#645 Unlocking Growth with Smrts: AI Solutions for Small Business Owners

How can small business owners truly harness the power of AI without losing the human touch?

In this episode of Talking with the Experts, indie podcast host Rose Davidson speaks with Roberto Martinez, founder of Braven Agency and SMRTS, about how AI is reshaping the way small businesses grow. Roberto introduces us to Smrts, Braven’s proprietary AI software designed to give entrepreneurs the tools and insights they need to succeed in a digital-first world.

Smrts isn’t just another piece of software - it’s a business intelligence solution built for transformation. By combining AI-driven reports with expert digital marketer input, Smrts empowers business owners with clear, actionable steps that lead to growth. This hybrid “human-in-the-loop” model ensures strategies are not only efficient but also practical and high-quality.

Roberto shares his lived experience as a Google Digital Coach, creator of LA Optimized, and trainer for global leaders like Amazon, Google, and USC. He’s helped thousands of businesses unlock growth, and in this episode, he brings those lessons to you.

Listeners will learn why adapting to new technology is critical, how AI can integrate seamlessly with human expertise, and why affordable AI solutions like Smrts are game-changers for entrepreneurs.

If you’re a small business owner wondering how to adapt, stay competitive, and grow in today’s digital economy, this episode will give you the roadmap you’ve been waiting for.

🔗 CONNECT WITH ROBERTO

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robthemarketer/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/robmartinez55

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/robertombraven/

Website: https://bravenagency.com/

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Chapters

• 4:18 Fear of AI should focus on competitors adopting solutions faster rather than the technology itself, as other business owners using AI more effectively will gain competitive advantages.
• 6:51 AI has existed in various forms for years through CRMs, streaming services like YouTube that learn preferences, banking fraud prevention systems, and chatbots before recent advances like ChatGPT.
• 8:35 Operational workflow analysis following Henry Ford's assembly line approach helps identify repetitive tasks where AI can streamline processes, reducing 10-hour tasks to 5 hours in areas like branding and social media.
• 12:37 SMRTS was developed to scale business consulting by creating an AI agent that identifies entrepreneur pain points through assessments, with human review adding value to generate actionable reports.
• 17:21 Innovative avatar solutions help reserved employees communicate ideas through third-person digital representations, enabling introverts to participate more actively in company discussions.

Transcript

Intro | 00:00
Business insights on talking with the experts. Hosted by Rose Davidson. 

 Rose | 00:10
In this episode, Roberto Martinez introduces an upcoming AI solution designed to help business owners grasp the key insights they need to grow and stay competitive in today's evolving digital market. Now, Roberto, thank you so much for joining us. I'm so happy to be here. Roberto is... Who is looking to thrive in the digital age. And he's going to share some insights that he can bring to the table. He runs over 500 marketing and entrepreneurial workshops since 2017, helping businesses to grow. He leads Braven Agency, a digital marketing agency, and SMRTS, a business intelligence AI company, where they help businesses scale with cutting-edge solutions. As Google's Digital Coach for California says, He teaches small businesses how to leverage Google tech to fuel growth. My God, this is something I'm going to have to talk to you about later. He launched a program designed to help businesses sell online during the pandemic. 
 Plus, in 2024, he introduced Braven Creative Studios AI. Offering AI training for industry giants like Google, Amazon and EUSC. Roberto, it's such a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for joining me on Talking With The Experts. 

 Roberto | 01:24
Hey, Rose. Great being here. Great talking to you and your audience. Happy to be here. 

 Rose | 01:29
Wonderful. Tell me, how did you get into all this AI stuff after being with Google? 

 Roberto | 01:35
Well, that's probably the primary reason is that they kind of nurture you along and drop hints and cookie crumbs on what the latest technology is going to be. So back in 2019, 2018, we're hearing about these solutions and machine learning and What is machine learning? What is large language models? And I remember I was in Puerto Rico talking to folks about this and about how repetitive tasks can be outsourced to computers and how these repetitive tasks are going to revolutionize the way We. Live our lives. And at that point in time, Yeah, 2019, 2018, 2019, it was all around image recognition. 
 So a machine does a really good job viewing repetitive tasks. So anything that's a repetitive task and they could scan and review. 
 I mean, we as humans can upload a lot of content, either written content, image content. That machine learns. And so from that point on, we started talking about Well, that image looks like an apple. That image looks like a human being. That image looks like a beautiful sunset. And what does that mean? 
 Well, in practical terms, think about a radiologist and what he does, where does it hurt, where it's the potential break in the bone, or if you have some kind of tumor. That are viewing that x-ray or that MRI If you have hundreds, if not thousands or millions of images, you could train people the machine to identify that way faster and with a higher predictability than a human. And so that was what was happening in 2019. 
 And then fast forward to 2023, Post pandemic, we started realizing we need to get businesses online. How do we do that? How do we help them? How do we help them grow? 
 Well, you know, there's search and there's AI and how do we marry the two to make sure we I'm a human that can review the work that the AI tool is doing to provide maximum impact and growth and revenue and operational excellence. 

 Rose | 03:29
Yeah, it's really important too that we adopt this new technology. I mean, there are people that are absolutely terrified of it. I don't understand why. I think it's... It's helped me in numerous ways, you know, to write show notes for the podcast. And it's helped me. In other ways with the podcast, like, you know, if I've written an e-book, which I've just completed a 16-book series and launched them today, it's helped me to... To like Polish it up to make sure that it's, you know, It's good for human consumption and, you know, it's got all the right information and I haven't missed anything. 
 So I don't know what people are frightened of. I don't believe it's going to be taking jobs away from people. I think we still need that human connection. 

 Roberto | 04:18
Well, there's a couple of pieces that I love to pull on a couple of threads. I think you're right in that. You know, Dall-E have to fear is fear itself. And, There's... 
 So, There's definitely some... At least from my perspective, I was definitely afraid once I started seeing the true capability. I'm not a Luddite by any stretch of the imagination, but there was definitely fear. And I was talking to one of my... Mentors and she runs the program and she was telling me, well, Rob, it's not you who needs to be afraid of the AI. It's the people who are using the AI that you should be afraid of. It's other competitors, other business owners who are adopting the solution faster than you are as a business owner and then they're going to eat your lunch. 
 So it's not the AI that's going to take over the world, it's those other businesses. So on that piece that really made a lot of sense to me. 
 So I'm like, okay, well now this is like a race. It's a competition. I could get into it. I used to play sports. 
 So I started seeing it in that lens and that helped me quite a bit. On the second piece, at least in where I'm standing from the industries that I live in and play in the States, in the United States, you are seeing a lot of replacement happening right now, a lot of workforce growth. Brunchy. And kind of, Thank you. And, you know, some larger software tools, and we're talking Salesforce and Cisco, and these big players are shrinking the workforce because they can't replace their talent, but the And I don't like to focus too much on that, but I think there's going to be somewhat of a disruptive within the white collar industry. 
 You know, and that's what we're going to see in the next two to five years. But the place that I do agree with you on, Rose, and where I think we have a niche is exactly where you said the value add, the ability to take what the... AI2 has given us and add our own magic sauce, our own authenticity, connecting to that piece of knowledge and adding our own spin on it. It's what's going to make and break business owners and user of the AI tool. And so I agree, it's time for us to be a little bit more authentic. 

 Rose | 06:18
Yeah, I think so too. And, you know, we can... I think AI or some type of AI has been around for a long time. 
 I mean, you know, look at the CRMs that have been developed over the years. You know, they have some sort of, automation part to them. And I do believe that even though that, you know, chat GPT and all of those other platforms, engines now you know us or fairly new but I think AI has been with us for a fairly long time. We've just not really realized. 

 Roberto | 06:51
It. Yes. And any streaming service that you have, I'm a big junkie of YouTube. They're learning what you like. And you get stuck in a bubble in the feedback loop because I'm a big history junkie. I'm one of those guys that lives on YouTube and Roman history. And so it keeps feeding me videos on Roman history because it's learned my preferences differently. Same thing with banks. Banks have really been early adopters because of fraud prevention and understanding and realizing, hey, why are you depositing this check or trying to withdraw money at three o'clock at night? It's not very typical of you. 
 So anything that's repetitive, I mean, bots, AI bots have been with us. Chat bots have been with us forever. And so it's lived among us already. We just don't really realize it. 

 Rose | 07:38
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, like, you know, Podcast editing software. 
 You know, that's been around for a long time and that uses AI, whether we like to admit it or not. I mean, it's still, it reads the video or listens to the audio and then it picks out the transcript of it without, you know, you having to really lift a finger to do anything. 
 So, you know, it has really been around and I've been podcasting for five years and it's been around for that long that I know of Thanks. 

 Roberto | 08:08
Anyway. Congrats, Rose. That's impressive. Cool. 

 Rose | 08:12
I just recently won an award for podcast of the year. So, yeah, I'm really happy with. 

 Roberto | 08:19
That. You should be very proud of yourself. 
 Sometimes we have to stop and appreciate our wins. So congrats. 

 Rose | 08:26
Thank you. Yes, thank you for that. How can we find more affordable solutions and strategies for small business and medium business owners? 

 Roberto | 08:35
Yeah, so what I always tell folks is start with your pain point. We need to know what we're running away from. And we need to know what we're running towards. And those are the two polar pulls and pushes that we need to think through when it comes to business ownership. It's where does it hurt? And where do I succeed and when? And once you identify those two things, it could be what we call problem statements or how do I get over the horizon, what I see over the horizon. Then we create those problem statements and we can use the Gemini, the JetGPT's, the multimodal AI tools to really solve and answer some of those questions that we have and some of those opportunities that we might be missing out on. I was just yesterday playing with our team and we created these really cool songs. We created our own song for our agency and our AI tool. And it was such a great song. We started Rocky now. We spent like an hour just creating songs using AI and, in English and in Spanish and, you know, Emos music, hard rock, Ballard. It was so fun. 
 So it's just depending on where the pain point is or where the opportunity is, you use that problem statement And then you lean into AI to discover the solutions. Now there's a ton of them. There's low hanging fruit. I live in the creative space. 
 So for us, it was Canva was a big godsend. But I think operationally, I don't mean to get boring here, but just understanding your operations. I always think Henry Ford assembly line was the first thing, second thing, third thing, fourth thing, and just go down the line understanding your operational workflow. 
 And then Where's the repetitive tasks where I could use an AI tool to streamline this and store my data? Hours to delivery. We've done that with branding. We've done that with logos. We've done that with style guides, with social media posts, with social media ads. And so something that takes 10 hours now takes us five hours, but each user case is unique to their specific business. And the first thing we start with is. Let's humanize this thing. Let's make it very easy to understand what's the steps and let's see where the AI tool can jump in there and expedite our process. 

 Rose | 10:37
Yeah, no, I absolutely love, I mean, I love GPT-5. There are a few glitches, but overall, I think it's a really great process. 
 I mean, it redesigned my business logo for me. I just gave it my old one and it came out with a new one and it's beautiful. I love it. It's, you know, made it all. Gorgeous, you know, so, you know, I love and I love Canberra. I think Canberra has just progressed in the last three or four years to such an extent that, you know, And they use AI and it's just such a creative tool and anyone's made not to be using it, I reckon. 

 Roberto | 11:17
Yeah, no, VO3 is one of my favorite ones right now, just because of the videos that I could create. VO3 is within the Gemini tool. 
 So Google has its own AI tool. And you can create videos. 
 So I took I take images of myself. And I have to speak Mandarin, I have to speak Vietnamese, I have to speak Spanish and French. And it literally it's me. Talking in these different languages. 
 So creating avatars, especially for folks who are in the HR space is fantastic. There's some great companies out there, Colossium, one of them, where you can literally create your own avatar. 
 And then let's say you're training up a workforce or onboarding someone or offboarding someone using those avatars to create the work and run the meeting for you. Makes the experience that much more agreeable and it Saves up time so you don't have to be in those meetings, training and onboarding your new employee base or your new client. 

 Rose | 12:12
Yeah, I can't, I mean, I just keep spouting on about it, but I've trained mine to such a thing that if I'm having a damn day and I go and wind about it gives me all this really nice feel good stuff to. 

 Roberto | 12:24
Do. Yes, I agree. 
 Sometimes we need someone to vent that's not going to talk back. Listen, I want you to listen. 

 Rose | 12:34
Tell me about SMART's Roberto. 

 Roberto | 12:37
Yes. So this really came from working with entrepreneurs and again, a repetitive task. One of the jobs that I have, and I'm very blessed for this, is to consult with business owners. I did it with government. I'm doing it with Google. I'm doing it with Amazon. I'm doing it with TikTok. And you just listen to the same problem again. And I'm just thinking there has to be a better way to do this at scale, right? How do we do this for 1,000, 10,000, 50,000 entrepreneurs? I can't be the bottleneck. 
 So that was the premise. That was the pain point. And I'm like, well, we have ChatGPT, we have Gemini, we have AI tools, and we have a bunch of data that talks about industries and sectors. Let's create an AI agent. That's able to identify the pain point of the business owners. As long as you give it a certain amount of, answers, and then just have a human That can review that information, analyze the information, and humanize the information. That value-add rules that you talked about when we were talking about your podcast. Podcast loads and provide reports to business owners. And that's what we did with SMRTS. We provided really useful reports. Assessments and reports for business owners. And we've seen some amazing wins within that category. We've seen companies grow anywhere from 50, the average is 15% increase in sales and or leads. 
 So I want to be very specific. We're not, you know, a magic bullet, but we do see 15% increments who wouldn't want a 50% pay increase? But we see that and we see connectivity, what we call digital connectivity, your ability to be online, connecting with your customers increases anywhere from 60 to 100%. Based on these assessments. And it's only getting smarter, the more data that we feed it. And so that's extremely exciting for us. It's one of those tools that we work with banks right now. We're working with a lot of different banks in our town. We're working with telephone companies, healthcare providers, because they all have their own ability to understand what the business owner's pain point is. And we just add Is that, those questionnaires into the prompts. And we add their business assessments human that adds the value. And we're seeing some impactful results for the business owners. And that's what we really were about. How do we drive results? Quickly, efficiently, making sure that the business owner is not wasting his time or her time barking up the wrong tree or spending too much energy on the wrong platform or the wrong AI tool. 

 Rose | 15:02
Yeah, that's sort of in line with one of the posts that I was reading on LinkedIn this morning. It was about, you know, wasting time. How, you know, if you have scheduled an hour meeting and, you know, you can solve the problem in seven minutes, then why does the meeting still take an hour to get through? 
 You know, when it could be dealt with a chat or a WhatsApp or one of those other things. And, you know, we do a lot of time wasting and, you know, sometimes, you know, it's exhausting. Mentally because you've got to spend all this time doing all this stuff that could take minutes or moments even and could be solved quite quickly and we just waste a lot of time. 

 Roberto | 15:40
Yeah, and something to do about culture there as well, understanding what is the culture of the company. There's some certain companies where you're allowed to get up and walk out of the meeting. And there's other companies where you're supposed to sit there for an hour and a half. I started my career in government. And you'll be surprised how many times I was just like, why am I in this meeting position? I think there's a happy medium. I think there's definitely a happy medium when you can marry the two. And what do I mean by that? It's important to hear everyone's perspective. There's some introverts and then there's some extroverts. And having the extroverts feel we have buy-in and we want to hear their opinion is important. 
 So I think there's a happy medium there that we can work through using AI. One of the things that I love talking about is parking lot notes when we have those meetings. Okay, we don't want to derail the meeting. But if you do have comments, there's a section within your Google Drive that you could add notes or comments there. And if we have enough time, we'll get to those. And so that keeps the meeting going and flowing. And it makes it more interactive to make the person feel heard and felt. 

 Rose | 16:41
It's really important too. I think that, you know, again, that's where you need that human interaction is where that, you know, you need to make sure that the people at the meeting depict, you know, depending off, as you say, introverts or extroverts, you know, feel seen and heard and you know especially the quieter ones that you know have these really great ideas but you know a bit too shy to bring them forward because you think well they're just going to laugh at me or they just don't have that you know that that confidence within themselves to you know to put their idea forward so it is important way that we are using ai but again that human connection is so important in any business. 

 Roberto | 17:21
Yeah, no. And you know, it's really interesting. 
 Still water runs deep, right? We know those folks are thinking and we just need to identify the best way they communicate the best way we can get their bright and best ideas forward. And it's not always the loudest. How many times have we sat in a room and we thought like, just because you're staying there with work, passion and does not mean you're right. 
 I mean, I'm guilty of that, but it's not who's the loudest. Sometimes it's who understands the problem and who can get us over the finish line. And I truly believe that some of our folks who might be a little bit more, Reserve? Have some really great ideas. I'm going to come forward. And sometimes, you know, one of the things that we saw from one of our clients is that, They created avatars for those folks who are a little bit more, reserved or introverts, and they had the avatar talk for them. That was really innovative. 
 Like, wow, like, they don't feel comfortable saying it. But if it's a third person avatar, they're all about it. 
 So they're kind of hiding behind their avatar. But the ideas are coming forward. And they're feeling heard and they're feeling respected. I just thought that was a great way of leveraging AI to really build that culture within your company. 

 Rose | 18:32
Absolutely. And if you want to find out more about SMRTS or hook up with Roberto, you can find him on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Instagram and at ravenagency.com. Tell me, SMRTS, is it available on the open market or is it only available through your agency? 

 Roberto | 18:50
Yes, you can go on there. We're giving away free assessments, March.co. We're rebranding right now. Very excited for it. We have two big national conferences where we're rolling out the product. We have some big corporations, which we're empowering in the back end with the product. And it's just, at the end of the day, really, we create this tool to help businesses, entrepreneurs know where it hurts and how to fix that problem. 

 Rose | 19:15
Wonderful. All right. 
 So go and check out Braven Agency or SMRTS.com and we can find out all about the new software. Roberto, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me today. 

 Roberto | 19:29
Pleasure's mine, Rose, and congratulations once again. On the ward five years is quite a long time. You were, Getting ahead of the ball when it comes to podcasts, it feels like everyone has a podcast now, but you knew it was going to be a great hit. 
 So kudos to you. 

Rose | 19:42
Thanks so much. Bye-bye for now. 

 Outro | 19:45
You've been listening to Talking with the Experts with Rose Davidson. The podcast that brings you real stories, bold insights and strategies that work. Be sure to subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast channel so you never miss an episode and dive into our full library anytime at TalkingWithTheExperts.com. Until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and keep talking with the experts.