Ep. 363 — Loren Horsager: The AI Fear You Have Is the Wrong One

6 min read

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Episode Summary

Your team is already using AI. You just don’t know which tools, what data got pasted in, or which licensing agreement they clicked through this morning. Meanwhile your competitors are figuring this out and your LinkedIn feed is full of consultants telling you to dive in headfirst. I brought Loren Horsager back on the show because he has been working in AI since the 90s, and he is one of the few people I trust to cut through the noise for middle market owners. We got into the two real fears (your competitors are using this and you’re not, and people will misuse these tools internally), why protecting your data is the number one conversation no AI consultant is having with you, and how to think about datasets by role so your marketing team isn’t training the public model on your financials. We dug into bots paired with team members for knowledge capture, the M&A implications when you can value a company by what AI unlocks inside it, and why the right move is to pause, build a small implementation team, and start with one or two use cases instead of letting your whole company freelance into ChatGPT this afternoon. Loren also walks through his ModelMind AI platform and why private, segmented data sets are the foundation everything else rides on.

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## Top 10 Takeaways
  1. The fear isn’t sci-fi AI taking over. It’s that your competitors are using this and you’re not.
  2. Your data is the asset. If your AI consultant didn’t lead with protecting it, find a new one.
  3. Pasting strategy decks into public ChatGPT is the same as posting them publicly. The data trains the model.
  4. Tell your team: no AI yet. Then build a small team to figure out where to apply it first.
  5. Most “ChatGPT apps” in the app store aren’t ChatGPT. You have no idea what’s getting tracked or stored.
  6. Segment datasets by role so marketing content doesn’t leak into financial queries, and vice versa.
  7. Don’t use AI to gut your team. Use it to accelerate the team you already have.
  8. Pair every Milestone 21 — Leadership Development with a bot. The bot captures knowledge that walks out the door when employees leave.
  9. Without a target valuation and a plan, you won’t know where to apply AI. The goal frames the use case.
  10. To be intentional with AI is the same as being intentional anywhere else: execute a plan with purpose.

Sound Bites

“Your competitors are doing this if you’re not, and they’re going to figure out a way to leverage this. And the second fear is, yes, with any technology, there’s going to be massive amounts of positive, but massive amounts of negative. And that’s due to people, not due to the software.” (@TBD) — Loren Horsager

“If that’s not the number one thing out of any AI consultant’s mouth, that you have a problem.” (@TBD) — Loren Horsager

“You didn’t install ChatGPT, you installed somebody else’s app. You have zero understanding of what the licensing or what’s getting recorded, what’s getting tracked.” (@TBD) — Loren Horsager

“My goal is not to eliminate your team. My goal is, how do we partner with your team so that they’re doing more of the productive work and they’re providing guidance to the AI?” (@TBD) — Loren Horsager

“If your job is to go get information and then bring it back to someone else so that someone else can make a decision, you’re kind of effed.” (@TBD) — Ryan Tansom

About This Episode

Loren Horsager is the founder and CEO of Mobile Composer, where he has built mobile apps and custom software interfaces for over two decades, and the founder of ModelMind AI, a platform built specifically for middle market owners who want to put AI to work without handing their proprietary data to the public model. Loren has been working in AI since the 90s, when he taught himself to code while running a commodities trading desk and automated the firm’s accounting and fund management overnight. This is his second time on the show. The first was Episode 40, almost seven years ago, when he and Ryan got into how SaaS and product offerings reshape the multiple a privately held company can command. This conversation is the practical operator version of that one, recorded in 2023 as the AI wave hit the mainstream.

Resources Mentioned

  • ModelMind AI — Loren’s platform for private, segmented AI data sets for middle market companies. — modelmind.ai
  • Mobile Composer — Loren’s software development firm.
  • Loren Horsager on LinkedIn — Where Loren takes use case conversations directly.
  • ModelMind AI Training Program — 10–15 hour AI implementation training launching August 1, 2023, for the team you put on the AI rollout. Intentional Growth listeners get 10% off.
  • Episode 40 with Loren Horsager — Their first conversation, on SaaS, software, and the multiple.
  • Bold and Abundance by Peter Diamandis — The mindset framing Ryan and Loren both built friendship around.
  • Peter Diamandis Abundance360 Conference — Where Sal Khan was interviewed on the future of education with AI.
  • Sal Khan / Khan Academy — Referenced for AI-driven education and learning.
  • Jordan Peterson interview with Brian Roemmele — Recommended for the psychological angle on AI.
  • Tom Bilyeu / Impact Theory Podcast — Referenced for interviews on AI.
  • Mo Gawdat — Solve for Happy — Former Google X exec sounding alarms on AI.
  • Marc Andreessen on Joe Rogan — Referenced for tech industry perspective.
  • Microsoft Research — Referenced for paper on prompt engineering by asking the same question multiple ways and synthesizing.
  • Azure OpenAI — The enterprise-grade environment Loren uses for security and audit compliance.
  • Web Pilot ChatGPT Plug-in — One workaround for using public-facing data in queries.
  • Tommy Mello (A1 Garage Service) — Referenced for scaling home services from two trucks to $170M.

Connections

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