The AI opportunity hiding in a chaotic golf shop | Clive Mayhew

Cold open

0:00Clive MayhewThe next day I spent a quarter of a million dollars on a domain called GOLF.AI.

0:05Clive MayhewAs an entrepreneur, as a founder, you do not need a tech team. It will be the best $200 you've ever spent. Use what you already know to build what comes next. I founded GOLF.AI at 60 years old. I'm 63 now, and I'm having the time of my life building in this world. We are just at the absolute beginning, like day one of this journey.

0:31Music[Music]

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Meet Clive Mayhew

0:37Dave PengelleyWelcome to AI Operators and our Operator Stories segment. This is where I sit down with operators that are in the world of AI. They're building products, they're building businesses, and they're generally trying to innovate using these new technologies. We sit down and hear their stories. Today I'm glad to be joined by Clive Mayhew, who's going to take us through his story. Welcome to the show, Clive.

0:54Clive MayhewWelcome, Dave. Great to be here. Thank you.

1:01Dave PengelleyYou are in a beautiful, sunlit, water-backed scene. I talk to a lot of people from around the world, in America and Europe and other places, but you're a little bit closer to home, aren't you?

1:11Clive MayhewYeah, I'm in wonderful Sydney. I'm here at [place name unclear in source captions], with the view behind me. It's great. I've actually just returned from America. I've been working in America for 12 months, and I'm so thankful to be home. [Laughter] This is by far the best city in the world.

1:29Dave PengelleyNice. We should have lined the ducks up, and I should have come and sat out there on the balcony with you live. Looks like a great spot to be. But anyway, we're not here to talk about your real estate and your balcony and your beautiful view. What is it that you do, Clive? What's brought you onto the AI Operators show? What are your business ventures and the clients you're seeking to serve with AI?

1:49Clive MayhewA couple of things. I'm the CEO, co-founder and majority investor in a company called GOLF.AI. We're the world's leading AI company in the golf industry. Most people go, ‘AI and golf?’ They always have a giggle. So I'm going to talk about GOLF.AI. Actually, next week I launch my first book, which is called Vertical AI: Changing the Game, based on my experience of creating GOLF.AI over the last two years. I would ask you a question, Dave, to start with: what do you think GOLF.AI does?

2:31Dave PengelleyI briefly looked at the website, so I cheated a little bit. But I'm imagining it's helping answer people's questions about golf: where to play, how to play. Maybe there's some video capture and monitoring swings and other bits and pieces—you could go down that path with a golf AI app. But as I'm not a particularly avid golfer, and the closest I've got to golf lately was watching Will Ferrell's The Hawk TV show, I'm probably not your target demo.

2:56Clive Mayhew[Laughter] I have to say I really love that TV show. He is just so funny. The way he got golf into his sense of humour was really good. So I watched that too.

3:08Clive MayhewI'm obviously a visionary. I think it's going to be everything right now—not so much just GOLF.AI. Our business is actually a little bit more focused than that. But AI for the sport of golf will become everything, and we're starting to see that right now. GOLF.AI, my business, is actually very simple.

3:32Dave PengelleyMm-hmm.

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What GOLF.AI actually does

3:36Clive MayhewWe answer the telephone, and we do bookings for tee times.

3:36Dave PengelleyOkay.

3:41Clive MayhewYeah. Think of it in terms of a booking platform for tee times for the golf courses. We answer the telephone in the pro shop. You can literally talk to our AI rather than talking to someone in the pro shop, and we'll do the bookings, the cancellations and all the member enquiries over AI. On the back of that, we're also the number one with our AI caddie. As you walk around a golf course, the caddie talks to you in 27 different languages about what your next shot is on the golf course.

4:12Clive MayhewThey're our first two services. We have many more coming, and I honestly believe that AI will be used for everything, including golf. So that's the little intro to GOLF.AI.

4:19Dave PengelleyNice. That's certainly the dream. If you watch the OpenAI Dev Day launch of dots, it's that ambient AI that is there everywhere. It's kind of that Iron Man [name unclear in source captions] sort of technology, right? Where it's just there and can talk to you and advise you around what's going on.

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From a golf-rules spreadsheet to an AI business

4:36Clive MayhewYeah, definitely. I think that what we're starting to see now versus two years ago is a huge difference. I was a great believer. One of the reasons I actually created this business and founded it originally—it was just over two years ago—we were playing around with an Excel spreadsheet. This is so good to say. It was an Excel spreadsheet that this guy developed over seven years, all about the rules of golf.

5:01Clive MayhewHe's a wonderful man in Scotland, a little bit crazy around his spreadsheets. He built this spreadsheet, and I met him in London. He says, ‘Clive, you know what? I could do this over a spreadsheet. I could answer any rules of golf. It's so good.’

5:16Clive Mayhew[Laughter] We took his spreadsheet, made it into this vector database, which is how AI works, and we literally started to play around with just asking golf rules questions through prompts. It was interesting: we got to about 75% accuracy based on his dataset, because he'd spent seven years building his dataset.

5:37Dave PengelleyYeah.

5:38Clive MayhewBut we could never get it any more than 75%. The reason was the whole way that you and I talk and the way we say things is very different. Now, in the AI world, we call that reasoning. How you reason about a golf rule question, how I reason [unclear in source captions]—very different perspectives. Before reasoning was actually introduced by the LLMs, like I say, we got about 75% accuracy.

6:07Dave PengelleyYep.

6:07Clive MayhewOvernight, ChatGPT was the first to actually launch reasoning into its LLM, and we went from 75% to 99% accuracy.

6:18Dave PengelleyYeah. For the people that aren't sure, reasoning is when you see the AI say ‘thinking’ and you look at the traces. It sort of says, ‘Oh, the user looks like they're asking about putting on a green, and I need to make sure that I'm looking at that,’ versus just, ‘Oh, keyword search, bang, response,’ right?

6:34Clive MayhewExactly, yeah. It's an element of AI which is actually quite detailed, the actual intelligence behind how they did that from a programming perspective. But the bottom line for our audience and ourselves is it's just an element of [unclear in source captions] reasoning, and it actually answered the questions. It took it from 75% to 99%.

6:50Clive MayhewLiterally the next day—and I'm not exaggerating that—the next day I spent a quarter of a million dollars on a domain called GOLF.AI. I bought that domain, and this is over two years ago. At that point in time, I was so convinced. Now I'm maybe even more convinced, but I was so convinced at that point in time that I put a big cheque on the table to buy a domain name. Then we started to add datasets in golf to make GOLF.AI.

7:20Clive MayhewThe first dataset, obviously, was—we're the number one in the world with golf rules. You can ask it anything on golf rules, and we'll answer you in 27 different languages. USGA, R&A rules, we have all of that. We had tens of thousands of questions every month on golf rules into our platform.

7:37Dave PengelleyWow.

7:37Clive MayhewThat was really what I wanted to do initially. Then the second dataset was quite interesting. It was the AI caddie. The caddie then helped you around the golf course. In the golf world, we have all the GPS locations of bunkers, of fairways, of tees. All of those are mapped for 42,000 golf courses around the world, and you can get that dataset. So we got that dataset. We started to work with that dataset and put an LLM model over the top of it.

8:08Clive MayhewWith the reasoning and the golf rules at the same time, that was our AI caddie. Again, we have thousands of users around the world who use our caddie every day to play golf on different golf courses. So they were our two consumer services.

8:22Clive MayhewBut you know, probably when you speak to operators and founders and AI-first companies, where's the money in that, right? Because both of those were free services for golfers. What actually happened about a year ago, just over a year ago now, we got a phone call from a golf course. They said to us, ‘Clive, this is great what you're doing with rules. It's great what you're doing with caddies. But is there any way you can help my golf course? Why don't you come in and have a chat with us?’ So I went in, and obviously I've been a big golfer for a long time.

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The pro shop moment

8:55Clive MayhewThis is what I saw when I went to see him. If you're a golfer, you'll know the pro shop is where you go in and register for the round of golf. But the pro shop is also where the telephone rings for their customers to book their tee times over the telephone. I walked into this golf course, and it was like chaos. It was Friday. There were 16 people shopping in the pro shop. The phone was ringing continually.

9:22Clive MayhewI'm going, ‘Oh my goodness.’ It was a public golf course, and it was like, ‘Is this just chaos?’ The guy behind the pro shop, the guy who is actually a golf professional by nature, was answering the call like this, putting the phone here and saying, ‘Yeah, [amount unclear in source captions], mate, for the balls. [Amounts unclear in source captions] for that. Yes, mate. Hold on for the booking. Hold on for the booking.’

9:46Clive MayhewIt'd be 10 minutes of this guy holding to serve these customers. He said, ‘Now, what do you want? What tee time do you want?’ Then he'd go into his tee-sheet management system, literally take the details on the phone and enter them into the system. He'd have a hundred phone calls a day, and it's a lot. I went away from that, literally an hour just observing this, and I went to the general manager.

10:11Clive MayhewHe said, ‘[Unclear in source captions], what can we do as a golf course?’ I said, ‘Well, the first thing is your pro shop, what I would call the front door to your business, is chaotic.’ He says, ‘Yeah, we put two people on these days, but one of them didn't turn up today, so you saw one person.’ I said, ‘Tomorrow you'll have two people, so it won't be as chaotic.’

10:29Clive MayhewThey'd accepted that chaos was actually completely acceptable to their customers: both the customers coming in physically to play golf and the customers on the telephone. We said, ‘Well, actually, why don't we build an AI concierge service where we can answer the telephone, take away all the complexity of that telephone? It can answer and do the bookings, link into the back-end systems.’

11:01Clive Mayhew‘We'll build that. Then your pro shop will just be an actual place or opportunity for you to talk to your customers and upsell them around all this wonderful equipment and merchandise you have.’ Really, that's where we started with our AI concierge service.

11:16Clive MayhewThat probably was the moment that I also started to think, in my own way, about my book. In my book, Vertical AI, it's all built around this concept called the ‘pro shop moment’, which is what I believe is the front door to golf. But when you say that across any industry, it's a front door to any industry. How do they operate their front door to their industries today?

11:44Clive Mayhew99% of them—and I don't think that's an exaggeration—still work in chaos mode. They're still reacting and building workflows and processes with people that are pretty much chaotic. Anywhere where you've got queuing, anywhere where you've got telephony, anywhere you've got multiple workflows coming in addressed by the same set of human resources, it becomes incredibly chaotic. Typically, the way owners of businesses have solved that is just by increasing the number of people serving the customer.

12:13Clive MayhewThere's a cost of that, the efficiency of that and just the chaotic nature of having multiple things going on. The pro shop moment, I think, happens in every industry. It led my thinking to Vertical AI, which talks a lot more, from the pro shop moment all the way through, about building AI workflows into your businesses, replacing or upgrading these chaotic processes you have today.

12:49Dave PengelleyYeah, that's all too true. You've got people that have the cash flow to put on extra staff, and then you've got the founders and the small business owners that just don't even have that cash flow. They're just so busy working in the business, they never have time to step back and work on it. They're just constantly themselves in personal chaos mode. I've seen that as well.

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AI agents and the founder's inbox

13:06Clive MayhewYeah. What's happened since then—this is going back, like I said, over a year ago—is the AI tools have become so good. Now let's talk about the small business owner, literally the person who runs a business by themselves. In the past, they've bought websites, they've bought SaaS products to help them do what they can. They've been taught how to use the software: follow the website, do the menus, do this and do that.

13:36Clive Mayhew‘Your data is here, but how do I access the data?’ Eventually, they have all these systems and processes and apps, and they get restricted in terms of what they can and can't do with the technology. So what you have now is a generation of founders who've been with tech for 20 years, and they are just bewildered by the fact they can't do the basic stuff.

13:50Clive MayhewAI has come along, particularly with the agents—and we'll talk more about that specifically. These AI agents now, if you link them to your Gmail, to your email systems, your Apple email, whatever email you have, will give you a summary of all of your emails and tell you the actions of what you do going forward. Very simple workflow re-engineering of how you do things.

14:14Clive MayhewTypically, people like founders get up in the morning, 10 o'clock, they check the email, they do two hours of that work, through whatever that may be. That is still a front door to your business, by the way. When I say the front door to the pro shop, a physical one, think about your front door of what you do as a founder or a business owner. Email is typically the largest front door that you're actually concerned with. Now AI and the AI workflow you can create replaces all of that.

14:44Clive MayhewYou'll have this AI agent literally checking everything, actually presenting it to you in a meaningful way, filtering all of the spam, filtering all of the rubbish, but telling you, ‘Clive, you need to address this issue today with this customer,’ or, ‘You need to talk to your employee about this today,’ whatever that is. But not in the email format, which we've been used to for the last 20 years: in a conversation element like you and I are having right now, Dave, where this becomes meaningful and it's all action-oriented.

15:22Clive MayhewThis is the huge change that's happening with AI, and in particular vertical AI. It's all about actions and outcomes. There's no middle ground. There's no stupid websites or apps you have to go through and learn. It's literally a conversation element about outcomes, which I believe will fundamentally help entrepreneurs and even small business owners become so much more efficient.

15:45Clive MayhewA day a week on email you can save just by setting up your email to use an AI agent. It's a day a week of your time. Think about that in terms of operational things you do. Think about all the other stuff you can be saving.

16:00Clive MayhewMore time with your family, more time where it matters, less time on this mundane administration and process stuff which we've been conditioned to believe is what technology is. It is simply not that anymore.

16:08Dave PengelleyIt's funny, you talk about the pro shop moment, and how the GM—it's just sort of, the chaos is expected. That expected level of chaos is okay. I've definitely spoken to prospects and clients as well where they just justify the chaos. They justify the time expenditure: ‘Oh, it's not that bad. It's only 10 minutes here and five minutes there, or 15 minutes there.’ But you add that up over days, weeks, months, and you go, ‘That's hundreds of hours a year. That's like half a day a week. You couldn't do something better with half a day a week?’ When you do the math and all that, they just sort of justify it and go, ‘No, it's okay. It's not the bigger problem.’

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Why businesses accept the chaos

16:47Dave PengelleyI don't know what you're seeing with talking to prospects and things, but there just seems to be that fear of change: ‘This is scary. It's just easier to do it the way we've always done it.’ Are you seeing that?

17:01Clive MayhewYeah, absolutely. We're absolutely at that position right now. I blame mainstream media for this, to be honest. You listen to ABC, you listen to any of the major media channels: all of them are putting this huge amount of fear into consumers and into businesses. It's like, ‘AI is going to take away everything.’ Well, what you just said in terms of AI replacing 20, 30, 25% of your own personal time to make that more productive—why are we not hearing that on the radio? Why are we not actually hearing about all the successes that are going on?

17:42Clive MayhewFor the first time ever, as an entrepreneur, as a founder, you do not need a tech team.

17:42Dave PengelleyYeah.

17:49Clive MayhewYou do not need your CTO. You do not need that SaaS provider. You do not need the hosting provider. You don't need a company to build the website for you. You don't need anybody to do your creative content anymore. AI can literally do all of that.

18:00Clive MayhewI want to just share with you: I don't know if you've started to use some of these personal AI agents yet, Dave, but I've literally replaced what I would classify as being my chief operating officer, my chief of staff—whatever those big titles are—with these agents. They literally are doing so much for me personally with my portfolio, but also in my business.

18:30Clive MayhewEverybody should start to use—go from ChatGPT, pay $200, become a ChatGPT Pro, get the dot, which is their AI assistant, and give it tasks to do. It will be the best $200 you've ever spent. I will say that from my experience of doing—

18:56Dave PengelleyWe'll loop back and hear a bit more about your experience with the dot, because I'm keen to discuss that. But just on engaging with customers and the time spent and so on and so forth: you mentioned it started with GOLF.AI, and you had that sort of brainwave moment through GOLF.AI. Now you've written a book because you see these principles going more broadly than that. You mentioned before we started the call there's some other things you're now looking to [unclear in source captions] from a business and client point of view, off the back of that, right?

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Vertical AI beyond golf

19:26Clive MayhewYeah, definitely. My core business is GOLF.AI. It's a global business. We're serving golf courses around the world. We're serving tens of thousands of golfers around the world, and so we're investing in that. That is very early in golf because it's quite a conservative industry.

19:41Clive MayhewBut, like I say, about six months ago I started to focus and apply my learnings in the golf sector, which is a very vertical—across what I believe is the future of AI, all these verticals. Whether you're in hospitality, whether you're, let's say, an electrician—an electrician is a good vertical, right? I think in Australia the number's like 17% of [unclear in source captions] are builders or electricians. So it's a huge sector. Something like 170,000 small businesses are electricians or builders.

20:14Clive MayhewThey are what I call a wonderful vertical AI, because they literally go to a business, they'll go to an office or they'll go to a house, they'll do a job, they'll track their time. Then how do they invoice that customer? How do they collect the money? Over time they've built these systems, and there's some SaaS providers who cater just for that sector.

20:40Clive MayhewWell, now an electrician can go and build an AI agent that does all that for them: does the administration of not only their time management, the administration of actually collecting the money, even collecting the money up front directly from themselves with the customer they're going through, based on the telephone name, telephone number and the name. They can do all of that.

21:03Clive MayhewSo we're starting to see a lot of what I call—I call it ‘changing the game’, right, because obviously I come from the golf background. But it's ‘use what you already know to build what comes next.’

21:17Speaker unclearYeah.

21:17Clive MayhewThat's what I'm trying to educate people in my book to do. Use what you already know to build what comes next, and you personally build this yourself. You don't go out and buy an off-the-shelf software product. You don't subscribe to a service. You build it yourself. You actually, in your own business, know more about your workflow than anybody else. No one knows the workflow of your electrical business better than yourself.

21:49Clive MayhewYou can talk to an AI engine and just tell the engine what you're doing and what you want to be done, and see what comes back. This is the magic of this technology. For the first time, it actually opens up a new way of doing things that we never thought were possible for small businesses, for people who want to do things for themselves, and they want to be able to own that and control it.

22:12Clive MayhewI came up with this terminology. I call it the ‘AI selfie era’. Just like we did with photography, where we all take photos—mobile phones changed that world—now with the AI engines we actually have the capability to build our own AI apps and websites and services for our businesses. Now, they may not be scalable to hundreds of thousands of customers, but most businesses aren't scalable to hundreds of thousands of customers. They're looking after 200 customers, maybe less, right? And they are certainly scalable to those sorts of numbers. So, yeah, we're going into the AI selfie era, vertical AI, and taking ownership and building yourself.

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Build your own or buy a service?

23:00Dave PengelleySo does that mean software as a service is dead? People don't need to buy apps anymore? What I mean is, what does that mean for golf? Does that mean golf courses should not buy GOLF.AI? They should just go and Claude Code their own golf services?

23:13Dave PengelleyI'm just curious, because there's a spectrum, right? I highly advocate for people innovating, inventing and building stuff, but there's also the timeline. Maybe it's a scale question. You mentioned that scale point of view, where you want that team that's actually building that thing because it's critical to your business, and you want it managed and looked after and operational, right? It's finding that balance.

23:34Clive MayhewYeah. I honestly think there's a role for both. Take what you just said about the scale. I think that's a good example. The electrician who typically has subscribed to those services in the past and never really understood how to use them—

23:45Dave PengelleyYeah.

23:48Clive MayhewHe or she could do this for themselves. There's the opportunity there to become the AI selfie provider, and they'll keep it small because they just want to do the stuff they want to do. Now take my industry, where you have golf courses and you have employed people. Typically, a golf course has about 20 people. It has food and beverage. It has the maintenance of the golf course. It has the actual membership and all of that. You have people there who are what I would call managers of those areas, and they don't manage the whole entity in itself.

24:22Clive MayhewThey possibly—and I still think it's a possibility—could build it themselves. But as a team of 20 people, they may find it a little bit harder because they have to go across functions and across workflows. So using a GOLF.AI that does that for many golf courses may make sense and be sustainable. But I'm still saying that in the next two to five years, I honestly believe the opportunity for vertical AI owned by the people who own the workflow, building it themselves, will be the biggest part of this market. It won't be the SaaS providers. It won't be the tech providers into those markets. It'll be the workflow owners, which will be the individual, predominantly the owners of those businesses.

25:11Dave PengelleyAnd that is part of the challenge for anyone who's building software. I've launched a software application. You've launched a software application. It's: what is the moat? What is our product differentiator? What are we doing that is too hard for regular people to go and vibe-code and self-create? What is that differentiation value that you provide? For you, you're saying it's that complexity, that level of multiple different business units within an organization and things like that.

25:35Dave PengelleySo, yeah, I think there's room for a bit of everything at the moment. But I love what you're saying around just experimenting and getting in there and doing stuff. Twelve months ago, when I started doing some consulting, I did what everyone else did. I went and bought a Squarespace website, because that's how you built websites 12 months ago. Then three months later, as Claude Code and Google Antigravity and all these sorts of things started really rolling along, I was like, ‘That's a sunk cost, because I bought that a year up front, and I don't care, because I can publish my own better website cheaper somewhere else and actually have the thing I want, not that thing.’ People have to understand that sunk-cost fallacy. I think there's going to be a little bit of that transition as well, right?

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What changes for CRMs and SaaS?

26:15Clive MayhewYeah, I think so. Again, take CRM systems as a great example. People have invested a lot of time and a lot of their own energy, and financially, to run those services. I don't think they will ever go away. They will be the database engine which you integrate into for the front end to be able to use that data in ways you've never used it before. But they become not so much the front end, which they've been trying to own for a long time. They become the back-end database, and the logic and the actual workflow is developed at the front end by the people actually doing it and using it.

26:50Clive MayhewTheir services will become commoditized. They'll become database services, and then we'll link into them, and we'll add all the value at the front end, by the employees or by the owners of those businesses. So, yeah, we're going to go through a huge transition. I was just amazed when they called it the ‘SaaS apocalypse’.

27:18Speaker unclearYeah.

27:18Clive MayhewWhen they literally took off 50% market valuations in America of some of the largest SaaS providers, some of the largest CRM providers, I thought it was a huge overreaction at the time. Now some of it's come back, but as this technology is developing, and as we're seeing these agents become more and more action-oriented, workflow- and outcomes-driven, I actually think those devaluations are less than what they're going to be. I can't see those companies playing in this space at the level that they used to play in the space. So I think it's going to be a really interesting change over the next few years.

27:58Dave PengelleyEven my former employer, Salesforce, they've recently been making some waves because they've gone with their whole [product name unclear in source captions], or they've rebranded [product name unclear in source captions] already to jump on that bandwagon. But they're now looking at charging people for connecting their agents to their login. You're already paying for a seat, but they seem to think that the data load of these agents talking through that login licence is going to be more extreme. So they're like, ‘It's okay if a human—you paid for a human seat. You didn't pay for a robot seat. We're going to charge you extra to connect a robot through your human seat.’

28:21Dave PengelleyWhich is a whole new place. We always used to say, ‘You're going to have an API, but to a back-end system like an SAP or something, give that its own user, because then you can restrict the login and the profile, and just the SAP connection is locked in and its own thing, and you turn off the UI. No UI for that particular user.’ That used to be a security thing. But now, if I'm a sales rep or a customer service rep or a customer service manager and I want to connect my agent to interrogate my business, that should just be through my login. But they're like, ‘No, we want to charge extra money.’

28:54Dave PengelleySo, yeah, I think you're right. Things like tools like MCP and all this sort of stuff, other than the computer use and letting the agents use the applications, is the future. Having that secured, managed data store is a great service. It's a wild world we're going into for the next couple of years, right?

29:13Clive MayhewIt really is. When I hear that about Salesforce, and I hear that they changed the pricing to try to compensate for the agents versus the humans, it's just a reflection on how quickly this stuff is changing. They really don't know, right? They don't know what value they can provide, where their value is now. When they were from start to finish, they had the value chain. Those customers that are start to finish, they will want to use their services. There's no question. So I don't think they'll disappear. It's just which bits of those services you really use, and what is the value proposition for those parts of the services? I think nobody knows right now.

29:50Clive MayhewEveryone's playing around with different pricing models. Everyone's playing around with how this will end up and who gets what. But I honestly think, for the entrepreneurs and the users of technology, there's never been a better time to build. There's never been a better time to play with this technology. What I find interesting: everyone who I talk to about these AI agents and starts using them, they get so excited.

30:18Clive MayhewThey get excited, for the first time probably for most of the time they've been running this business, about understanding their workflows again. They've almost given up on changing workflows because it was so hard. Now they go, ‘So I can do this, this and this by just saying this to an agent, and I can actually do this, and if I get that right, therefore this will happen.’ They get this huge amount of excitement in every industry, in anything they're doing, because for the first time it's waking them up to: they are the technologists themselves. They understand the workflows, and suddenly they've got tools where they can actually do stuff with outcomes. It's very, very exciting to be a part of.

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From Netscape to GOLF.AI

31:02Dave PengelleyIt's a huge thing. Maybe that's a good lead-in to how you went from what you were doing before into GOLF.AI. Were you always in technology and AI? What was your bridge from your previous life into this new AI-focused life?

31:16Clive MayhewYeah. I was originally the first employee for Netscape in Asia.

31:22Dave PengelleyWow.

31:29Clive MayhewLet's go back a while, Dave. [Laughter]

31:29Dave PengelleyI was an original Netscape user. I'm old enough, don't worry.

31:36Clive MayhewOkay, good. A lot of your audience won't remember who they actually are, but the original internet company. They developed the whole of the standards which we use today: how the internet works, TCP/IP, JavaScript. All of that was invented by these engineers at Netscape and came through the browser to begin with, back in '96, believe it or not.

31:59Dave PengelleyYeah. Before Internet Explorer, before Chrome, there was Netscape. That was the GOAT.

32:05Clive MayhewYep. At the time I was there, I was the managing director for Asia. I had that job from '96 to '99. It was interesting, that era. I saw the beginning of the internet, right? I was there right at the beginning: how corporates got so excited about that, what they were doing, what they were trying to do with the internet right at the beginning.

32:26Clive MayhewAfter that, I became a bit of an investor in some of my own startups. I'd done reasonably well. I retired and started to just play golf. I was very lucky: I had a tech background, retired early, played a lot of golf. I played 85 of the top 100 golf courses in the world. I still have 15 to play. Then, literally, [unclear in source captions] came. I was stuck in my house, playing a bit of golf in the back garden.

32:55Clive MayhewI just started to dabble with some golf tech at the time. Got to know Greg Norman pretty well. I did a metaverse for LIV Golf as a project for Greg. That evolved into this Scotsman's rules—the Scotsman with the rules. As soon as I saw that, I thought, “Wow, this is going to be really interesting.” Very bored, just playing golf, so I came back and said, “I'm going to create a new startup.” I did that about three years ago. I'd been an investor the previous 10 years and I'd been chair and running some of these companies which I'd invested in, in the tech space. For me, it's like doing the full circle back.

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Founding an AI company at 60

33:36Clive MayhewI'll say to our older audience: there's no better time to build your business than right now with AI. I'm a great example of that. I founded GOLF.AI at 60 years old. I'm 63 now and I'm having the time of my life building in this world. I love it because all these kids are there; they think everyone has to be young to be able to enjoy this technology. This technology is suited to the older person who doesn't need to know that and can just use their experiences to build this stuff. I'm a great believer in experience and workflows, and that's what's going to fundamentally change businesses.

34:16Dave PengelleyYeah, I agree. I think being able to apply industry knowledge and expertise—you've just seen stuff. You know how businesses work. You know how things work. You have that to leverage, because the AI is the average of everyone's knowledge, but doesn't have your specific knowledge. It doesn't have your specific expertise.

34:35Dave PengelleyWhen you augment this generic AI with your specific knowledge, that's where the superpowers happen. If you just say, “Make me the best golf app,” you'll probably get something that's rubbish. But when you say, “Hey, I want the golf app that does this and this and this, and covers these, and thinks about this, and does that,” then you start getting good results, right?

34:53Clive MayhewYeah. I think now, with the technology which has personalised memory, personalised intent, it goes even better, even deeper. A lot of that, I don't think, will go across, as you say, the horizontal tools. They'll never take a little bit of learning in my vertical and my workflow and apply that to everything else because it just doesn't fit. The example of the electrician is a great example. That electrician understands his area of business, where he works, what he does there, who his customers are, so much better than anyone else will ever understand. Now apply that. Use AI to build your own memory, build your own intent, so you can do that more efficiently. That's where this technology becomes incredibly interesting. I call it vertical AI.

35:38Clive MayhewThe book's called Vertical AI. It's all about being very, very focused around the workflows and the vertical elements of how you do things.

35:48Dave PengelleyBrilliant. That's really interesting and exciting, writing a book. Congratulations. Well done. That's a huge thing in itself, let alone the success of GOLF.AI. Let's get back to the dot. You're obviously a ChatGPT, OpenAI user, and you've been using a dot. Have you given your dot a name? Have you personalised it?

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Living with personal AI agents

36:02Clive MayhewYep, I have. Clivey.

36:10Dave PengelleyClivey?

36:11Clive MayhewClivey. That's my nickname. People call me Clivey. All my mates call me Clivey, so my dot is called Clivey.

36:18Clive MayhewI have a great story. I introduced someone else to a dot. I think she calls it Val. She's an entrepreneur herself and she's become the most obsessed dot person I've ever known. She now does everything. She was shopping the other day and telling me how she's got these best dresses for 25% off, and it goes on and on. It was so funny.

36:42Clive MayhewI said to her, “Why, when you talk to the dot, are you so nice?” Because she says things like, “Oh, thank you so much. That was so helpful. That's so nice of you to do that.” I said, “Do you realise you don't need to say that?” She said, “But I actually really like it. Do you know that the dot actually calls me now by my name, Chris? And dot also knows your name, Clive, because I told dot about you.” So she says, “How's Clive today?” And I'm going, “What is going on?”

37:14Clive MayhewShe's gone to a level where it has literally become her best friend. When you start to think about that, I'm just using it for efficiency of my time. She's actually using it as a real helper in many different parts of her life. That's where this technology is going to go. It's going to be everything for everything, doing everything. We are just at the absolute beginning, like day one of this journey.

37:47Clive MayhewWhen you think about that and how we react to voice and how we react to conversations—we react to conversations like this over Zoom, but conversation like this to a piece of software will be a big part of our lives.

37:55Dave PengelleyFor sure. For sure.

38:03Speaker unclearYeah.

38:04Dave PengelleyYeah. Any regulars on the show, watchers of the show, would know I often go for walks and I'll go into voice mode with ChatGPT, before the dot, and just talk through ideas and soundboard, and get it to extend and challenge me. I think your brain operates differently when you're using voice. These dots are amazing technology. I'm also deep in with the “Grock bots” [name unclear in source captions] as well.

38:20Dave PengelleyYou speak of verticals: the “Grock bots” [name unclear in source captions] have the advantage that you can have multiple of them. You can really target them for specific vertical project stuff, or I've got horizontal ones, like a communications expert. Any of my fleet refer copy questions back to the marketing person that covers across all of them.

38:37Dave PengelleyI've got multiple email accounts, like everyone else, and I had it hooked up to my business and podcast-oriented ones. The other day I realised I should really hook this up to my personal one. I think that's useful because you've got all your personal errands that you've got to make time for. It proactively went, “Just so you know, I see this email from the school about your daughter's field trip, and you've got to get there 15 minutes earlier because [unclear in source captions] changed the time to make sure they can catch the buses. Make sure you fill out the permission form.”

39:10Dave PengelleyIt just proactively searched through and said, “Your house insurance—you've got to make sure you renew that. That's due next week.” This is amazing. It proactively goes and finds these, ignores all the spam, but actually found the real nuggets amongst all the emails to go, “These look personally relevant and important.” It does that on the business side, but I just hooked up the personal one yesterday and got all these fresh alerts. That's pretty wild.

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Does email disappear or get a new interface?

39:33Clive MayhewYeah. When I hear these stories, I say, “Why are we using email? What's going to happen to email?” Seriously, how are we going to replace that form of communication when this form of communication summarises it so well? Maybe it doesn't change. The messaging and the mass information which we get given and sent to us just gets filtered down, and email continues for another hundred years.

39:57Clive MayhewI keep thinking about that. When instant messaging came along, when it started, I thought that was the end of email. It never was, right? It just became a more personalised, smaller group of people who you WhatsApped with. Now this technology is going to take it to another level. All the time these technology waves come in, and I don't think anything disappears. It just makes it better and better. [Unclear in source captions] I mean, some of your listeners today, if they're dot users: dot had an outage today.

40:35Dave Pengelley[Unclear in source captions] I didn't notice it. I must have been using it around the outage because it didn't [unclear in source captions].

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What happens when your AI goes down?

40:41Clive MayhewI think there'll be a big article on it around the world tomorrow. Now, that's interesting. Already at this stage in my life, I'm pretty dependent upon dot, right? [Laughter] When dot's site just disappears, you go, “Okay, what's going to happen if dot really disappears?” You can say the same about email or WhatsApp or whatever, but the point is that we're going to be in this world where we become incredibly dependent upon the technology very quickly. Then it's going to be, “Okay, what is our backup to all of this?”

41:20Clive MayhewI think we still live in a world today where we do have a backup outside of the tech, but possibly going forward we may not, with all this stuff: more robots, more automation, everything being done for us. Half of me is incredibly excited, and half of me is like, “I'm glad I'm as old as I am.” [Laughter]

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Price rises, overnight work and micro-apps

41:44Dave PengelleyArguably, the worst case isn't that it goes away. It's that they quadruple the price and it becomes uneconomical. You've built all your business processes around this tool, and all of a sudden they go, “Actually, we need to jack the prices up on this.” All of a sudden you go, “That doesn't make economic sense for me anymore. I'd better go hire those people back.”

42:00Dave PengelleyIt's a strange time, but the dot at the moment is basically unlimited. I've been building video games with it. I go to bed and go, “Big sprint tonight: fix this, change that, implement that, add this new feature, do this, do this. I'll see you in the morning.” At 8:00 in the morning it goes, “Here you go, Dave. Here's the latest repo. Pull it down, do some playtesting.” It's just phenomenal, the productivity you can get when you just hand big jobs to these tools. It's great.

42:22Clive MayhewYeah. Like you say, I think the building of anything is now down to an individual, that you can build anything. A great example: your passion is building these video games, but you can build anything. Anyone can build anything, and it's pretty much zero cost. It really is zero cost. That changes everything in the tech space. It is a very, very exciting place to be at the moment.

42:46Dave PengelleyYeah. Just micro-apps. I shared the story on one of the episodes a few weeks ago where I had to get up and present some stuff at church. In five minutes, [unclear in source captions] little cue cards, with little flick-out cards that I could just flick through with one thumb on my phone, in minutes. I didn't have to go looking for free trials and which service did this, and sign up to anything. I just said, “Grock Bob [name unclear in source captions], build me this thing.” And it just, bang, built it.

43:07Speaker unclearAll right. I was literally—

43:07Clive MayhewYou were just thinking about that that morning, right?

43:12Dave PengelleyYeah, I was going through all the things I had to say in order and what order to do them in. I'm like, “I need an app for this. Build me the app.” Bang.

43:18Clive MayhewWow. That's amazing. Yeah, it's a wonderful application.

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The book and where to find Clive

43:22Dave PengelleyYep. Brilliant. Thank you so much for joining me, Clive. I really appreciate your time, taking time to tell us all about what you're doing and dive deep into businesses and how you see AI being this lever—this lever, lever, I don't know, [unclear in source captions]—for business productivity. You said you're launching the book next week. Where can people find more about you, find more about the book? GOLF.AI?

43:45Clive MayhewYep. Next week, Vertical AI will be on pre-release on Amazon. I think it's pre-release next week. It's officially, I think, available from the middle of November. It's $35. I mean, it's nothing.

43:53Clive MayhewThe message and the thing behind the book is Changing the Game, obviously because of the golf background. There's a big parallel in the book to golf, but golf is just for you to understand, and it's so simple as an industry. The key I want to leave people is this concept: we are moving now to this world where you use what you already know to build what comes next for you, for your business, for your friends or your community, your church, your family. That's the opportunity of this. That's the era we're going into, the AI selfie era. It's going to be whatever you make it, but you have to take ownership yourself.

44:47Clive MayhewIt's not about using people like Dave or myself anymore. You've got to take ownership of this yourself and just have fun playing with this technology, because you will love it. I'll tell you right now: everybody I know, no one who uses this doesn't love this technology.

45:03Dave PengelleyBrilliant. Great way to wrap things up. Thank you so much, Clive. If you like these kinds of stories, make sure you like and subscribe, follow the channel, drop a comment in there. If you want to follow up with Clive, we will put all the links to him and how to access him and his book in the description down there. You know where that is.

45:23Dave PengelleyWe've got the Operator Stories that we publish on Mondays. We've got our live panel show where we discuss things in real time on Wednesdays, and the Field Notes are on Fridays. Lots of content for different people, depending on what you're looking to consume and learn. All the time, we're here not to hype things, but just to give you these real stories around AI in the real world and how it's having real impacts for people. Thank you for joining me today, Clive. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you to everyone for watching this, and we'll see you next time.

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