BROWNSVILLE, Texas - Harva (formerly Supply Pay) is the title sponsor of this year’s RGV StartUp Week, the Rio Grande Valley’s annual entrepreneurial celebration that offers a week of educational workshops, networking opportunities, and hands-on resources.
At the event, Harva’s co-founder and CEO, William Steele will deliver a 45-minute speech on how some of the entrepreneurs he knows - not just from the fresh produce sector that Harva operates in - have been using AI in their business.
Then, thanks to a tie-up with the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation, Steele will start a monthly workshop at the eBridge Center for Business & Commercialization in downtown Brownsville.
In an interview with the RGG Business Journal, Steele gave an example of what he will talk about in his workshops. He cited Juan, a buddy of his from Top Gym.
“Juan is a super smart entrepreneur. He was like, well, how do I automate inventory ordering? He wanted to know because he has a bunch of different products, ordering from four different vendors. It is something he does every week… go in and check the inventory in his Square thing in his Square inventory management system. He then places those orders out,” Steele said.
“I told him, there are two ways we can tackle this. I can do it for you in about a day. Or I can teach you how to learn with AI, to teach yourself how to build the code and host it yourself. And on Saturday, it will be done, and he will have done it himself.”
Steele said: “I want to teach other business owners, through some of these workshops, all of these frontier things that I'm learning at the edge of finance and supply chain and ERP, which is a very unique software to build. ERP is a full accounting, general ledger system. What I'm learning there, I'd like to distill it down and share it with other business owners in the region, because they can then go out and compete with other regions very effectively.”
In the case of Juan, utilizing AI can substantially reduce operational expenses in a high margin gym business, Steele predicted. “Juan can go and expand. And then he becomes a big success story for the area. And same thing can be said about financial analysts, all types of industries. It's almost mind blowing, how much can be done with AI now.”
Steele said he would like to do his monthly workshops in other Valley cities, such as Mission.
“Although I am starting out in Brownsville, I’d love to partner with each city, do it once per month in each city. I'll probably host one specifically just for finance executives, just for the bank shareholders, and just for the CFOs of those financial institutions. “It would be like, hey guys, here's how to use Claude in Excel in a very nuanced way. Like, here's a six-year cash flow statement model that I built in five minutes. Here's how to tweak those equations using natural language.”
Steele said the first workshops would be entry-level. “If you only have used Chat GPT once or you’ve never used Chat GBT, it's for you. But the intermediate ones will be really exciting because that's when I'm going to teach the businessperson control of web applications. That's where I'm going to teach you hosting. And the cool thing about AI is you have an infinitely patient teacher that will help you no matter how many questions you ask it. So, you can screenshot any issue you're having, paste it in there and it will tell you the answer. I've never, ever, hit a wall that I can't overcome using AI.”
Steele said the opportunity for Valley entrepreneurs and business owners, if they fully embrace AI, is limitless.
“If we can embrace it first, we're going to be competing GDP-wise, with major metropolitan areas of Texas.”
This claim seemed a little fanciful and so the Business Journal said, surely there are folks similar to Steele in those metropolitan areas that are teaching the same things.
Steele responded: “They’re just building agencies and charging super high consulting rates. Which is not a bad thing. It is good because that's what their economy enables them to do, and their services are worth it. I know guys charging right now close to $900 to $1,000 an hour just to consult on these types of things. And because they're going into companies automating something that… let’s say they have ten analysts, and those ten analysts do that one thing an hour a day each, that's ten hours a day. Multiply that by five, that's 50 hours a week. And if you look at their hourly rate for their salaries… that $1,000 or $5,000 I just paid that guy to automate my system in five hours… they just made that back in a week. And now they made that back every week, moving forward. There are people that are being hired exclusively to do this, and they're going into organizations and automating a lot of that work.”
When asked what such automation would mean for the Valley, if the region’s entrepreneurs were so empowered, Steele said:
“I can't even imagine it because entrepreneurs are so magical in the sense that they generate huge net value to society in their own ways. Like if I teach Juan to do this, sure he might use it for the gym and make one of the best gyms on the planet in terms of marginal efficiencies. But he might also go and now build a new application, because he's empowered to build software and host it himself, and he has high business acumen, so now you're taking people with incredibly high business acumen and empowering them to build software. Now that's a dangerous combination, because now you're multiplying the efforts.”
The other great thing about people with high business acumen, Steele said, is they don't want to pay a lot of money for something that they know is not high value for them.
“They're scrupulous business owners, right? In a good way. They are very efficient with a capital allocation. If you give them the ability to compete in the software market, they'll create jobs, right? They'll create huge net value. The GDP of the area can multiply substantially, like exponentially, if done correctly, because now I'm empowering developers, ideally, to to go out and find these business owners and do this with them. And then you're empowering the business owners to learn how to build it themselves. It can be huge.”
Steele said the people teaching AI should be those on the front lines, not academics.
“I have no quarrel with academia. But the people who know the most about the frontier of this technology are actually in business, the builders, the people applying it, not studying it. This is what I proposed to them (BCIC).
“I actually said this also to Mr. Victor, Victor Perez, president of Pharr EDC. I spoke with him at lunch at one point and I said, you can't have an academic come teach business owners about AI. You have to go find a cutting-edge entrepreneur and have them walk through workflows and the logic behind how they're applying the tools.”
Steele said it is important to stay abreast of the latest developments in AI. He does so through an agent he built that tracks the latest breakthroughs in technology.
“This is the first thing I'll do in the workshop. I'm going to walk them through… okay, who here uses Slack? Who here uses WhatsApp? We're going to build a pipeline. Do you have an X account? Do you have a Twitter account? Do you have a GitHub account? We're going to set them up with those accounts and then build and prompt an agent to run a recurring loop once a day to go out and find the leading projects and provide that to them.”
When asked what the maximum number of participants will be for the workshops, Steele said “For the beginner workshops, we're going to do six to eight. I want to keep it like very manageable, and I also want each person to walk away with some workflow automation that's unique and bespoke to their business.”
For the other workshops, he said he would take a broader approach.
“There, we can have between 30 to 40 people, but it won't be as bespoke to your workflows. I'm going to show you examples that I've done, and then give you the tools, and then give you a learning, a learning curriculum that you can go and use on YouTube to self-teach.
“Work with a group where… all the builders in the community are having access to the same area, where they're talking about what they're building, they're talking about tools, and they're communicating this information. Those are the two types of workshops I'm going to run.”
He said the workshop that is more bespoke will be pitched at a higher price point.
“I will focus on different verticals. So, the first month will probably focus on finance, the second month will probably focus on marketing, the third month will probably be focused on automotive. What's also cool for me is it stimulates my curiosity, because I get to go work with the business owners of these different industries and ask them, what is the biggest thing you're spending all of your time doing?”
