane, are not paid to be taking pictures. They’re paid to move freight. So probably this image that I have, the picture does not exist anywhere on the planet, but it was the. Image that I needed and I wanted, I was able to design the exact image that I want. I mean, that’s, you know. So you got images, you got music, you got editing, you get video, videos, you know. And watching the video, evolution of video closely, especially with an election going on, because there are some dangers to it, but, but, yeah, it’s everywhere you you go and typically, and this is the advice I give, typically, any, any of these platforms have a free version and a monthly paid version. So I say, try as many of the free versions as you can see. What works for you Brandon might, might be different than what works for me. Try the free version if you like it. Move, you know, then think about the other one. So there’s, there’s a handful of them that I have gone and gone and bought the paid version because I knew I was going to get that much, that much use out of it. But it’s hard to, it’s hard to navigate all of this. So, so I’m going to keep trying as best as I can to get good information into people’s hands. Yeah,

Brandon Burton 40:55
that’s great. As we start wrapping things up here, I wanted to ask you for a chamber listening, who wants to take their chamber up to the next level? Imagine that’s why most of them do listen. What kind of tip or action item might you share with them to try to accomplish that goal?

Craig Turner 41:10
Sure, and there’s two. I give two answers to that. One of one is the obvious one, because we just spent all this time talking about AI. You have to be a leader in AI. And again, there’s, there’s the practical aspect of it, where you can train people, and they’re guaranteed there’s someone in your membership that does you know that would do an AI training for you? Get it on your calendar. If you haven’t already, I’ll do it. And if you if I would go ahead and do it. And if you don’t call me and I’ll set one up for you, it’s fine. We run regular ones anyway, that we just kind of lump chambers on to so that they don’t have to host their own. And it can be thought leadership. That’s where, you know, educate your executive your president, your executive director, on AI, bring in some experts. Run a run a panel. Run a thought leadership panel, just to kind of position yourself your brand near AI, because it’s going to be so important and it’s not going away. I mean, that’s, I mean, I always when people think it’s a fad or it’s going to, you know, it’s eventually going to tap out. I mean, Volkswagen put chatgpt in their 2024, models. All right, it’s a unit for voice chat GBT. I mean, it’s not, it’s not going anywhere. It’s only going to get stronger and more important. So that’s the one. That’s the obvious piece of advice to sum up our our conversation. The other one that I’d say is, I, you know, I do believe that it’s going to becoming more and more important for chambers to get granular, more granular with their delivery of member value in that companies are trying to and again, this is especially as we get into the millennials and the and the Gen Z. If you don’t have a teenager right now, or a college student, they like to know why before they make a decision, they just do so you’re gonna have to answer that question as they get into leadership positions, because they’re gonna because they’re gonna want to know why they’re spending, you know, an hour at your committee meeting. They’re gonna know why they spent $350 on the on the membership, and it’s a lot of work to explain that to a lot. You know, you’ve got chambers with four or five people taking care of 1200 members. It’s a lot, it’s a lot to do. That’s why we created the AI platform to help to help do that, but, but unfortunately, that’s what it is. And even back when during the recession, when I told that story, it was largely the small and medium sized businesses. But now I’m seeing more and more. It’s the bigger businesses too. I’ve been giving you $25,000 a year for the past 40 years, but a new CFO comes in. Why are we giving you $25,000 a year? What are we getting for it? You got to be ready. You got to be ready with an answer for that question. Yeah, for sure.

Brandon Burton 43:51
Well, Craig, this question maybe may have an obvious answer, but as we look to the future, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Craig Turner 44:00
I Well, yeah, I think the purpose is is even more important now I said companies are busier and busier than ever, which means they have less and less time to do things other than run their business and and try to succeed and thrive. The chambers fill a role there in being the, being that voice of business, and being the source of education, even what I say I’m doing on the AI stuff, you know, the chamber to learn everything. That’s the the asking me of a chamber, you have to know, you have to be able to answer a question on any topic somebody, somebody brings you, so you have that body of knowledge that you can share with your members who don’t have time to get the knowledge on their own. I think that’s a critic. That’s a critical piece of it. You know, the other thing is, there is it’s becoming, I’m seeing it become more competitive, and I think chambers have to rise to that occasion. And it’s not that, it’s not chambers competing against other chambers. We’re going to. Region versus a county or whatever, but it’s you’ve got your chamber, and then you got this group over here, and this business association and this group and this group and this group, and everywhere I go, everybody talks about this, this challenge, the two ways to do it are to be better and stronger and basically take the other ones out because you’re because they just can’t compete with you. And the other is to be collaborative. I’d love to see collaboration. For so many years, it was okay. I’d collaborate with I’d love to collaborate you on an event, but who gets the $15 ticket and who gets the $100 sponsorship? No, just collaborate. Figure all. That’s the other if I if you bring a sponsor, it’s yours. If you bring sponsor of yours collaborate, cast a wider net. And I think, but I think that that existence in a increasingly competitive environment is is huge, and you have to be thoughtful about it. And you know, back to the AI thing, seminars, webinars are chambers, bread and butter, educational seminars and webinars. Well, you need to bear in mind that most topics, I can go to chatgpt and get an answer on anything I want in 30 seconds. So you have to up your game on these educational topics in that it’s not just about giving information. It’s about providing a perspective and a path forward and something where, where somebody’s going to go spend an hour with you. You want them leaving saying, Yeah, that was an hour well spent. So I think that kind of thinking is really going to be important as chambers exist in this competitive environment, but I don’t think they’ve ever been more important before than they are right now.

Brandon Burton 46:37
Yeah, that’s great. I love the answers, Craig, I wanted to give you a chance for anyone listening who may want to reach out and connect with you, possibly have you do a training for them or work with you somehow. What would be the best way for you to point people to connect and reach out to connect with you? Sure,

Craig Turner 46:55
best. There’s two things I’m as you’ve heard several times during this interview, I’m very heavy on LinkedIn, so you can get me on Messenger. If you do want to reach out, connect with me. Don’t follow me. Connect with me. If you follow me, I’m going to turn around and send you a connection request anyway, on LinkedIn and Facebook, I have AI for Chambers, exclusive groups where I share content and and prompt ideas. I set them up to kind of be like my Hey, I had this idea today, and I’ll share it so but get me on LinkedIn. Otherwise, very easy it’s Craig@Momentumhub.ai if you want to email me directly. I mean, I’m an email guy, still.

Brandon Burton 47:42
Very good. We will get that in the show notes for this episode make it easy for people to connect with you and learn more about what you have to offer and how you can help elevate their chamber. Awesome. Craig, this has been great having you on the show. I’m grateful for your insights and perspective that you brought, and I hope it helps move the needle, and especially as we look at the workforce issues among chambers and communities, to be able to help fill those gaps and to help chambers stay relevant as they move along into the future. But this has been great, and I really appreciate you. Craig.

Craig Turner 48:14
Well, thanks, thanks. Thanks to you too, Brandon. I do appreciate it. And but you know, best of luck with the Chamber chat podcast. I love it. You could tell I love this stuff, though. So

Brandon Burton 48:27
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Craig Turner 48:57
Hey, everyone. This is Craig Turner, founder of Momentum AI, I want to give a great big shout out, and thank you to Brandon Burton and the Chamber Chat Podcast for an incredible conversation today we touched on something game changing for chambers. That’s our Momentum AI platform. It’s designed to create customized, personalized strategies for your members, showing them how to make the most out of their membership with you. Whether you’re looking to boost engagement, retention or growth, this platform is your new secret weapon, and for all you Chamber Chat listeners, we’ve got a special offer just for you when you sign up for Momentum AI, use the code Chamber Chat C, H, A M, B, E R, C, H, A T, to get 10% off your initial subscription no matter what level you choose. Let’s harness the power of AI to supercharge your chamber and your members, head over to www.momentumhub.ai to learn more and get started today.