Dr. Kay Durairaj 0:15
Well, hello, hello guys. You're listening to Beauty Bites with Dr. K at Secrets of a Plastic Surgeon. In today's podcast, let's dive right in. We have Annie Robertson Hockey, and she is the president of Skytail Group. And prior to Skytail, she co-founded and served as CEO, co-CEO of Column, which is a nationally charted infrastructure bank. And she currently serves as an advisor and board member there. She has worked all around Silicon Valley as startup at several companies. She's previously worked at Goldman Sachs, Bain and Company, and she graduated with honors from Stanford University and Stanford Graduate School of Business. So, I love that she serves in our entrepreneurship, and she's come over to esthetics, and she has so much advice for us today. So, we're going to dive right in. And, Annie, let's talk all about your thoughts on what esthetic practices need, what AI's we should be using with social media tips and tricks, and anything you have in mind.

Speaker 1 1:16
Oh, that sounds perfect. Thank you so much for having me. It's a treat to be here.

Dr. Kay Durairaj 1:19
Yeah, it was so great. I was on a panel with you, I think, in Las Vegas or someplace, where we had an esthetic show, and we had kind of a great discussion on what kind of AIs we're using in our practices and in real life too. So, how has AI affected you as an entrepreneur in business and technology?

Speaker 1 1:40
It's such a good question, and I love that panel. I think we had, like, you know, 20 minutes or something really short, and I think we could have gone on. I think you know the folks on the panel, we were like, "Wait, we've.. there's more that we want to talk about, because what comes with AI comes with responsibility, and you know, using the tool wisely. I was, I was actually just listening to an Wall Street Journal podcast this morning, and it was saying that the CTO of Uber shared that they had loaned through their entire AI budget within the first quarter, and I think it's such an interesting example of, you know, AI is not something that we can just like throw a bunch of things into, and hope it does our jobs for us, you know. That's where, like, all that computing power has come from, and that's why folks and companies are finding it such an expensive tool in terms of tokens. But really, what it's here to do is to, you know, in my perspective, complement what we do and allow our brains to focus on the highest and best use of our time. So, what I do, both at work and at home, is pay attention, whether it's me or my team, to what are the things that I'm doing over and over and over again that are pretty kind of like manual and rudimentary. Those are the things that I'm really excited about AI taking over now. When I'm thinking critically about, like, the strategic problem the client is facing, that's that's where I kind of need my brain to come in, and I think it's really important that we don't conflate those two things.

Dr. Kay Durairaj 3:10
I think you're so right. I think it's easy to mentally check out and use AI and not even read AI's work or follow up with it, or I'm finding that in our office that I encourage everyone to use AI, but then when I look at their AI use, I want to dial it back, because, like, there's mistakes and typos, and like things that are not accurate, and we have to be so careful about

Speaker 1 3:35
it, but someone was telling me, a friend was telling me that we should treat AI like, like, you know, a fresh, smart, green analyst coming right out of college, right? It's eager, it wants to give you answers. Sometimes it's a little bit too definitive in what it says, but, but they're errors, and you, and you really do have to keep an eye on those things.

Dr. Kay Durairaj 3:55
It's so true, business wise. I see so many videos where people are just using Claude code to run their whole entire life in office, but in actuality, I don't think people take enough time to sit down and do like six hours straight of like let me implement this one track, like every I say I have saved a million of those videos because I have full intent to do all that, and then right, are there some specific AI's that you love for use in esthetics practices?

Speaker 1 4:26
Yeah, I do. And I think you know, if you're someone who's listening and wants to learn more about AI, the thing that's really great is you could ask it to teach you. You know, you're using Claude, or you're teaching, or you're using Chat GPT. I'll take Claude, for example, because we use Anthropic or Cloud across our enterprise at Skytail, and you can say, you know, I'm new to the system, I'm really hoping to use it for these types of things. Can you create 345 minute modules to me that I can read through or watch to learn more? Where do you think I should begin? Like, you can prompt it, you. Even in that way, and just put the work on, put the work on the tool to teach you about the tool. That's one of the things I actually think is like most wonderful about

Dr. Kay Durairaj 5:08
it. Yeah,

Speaker 1 5:08
but in terms of practices, the way I'm seeing AI used, I think most interestingly is really just embedded within workflows in many ways, sort of like embedded in current tools that we're using, so the EMR, EHR, PMS systems, they are all running in the direction of AI. I really love it in the usage of understanding your data, so not only analytics and reports being kind of pushed to you, but one of, one of the areas that I'm particularly excited about AI with practices, and AI was, was still, I think, especially independent practice owners who don't have, you know, data teams that get to produce reports for them. It's just, it is analytics, and not only surfacing analytics, but, you know, the use of these things we call agents, where you know you can go into your system and ask, can you share with me revenue production by provider over the last three months, right? Or you can say, can I look at revenue trends in our energy-based devices over the last year or so, and it should be able to push those answers to you. That's pretty powerful, because you don't need to be a, like, technical person, if you will, to see, see what you need to see to make decisions.

Dr. Kay Durairaj 6:26
Yeah, I need to do that. Do you think I can connect my esthetic record into that?

Speaker 1 6:31
I think, yes, I think that there's some actually really cool, is that like layer on top of your EMR, you know, EHR is like esthetic record that can, that can do those things, so you know, Illume is a wonderful solution. Crowd data is a wonderful solution. I'm friends with both of those teams, and they're wonderful. So, absolutely,

Dr. Kay Durairaj 6:51
what was the first one? Illume,

Speaker 1 6:53
yeah. And then crowd data, like you're corralling, you're corralling, you know, your data, if you will.

Dr. Kay Durairaj 6:59
Oh, so interesting. Okay, I'll have to check those out.

Unknown Speaker 7:02
Yeah,

Dr. Kay Durairaj 7:02
there's so many providers out there. I'm sure you see us all, and we are amazing clinicians, but they - we were never trained to run businesses or be CEOs. And what is the mindset shift that needs to happen when a doctor becomes the leader of a really growing business, an esthetic business?

Speaker 1 7:20
Yeah, it's such a.. it's.. it's a hard mental shift, and in fact, it's.. it's hard for everyone to become a leader or a CEO, let alone if you've been really trained to be a specialist for years of your life. I mean, Dr. K, you were in school for a really long time to do what you do. Business school's only two years, but I really think that the mental shift is thinking about systems and almost taking yourself out of the equation and thinking about, you know, how would this practice run without me? How would this practice run if we're twice our size, if we're five times our size, if we're 10, and really trying to think of answers that aren't just, you know, a band aid every single day, but allow those things to happen, so it's almost again taking yourself out of the equation. I mean, something I do at Skytail all the time, right? We have some processes now that would, like, candidly break if we had 3x the clients that we do, and so those are things that we, you know, need to focus on automating, documenting, creating SOPs for, just so that that doesn't happen.

Dr. Kay Durairaj 8:21
I think that's so true. I feel like every time I go out of town on a trip, the office just kind of pauses in the background, but as many systems as I put into place, there's always something.

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