Why the world is moving towards Sovereign AI + How you get traffic to convert on your website

OPENING - EPISODE 27 PAUL WRIGHT Hello everyone and welcome to the Link Thru Social Podcast. I'm your host, Paul Wright. Well, today we have Krishna Kumar Sharma, who will talk to us about how AI is bringing robots closer to humans and why the world is moving towards sovereign AI. He is also the author of the upcoming book, Agentic Coding, The Boring Way. And then we will have Tom Belasek, and he will share details on how you get traffic to convert on your website and answer the question. He is also the author of the book, They're Looking For You, your no BS guide to marketing that actually makes you money. So episode 27 will start right after this brief message. But first, thank you to all that have been liking, sharing, downloading, subscribing to our Link Thru Social Podcast. Please keep the momentum going. We're really building this community together. We're going to take a brief break, and right after this message, we'll get started with the show. SPONSOR MESSAGE - TICKETPORTX SPONSOR MESSAGE Increase brand visibility, create a stronger connection with your customers, deliver a seamless user experience, and monetize your brand with high converting pages powered by TicketportX's secure hosting, payment processing, and event technology. Perfect for festivals, conventions, classes, retail storefronts, charity events, sporting events, and even free events. Manage entire event series from a single storefront and spend less money marketing multiple links and event pages. One platform, one link, endless possibilities. TicketportX, powering your brand, your events, and your growth. INTERVIEW 1 - KRISHNA KUMAR SHARMA / OMUKAI PAUL WRIGHT & KRISHNA KUMAR SHARMA And welcome back to the Link Thru Social podcast. Well, we have an amazing guest for us today. It's Krishna Kumar Sharma. And Krishna is the former head of AI engineering at Amazon and a seasoned tech leader with over 12 years of experience building large-scale AI systems. He recently left the corporate world to found, that's O-M-U-K-A-I, a sovereign AI startup building multimodal interfaces to control robot drones and machine swarms through natural language. He is also the author of an upcoming book, Agentic Coding, The Boring Way. Today, Krishna is here to share his journey from big tech to deep tech founder and to give us an insider's look at the future of human AI interaction and robotics. Very excited for this interview today. Welcome to the show, Krishna. Yeah, thank you so much. Super excited to be in this particular call. So before we get into things, Krishna, I briefly gave a little rundown in the intro there, but why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your experience in this industry? Yeah. So basically I have worked so far, like my overall career of 19, 17, 18 years basically. And but I'm working since 19 years overall. And last 12 years I've been doing large-scale projects, and I have worked across robotics AI, internal AI initiatives, AI-related tooling, and then also worked with government clouds. So, like a lot of regulatory environments, a lot of deep take, a lot of global scaling kind of stuff. last five years I would say very deeply into AI topic itself, and before I did a bit of data engineering, machine learning, data science at as well. But yeah, but that's how currently it is going on. And then after doing this for a long period of time and seeing that there is like you know this entire bubble around AI, I wanted to do something which actually brings some good to the society, like some real innovation, like not hype chasing, something actually moves things the way people live their lives, and that's how I came across some ideas and I started on my journey. That's that's absolutely amazing. So I have so many things I want to ask you because you're you have some incredible experience in this industry. but first of all, let's let's start off. How is AI bringing robots closer to humans? Yeah. so just to dive deep into it, Paul. Yes, few years a few years ago, like before five years, if you want to train a robot, you have to give some instruction in a simulated environment. So AI simulators exist for like more than 20 years. No, not AI, but like robotic simulators, they exist for more than 20 years, and people have been using them in one way or the other to train their robots. But the problem was that a lot of things used to be manual, a lot of like self-calculations, which was going into the actual physics, because the robots don't see the world how we can perceive. They just understand numbers, and then you have to convert the things such as the distance, the depth, the height, the width, and all these perception-related items which come from multiple different sensors like LiDARs, camera, depth perception, depth perception sensors, etc., all into one, and then somehow tell robot, hey, this is how you actually walk and talk and do other stuff, right? Yes. And the way we currently do reinforcement learning with AI, that you provide data and then AI learn automatically. You can actually do it now with robots as well. So you can apply reinforcement learning to how robots interact with the physical world. and the way you can train 100 AI models in parallel, you can actually run 100 different reinforcement learning pipelines in parallel with the robots, and then this ensures that you are able to train at like unimaginable speed compared to what we were able to do before. And if you will see in the last two, three years, there has been a lot of open source AI models coming in terms of physical AI, and that's how like just copying the same concepts, how we train AI, using them in the robotics. Now we are able to teach robots how to actually perceive reality in a much faster way. Absolutely fascinating. I just can't I just can't believe the strides we've reached over the last few years. why is the world moving towards sovereign AI? What's your view on this? Yeah, so basically for the viewers, so I founded a company called Omukai. So here Omukai is a sovereign AI company. So here what we will with Soven is that your AI is not controlled by any other country's regulation. Example, tomorrow, if US is building some tech, US can tell the US companies that, hey, do not sell your tech to this XYZ country because of XYZ reason. So across the world, there is this push that you want to build your own independent AI which cannot be, or even products in general, which cannot be controlled by any other country. So you own it end-to-end without any interruption. And that's why I'm trying to build sovereign AI focused on Europe basically, but I also have a lot of connections in India. So at this point, like it is primarily for EU and India what we are building. Interesting, interesting. So it's almost like you know, when the emergence of cryptocurrency years ago, the original idea of having crypto was it wasn't controlled by one government or one thing. So now we're evolving, and AI is obviously the hot topic. And this is the tell us some more about the your website because I'm I'm sure because I'm I'm very fascinating. I'm sure our viewers and listeners are as well. what do you have in store for us in the immediate future? Because this is moving so fast, but yeah, in the we'll say the next six months to one year, what is on the plate for your company? Yeah, so I'm basically a Japan nerd. I've been watching anime before. Animes were actually cool, yeah. and now they got like super good. But when I was a kid, yeah, I used to be looked down upon, right? But coming back to the topic, I was talking about Japan and anime because the word omoka actually comes from two different Japanese words. So, first is omo, omo means thought, intent, and then kai means action. So the company means that from intent to action. This is exactly what Omokai is trying to do. That instead of using any controller or an interface to get robots to stuff, you can just speak to a robot or a drone or any machine with some intelligence. They will understand your intent, your thoughts, and then the and do the action autonomically, autonomously, just because you said so, right? So the way you speak to you're speaking to me, imagine you can just speak to a robot and then they do what whatever you want. Like it makes the interaction like you know so much smoother and so much fluid. And this is the problem which we are currently solving. In our case, we already have built an interface that you can use, you can command multiple different kinds of robots and a drone, all by a single interface. You can give them different tasks and they will understand what you want to do and they will do it. And now we are converting from the same to real, like how it will also work in the real life. I think that in six months, robotics will have taken multiple jumps already. Example in China now we have these real robots which interact like your companions, they can see and sense around 21 emotions already. They are not off for selling, but they will be off for selling soon. I'm also like a bit more worried when I see all these things because if you see, like since social media, right, like the human relations has been so complicated and so distant. And imagine now you have just a robot girlfriend and boyfriend, so like fuck everyone up, like you know, I'm going with them. I you know, I'm 55 years old, and I never thought we would reach this point that we are right now, and it's changing every day. My God, it's it's it's exciting but scary as well at the same time. And I think you know, in the coming months and in the next few years, it's all gonna have to be about education because there are fear mongers out there. There's fear mongers for everything that comes that is new, and that's exciting. There's always gonna be those fear mongers. And because of the strength of social media and how people can get the word out so quickly to so many people, education is gonna be key to letting people know of the advancements, but also that these advancements can bring so much good. And there are gonna be some negative aspects as well, and we have to educate people about that, you know. That's that's what I think the most important thing is in this whole this whole scheme of things when it comes to AI and the advancements of and the advancements of AI. Now, how to make a dumb robot drone smarter? I was reading your bio. I'm very curious to know what you have to say about this. Yeah, so basically what we are building is an physical AI operating system. we are using AI itself to do a lot of intent to action conversions, then we are using these multiple operating systems which already exist for robots and drones. We are like combining them all together, creating our own sophisticated orchestrations around them, and that's how we are trying to solve this particular problem. Another thing, what we are doing is that, of course, this is a very big field, right? Like you can use this speech to intend for anything from being a girlfriend to, I don't know, whatever else you want to accomplish. So we are focusing on security and inspection kind of use cases, which actually immediately help people. Example, I'm not sure like if you are aware or people are aware that currently in the world, especially in the Western and educated world, like we have this population decline happening, but the critical infrastructure is like increasing. Like, you know, we have no nuclear power plants, we have like ports, we have warehouses manufacturing goods and all, but there are not enough people who can actually secure this critical infrastructure. And then what you can do to solve this particular problem, because imagine someone just goes and vandalizes a power plant or a port, then your entire city's electricity is disrupted. Currently in Iran, if you as we see like you know, the whole in the state of Hormuz, there are these mines like which are blowing up the supply chain currently, which is impacting all of us. But imagine that instead of like us humans, we can just send hundreds and thousands of robots or drones or water drones, and then they go and identify these mines automatically in the water and they destroy it, right? In terms of electricity power plants, you can just have instead of humans, robot dogs or drones securing the perimeter, and they keep an eye on something suspicious, someone who should not be there, jumping in, and then they can go and try to take an action or alert the actual security guard or police, right? So it scales the security and inspection use cases massively. we are like working with currently with one Japanese company, like one of the top drone companies in Japan, and their use cases that they want to as like Japan is a country made of many islands. And if something is happening in some remote island, like how you cannot send a human to go and check it, right? You there has to be some faster way to do it. So there they use these long-range drones which can travel like 50 kilometers, 150 kilometers, and secure the inspect the area and see if something is going wrong, or some person needs help and then come back. There are like many such use cases in real world where you require some intelligent system for drones and robots, and this is the use cases we are focusing on. And I was speaking about use case in details because like going back to my previous statement, right? Like we want to do something which actually makes the worlds a better place, and that's how that's why we are focusing more on not robot girlfriends, but you know, something which is really useful. Sure. Absolutely. And you mentioned something just now. You said that these drones will you know inspect the parameters and get the places that humans can, so they're not replacing humans, they're just making things more productive, less painful for human and you know, and then of course it's still gonna report back to the humans to take the next steps or whatever. So that's the key. It's not replacing, it's it's making the humans more efficient and potentially more safe as well. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we are focusing more on scaling the operations, like how we can scale things as much as possible. And even in our website, somewhere place someplace I have written about our mission that we want to not think about replacing people, but making things more scalable and easier for everyone, right? So I think you are 100% correct there. yeah. Yeah, no, that's it's amazing. Now we have to unfortunately wrap things up, Krishna, and I'd love to have you on the show again, by the way. You're fascinating guests. you have an upcoming book, Agentic Coding, The Boring Way. just tell us a little bit about that and when you expect that to be released. Yeah. so in Amazon, when I was leading this large-scale AI initiatives, we were also doing a lot of AI-enabled coding. And I realized that the way any software development organization operates, we should also use AI the same way. Example, a senior architect creating like some sort of plan with a product manager, and then this plan getting divided into small tasks, and then this small task getting picked up by a person, getting worked on, and then someone else reviewing it, etc. etc. So basically, the book Agentic Coding, The Boring Way, goes away from all the notions you hear about like you know, token maxing or loop engineering or whatever, like using hundreds of agents, because all these things are only making the frontier labs richer. The more tokens you waste, the more money they make, right? Like how it is actually helpful to you. So, this book is focused on why and how you should be using AI responsibly and how you can make ROI maxing and not token maxing using AI. And I'm also giving a lecture on like on this same topic at UC Berkeley at one of at a conference, I'm attending them at end of July basically. And after this session, I plan to release the book sometime in August. Oh, wonderful. Okay, well, your main website is omakai.com. That's omoka i.com. And for those listening and watching, I will provide the link to the wait list for Krishna's book, and we'll provide that in the description as well, and of course, on all our social media links. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. You're an amazing guest, Krishna Kumar Sharma. Thank you for being here. And I would like to personally invite you on the show after the book is released, and we can continue this conversation because within a few months I'm sure things will be rapidly changing. So it would be wonderful to have you on again. Yeah, thank you so much, Paul. It was an honor and pleasure being here, and thank you so much for the interesting interactive discussion. Okay, that's Krishna Kumar Sharma. And the Link Thru Social podcast will be back right after this short message. SPONSOR MESSAGE - SMART POST APP SPONSOR MESSAGE Tired of stressing over what to post on social media? 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And he's from Easymarketing.com. Tom has been helping small business owners grow and run a better business over 30 years. He is he helps with marketing, business consulting, and is the author of four books. Most recently, They're Looking For You, your no BS guide to marketing that actually makes you money. I love the title and I'd like to welcome you to the show, Tom. Welcome to Link Thru Social Podcast. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, this is that was my fourth book, and I finally said, you know, let's just let's just really dumb it down and make sure people really understand the fundamentals. And I think sometimes marketing just people complicate it and it doesn't have to be. Yes, exactly. So before we get started, Tom, maybe you could just give us a brief synopsis of your history, how you got into marketing, 30 years in the business. trying to condense that down to a few minutes. Yeah. Yeah, like can you do that in three sentences or less? yeah, I'm I'm predominantly I'm a sales guy. So I started out selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door. And so then a friend of mine was talking about his website business that he was starting. I had no idea what the heck that was, because that was 1996. I just learned how to build websites and then start opening up my own agency doing it, and you know, now we do every everything digital we do now. So yeah, it's been quite a journey from AOL you've got mail to AI. Yeah, AI is here. Yeah, we're talking about that function point. Your website is easy, like the letters ez marketing.com. And I encourage everyone to go to your website and check out the different services that you offer. so Tom, let's let's get started. So I have some questions for you, and I'm I'm curious to get some feedback from you. first of all, how do you get traffic to convert on your website? Yeah, so a lot of websites just aren't structured to convert. So there are a couple things that are just core fundamental things, and they mostly occur in the navigation. So, frequently what people do is one, they waste the space and they put the word home. everybody knows the logo is home, you no longer need to do that. So, because we read from left to right, the most valuable spots are the first word and the last word. So because that's where your eye stops. so what we always encourage people to do is have like what do you really want them to do? So a lot of people put contact us as the last word. Well, yeah, that's not really what you want, right? So I don't care if it's get a quote, schedule a meeting, book a consultation, like whatever it is, that needs to be the last word and needs to be a button, right? A button that's a different color. So whatever your accent color is, that's your button color. and then I want your phone number right above it. Right. Because that's what people like, they go there and they say, Well, how do I reach you? And if they can't find that immediately, you've lost them. So those are my like you if you just fix that, you'll see an improvement. Absolutely. Yeah, no, that's that's a great point because you literally only have a couple of seconds to catch them once they've visited your site. You did a lot of work to try to get them to your website, so you can't waste that opportunity, right? Exactly. And then my other my other tip, Paul is that people need to know exactly what you do and the problem you solve immediately. Like people want to talk in fluff or brochure language, and if I don't know what you do, I'm gonna hit the back button, I'm gonna go someplace else, right? Because Google search has even changed now, they're really looking for what you do when they get there, right? Because ChatGPT took care of all just the general information questions or the AI overview took care of all that. They're not going to your site for general stuff anymore. So when they get there, they're probably more qualified. Exactly. So you brought up ChatGPT and Google in the same breath there. Google. It was all about Google being found on Google. SEO, make sure that you're found, you're in the top five rankings in Google. Now, with the emergence of AI, people are doing their research and trying to find different types of businesses through using AI. So does Google matter anymore, the Google rankings, or it has it just shifted? Yeah, Google 100% matters. it's just different now, right? So the same things that worked before still work, but what's happening is now we need to do new different things so that we show up on ChatGPT or we show up in the AI overviews, right? So now it's an added tactic, which is just a shift in tactic, and it's not it's not like it's radically different. so I'm always perplexed by the people who are like, oh my gosh, Google's dead. Like Google's not dead. Like, what like do you not look at your Google Analytics? I don't understand. or your lead source conversion, like it's not dead. No, no, definitely not. so let's keep on the topic of Googles. a lot of people are worried about where they rank on Google Maps, yeah. And how can how can they get ranked high up on Google Maps? Because you know, if they're looking for a specific type of business in a specific area, you obviously on the Google Maps, you want to be on the top. What can businesses do to rank in Google Maps? Yeah, there are there are a few things. One, like make sure your profile is filled out completely. So Google adds new stuff in periodically to the profile. And if you're not paying attention to it, like please like fill in every single detail. Then you know, make sure you have photos in there. use the posts almost like it's social media posts. you know, definitely do that. But I'm gonna say one of the biggest things you can do is it's Google reviews. across the board, those Google reviews impact so many different areas. so and they're hard to get, right? Because when you want to give reviews when you're mad, not when you're happy. So we need to incentivize or help people want to give that review. So good point. Like it's it if you have a point of sale business, it's always good to have like a QR code right at the at the sales desk, and you can encourage them to do that, or maybe even like you said, an incentive, give them an extra five percent off or ten percent off or something, yeah, just to get those reviews because reviews are very important. and you're right, a lot of people just react when oh, I didn't like this restaurant, I'm gonna complain about it and start typing it in. but I'm in this type of business, so I go out of my way if I enjoy something to let them know that I enjoyed it and put it out there on Google so other people can see it. But not everyone has that same mindset, unfortunately. Almost no one does, yeah. Yeah, so sure. So human nature, we're very fascinating creatures. We certainly are, and on social media, it's just a different breed altogether. Yeah, oh man, is it ever? So are is EZMarketing, are you very involved with social media as far as doing social media management as well? Or are you're strictly in the kind of the marketing web genre? Yeah, we do we probably do more social ad management than just post management. but yeah, it's it's amazing how effective social ads are. you know, if you can really define that audience and create a really nice video and message and drive them to a landing page and then drip on them and have a sequence, it's complicated to get the results. but very valuable. there are definitely some industries that it's just mind-boggling how effective social ads are. Absolutely. So a business say they've decided to do it on their own. They've done a few Instagram or Facebook ads, and they think, okay, we've we've narrowed it down to a certain type of audience, certain likes that the person that they're trying to attract might have, or in a geographic area. And then they get a lot of clicks, they get a lot of visits, but no conversions. What advice would you give them in this type of case? Yeah, well, there's something wrong in the steps, right? So we have to go back and look at each piece and say, is that is this the right audience we're going after? Is this the right message? Do we need a different offer? do we need to add video to it? or are we getting lots of clicks over the page, but it's not converting? Why isn't it converting? so I think we need to look at that. Sometimes spam influences things in an inappropriate way, or like, oh well, I'm getting all this. It was like, well, you're not really getting that. But yeah, it's it's really breaking down the individual pieces and looking at where are our conversion points, where did our message miss? And sometimes it's just maybe it's not the right, maybe it's it might not be the right tactic. and that's okay too, right? not all tactics are effective for every industry. So switching back to the AI, EZMarketing, how is your company using AI to streamline your own business and then passing that along to your clientele as well? Yeah, well, how aren't we using AI? That's maybe a better question. Yeah, you know, going back to the R people Fascinating thing, right? So, you know, we first started to use AI I don't know, three years ago, more on the content side, right? And it took a while for the team to really embrace that this wasn't an affront to their craft, and really move in the direction of instead of being the writer, you're the editor. and we're really able to take our time in massive reduction over the last couple years. one of the ways that we do that is we use a universal platform that we actually resell that allows us access to about 70 of the AI models. So we don't have to have separate company accounts for Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, right? and then we build an agent for every client that we have. So we want to learn everything about that client and put all those details in there so that when we write for that client, whether it's ads, headlines, long-form content, that we're writing in that voice. So we've been able to reduce our back and forth with clients as well. So, in other words, what we're showing the client, they're like, Oh my gosh, this is so good. Before they were like, Can you change this? Can you change this? Can you do this? Right, because you have different writers and they don't know, like they don't know everything. But now that I can get my agent to know everything, now I'm just prompting and saying right about X. Yeah, so that's that's been great. We're using it for web development, for code, code snippets, building full websites in AI is something that we've really just get we're getting into now. it's it's been we use it in the sales process, you know, show me your top competitors, what do they have that you don't have? Compare this, you know, why isn't this site ranking in AI, doing audits? Like there's it's almost like well, what I'm what am I not using AI for? Of course. it's it's the first thing we do is don't ask another team member, ask, ask AI, and then if you don't get it, then go ask a human, you know. Why are we wasting everybody's time with your dumb questions? Like, oh, they're not dumb, but you know what I mean. I know what you're saying. It's it's a very exciting time for our type of business, isn't it? It's just it's it's the wild west. All business untraveled territory, and it's just moving at such a rapid pace, it's just unbelievable how AI is well and think of how it's going to impact all businesses. So I own an IT company as well, like IT support. And one of the things in that industry is really looking at how do we help clients overall just run better businesses, right? So if we can take all your different data sources and we can have a centralized, essentially chat GPT that can query these things, well, now your manufacturing process and your accounting process can now talk together, and they could never do that before, right? So it's it's mind-boggling what how AI is gonna change our lives. Absolutely. let's talk about AI video clones. I love it, love it. Well, so do I. I really do. I'm curious to know your thoughts. yeah, have you cloned yourself yet? I have not actually. I it's a it's a prize. I mean I'm falling behind already. I yeah, plans of doing it and then getting sidetracked, but it's definitely on my bucket list in the next few weeks. tell me what you think about this AI. So it used to be hard. So we had we've been probably doing AI video clones for three, three and a half years, maybe. and at the beginning, man, they were bad, but they were good, you know. Like at the time, you're like, oh my gosh, look at this. I was so excited. I'm showing my wife, and she's like, that doesn't even look like you. I'm like, yes, it does. It's amazing. She's like, what's wrong with you? and now it's kind of hard to tell the difference. So it looks like me, it sounds like me, it moves like me. it's moved from it used to just be you can animate your mouth. So whatever hand gestures, head gestures you did in the original bass video is what you did all the time, right? So I couldn't I couldn't wave my hand, I couldn't point, but now it takes the base footage and it learns your movements. so it matches what you're saying and it creates movements. I can change the background, I can change my shirt all through AI. And before I could never do that. so I'm gonna say that in six months it's gonna be exponentially better than it is right now. so every single thing, pretty much you get our YouTube channel, it's not me. It's all AI me. So we just have a couple minutes left, Tom. why don't you just go through a little bit of services that you do carry at EZMarketing.com. That's ezmarketing.com, and just share that with our viewers and listeners. sure. So our core services are website development, SEO, Google Ads. Right? Those are the three things that we do the most of because those are the foundational pieces. Like if you don't have that right, it's kind of hard to get all the other stuff to work. Right. So then you know, after we've kind of mastered that for you, then we're gonna move into social, email, geofencing, programmatic display, all the other digital products. So we are just straight digital. If you need a brochure, we're not your guys. Yeah. Okay, fair enough. Well, Tom, I really appreciate the time, and I encourage everyone to visit EZMarketing.com. wish you the best. And hopefully we can potentially have you on the show again later in the year or next year as things evolve even quicker. Exactly. Exactly. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you, Paul. SPONSOR MESSAGE - TICKETPORTX SPONSOR MESSAGE Introducing TicketportX multi-day events, hosting a festival, seminar, conference, tournament, or event series. No more manually sending tickets 24 hours later, no more scrambling to issue comps and catch up with attendees. With TicketportX, everything happens in real time. 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