DAWID NAUDE | from Pathfindr

This is a chat with with Dawid Naude Founder and CEO of Pathfindr. I've been tinkering with AI tools myself, so I was eager to dive into Dawid’s insights on how this transformative technology is reshaping businesses, investing, and our daily lives.

Growing up in South Africa, he was handed a family computer in the mid-90s with a golden ticket: his mother’s permission to break it and fix it. That freedom sparked a lifelong passion for technology, leading him from web development to founding Pathfindr 18 months ago. His mission? To help businesses harness AI for efficiency, innovation, and growth.

So, what exactly is AI, and why is it causing such a stir? Unlike older AI systems that excelled at narrow tasks—like Google Maps rerouting your drive—modern generative AI, powered by large language models like ChatGPT, is a jack-of-all-trades. It’s not perfect, but it can handle a vast array of tasks with surprising competence, from answering questions to generating images.

Dawid emphasized that AI is less about productivity and more about intelligence, acting like a versatile assistant who can tackle almost anything you throw at it, often at 80-85% effectiveness. It’s not about replacing humans but amplifying what we can achieve. One of Dawid’s most practical tips: download ChatGPT, switch to voice mode, and have a conversation. Just say, “This is who I am, this is what I do—how can you help me?” It’s like chatting with an infinitely patient tutor.

Pathfindr’s work with businesses, governments, and not-for-profits further illustrates AI’s versatility. Initially focused on custom AI solutions, Dawid’s team pivoted to leveraging off-the-shelf tools like ChatGPT after seeing a small real estate company outperform larger corporates. They created property listings, translated tenant handbooks, and even produced CEO video replicas—all with minimal resources. This led Pathfindr to focus on training leadership teams to become top-tier AI users, fostering a culture of innovation that sticks. Dawid’s example of an olive oil company using ChatGPT to count buds in their groves showed how even niche industries can experiment with AI to uncover new efficiencies.

Dawid views AI as a tool to enhance, not replace, human potential. I left our conversation convinced that AI is, as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it, “wildly underhyped.” Its impact on investing, business, and society is only beginning to unfold. If you’re intrigued, join Dawid and me at the Australian Shareholders Association Gold Coast Forum in September, where we’ll dive deeper into AI’s implications for investors. In the meantime, take Dawid’s advice: have a chat with AI. It might just change how you see the world.

TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS AFTER THIS BRIEF MESSAGE

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Phil: G Day. And welcome back to Shares for Beginners. I'm Phil Muscatello. Is there a looming megatrennd that investors are ignoring? What is AI and how will it affect your investing decisions? Joining me today to discuss artificial intelligence with his actual intelligence is the founder and CEO of Pathfindr, David Naude. G'day, David.

David Naude: Hey Phil, how's it going?

Phil: Very well, thank you. David is a trailblazer in harnessing artificial intelligence to transform business. Through Pathfindr, he empowers organisationss across industries to integrate AI for operational efficiency, innovation and growth. David, uh, tell us your origin story. How did you come to this point in your life?

David Naude: Yeah, great. So I've always been pretty much at the bridge between technology and the business, so love the tech itself, but also love seeing it in the hands of business people that are using it. And so I've always been playing with these things ever since I was a young age, particularly with web development. And then I think the biggest gift my mother ever gave me was when we got a family computer in kind of the mid-90s. She said, this is your computer, you can play with it, go your hardest, do whatever you want and if you break it, we'll get it fixed. Which was very different to the message all my friends got. You know, Uh, a computer in the mid-90s, particularly in South Africa, was over $2,000 back then and like I did break it all the time, pulled it apart, broke it, broke hardware, software, everything. But whilst my friends were kind, weren't encouraged to do that, I was. And it meant that I just had great curiosity and experimentation and tinkering with these things. And that's led to, particularly when it comes to newer technologies, being an early adopter and playing with these things and have had many different types of things that I've done through my career. I'HAD a couple of very big kind leaps and tangents and most recently was starting my own business with Pathfindr about 18 months ago that has really exploded and Grown as we help companies adopt, um, everything that's happening with AI.

Phil: So what was the motivation for starting Pathfindr?

David Naude: Yeah, so I worked at a startup uh, about 10 years ago that had a couple of years of explosive growth. Absolutely loved it, loved the journey of doubling in size every year and just kind of the, it was just a great growth time and still magic uh, connections from those days. And then we got acquired by a massive organization and I was there for about seven years and I felt a calling to get back to startup world and also thought that at the times, right, to actually dive in and take some risk and try start my own business. Particularly because I had an idea, a bit of a vision of around AI that it needs to be addressed very differently to any other technology. It a very different technology. And anybody who's in AI knows that when the bug bites, it bites really, really deep. I just wanted that to be my full time job, just helping companies with AI and paving the way and figuring this out and that was kind of the dive in. And also with starting a company like Pathfindr, it's not like starting a restaurant or starting a factory. It'it's software. And so the capital outlay is basically nothing. And it's just about being able to get enough conversations going with customers so you can start figuring out where are people at, what's the unmet need which was significant. Just overwhelm was basically the key thing that the feedback that we got and then constantly uh, kind of shaping and iterating how we can help them. Well simultaneously we've seen AI just explode in how capable it is in the last um, year as well. Just kind of doubling in its capability every few months. So that's been the journey.

Phil: So David, can you give us your potted summary of what is artificial intelligence actually and what's the role that it's beginning to play in all our lives?

David Naude: Artificial intelligence has been around for a long time, but one of the things that people get wrong when they say, well AI has been around forever. Uh, they're not actually accurate when they talk about large language models. So when we talk about AI today, what's really captured the imagination and the attention of everybody is tools like Chatpt that you just ask a question, it does a very good job of answering it. We've never had a

00:05:00

David Naude: technology in AI like that before. Any other AI tools that we've had, they're very good at a very narrow thing. Think of Google Maps. So if you're adjusting where you are going, it is kind of rerouting and doing all that for you, that is kind of AI, that is doing that. But you couldn not get that same Google Maps to all of a sudden generate an image for you or help you solve a complex maths problem. And that's really what the current form of AI does. Uh, generative AI or uh, specifically the large language model is the big one. And that's very recent. The research paper was only like 2016, 2017 that described it. But if I talk about today's AI, what it is, is it something that is very good at doing almost anything up to some kind of decent degree of effectiveness. So like think of it more like a person. And that's why I think the eye is really important in the AI artificial intelligence. There's a thousand things that you've never done before that you probably could do if you were asked. So even my role, like running an AI company, you're probably going to do enough to keep it going day to day. It's not going to be great, it's not going to be perfect, but it's not just going to be like a fail every day. Can't do it. And I think that's one of the key things with AI is how well does it handle general things and how well does it do that can uh, of do like 80, 85% of a vague task that you give it and it's able to at least help you somewhere along the way.

Phil: When I was researching you and some of your content on YouTube, I think you mentioned in one video that you really suggest that people just download chat GPT, put it into voice mode and have a talk to it and say this is who I am, this is what I do, how can you help me? Tell me a bit more about that.

David Naude: Yeah, it sounds so obvious, but it only dawned on us relatively recently that if AI is an intelligence tool, and I think that's one of the things that people are getting wrong, they're treating it like a productivity tool. I think it's big wins as an intelligence tool, uh, helping your leadership team make better decisions, helping us all learn new things. This is not a productivity feature, it's an intelligence feature. But because the voice mode is so good, it's not just like voice to text and text to voice, it's been customized and fine tuned to be as if you're having a conversation so you can interrupt it, you can cut it off, there's very little lag, the responses are quite short. If it's an intelligence tool and you can chat to it really easily, Surely the first thing you'd be able to do with AI is get it to help you understand what AI is. And it does a remarkable job of that. And so one of the best hours you could use to learn AI is to download, chat EPT, put it in voice mode, put your AirPods in, go for a walk on the beach and just say I know nothing about AI. Can you help me understand it? And if you don't understand it, be honest, like I don't get it. Help me understand. Give me an analogy. No, I need to make it more practical and I find these conversations absolutely fascinating when I have it with it. I'm looking forward to when it's really well integrated into like cars with CarPlay and all of that. So that if you've got a long drive you can have this conversation. At the moment you've actually got to uh, pull out your phone and flip it to voice mode whilst youe re driving. Which of course not great to be able to have that conversation, but it'really really powerful.

Phil: So what are some of the misconceptions about AI that you come across from people?

David Naude: I think the first one is that using a trains the model and that it's completely unsecure. There is truth to it if youe not deliberate in how you approach AI. So if you are re using a free version of pretty much any technology tool, it might be financially free but you are paying for it with your data. So think of Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn. If you put something on Facebook about you thinking of taking up gluten free cooking, you're going to see ads for the next two months about gluten free products that can sell you. So you're giving up your data so that advertisers can advertise to you and that's how they make their money. Uh, AI is really no difference. So if it's free, you are the product, your data is the product. And so that's the first one is that yes, if it's free you probably need to double check what's going on there. And even with a tool like Chat ep, even on the free one, you can opt out of training the model and now you're not contributing your data to be trained. But of course in all the commercial tiers of all these products like chatd Team and the rest, there's no such thing. It's opted out. It's highly secure. That's the first ones. The first one is it can be incredibly secure. The second misconception, and this is uh, Come across like a bit controversial is the impact to the environment. And it's not so much a misconception, but its perspective is incredibly important. Now there is an impact to the environment. Absolutely.

Phil: This is about the data centreers and the amount of energy that they consume. M to know, pump out all that. That's corre that GPU processing power.

David Naude: That's correct. Because

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David Naude: it's energy ultimately that does these things that whenever chachd gives a response, it's energy that's being used to do that. Most of the energy is used when the model is trained and so outside of your control. And so to get those great responses it had to go through a very complicated, highly energy consuming activity to get the model to the state that it's in. But your use of a tool like ChatPT every day is so small in terms of how much it contributes to any environmental footprint that there are 10,000 other ways that you can dramatically reduce it in other ways that would be far more effective. Even just boiling a kettle once is going to make up for most of your chat eptus for several days. And one zoom call or one Netflix show with their videos on is going to account for basically a week worth of highly intensive chat ept use. And so you think of being able to use these AI tools to actually reduce impact in so many other areas of you're not needing these meetings, you're not needing to travel. So I think just the perspective is really important. And the third one, and my favorite, is that it's primarily a productivity tool and I think that that's the wrong way to look at it. Just as how looking at the Internet is a more productive way to send messages to people faster instead of over maybe snail mail back in the day. And now you're going to send an email. Yes, doing what you do today faster is one aspect of it, but the bigger aspect is reimagining entirely what you do, using it for all sorts of new growth, new products, new experience. And so we see this much more as like a growth engine instead of uh, a cost saving or productivity engine.

Phil: Are uh, you confused about how to invest? Life Sherpa can ease the burden of having to decide for yourself. Head to lifeshara.com.au to find out more. Life Sherpa, uh, Australia's most affordable online financial advice. I was watching a video with ex Google CEO and Executive chairman Eric Schmidt about the advent of AI and he said that it's still wildly underhyped as general understanding is not yet fully appreciative of what is yet to be achieved? I mean give us the big picture. What's the blue sky that we're all looking at here?

David Naude: Wow. Te. Okay, I haven't listened to that one. So I have listened to some of his interviews before. But the reason why I smiled so much there as you said that because I say this all the time, I think it's a uh, it.

Phil: Wildly. Underhyped is a great phrase, isn't it?

David Naude: Yeah, it is. And that's exactly what I've been saying is that I actually think that AI is underhyped. I think that we can't comprehend how much it's going to change the world even in the short term for those who want to embrace this technology properly. Okay, so the big picture, first of all, it is impossible to forecast. So somebody who. I uh, don't like it when people or it doesn't mean anything to me when somebody has the term futurist in their title. I just think it's, it's really impossible to say what's coming up in the.

Phil: Future, but it a bit, it's a bit wanky, isn't it?

David Naude: It is 100%. And also like why think about the so far ahead in the future when there's already so much opportunity that's uncaptured in front of you immediately. And that's really where I like to play. And so the bigger picture long term is that I'm hoping that a lot of the work that we do today is reduced by about 80% but then we replace that, we fill that extra time with incredibly productive things. So one of the banks that we've worked with, I gave the example of the Pareto principle. 80% of the outcomes comes from 20% to the effort. And it'a common kind of heuristic, the 8020 rule. And they said it'actually just uh, a heuristic. We did a study of uh, our bankers recently. We have found that about 78% of their time was. They found that it didn't energize them and 22% of their time were energy creating activities. And I thought that was such a great way to approach it. What gives people energy in their day versus what doesn not t. When we looked at the 78% of energy draining activities, almost all of it could be completely eliminated with AI but then when we looked at the 22% of energy gaining activities, it couldn't be eliminated by AI at all. And if AI played a role it would make those things better and more energy gaining but it wouldn't Replace them. And most of those things were around customer connections, interactions, relationships, like things with your teameah. It was really, really fascinating that approach. The other thing with Big Picture is that education is something that I think it's going to have just this incredible, incredible, incredible impact. If you think of the kid,

00:15:00

David Naude: many listeners will relate to being the kid in the classroom that could pay attention for the first minute and then you were on another planet for the next five minutes and when you came back the train had left and you couldn't actually catch up again and catch up with the rest of the class. And so you just spend the rest of the class daydreaming and then cramming the night before the exam and all of that. AI is an infinitely patient tutor and mentor and that's read every single book in the world. And I think that we shouldn't try compete with that. Now if you think of a teacher, they're a lot more than somebody who just gives somebody knowledge. They're also a mentor, they're a nurturer, uh, they're helping with many other things that kids are going through. And so I just see there's this amazing role that we could say that look, I'm not going to try compete with AI being a brilliant knowledge transfer specialist, but I'm going to help them with other life challenges or maybe feeling like they're not at the same level as the other kids, encouragement and all of that type of thing. And you can notice it yourself if you used chat GPTT on voice mode and you have that conversation walking on the beach. Pick a topic that you don't really know much about. It might be something that's like all over the news. Let's take Trump with his tariffs and you don't even know what the term tariff means, but you see it everywhere. You'll be blown away how quickly you'll understand tariff. Even if you were re a 10 year old, you could say look, uh, I'm 10, explain it like I'm 10 and it's going to give you these incredible analogies. Ah, you can ask so many other questions. It's also a nice little hack of using these tools. If you type in Eli10, explain it like I'm 10, Eli10 it'll go and translate a whole topic to you in that kind of language. So you can say Eli 15, Eli 20 basically dumbs things down so it's far more relatable. Now imagine what that does across the entire world when any kid in a remote part of say South Africa where I'M from originally can have a tool like this that teaches them in their own language, at their own pace, at a level that they can understand 24 hours a day, basically for free. Who knows how far we can go with that and what that means for society. I just think it's incredible.

Phil: Yeah. Just on a personal note, I've used AI quite a bit now for the last year and it's really helped my productivity. First of all, you mentioned encouragement. It's so encouraging, isn't it? And just an example, I've had a very bad media kit about the podcast for a long time. And then with interacting with artificial intelligence and being able to upload PDFs and download and suggestions about templates in Canva, I've actually used AI to create a media kit that I'm actually a lot happier about. Then I can go out into the real world using this media kit. So much more inspired. And I feel that's the kind of thing that you're trying to inspire as well, on many different levels, across many different organizations.

David Naude: Absolutely. And what you've done there, you haven't done something that you were going to do, but faster. You've done something you probably wouldn't have done in the first place. And that's what I get really excited about. So it's somebody who's running a small business and doesn't have a, uh, graphic designer or a video editor. Never would have gotten one, but now they can actually get it done. You don't have a website for your small cafe. You can get it done. You want to have some kind of nice little automation that when a customer signs up as a listener, you want to automatically send them a nice little booklet with some other cool things. And this is actually a little workflow that needs to be configured in a workflow tool. You've got no idea how to do this. Maybe you do the beginning bit yourself, but you get an error and now you're stuck. And you don't continue just being able to put a screenshot into a tool like ChatPT to help get through that error. That's a way I use it all the time. It's absolutely remarkable how it can help with those things. And it just means that we get to do things that are really interesting and that we couldn't do before.

Phil: May I take a moment to interrupt normal programming? This episode was recorded before I had the promo code for the Australian Shareholders Association Queensland Investor Summit to be held at the Langham hotel, Gold Coast, September 21 to 24. You'll receive a $150 discount by simply using the promo code QLDSummit. When booking links are in the episode description, Come along and say hi, I'm the emce. Keeping this rough and rowdy crowd in order. That's a two day summit pass for $95, normally 745. Thank you for your attention. Back to the show. Just give us a quick overview of what Pathfindr tries to achieve for business governments and not for profit organisations that you deal with.

David Naude: Yeah, so it's really changed over the last 18 months. When we first started Pathfindr, we're very much a business that would go into a company and create an AI strategy and then build custom AI solutions. We did this all over the place, but then we realized that off the shelf tools like

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David Naude: Chat GPT as well as others were actually absolutely incredible by themselves as well. And we stumbled upon that somewhat by accident. We one company asked us to just give them training. They were a smallish company of about 40 people, a real estate company and what they did between the training and a check in session, they'd taken these off the shelf tools further than we'd seen any of the big corporates do with all their custom work in their large wallets. They'd created like GPTs and chat GPT that would automatically create property listings for them. They refreshed all of their tenant handbooks into like seven different languages. They made them look brilliant using a uh, tool called Gamma to give great images. They'd created uh, a video replica of their CEO and she would give property announcements in different languages of what's happening in the real estate market every month. And so we're just kind of blown away of what they were able to do with these tools. And we realized that this concept of a general AI assistant was incredibly important, that every company would need a tool like ChatPT just as much as they need the Internet to give everybody an assistant. And so what we started doing initially was giving training on these things as well as the other work that we did. But we found that the training, it was great, was incredibly well received for the day, but it just wasn't sticky. People would fall back into their old ways as well as they would miss all of the new things that would come out. What we also realized is that we noticed that if a leadership team were power users of AI, uh, not a strategy like some PowerPoint, they were users of AI. The amount of AI that was deployed and adopted and their progress was in a completely different league to those where they paid some consulting firm a Fortune to create them a PowerPoint on how to get started with AI across their business. And so we figured out we need to come up with a way of helping a company go from overwhelmed to really productive and reimagined with AI in a duration that's long enough that it sticks as well as be able to embrace all of the new advancements. And so what we do is we'll first train a leadership team to become the top 1% of AI users in the world. I think this is incredibly important. I think it's imagine if your leadership team was the top 1% of AI, uh, users in the world. I mean, what would that do for your business? It would d be absolutely remarkable. The next thing is working with a group of champions, which is just a heuristic, but typically 5 to 10% of the organisation is a good benchmark where you test different tools, you test different accuracy, different results, different scenarios. With that cohort, it's like an incubator group and their results become the decisions for rolling out AI across the rest of the organization. And so we run an accelerator process that helps across that. What we really encourage organizations to always do is start with off the shelf tools. You're going to get a very long way. Also going to learn a long way. You're going to learn a lot about the technology itself with these off the shelf tools. And then after that you can decide what you roll out. Just adopt like a tool like Chat GPT or do you need to build something from your learnings and to make it come to life with an example. Met with somebody who makes olive oil and they uh, were showing them all the things to do with the chatptt and their mind was completely blown. And then I said what could we do in the olive groves? I said well first let's see if ChatPTT can recognize Olive tree and it could do that very well. Then I asked, well what are some of the things that you do in the olive grove? Or we need to count how many buds there are so that we can forecast yield. Great, let's try counting it. It did that very well with the uh, 03 model. Took like two and a half minutes and came back and said there's 30 to 35 that are blossoming at the moment and there's five that are open but I can't see a few of them. So this is rough estimate and it was accurate. Now is the future of that olive oil company, people walking through the olive grove, taking photos which chatpt and counting definitely not. But now they know that the technology can do it. They can figure out how to get it a drone to take photos and then drop it into a folder that automatically assesses it. And they can figure out how to get the accuracy up from maybe 85% accurate to 95% through prompting and fine tuning. But they discovered that the technology was possible just by playing with it that way. And so we see these off the shelf tools as the absolute gateway into creating an AI strategy. And you can see why the leadership team was in a warehouse taking a photo of some product and seeing can it identify this product, can it identify the condition of the product and can it help me decide what to do with a tool like ChatPT? They can figure out how can I now turn this into an automated workflow? Because I know that the tech can do it.

Phil: That's incredible. And really this is, it's an indicative of what the tsunami is going to be sweeping through

00:25:00

Phil: every business, every industry, every sector. It's really AI is sex agnostic, isn't it? It's going to be affecting everything. And I just don't think people. It's like we were saying before that it is under hyped. It seems to be one of the most hyped areas at the moment. But as we both agree it's under hyped.

David Naude: I completely agree. And it also challenges your thinking. So we like the term reimagine. You should reimagine generally how you work. And uh, I think a really relevant example is think of marketing. So at the moment, so you have language models like chat. GPT has GPT4.0. It's a language model, large language model trained on text. It does other things as well but text is the main thing. Google have a video model called VO3viewsful video that was released about uh, a month or two ago and it is a massive improvement on what was previously available. Now the reason why Google's one is uh, so powerful is because think of their training dataset. They have all of YouTube as a training datase set. Now that's a pretty good training data set for a video model. But the videos that you do generate in it they are absolutely mind blowing at the moment. It does these eight second clips and they are brilliant. But let's say you don't want to have any of those clips at all ever in your videos because you're very proud of your production process or anything like that. You can still use it in an incredible way for brainstorming, campaign design, things like that. So think if your first marketing meeting when you want to have and figure out what your campaign is going to be for the next quarter instead of some kind of unproductive meeting as most meetings are, we're just talking what if you said okay at the next marketing meeting I want you to bring each of you to bring your top five eight second videos that demonstrate what you think the next campaign should be. And all it requires is you basically working with Google Gemini with VO3 and just prompting, prompting, prompting. Eventually you're going to come up with a few and then the first 10 minutes of the meeting is each person pitching the top five concepts and then all of a sudden you going to go wow, these are the three that we really like. Lets run with those. Imagine how different your workflows and how your work could be. So we think that it is tricky. People do need to kind of break out of how they are thinking instead of just taking I do this today. I am going to replace creating a video manually with creating it automatically. You need to reimagine. It is not quite like that. You have to think of it in different ways. And I'JUST imagine that across absolutely everything.

Phil: Ditch the spreadsheets. Share site is Investopedia's top tracker for DIY investors. Invest smarter, not harder. Grab four months free on an annual premium plan at sharesight.com sharesforbeginners okay, so we're talking today because we're both going to be at the Australian Shareholders Association Gold Coast Forum coming up in September. There's going to be a promo code which is available and a discount available. So you can come and meet myself and David at the, at this conference. So what are you sharing with investors about AI at this particular conference? What's it going to mean for the future of investing from your point of view?

David Naude: So the angles that I'm getting asked are quite different. So one is how can I use ar, uh to help me with investing which has been some of my work with the Australian Shareholders association date has been as simple as that. So it's been how could you take a retail investor that maybe has retired not particular good with tech? How could they leverage AI? I mean it sounds so terrifying for somebody who's not good with tech all of a sudden being told use AI to look at your investment portfolio. And there are very simple things like you might want to always endeavor in the next year you're going to get good at reading annual reports and announcements and analyzing these things a lot deeper. But you're busy and also for many it's a pretty boring activity. Being able to drop in an annual report is pretty amazing within a tool like ChatPT or Claude anyone like it and get it to really understand what's happened to that annual report, but now compare it to another one of their competitors. So, uh, take a Callol's annual report and a waroolworth one, put it together over the last five years. Can you analyze these and note anything that you think I need to know about? And of course, the better you instruct it, what are you're looking for, the more powerful it's going to be. And as you start playing with that, it's incredibly powerful. So I think that AI in terms of investment, just in terms of understanding your investments, understanding what's happening, understanding what potential impact something could have, like the Trump tariffs. Again, even just asking it, hey, this is my portfolio. Can you do a whole lot of research and find what this might mean for the impact to my share portfolio? It'll be very, very, very good at that. The second thing I get asked about is AI investments, what should I be investing in? And this is a really fascinating area because if you think of AI as

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David Naude: like 85% good, most things, even if I asked AI now how should I invest, it's probably going to give me like an 85% good answer. But there's a massive opportunity. Anybody that can take AI from 85% to 95% and reduce the need for the person, the end user, uh, to become like an expert chat EPT user is a huge, huge, huge industry. There is so much there. And this is often what I encourage people to do is whatever area you know very, very well, either become the person who trains people in that area to use tools like ChatPTT or develop a product that specifically addresses this. So a real example on that is I have a friend who's an electrician. I showed him once how to use Chuc ept. A week later he showed me he'd really like use it on his mobile phone the whole week. He showed me how he'd take a photo of a warehouse with a customer and ask Chat GPT to mock up what a commercial air conditioner would look like after it us installed blue his client'minds and he used it just so well in so many other areas. And I said, tim, Nick, I think you need to stop being the electrician who uses chat GPT and start being the electrician who trains electricians how to use Chat GPT. That's going to be far more lucrative, far more scalable and you're going to make a Huge impact. And so that's one particular area that I think people should looking at investment in. The other area is where a customer has, or a potential investment has access to a data set that others don't. So for instance, and I'm not saying this is a good investment or a bad investment, I'm just using it as an example. Anybody in the world could use Chat EPT and create an AI travel planner. And you could create a nice little app if you typed into ChatPT right now, I want to go to France for the weekend. Can you help me come up with an itinerary? Anybo, any good developer in the world could create a very good app just using ChatPT or the tools behind it to do that. But a company like Qantas, if you're a Qantas frequent flyer, uh, they've probably got like a decade's worth of frequent flyer data about you, all the flights that you've been on, even potentially like the newsletter info, all the other kind of data sets about you. And think of something like a Qantas AI travel companion. And you have two apps. You have one that is brilliantly designed but doesn't have frequent fly information, and another that does. One is going to be quite a generic answer, but still impressive, but the other is going to be really specific. And so that's a really important thing to look at is do they have access to a data set that is very hard for others to get access to? And even if they're starting their AI journey late, it doesn't matter because they still have the most valuable part, which is a differentiator. This all comes to life very well. Using Google as an example. Now, many people criticized Google as kind of being asleep and late and all of that. And whether that's true or not, I mean, there's nuance in it. But I still think that Google long term, uh, will all be using Google Gemini at home instead of a tool like Chat GPT. Even though I really do like Chat GPT and Claude, I do like Gemini as well. But long term, just think of all the data that Google has about you. It knows your search history, knows your YouTube history, it knows your travel history just through your Google Maps information. It knows your ad behavior as well. What are the things you click on? And then it also has so many other tools like Google Flights and it has reviews and all of that through Maps. And so the ability for you to say, uh, I'm trying to plan a weekend in Sydney. Can you come up with an itinerary for me, Google should be able to create a 10 times better, thousand times better itinerary than Chat, EPT or any other tool out there for you by using your own data. It should also be able to make it really easy to book it because it has access to Google flights, which it now does. And so it'll be able to search flights and even present an offer to you in. Then you could potentially book it directly in there. And then it's got Google hotels which you could book in. And so it's like this whole ecosystem which just could come to life with AI. So that's the other thing that I would be looking at.

Phil: Okay, so with the ability for artificial intelligence to look uh, at and understand company, what do you think is going to be the impact on the financial services industry as a whole? I mean it's a real game changer, you know, from my point of view it is.

David Naude: So some people would be familiar with a, uh, tool called DeepSeq. And for those who aren't so DeepSeq is, uh, a very, very powerful ChatPTT competitor that came out of China. Very explosive kind of awareness and entry to the scene. When they released an update many months ago because it was more open source than chatippt, meaning you could see how it was thinking. You can see I was trained and all of these other things. But the fascinating story about that company,

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David Naude: Deepseek, is their major investor and company behind them. It was a, uh, quantitative investment fund. And they thought, well, if AI is were great at reading text. And that's often how. Well, it's how you find out things about investments is through a press release or an earnings call or an annual report or some kind of announcement. And so they thought if we can read that report sooner than anybody else, we will have a small window of like we've got a window of a couple of seconds before people start buying or selling. And if we can actually just win that by one second, we get all of the upside. And that was the genesis of that is like being able to read this report, uh, kind of instantly. And that was one of the key reasons behind DeepSeq or one of the early use cases. So with investing in general, I think it's really hard to say. I think one of the things is we've always had algorithmic trading and robo investment and things like that. I think it's just going to amplify incredibly. I don't know exactly what that means long term. I think the other thing for financial services in general, so outside of investments, is we're going to be able to get banks that are much smaller in terms of headcount than the major banks. So you could start a new bank and get to an equivalent level of service as one of those big banks in a very short amount of time. As long as of course you've got the balance sheet, you're do need the capital. Right. But you're not going toa have to stand up a dozen call centers and all of this infrastructure and 1000 systems to actually have a functioning bank. Because AI is a brilliant customer service rep. So being able to call in and ask for help, being able to get help, being able to stand up a beautiful user interface for people to the Internet, banking, mobile apps, things like that. So one thing that I really like and I think it's something we all want is more competition across the financial services sector from these challenger banks while still having a great experience. And you know, there's challenges with that. You also still need to have very, a very secure capital environment with these big banks. But I think just there might be some new innovation in financial services that we haven't seen in quite a long time thanks to this technology.

Phil: And you mentioned previously in the interview about Pathfindr being a capital light business to set up. And I think this uh, capital requirement and then the weight of capital required to start businesses is going to be much lower now with artificial intelligence as well.

David Naude: I agree. And often when people talk about job loss and concern of AI they are not recognizing that. I cann remember the stat but half of Australia is employed by businesses that have less than 10 staff or less than 20 staff. It massive. Those companies dont want less staff, they want more but they can't afford them. And they want to have a great video ad on LinkedIn but they can't afford it. And so they want to have a better website but they can't afford it. And then all of a sudden they get some um, letter from a competitor, now they've got to get a lawyer and it's just all of these burdens. And so I think that's one of the huge things that we'll see is that you're going to be able to do so many things that you could'in the past like your small businesses. This is going to be such an incredible engine. It's going to help them in so many ways and that's such a great thing. I really think, uh, starting Pathfindr it'really really hard and whilst AI certainly didn't make it easy, it meant that for certain things like getting a shareholders agreement and company information and all sorts of other things. It meant that AI played a critical role in getting that to a point. And then I took it to a lawyer and the lawyer pretty much said, yep, looks good. But I still kind of needed them to double check it. And I didn't trust AI all the way to the finish line. But I just look at what our legal fees would have been otherwise. Maybe it would have made it really challenging to do that. So that's why I think it's going to be just a brilliant enabler for small business.

Phil: Yeah, uh, try, um, I also uploading your blood results when you go to the doctor as well. It's pretty incredible, the level of detail. I mean, I trust my doctor and I love my doctor, but what was able to spit out for me was incredible because the doctors sort of say about certain readings, I don't need to worry about that. Could have it confirmed. Why you don't need to worry about it.

David Naude: Exactly.

Phil: So one final question before we leave. What is it about rugby with Kiwis and South Africans?

David Naude: Uh, I. It's just a religion. Like, it's so difficult to describe. Even though we, like, in Australia, people do like rugby. I mean, you're competing against airfil and league and it's just you're competing against all these codes in South Africa and in New Zealand. It is a religion. Like the whole mental

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David Naude: health of the country is largely predicated on how well the Springboks are doing in South Africa. And something that when you try to like, particularly when South Africa won the World cup and the World cup before that, like when it happens. I was speaking to one of my American friends and I was like, I just like, I don't think you know how much this means to ush. And she says, yeah, I see it, but I don't get it. It's just like, it's so, so part of your blood or from, from very early on in your life. And yeah, it is. It's something that really, really unites the country. And particularly in a company like country like South Africa, uh, has a long history, even as part of kind of progress and reconciliation. So, uh, yeah, I don't know what it is, but it's very deep.

Phil: David Naude, thank you very much for joining me today.

David Naude: Awesome. Thank you, Phil.

Phil: Thanks for listening to Shares for Beginners. You can find more at chesforbeginners.com. if you enjoy listening, please take a moment to rate or review in your podcast player or tell a friend who might want to learn more about investing for their future.

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