Embracing AI in Networking: A Conversation with Dr. Ivan Misner

Speaker 1: 0:00

I believe that networking has always been a cornerstone of business success. There's nothing quite like the in-person meeting to build strong relationships and open doors to new opportunities. And now we're seeing a big comeback to face-to-face networking. Post-pandemic People are eager to reconnect, to shake hands and share ideas face to face. But this time around we have AI starting to make its mark on the networking scene. It's making connections faster, more precise and sometimes even before we step into the room. So how does this blend of traditional and tech-driven networking shape our future? Well, to dive deep into this fascinating intersection, I've got the perfect guest joining me today. I am thrilled to welcome Dr Ivan Meisner, the founder of Business Network International, or as most call BNI, the world's largest business networking organization. With his unparalleled insights into the world of networking and how it's evolving with technology, dr Meisner is here to shed light on how AI is influencing the way we connect, build relationships and grow our business in the new era. Let's do this. Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show. Welcome to the show, dr Meisner.

Speaker 2: 1:41

Hi, how are you doing, Michael? I am doing well, and please call me Ivan Ivan.

Speaker 1: 1:45

Ivan, ivan, awesome. Thank you very much for that. The last time you and I saw each other was like late 2000 aughts, like 2008, 2009. We were at an awards banquet for BNI of some sort, smoking cigars and sipping whatever we were sipping back in the day. I want to thank you before we get into this conversation for BNI, because I was a member for 11 years and it was the catalyst to my first million in revenue for my business, and without Giver's Gain and without the connections and the networks that we had created through BNI and this was up in Anchorage, alaska, of all places I don't think I would have been as successful with it. So I want to just thank you for that and I want to thank you for your time today we're diving into this.

Speaker 2: 2:36

Can I just say thank you for bringing that up and I love hearing that we really want to make a difference in people's professional lives by helping them build their business. I don't know if you know, but last year we passed over 15 million referrals. Nice. We generated over 24 billion, I think it was. In the last 12 months it's been 24.7 billion with a B $24.7 billion in thank you for closed business and, as you know, $24.7 billion in thank you for closed business and, as you know, that's the amount of business that members generate for their business. $24 billion. Now, just so you know, michael, $24 billion there are based on the United Nations estimates of GDP for a domestic product. There are actually 100 countries lower than what BNI did in Thank you for Closed Business in the last 12 months. That blows my mind.

Speaker 1: 3:31

I was about to say I'm sure that's higher than a lot of GDPs In 100 countries. That is literally 40% of the countries in the world.

Speaker 2: 3:41

Yeah, yeah, it's amazing to me that we are generating that kind of business and it tells me that we're making a big difference in communities all around the world and in businesses like yours and many others.

Speaker 1: 3:52

I appreciate that and I do so. Your business has been around since, if I remember correctly, the mid to late 80s 1985.

Speaker 2: 4:04

We will be celebrating our 40th anniversary in January.

Speaker 1: 4:08

Wow, that is so awesome. I got another year until my 20th, so that gives you some perspective there.

Speaker 2: 4:16

I earned all this gray hair.

Speaker 1: 4:19

Well, I've already lost all mine, so I don't know what to do with it. So you've seen technology I mean literally networking before the internet right Like this. That was a different world back then, and then the introduction of the internet in the 90s really didn't take a hold until probably the early to mid 2000s, if you will. But now we have this thing called AI. Yeah, how are you seeing the evolution of networking, as the evolution of technology continues to just rapidly impact our lives?

Speaker 2: 4:58

Well, that's a multi-layered question, and let's go back to the fact that BNI started before the internet, um, and really before before most computer systems. I'm the first computer I had back when I started. Bni was a cpm based computer with two floppy disk drives. So, uh, you know we go way back, but bni has been an early adopter to technology from the beginning, and a lot of people are surprised to hear that because we're in person for, for the most part, in-person networking organization, although that's changed since COVID. But anyway, we have always been an early adopter to technology. You can't have a three-letter domain name BNIcom unless you're an early adopter. So we've always been an early adopter.

Speaker 2: 5:48

And the truth is, I learned a long time ago that you either lead disruption or you will be disrupted. Blockbuster, sears, kodak are all great examples of companies that were disrupted. They got in their own way. They could have been leaders in their industry had they not wanted to change. And so the short answer to your question is you've got to be prepared to change. And if you're not prepared to change and look for opportunities to change, then you're going to be disrupted. And I want to lead the disruption, not be disrupted.

Speaker 1: 6:26

You know it's funny that I just watched a like a kind of a documentary of his more cinematic documentary on blueberry or blackberry, blackberry.

Speaker 2: 6:37

There was a movie made.

Speaker 1: 6:39

Yeah, that movie talks exactly to what you're just said. Is like they were. They were before apple. They came out before apple. They had the smartphone in their hands and the founder couldn't get out of his own way, right when innovation was looming at the doors, right and and that's happened over and over again, I mean sears closed down their catalog.

Speaker 2: 7:02

You might, you might be just slightly too young to remember the sears catalog, a big printed catalog that came out every I don't know every quarter or so I remember them as a kid.

Speaker 2: 7:10

Yeah, well, they closed down their catalog in 1993. Amazon opened their door in 1994. And Sears said you know, let's hang on. Let's look at this internet thing that is starting to come about. Sears could have been Amazon. It could have been Kodak invented the digital camera. Isn't that crazy? They had the patent on the digital camera. Kodak could have been Apple. I mean, when you think about it, a computer company becomes a phone company. Where does that come from? Well, a film processing company to become a phone and camera company, it's no bigger a leap. And, of course, blockbuster had a chance to buy Netflix, and because they didn't think they were a competitor. And so there's so many big companies that have been disrupted. I don't want to be disrupted, I want to lead the disruption. As a matter of fact, in 2018, you can find it on entrepreneurcom I wrote an article this isn't the title, but it's close the future of face-to-face is online, nice.

Speaker 2: 8:16

And when I wrote that, people were like oh no, don't say that shit, you're the founder of BNI, the old man's starting to lose it. I think I heard that and I was like no, the technology is advancing at such a fast pace that the online meetings are probably inevitable. And I even said we're going to see holographic meetings, where people are doing holographic meetings like you know, star wars, you remember? Yeah, a real jedi and then a couple of holographic jedis and real jedi. In the article I said when we get to that point, I want to be obi-wan kenobi, um. So I I wrote this. People thought I was crazy. But guess what? January of this year, january of this year, just six years after I wrote that article, we had our first BNI meeting in Dubai, where the chapter president showed up as a full-length holographic image and ran the entire BNI meeting as a holographic image. Isn't that amazing? It is amazing. And look, if we don't stay focused on what technology is doing, we're going to be disrupted by it.

Speaker 1: 9:32

So how are you seeing AI facilitate the new age of networking?

Speaker 2: 9:39

Well, I mean, I think there's still a lot up in the air on that. There are things that I have already told BNI members that they can do with AI that would help them greatly. For example, you're familiar, I'm sure, with the concept called context fears and power teams. A context fear, or a group of business professionals that are in a symbiotic relationship, and a power team is those people in that context here that you actually have the relationship with, right. And so one of the things, um, that I learned early on with the release of ai and I did this when I was I was being driven by a BNI member sedan service and he was saying I'm trying to figure out you know who should be in my power team, and I said why don't you ask AI, ask ChatGPT? And he said what a great idea.

Speaker 2: 10:28

So I did a form. I said give me your email. I did a form and I said you know what professions fit within this power team? Right and a power team and a power team the context are a group of professionals that are in symbiotic relationships, compatible, non-competitive, and it gave me a whole list of professions, that's all, and I reached out to the guy and I said these are the people that you should be really bringing into your personal network. These professions, uh and to me that's the low-hanging fruit for something like ai. You use it for information gathering. I'm sure down the road it's going to be used in many, many other ways, but um, information gathering is the obvious one right now I think that, yeah, so data right.

Speaker 1: 11:13

Like people don't realize that ai is the king of sifting through and synthesizing data right, and one of the things I see coming in is like when you have a referral partner or maybe even a JV, a joint venture, and you're coming, you're like, well, who do you know? Don't ask the person across the table from you, ask GPT, right, chat GPT who in my contact sphere should we be talking to and introducing each other to? And it's going to give you the reasons and all the other things and it'll even help you write the email for the introductions, right?

Speaker 2: 11:49

Oh, yeah, absolutely Absolutely, and you know I've used chat GPT. I had to write an obituary or comments about somebody who had passed away, who I didn't know real well, but they were active in the organization, and so I used ChatGPT to say give me some suggestions. Now I rewrote it to make it a little more personal, but they gave me some great suggestions. I used AI to do a survey. So when I do surveys, as a rule you write up a survey, you do a rough test, you got all kinds of problems. Then you do a second version and you send that out to people again. You get more changes, you do a third version and the whole thing takes three, four months to get a good survey.

Speaker 2: 12:37

I did it in 30 minutes with chat gpt I did one test got back and and the survey was I needed 70 items on how to scale a business okay, finance, marketing, management, hr. You know different topics but I needed like 70 of them, dang and and I said you know, give me, give me 10 on finance. And it just went and I did one test and and got back like 30 or 40 responses and only one new idea from doing the test. So the whole thing took a week versus three or four months and I put the survey out. The survey, by the way, is for a book I'm working on, called a garage to global. How do you take your business from your garage, which I did, to a global enterprise? So things like that. Just like you said, data, right, uh, it gave me all these ideas that were phenomenal, um, and, by the way, I plugged in my ideas so they knew what I was coming in with. Right added to it, right to it.

Speaker 1: 13:40

Right. I think that that's where a lot of people they get. I don't know if they're lazy or they just don't know. The more you give AI, the better output you're going to get, the more personalized you get. Yeah, can I give you another example? Go ahead.

Speaker 2: 13:54

I was with a friend of mine who's a member of the transformational leadership council and he's doing a book and he wants to use he wants to show how you can use ai as a thought partner. Yeah, so he did an audio version of chat gpt with me and he said tell me, tell chat gpt about your book. And so I have a new book that just came out a few months ago called the third paradigm, which is about co-creation so I did like five minutes just explaining it to the book, maybe not three minutes explaining it to Chad GPT.

Speaker 2: 14:25

And it said, okay, I've been in it, asked one or two questions, and it said so, how can I help you? And I said, well, what can I do to market the book that I'm not doing already? And then I said all the things that I'm doing already. And I thought it's not going to give me anything. I mean, I've written 29 books, right, I'm not going to get anything. It gave me something I had never thought of, which was brilliant. It said, well, it seems like you're doing all of the things you should be doing to market a book. However, have you thought about doing a series of webinars, remote webinars, on the book? So you do a virtual tour? It called it. Have you thought about doing a virtual tour? And I'm like, no, what would that look like? And said, well, break the book down into different sections and then do a tour online and just invite thousands of people. I thought, wow, what a great idea. Oh my gosh. And so I started doing virtual tours for my latest book because of a discussion with ChatGPT.

Speaker 1: 15:30

Yes, it's something that my wife she's actually asking me about. Can the ChatGPT help me with this? I said yes, and she's like what can't it do Anything you can't ask it to do? Like, if you can't formulate a question, chat, gbt or any AI can't help you, right, but if you can formulate what you need in a question and sometimes I even use it in like, what question should I ask you to get this output? It'll give me all the questions I'm supposed to answer, right? Oh, here's all the information I need from you before I can give you this output.

Speaker 2: 16:03

Okay, great, we can have chat GPT implanted in our brain so that when we're talking to our spouse we can say how do I answer this question? It gives you some choices.

Speaker 1: 16:16

And make sure you get the right tone now.

Speaker 2: 16:18

Yes, oh yeah, you got to have the right tone. Got to have the right tone, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 16:21

So let's do some future thinking right. Yeah, If nothing was impossible, how would you? What would your dream be of how AI could impact networking organizations and networking in general?

Speaker 2: 16:42

Yeah, Well, first of all, I think we're going to see certain professions disappear and there'll be professions that are created that we've never thought of. I mean, people say to me well, what professions are there really that have come out of nowhere, other than the technology professions like website development and robotics and whatnot what? What profession that you would see on main street has come out in the last several years? And I, there's there's several, one of which is business coaching and life coaching. When I started bni in 1985, a coach was my football coach. You know, I, I, there were no coaches. So there are professions that, uh, have developed, but there are also professions that have disappeared. Um, for example, uh, one of them are travel agents. Now, yes, there are still travel agents out there, but there was a time in bni where virtually every chapter had a travel agent, but because of the internet, I would say maybe one or two out of 100 chapters have it.

Speaker 1: 17:51

Wow.

Speaker 2: 17:52

Because the industry has changed Right. So we got to be cognizant of what professions might be in trouble. Paralegal's in trouble.

Speaker 1: 18:01

Oh yeah, they're almost Paralegal's in trouble, what?

Speaker 2: 18:03

you're going to have is an AI coordinator, a paralegal coordinator. What you're going to have is an ai coordinator, a paralegal coordinator, um, but, uh, a paralegal themselves. I I think, uh, I I'd be worried if I were in paralegal and my daughter was studying to be a paralegal assistant and I said I, I would, I would focus on ai and paralegal as opposed to paralegal or yeah, or how, how you can manage paralegal tasks, because it still takes a human right.

Speaker 1: 18:29

I think that, like in writing a lot of people, it's about research, yeah yeah, you use it to do the research.

Speaker 2: 18:35

yeah, yeah, that's ai's expertise. The other thing is and people are going to hate to hear this, but physician's assistants oh yeah, um, so I, I, I live on 10 acres in Austin. I've got a lot of deer and I got a tick bite. And the tick bite was clearly Lyme disease, and when it's a tick bite it's like a bullseye, and so I could tell it was Lyme and so I called up my physician's assistant, showed it to her, did it all by Zoom, by the way, and I showed her a photograph and she's like, yeah, that's a tick bite, uh, lime.

Speaker 2: 19:10

So here's what you need to do boom, boom, boom, you need to take this particular antibiotic. She gave me the whole thing to do. I thought, yeah, I wonder what chat gpt would say. So I got on chat gpt and I gave all my symptoms. I didn't say I had it, I just gave all my symptoms. It gave me two paragraphs of you can't use chat GPT for medical advice. We are not qualified to do medical. It was the lawyers you know like you cannot use this for medical. And then, when it was done, saying that it gave me like four paragraphs of everything I should do, and it was exactly exactly what the physician's assistant said, down to the antibiotic that was recommended. They said there's like five or six antibiotics that are often used, but this is the most common and this is the one that you should use generally.

Speaker 1: 19:59

It's hilarious. Wow, I think that we're going to become well so like you're an author 29 books, right, and I'm an author. I've got a couple of books out now too, and I find that I can utilize ChatGVT for all the research stuff really well. Right, it doesn't write for us, but it definitely dives into the ideation, the research and a lot of editing.

Speaker 2: 20:22

Well, a lot of editing, but I fear is that it does write for us. Can you get that?

Speaker 1: 20:27

back out to me, and a lot of times I do.

Speaker 2: 20:30

Yeah, and you could put in material and it will edit. But what I fear is, you know, AI writing for us.

Speaker 1: 20:38

And.

Speaker 2: 20:38

I teach at a university. I won't name the university to get them in trouble, but I teach at a university. I teach an MBA program on leadership to get them in trouble.

Speaker 2: 20:48

But I teach at a university, I teach an MBA program on leadership, and I was, you know, I had started the class and AI was just reasonably new and I didn't say to them you can't do papers with AI, and 25% of the papers I got back, yeah, you can run them through AI search online programs 25% of the papers I got back had been written by AI, and and so I'm worried about education, I'm worried about learning, I'm worried about writing. You know, if AI is writing for us, uh, that concerns me a little bit, and it concerns me in an educational situation in the sense that I need to be thinking about especially leadership. What kind of leader do I want to be? How do I want to interact with people? What are the values that I have as a leader? How am I going to implement those? These are things that I should be writing about, not asking AI to write about.

Speaker 1: 21:45

And so.

Speaker 2: 21:45

I have fears about stuff like that. Um, that doesn't mean we shouldn't look the genie's out of the bottle. It's out, so what we need to do is figure out how to deal with it, as opposed to um you know, trying to put it back in the bottle, because that isn't going to work.

Speaker 1: 22:03

Yeah, it's not going anywhere, I think. I think you hit the nail on the head, though. It's a tool, right, and you have a quarter of your class in an MBA program. That is not really. It sounds like to me. If somebody's using ChatGPT to write their paper in leadership in an MBA program, they're there to get the credit, not the education right, and when you're curious, you want to be the creator, because when you create, you learn right. When you teach and learn, you know when you're, when you practice, and and I think that the big takeaway here is that we utilize AI for what it is. It's a tool, not a crutch.

Speaker 2: 22:42

Yeah, a hundred percent. And life gets in the way and when we see opportunities to kind of cut corners, many of us will cut corners. I mean, I've cut corners a couple of times in my life and didn't like the fact that I did that and stopped cutting corners. And I'm hoping that the students that I busted and I busted them, I didn't bust them.

Speaker 1: 23:08

Was it public?

Speaker 2: 23:08

shaming. Well, it was a public shaming to the entire group, not any individual individuals. I all you know you always reprimand or redirect in private and praise in public, and so I redirected publicly to the group and then individually to all of the students, one at a time privately. And I let them rewrite their paper and whatever grade they got, I knocked it down a grade, so they had a chance to redo their paper.

Speaker 2: 23:44

And they all did, 100% redid their paper and 90% of them admitted guilty. One didn't. And I was like, well, here's the evidence, I just showed it to her and she's like I'll just redo the paper. She never said I did it, but she said I'll redo the paper. That's hilarious.

Speaker 1: 24:01

Oh my gosh. I definitely want to thank you again for your time today. I think that we've definitely dove a bunch of different ways with AI and how we're interacting as humans with this new technology and how it's continually going to be affecting how we move through our existence as human beings, and we don't know what the future holds.

Speaker 2: 24:23

There is one thing, though, if you don't mind me adding, it's still about relationships. Yeah, and so, even though you've got the technology, the AI, it's still about relationships. It's about the fact that networking is more about farming than it is about hunting. It's about cultivating these relationships that you have with people. It's about creating visibility in the community, most importantly, establishing credibility in the community, and then you lead to profitability, and so you have all these tools. I mean, I think back when I was younger and in college and having a calculator and the professor saying you can't use a calculator in math class. We've come so far. Yeah, where's your calculator? And just use the calculator. So, um, we've come a long way. Ai, we'll work it out. I really believe we'll work it out. Um, but it's still about relationships. I. I know we're out of time, but I'm going to tell you one more quick story.

Speaker 2: 25:23

I went to a bni event once where they were talking about the formula for success in networking. I'm like man, I got to see this, and so he stood up and he had this whiteboard and he's writing on this whiteboard. It was a really complex formula about Metz law and Dunbar's factor and all of these things and doing the square root of the number of the people. And I'm like, whoa, this is really confusing. And he's sounding confused with his own formula. And then, finally, he looks at it and he puts a big red X through the whole thing and he says, oh, forget about the formula, it's all about relationships. And we're like, yeah, okay, that's it, it's all about relationships. So use AI as a tool, but don't forget, it's all about relationships.

Speaker 1: 26:12

Oh my gosh, that was huge right there. So many nuggets. If you didn't pick up at least a dozen, you owe it to yourself to go back and listen to this episode again. Ivan Meisner one of the most giving people I've ever met in my life. Like he said, he's got 29 books. If you want to check out more about Dr Ivan Meisner, go to IvanMeisnercom. If you're interested in learning more about BNI, go to BNIcom. Believe me, I was in it for 11 years and I'm telling you right now it made me millions. You should check it out too. Until next time, stay buzzworthy.