"Sprinkle some AI on it is not an AI strategy."
Anne Cantera on why most AI projects fail before they start.

Anne Cantera is an AI consultant and conversation designer who left enterprise to start Elementyl Intelligence, a consultancy built for underserved, minority owned, female owned, veteran owned, and disability owned businesses. Her work sits at the intersection of omnimodal design, conversational AI, and what she calls trust design.

In this conversation she unpacks emotional debt and context debt, why "set it and forget it" is the most expensive assumption in AI right now, the gap between a skilled AI operator and a slop generator, and why governance belongs on day one instead of after the incident.

WHAT WE COVER

• Why bolting AI onto an existing offering keeps failing at the enterprise level
• Emotional debt: how one bad interaction erases two years of good ones
• The interview technique Anne uses to make AI extract her thinking instead of replace it
• The one dollar truck, and who is on the hook when a chatbot goes off the rails
• Designing the right interface for the moment: voice, chat, or neither

BROUGHT TO YOU BY ZAPTIME
Anne says the real wins are in repetitive, low risk work, and that if you watch the seconds and the minutes, the hours take care of themselves. That is the whole idea behind Zaptime, AI time and workforce management that gives those hours back to your team.
https://zaptime.ai

🔗 LINKS
https://linktr.ee/buildwithmm

#AIStrategy #ConversationalAI #AIAgents #SmallBusinessAI #TrustDesign

Your customers stopped searching where you're advertising. They're asking ChatGPT which plumber to call, watching YouTube on their living room TV, and comparing you to two competitors in a conversation you're not part of. David Wilson has a name for what comes next: Search Everything Optimization.

David Wilson, EVP of Digital Marketing at Boston agency Zozimus, joins the Next Build Podcast to explain why the twenty-year Google playbook is running out of road, and what to do about it. He walks through the practical first moves: checking what AI actually knows about your business, rewriting the About Us page nobody has touched since launch, fixing your Google Business Profile, and deciding whether to publish the pricing and competitor comparisons AI needs to recommend you. He also gets into why "cited and mentioned" is the new ranking, why the most valuable traffic is quietly leaving Google, and which marketing jobs are about to disappear. If you are a business owner who feels behind on this, his answer is refreshingly small: pick one thing, hook AI up to your analytics, and start asking it questions.

Brought to you by Zaptime: https://zaptime.ai

Zaptime is AI time intelligence for people whose hours are expensive. It tracks where your time actually goes, names your biggest weekly time sink, shows where AI can win those hours back, and turns billable time into a one-click invoice.

🔗 LINKS

https://linktr.ee/buildwithmm

After 20 years as a copywriter, Ange Dove joins Mason to talk about how ChatGPT upended her business and pushed her into a new role coaching professionals through career transitions and personal branding.

They cover how to get AI to write in your actual voice instead of generic "AI slop," the LinkedIn profile mistakes she sees constantly, and why repetition, not reach, is what makes you memorable online. A practical conversation for anyone rethinking their career, content, or brand in the AI era.

Everyone's racing to adopt AI. Almost nobody is asking the one question that determines whether it works or blows up in their face.

In this episode of the Next Build Podcast, Brian Beck, founder of Proxurve Solutions, an Indianapolis based cybersecurity and AI consulting firm helping small and medium businesses build AI strategies that don't fall apart. Brian breaks down why AI hasn't changed the fundamentals of cybersecurity, why "I want AI" is not a strategy, and what actually separates the businesses getting real value from AI from the ones burning budget and calling it innovation.

If you've ever wondered whether your organization is actually ready for AI, this conversation will tell you.

In this podcast, we explore the intersection of AI, SEO, business, and the future of digital growth from the perspective of real business owners and SEO professionals actively working in the industry. We dive into the strategies, experiments, wins, failures, and lessons that come from building businesses in an era being rapidly transformed by artificial intelligence and search evolution.

From AI automation and search engine changes to branding, content strategy, local SEO, and scaling online businesses, we break down what’s actually working and where the industry is headed next. The conversations are raw, practical, and focused on real-world implementation rather than theory.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, marketer, agency owner, or someone fascinated by how AI is reshaping business and the internet, this podcast delivers meaningful insights, actionable ideas, and honest discussions about the technologies changing the world in real time.