Interview with Silicon Slopes' Meat & Potatoes podcast

Full Transcript:

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• Welcome to the Meat and Potatoes podcast. Today we're joined by Afu Taumoepeau, who is the CEO and Founder of OP Media Inc. How are you?
•  I'm good. That's pretty good. Taumoepeau, you did great. There you go. 
• Well, you coached me a little bit. Appreciate you taking the time here. Interested in learning more about you, your background, and obviously the origin story of OP Media Inc. 
• So just set the table with a little bit of your background, where this idea came from and how you guys have started building the product and the company.
• Sure, yeah, so I was, I'm first generation American Tongan, born and raised here in Utah, in the avenues (by the state capitol building). And I, my career background is I've been in operations for a long time, you know, whether you're frontline, I was frontline and all the way up through the channels into management. I've been there for 30 years and it was my background is, I've always tried to find the best way to do something. It didn't matter what industry. I was in healthcare. And I was there with a company, Sutter Health. It's a Northern California company and healthcare system. And my work there was to go and try and find the most efficient way to do things. I worked a lot with lean groups and lean healthcare was a big thing during that time. And again, it was just trying to find the best way to do the work that needed to be done. And if you think about it, you know, with regard to businesses in the United States and the SBA, there are 30 million businesses. The question is how well do they function? How well do they operate?
  And it doesn't matter how small or how big you are. That's the big question. If you're functioning really well operationally, you're going do really well. And if you're not, you don't.  This is something that I believe will resonate with a lot of operators who are out there. It doesn't matter what role you play. But I worked a lot of times with different areas, different departments where, for example, billing. I would go into billing and I'd ask, where's your knowledge base? What are you using to run your operation? And you'd go and you'd look at, they'd pull out the document and it'd be a hundred pages of Visio diagrams. And you'd look at that bottom corner and you see that version and that version is two years old. So then the question is well how are we even functioning as an operation here? And you may have or may not have heard of that term tribal knowledge. You have those you have those tenured staff members who are really good at what they do and so you know that tribal knowledge means that they have like 10 or 12 people that are around them, could be 10 or 12 people, that know exactly how to do it the way that they do it. And no documentation, you know, they just know how to do it.
  And so part of it is you'll see that, as we discussed this, we have an AI component to our technology. And so OP Media Inc is our company and we have two flagship products. The first one is OP System and then the other product is AiBL and AIBL. And it stands for Authentic Intelligence™ Beyond Legacy™. And legacy is that system that we work through. And if you really think about it, back in the day, it used to be hard copy documents, right? That's what we worked through. And you can imagine the filing cabinets and all of that, of the documents of our systems and how we need to do things. And then as computers came into it, all you've really done is you've taken that, those mountain of documents, moved it into a computer. And then, and then of course, putting them into PDF repositories, and now you can go and access them, but they're still in documents, and that's a big issue. And so even in 2024, and as we're talking about AI and how we move into AI, the two products that we have, Op System is a technology that what we've done is we've removed the friction between the subject matter experts and the processes that they have, the best practices, those workarounds that they've developed over time. And instead of giving them the tool, a Microsoft Office to go and create a Word document or a Visio diagram, we are presenting and showing to them that they can actually, without any coding or programming knowledge, create software platforms. Dynamic and digital, and they can deploy them and publish these into URLs, and put those URLs behind QR codes, and whoever needs it can go and use it, and they're just clicking through. But then it goes back again to the idea that if I knew something I wanted you to know how to do it I would put it in a document, lay it all out, expect you to do it. But whether you did it or not I wouldn't know until it was actually done. And so that outcome is really what we're looking for but that's the data. But the question is beyond that, where did you generate that data? Because data came from a process, a set of steps that you were supposed to do. And so that's something that's really, really important. But yeah, I'm really, really excited today to be here and share more about what we're doing.
  
  Oh, for sure, thank you. Man, there's a billion examples that come to mind. 
• That's right. 
• One for whatever reason is like there's big farmers and they have hired hands. And their biggest thing in their existence is like the turnover of hired hands. 
• That's right. 
• Because they've been farming for 20, 30 years and they're keeping up on what their grandpa did but also like what everyone else is doing. Sure. But there are there's a decent amount of math and calculations it's not just here's how you hit the drill. 
• Oh absolutely yeah yeah yeah. And it's all verbal. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And it's days and days of like explaining and then you did it wrong. Yeah. And a lot of hired hands are like well I don't want to do it like that. 
• But if they would have had what you're describing, yeah, less friction, less friction. 
• Yep, yep. Again, and you know, a lot of those frontline staff, those people who know how to do things really well, they don't know how to code, they don't know how to program. And so to remove again, that friction, and you might provide your We're in 2024, everyone has a phone. And so, if you might have put next to that piece of machinery that they have a QR code, then maybe they could just click on it and they would have the information that they need right there. They don't have to try and rely on the training that they were provided before, because that's how we've been doing it currently, or how we're doing it currently, and how we've been doing it. And it'll be that way until something changes. And I believe that our technology allows for that change.
  
  
  Yeah, it's a great idea. Because I assume we've all walked into a place, like it could be healthcare, right? Yeah. Because everyone is, my entire life, bitched and moaned about how healthcare doesn't work and it's broken. Yeah. But you walk into a hospital or a doctor's office, and they might not be the CEO, they might not even be upper middle man, they might not be paid that well, that's the most important person in the room.
  
  It is,  yeah, that's right. And I think a lot of times we tend to under appreciate that frontline person that's doing the work that they're doing. They've, again, been resilient, they've been creative about how they're supposed to do something. Of course, as managers, we provide the guidelines, right? The policies and procedures, but it's them who has to try to find the efficiencies within those policies and procedures that keep the work moving forward.
  And it's cool you mentioned healthcare because we are in the middle of pilots with the rural hospitals of Utah. We're working with three and we're seeing some really amazing opportunities there. And what's really exciting is we're seeing,
  you know, we have different people from different backgrounds. You know, you have a nurse who's in her mid 30s, who's building out an op, and she has been around technology for a long time. You know, we've built our technology in a way for her to know and understand it really well. And she learned it within a matter of three minutes. And she has a quick reference guide that she provides to the other nurses. And she's printed that out, put it together in a laminated product that they put at the desk, hard copy. And she wanted to know if she could use our technology to put that 39-page document in an op. And then now they can click through and go to the areas that they wanna go to, put it behind a QR code and now you have that and it's supposed to that document. Think about all the time she took to put that together. It was a really fun moment to hear her talk about the hours that it took. She took about a week to put all of that together, put it in this laminated document, put it at every nurse's station, and then now it's a QR code. The other thing that she talks about that's really exciting for her is the ability to go in real time and make the adjustment. If there is an update that needs to be in there, she can go make the update in the system, and all the nurses need to do once she publishes is either refresh or go into it new and the change is there. In the old way of doing it for her, she has to go and change the Word document, reprint, laminate it all over again, take the parts that don't work, throw them away, put a new one, a lot of waste. So deficiency there in time and cost is huge and that's just one off. And right now there are different groups within the hospital that are looking at things like revenue cycle management. You have people that are in billing, they're the ones who put in the CPT codes and things like that. Billing is a very tough cookie because you have to deal not only with how to do it internally, but you have to do it in a way that it works for the insurance companies. And so, working with the revenue cycle management groups and seeing how they might build out ops, and again, with the idea that we want this done right the first time when they go through a process, and they're hoping that they see that kind of a result. And I'm confident because it's not us trying to help them make this stuff better, it's them, it's their knowledge, their understanding, and they're just putting it in a way that it could be dynamic.
  And the other exciting thing about that is the data. To be able to know, as the leader of the nurses, where are they struggling in the system, where they didn't know about how to get that information, except for to interview the nurses and it's in a static document to move it over into an op now she's able to then now start tracking where they're going and to see what they're doing correctly or incorrectly and try to expand the op even further so that they can work within the system. And it's really exciting. The other thing to consider is the EHR itself. You have data now where the nurses go to specific areas and they're having struggles. So that data may be really important to the EHR itself. And we're really, really excited again for these opportunities. I think we're opening up a new wave of data that wasn't ever tracked before by being able to take processes and draw them out of documents and putting them into ops.
  
  Yeah, it all seems pretty magical and from a business perspective there's ROI sprinkled all over the place.
  
  
  Yeah, that's right.
  
  
  And outside of, because like plugging some electrode into the brain to the tools that you guys have built, it's a lot quicker now too.
  
  Yeah, well, and to that point, we also are running some pilots with local county groups and we're excited about the counties that we're working with right now. Maybe next time I come in, I can talk about what they're doing. But the focus there is emergency management. And the question that is being asked, and we hope and I feel very strongly that we can answer it, is can these county groups and the cities deal with emergencies in a more proactive way? Can we track data in real time? And can we track data in the steps that we take to deal with emergencies so that we can be better prepared for future emergencies. And it's really exciting to see those operators in emergency management.
  
  You know, they're using our technology, but it's that, again, I go back to that resilience and that creativity that they have about the thing that they know. Because we don't know anything about that, but hopefully we can provide a tool that helps them to move the things that they do in a much more dynamic, than I, you know, the other thing is a dynamic and scalable way. And then to know what your frontline staff is doing in real time, really huge. Yeah. And you know I come from my parents are Tongan. I'm from Tongan heritage. In 2022 there was an underground volcano that went off. Yeah. And you know everyone has all this
  information and resource about emergency preparedness and emergency recovery and all that. What was troubling and at the same time eye opening for a lot of people is that when they went back and audited and reviewed how they did in the emergency, a lot of people didn't get the recovery assistance that they were looking for. And that's a big deal. And had you had something like an op, of course, you know, at that time, you had the communications were cut, but now you have things like, you know, Starlink, Elon Musk, and being able to provide that. You know, you can have that connectivity, you know, because everything that we do is tied to the internet. Yeah. And that brings my other, you know, something else that I feel is really important that we all have to understand and that is, you know, five billion people go into the internet every day in the world. Yeah. And only 24 million people know how to build into it. Yeah. That's staggering. And then if you think about big tech, you know, there's a that's even a smaller number, my minute number from that 24 million. Yeah. And to be able to take the knowledge of the people who know how to do things and having a tool that allows them to build it in a dynamic way and put it out into the internet. Whether it's closed off in your organization or company, my vision and my hope is that our technology will be on every computer. And then you'll have people who have recipes that they want people to, that they wanna share. And they might go to the data and say, well, you forgot this step or something, I don't know. Yeah. But that's a vision, so.
  
  I love it. And for whatever reason, mine's being drawn to the war over in Ukraine, because the Ukrainians are adapting and duct tape and bailing wire with electronic gaming and drones and all of that. And for them to communicate up and down the lines of, this is working, this is working.
  
  Yeah, or to be able to see it as they're working through it, right? The flow of process and rather than a checklist that you have to go through at the end of what you're doing, to see a process and see that flow that way is really exciting. We actually were one of eight companies part of the Catalyst Accelerator. They have, they're sponsored and they're advocated by the DOD, Digital Transformation Office. Last year is when we were part of it. And we were really, really excited about being part of it. Again, one of eight, you know, and Hill Air Force Base is involved. And we got to meet them. But we were going in there and our message was stop trying to make PDFs better. Yeah. Let's take the process, draw it out, put it into an op, and let's see what we get from the process itself. Yeah, well they're looking, they're looking. So AiBL, which bringing that up, AiBL is our AI piece, and we're really excited about that. That sits at the core of Op System, and what it's doing is it's learning from two areas, well, multiple areas, but the two main ones are the knowledge base that's documented, and then you have the knowledge base that's not yet documented because it's still in someone's head. And so our system is such that allows for all of that to, for everyone to come into the ecosystem. And if you're a subject matter expert, we're training our AI able to custom LLM. We're training it to learn from you as a subject matter expert, putting in information around a process and how it works. And then also as you publish it, that's that information of the end user. And as the AI learns that, and as we know, I think everyone understands whether you're an AI guru or not, that AI is only as good as the data that it gets. So to imagine a large ecosystem of people that are working around processes to get the information that comes from the subject matter expert and then also the data that comes from those who are using the ops, then now you have something from which it can build. And who's put together the EHR quick reference guide, we know that over time, Abel will be able to understand what she's doing or what she's done, and then start to try those to you to find those efficiencies. And my vision is that you'll be able to prompt AiBL at that point, and AiBL itself will start building ops that'll be more efficient. So, yeah, exciting stuff.
  
  Yeah, because I've got a lot of friends that are like, AI is gonna just solve and do everything.
  
  That's right.
  
  And then others that are worried, but a cool part, at least what I'm hearing is there's the human and AI element, right?
  
  Yes, the human in the loop. And then, yeah, and that's something that people talk about all the time. Well, how do you bring people and humans into the loop of AI? Well, you start with them who knows and understand the process and have them put their knowledge and understanding of a process into the system. Again, no coding or programming on their part, but then you have others that are end users that are clicking through and making sure they're getting the content information that they need. And then over time, AiBLl, right there in the middle, will be able to say, hey, so-and-so is not being efficient in what they're doing. They're missing some steps here and there. Maybe it's time to talk to them. You know, that's where I see AI being what you want it to be.
  
  Yeah, because even like genuinely proper lazy people still want to be efficient. 
• Yes. 
• That's right. But like if you're a hard charger you really really want to be efficient.
• Yes. And if you can compound all of these things. Right. And get that additional help. Let's say you're middle of the road and you want to go home early. And while all your work's done and you get to go home and go to the kids baseball game.
  
  That's right, that's right.
  
  And all things being equal, it was mission accomplished.
  
  Well, and that's the other thing too, is you have a lot of baby boomers that are leaving the workforce. You have the Gen Z, Gen X is still there, we're coming up. We're the ones who are taking the baton from them. There's a lot of things that they're doing that a lot of these younger people just are not tolerant of. They're not willing to stay the 60 hours that you or I or our parents were doing before. They wanna work 40 hours if that's what I gotta do, that's great, but if you can get 30 hours, even better. And then there's the part about a process. If they were under the tutelage of something, someone who's jimmy rigging process and saying, you know, you got to do this and if you do this, take this wire and do it this way, you know, and stuff and they're like, I don't want to do that. Yeah, I just need you to tell me how to do it from step one to 10. And then track how I do it. And I'll be good on by the way, still pay me the same as what my, my, my parents or grandparents were making. So we hope to address that too in our technology and as we continue to move forward. I have a very straightforward vision. Right now we're using tools like Microsoft Office, Visio, Lucidchart, things like that. And I'm not discounting them in any way. All I'm saying is that at this point, why not have Op System right next to those products on your computer? And if you're as a subject matter expert, again, we've removed all the friction between you and building out a process instead of going to a Word document or something. And so to me, that's exciting. And I go back to what I said, 30 million businesses in the United States. I will bet that every single one of them has a document that has a process in it that someone's supposed to do it that way in a PDF repository or something. And why not put it in an OP. 
• Yeah, yeah, I love it. Because I'm picturing, I want to learn how to do this. I want to learn how to do it better, but I don't want to go through the work.
•  But you're willing and able, again, less friction. You're like, oh, OK. And that's the exciting part of the pilots. A lot of the feedback that we're getting and the use cases that we're getting, again, the use cases aren't driven by us. We're just providing the tool. We're saying, you give us the use case. And in a lot of these cases, or in a lot of these situations, they're more than happy to do it that way. And again, it goes back to what I said, what is the alternative? The alternative is to go and put it in a document. You don't know how to code, you don't know how to program, here's the alternative, put it in this way. But a lot of the feedback that we're getting is it's really easy to use, and they're really, really surprised by it. And that's what we want. We want to be able to scale that. And I'm really, really excited about it.
• 
  I love it. Yeah, it's gotta be rewarding to give people a tool and see what they do with it. 
• Oh, you don't know. Yeah, I was working, I was with my staff and we were, you know, as we were working through these pilots, you know, when we worked with the nurse and we said, here's how you do it. And she said, oh, okay, I got it. And then she's already starting to like build it out. And you're just like, oh, well, there we go. I'll just stand back. You can imagine how excited we were to see that. But you know, we also have, you know, like an older demographic, there's a nurse there who's getting ready to retire at the end of the year. Her concern is she has so much knowledge. How do I leave behind what I know and feel good about, about leaving? You know, she's also someone who's been there. You know, it's a rural hospital, she's been there for years. 
• You know, the farming, you know, like, I've always found that farmers are very resilient and very creative people, 
• but I find that people in these rural areas, they've had to do, wear a lot of different hats, and they're very resilient and very creative people. And to see her, you know, it was always like, I remember before we handed it over to her, we were like concerned because we didn't know how much technology, is this too much technology for her? And man, you'd be surprised at how much she's flying with putting that information into an app. And really, really exciting stuff. 
• Yeah, very cool. Love hearing the story. Love that it makes sense to me, right? Sure. We were sitting down before and I was like, alright, let's explain this. Yeah, right, right. I just see it being applied in pretty much everything and anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, congrats to you and your team. Thank you so much, Afu, for joining us and well, congrats to you and your team. Thank you so much, Afu, for joining us and best of luck in the future. It'll be fun to watch. I appreciate it.
  

Thank you.