And it's weird for me to say, because I've been promoting AI for like the past four years. And a lot of AI companies have paid me a lot of money to promote this message. And now I feel kind of like Oppenheimer, where like, I want to undo the damage that I've done over these last four years, and If everybody is so reliant on AI, they're basically becoming zombies, right? If you are the one that can maintain your thinking and your ability to process information, you're going to be a step ahead of everyone else. Because a lot of people will be surprised that I only have one full-time employee. All right, guys. Remote first podcast series, GHL speaker series. This month, I have been actually sitting with a lot of speakers coming to HighLevel Summit, 2026, October 26th to 29th. And this time around, I have a special guest with me, Hamza Automates, Hamza Baig, one of our close associates. He's been in the circuit for a long, long time with HighLevel. I think in his own words, he has been doing automations and AI even before they had a word for it. You have a long introduction here for me. I have something right. Of course, you're working. hamza automates he's a coach there's a whole history to it we'll get into it 250 000 people following you've helped more than 1500 businesses now you have 40 000 students across different communities YouTube you have 34 000 subscribers within the HighLevel world also right so that's a different it you have you've won platinum 2024 and the next year. And it tells you a little bit about consistency, right? Never stop, never get comfortable. You got diamond. Welcome to Remote First Podcast, Hamza once again. Tell us about your journey at HighLevel first. How are you engaged with HighLevel? Amazing. Thank you for that awesome introduction. I appreciate it hello everybody I'm hamza automates and HighLevel has been a huge part of everything that I've done like it's what I've run my entire business on it changed my life I'd say founded back in 2021 found it on a viral random tick tock video saw that video I thought this was the most amazing tool ever decided to jump into it I was already in the ai automation space but this just made everything so simple, right? Everything under one ecosystem, under one house. So I dedicated my entire life at that point to mastering the HighLevel tool. And I grew with the company, I became one of their top affiliates, their top SaaSpreneurs. And now I'm being seen as, I guess, one of the leaders that if someone wants to start a business with HighLevel, you know, my name comes up where I can teach you how to start an AI automation agency under the HighLevel That is amazing. And then I'm going to come right to it. on the screen we see you know of course you as being a young entrepreneur a successful entrepreneur getting multiple awards being on stage so tell us about a little bit about your journey you know looking at you doesn't look like it's a really long journey to be honest but I know behind everything you know we have people only see you know the fruits but there's a lot of effort behind it. Tell us a little bit. I know you started in 2021. Yeah. But tell us about a little bit more about Hamza Yeah, absolutely. So Hamza Baig is an entrepreneur at heart. If it wasn't this, he would have found something else to make it work. Right. So my background was in sales. I studied finance at university, graduated, realized that this wasn't for me. I didn't want to work at the banks. I didn't want to do consulting. So one opportunity that came up was a sales role. And it was as bad as you can imagine. It was a call center where I had set made 300 dials every single day. And at the time, I absolutely hated it. But what I realized is what it was doing to me in terms of personal development. I was understanding how to objection handle, how to speak with confidence, how to get my point across in the shortest amount possible. Right. So these soft skills accumulated and I was like the salesperson. I was doing very well at these companies. And then the opportunity came where, you know, I could start my own business. HighLevel was presented to me as, look, you're selling software for these other companies and you're getting a 10 percent commission. Why don't you own 100 percent of the software, white label it as your own and resell it as your own business owner. So that's essentially what I did. I was like, this is amazing. I was basically bred for this. I'm a software salesperson. Now I can make my own software company. So overnight, I signed up for HighLevel. I rebranded it, white labeled it. And I basically, I mean, starting out, no one really wanted to buy a CRM and that's all it was back then. So a lot of it was just hard, cold calling, door knocking, going door to door in person. And to make this work, I basically, you know, I quit my job. I cut my expenses down to zero. I was renting apartments to just stay afloat. And eventually what happened is I was very lucky that the AI boom was happening just around that time. And when ChatGPT first popped off, I was one of the first people to be like, yeah, this is cool. And it can answer questions and it can make funny images, but it has business applications. So I was one of the first people to take ChatGPT. And this was before that a native integration. I use Zapier and make.com and I connected it to GoHighLevel and made like one of the first chatbots ever on HighLevel. And you can go to my YouTube and you can go to the oldest video that I have. And it's about making chatbots back in like 2022 when nobody was doing this stuff. So I just realized that, you know, There's an opportunity for this. And then as AI grew, I was very lucky to ride that wave and then cement myself as kind of that person. But me at a heart, I'm an entrepreneur. I love creating. The most fun I have is when I'm inside their automation builder or when I'm inside HighLevel itself, just breaking things, trying out different tools and learning and then sharing what I learned in my content. And that's why my content as well, because it's just me authentically documented. Hey, look what I look what I built. This is how my automation works. And people love that stuff. So I never tried to make content with the intention of kind of, you know, being a guru or a coach. It was just really look at the cool stuff I'm building. And if you like it, I'll teach you how to build it. And that's what people wanted to kind of learn from me. That's why I think, you know, your content, you said it comes out as authentic because the best thing is, you know, how can you do something that you would like? If you do that, you know, then there's so much heart in it and it automatically is impactful. so I love its finance sales background but before we have you know you had a lot of other points ai is you know one of the key early adopters but before that you know because you talked about how in the beginning HighLevel is only six seven year old company yeah how have you seen HighLevel itself software and the company change since your time you know starting and now yes the cool thing is if you go to my old YouTube videos and you go by like the oldest video you can see how clunky and basic the software was back then. Like it's nothing compared to what it was today. And the reason for that is because of the, well, the mission statement they have, the founders and their mentality on how they rapidly adopt and how they just keep innovating on the product, but how they also listen to us, like us as their affiliates, us as their agencies. They're always hounding me for feedback and support and how's this feature and do you wish that this was different? So they actually take that to heart and that makes a massive difference. and you can see how quickly the product releases are coming out. And the other part of that is they're very on top of the latest technology. Like Claude Opus 5.5 will drop tomorrow, and then the next day GoHighLevel will have an integration to that tool. There's no waiting. They ship and they push things, and then they test afterwards, which is both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes you're going to have bugs in that sense. But just the rapid speed in which they operate, we appreciate that because now we can stay on top of everything and just let them worry about the later stuff. And then I think it comes to you. I was listening to one of your, or watching one of your stories, and you said, you know, I think it comes maybe you talking to 300 people a day with the conversations you know and you said what's the one of the most important thing people skip and you said speak to your customer right so why is that important right you're all based on automation ai and you're coming or what is the most important thing talk to your person people that's a hard thing to do so why is that important it's one of the most important things right now because it's become so easy to build, right? Anyone can decide tomorrow to become a software company or an automation developer, right? That's not hard to do. But to know what to build and to know what someone is actually going to pay you money for, that's only something the customer can tell you, right? You can't predict it. You can't scrape online. You can't read Reddit and think, oh, I'm going to build a product because there was a Reddit comment that said this is a good idea. The only person that can tell you what to build is your end user and your end customer. And the reason why people don't have success is one, they skip that step. And two, because it's hard. Like going up to a stranger and asking them their problems and then saying, hey, will you pay money for this if I build this? The average entrepreneur is not going to do that. So that's the new moat. The new moat is like, how do we actually get this and build the right thing and sell it to the right person? So I'm glad that it's hard to do. Otherwise, everyone would do it and it would just ruin the market. So that's the differentiator right now. I say, you know, everybody can be a salesperson, but not everybody does it because it is not easy, you know, to get phones slammed on you. People just in the middle of the phone just hanging up on you. And sometimes, you know, you see a lot of interesting things also on the sales call. But that's where the real learning comes from. We call it active listening at RepStack. So I was also looking at, you know, going back on your Instagram, your social media. One of the things going back to your automation is AI automation agency, right? And you said you help people basically from scratch. And if someone is already there, you help them scale. First, my question is, you know, what is an AI automation agency? And then we can go from there. Yeah. So defining an agency first. So an agency is basically any sort of business that provides a service to help another business either create value in the form of generating them more revenue, saving them time, those kind of things. Now, if you add AI automation as a layer on top of that, it's basically just using AI automation to provide some sort of service or system to help a business automate something that they're doing manually. The intention of this is to save them more time, make them more money, cut their costs, things like that. So for example, like if I know that a business is struggling with missed calls, the second it becomes 6 p.m., the receptionist goes off for the day, they're missing all the calls after hours. A very simple solution is I can use AI to create an AI agent that basically answers the phone and speaks to every lead that calls after 6 p.m. I've used AI automation to solve a problem and provide a service for a business and make them more money in the process. process. Okay. And for small, medium-sized businesses, you know, I haven't kind of segued with the same question. What is the key to adopting right now in RepStack? Or actually, you see everywhere, our challenge is everybody is an AI coach and everything is so little shiny. One model comes out, the next thing comes out, then the other thing is built. So what is the key, especially for small and medium size, you know, you can spend so much in R&D and just go on a tangent. And the next thing is you're, you know, the whole day is gone. What would you tell to, you know, small, medium businesses to look for when they're trying to do AI in their own agency? Yeah, I mean, the first thing is to understand that AI is not what businesses buy or AI is not what we care about, right? AI is simply a tool to achieve an outcome. We want to talk in terms of outcomes and results. So what I mean by that is when I go to a business and I want to sell them a voice AI receptionist, I'm not leading in there saying, I want to build you an AI voice receptionist that's going to answer the phone. All I'm going to say is, look, you have a problem that after 6pm you're missing all of these calls. I have a solution that's going to solve that problem for you. Whether it's AI, whether it's a human being that I'm staffing, they don't care. All they care about is will my missed calls be solved? So a lot of people are thinking that AI itself is the value and AI is the shiny object when it's not. AI is simply a tool to achieve you some sort of outcome. When you start thinking like that, you stop putting AI on your website, you stop calling yourself AI first, you stop using and caring about all these models. If I build a chatbot with Opus 5.5 or Opus 4.2 from like three months ago, the result is almost the same. The business owner could not care less. And I do not want to tell him what model I'm using that does not become part of my pitch because they get way too distracted in all this shiny garbage about this new model, this new innovation, like AI is not important. All we want to do is solve a problem for the business owner and you need to frame it that way. If anything, it's better to not say you're AI first because of how much noise is out there. Everyone's saying, you know, we use AI here, we use automation there. It's not, it's actually turning them off. There's something called AI fatigue where people are like, I don't want AI. I would rather pay a human being to not talk to AI. So there is that sentiment going around. And I think people are putting too much emphasis on the fact that they use AI, when really it's just you're solving a problem. AI just happens to be the tool you used. I think it should be just understood now that, you know, whatever you're doing, if you're doing media buying, if you're doing SEO, you know, you're doing prospecting, you are doing with AI's help. It should be a given. There's no need to say it. it's assumed at this point yeah and you know you're going to be losing a lot of time right now so with this okay early adopters and within your time right now you're working with so many agencies what kind of businesses you know right now are kind of more fertile for adoption on ai that you've seen in succeed in your coaching, you know, with your students? Yeah, in terms of the industries, it's really any appointment based business. So ones that rely on bookings, like consults, inquiries, that kind of stuff. So a lot of home service businesses need this, a lot of like clinics, practices, things like that. But it's less so about the type of industry, because a lot of people say, oh, what's the best niche? The truth is any niche can work, right? A dental clinic and need it just as much as a plumber could need it. It's about what is the state of that business? Like, where are they in their life cycle? In the sense that if this is a brand new dental clinic that just got started, they likely have no infrastructure. They don't have any SOPs. They don't have any lead flow coming in. What they need is a marketing agency to run ads for them, right? I wouldn't touch that business because I have nothing to automate. They don't even know what's going on. They just started. However, if I was talking to a mature business who's doing between five to $15 million in revenue, likely they're getting hundreds of leads a day. They're running ads, they've got their SOPs, they have their infrastructure set up. That is a business that I can work with. I can automate whatever they're doing manually now, and we can make a lot of value together. So the industry matters less. It's the what level or state or what is the health of the business. The way that I judge health is lead flow. If you tell me your lead flow and it's a healthy lead flow, then I know that you've got some things right. You understand marketing, your infrastructure is good, and then there's things for me to work with. So going deeper it's the the appointment based businesses so clinics home service businesses but then also my sweet spot is between three to fifteen million dollars in revenue that's where like they're at that break point and then I can help them get to that next revenue level from there so you're more on a scaling side once you know and that's where I guess more ai would come in initially you got to put in the hard work you gotta have your hands dirty yeah other sorry was gonna I was going to add on to that. So like for me, I was talking personally for my business, right? Like we like that sweet spot to help them scale. But if a beginner comes into one of my coaching programs and he's like, look, I just want to get started. I'm like, yeah, you can go after a business that just started yesterday and then give them the basics, set them up with a website, set them up with a Google business profile, reputation management, give them the CRM. These are perfect offers for a brand new business. But that's not what I do. I would help a business scale with complex AI automations. So there's different levels there. A beginner can start with a beginner package. And then when they're ready to scale, they can use AI. And one other thing, everybody gets really confused. We see you in riches, are in niches. How do you pick, you know, someone's coming in on the beginning level? Of course, if someone's already there, they already have it dialed in. Initially, someone's coming in to start. How do they pick their niche? How do you guide that to your students? Yeah, there's a lot of ways to do it. My methodology is the main thing you want to focus on is what does the value of one extra customer provide to them in the sense that is it a high ticket business? So is their average ticket size like two to ten thousand dollars? Right. Compared. So maybe like a door installation company or a garage door company. That's a high ticket thing. Obviously, every deal that you get them is going to be pretty, pretty valuable to them compared to a restaurant. For every new deal you get for a restaurant, it's like a $20 burger, right? And their margin on that is basically nothing. So when you're looking at niches, compare what that ticket size is. Then what is the average lead flow, right? So in terms of like, we have a client that's like, I think mold removal. Now that's a very high ticket business, right? Like, you know, you can go to the tens of thousands of dollars, but they don't get a lot of leads. It's a very intent-based business. You might get a couple a day, a couple a week. So there's not a lot for us to automate at that point versus, you know, like a roofer. Roofers get a constant flow of leads and they're high ticket. So that makes it a more attractive niche at that stage. So we have these little criteria as we look at. So it's the ticket size. It's the lead flow. Then it's how is how accessible is the point of contact in that business. For example, if I'm going after, you know, a big conglomerate or a manufacturing company, it's going to be very hard for me to get to that executive level of who I need to speak with versus if it's more of like a local business that is doing well they're still like online these things matter as well because if they're an online business ideally remote then all of their ecosystem is what we can automate if they're in person they rely a lot on like pen and paper and documents and things there's not a lot for us to work with there so I give criteria to my students and then let them do the math themselves to figure out the niche I can't just give them like a list of 20 niches otherwise it gets saturated immediately it's more of the methodology that goes behind it and if I tell someone oh go after plumbers and it doesn't suit their personality like you know like maybe they want there's someone that doesn't like to work with blue collar businesses or like you know service businesses that's fine Maybe they're more corporate. Then I recommend they go after a business that like lives on LinkedIn, for example, like lawyers, like personal injury lawyers. Right. So it really depends on the personality, too. So there's so many factors. In my one on one coaching, I sit down with the person and we do like a full analysis where I understand their background, their personality, what they're looking to get out of it, what kind of outreach they want to do, because like a plumber is not going to be available on LinkedIn. So if my person wants to build a LinkedIn brand, I got to find them a niche that lives on LinkedIn. So there's logic that goes behind that as well, based on your outreach. I like how you put it, right? So it's like basics. And, you know, and I can see now why you're a good coach. The way you explain it, like a light bulb went in my mind. And I was not even trying to figure anything out. It was average ticket size, lead flow. It means just make your probability higher. anytime you're going in you know usually we don't want you to throw you know darts in the dark but make sure you have a broader picture it's a bigger playing field so I love it exactly right you don't see access that was like what made me smile I'm like okay you know that is someone who has worked with people who are starting because just the way you laid out you know and said you know it made things more clear because rich sorry so with the niche you know it is kind of confusing and people kind of take it completely completely wrong way I would say if sometimes you know you pick a niche and sometimes a nick and it's just picking up picks you up that's that's absolutely right when just just add on that it's a great point because when I tell when people are starting oftentimes they're very like laser focused and committed to one niche where I'm like you don't know that the niche you pick today is the one you're going to be working with six months from now like play the field try a bunch of different niches talk to as many business owners as you can and you'll be surprised you might like working with a completely unexpected industry and then go all in on that but people are so laser focused they're like I only want to talk to roofers and I'm just like why like there's so much so many other opportunities out there and initially yeah you gotta get the card swiped you have to pay the bills yeah and then once you have that you know and then you say okay maybe you know you don't like plumbers but if you're really good with connecting with them. Maybe that is your forte. So going back to the AI questions, you know, I don't have, we don't have too much time, but I also really want to ask one question I heard you say on your video again. You have so many actually, by the way, out there. AI is making everyone dumber, right? Again, AI, you're building AI agencies, you're coaching. But again, that's kind of a weird thing to say. What does that even AI is making me dumber. Like, I can, like, certain things it takes me a second to think of, or like math, for example, like, it's just, it's making me less sharp because I got into the habit of outsourcing a lot of my thinking, giving it all the instructions. Even now, like, right before this call, I didn't have time to send an email. So I told Victor, my AI, write an email, respond to this person, and I didn't even read the email. So little things like this, we think that they're harmless, right? But over time, they're basically reducing our cognitive function, our ability to actually process information, come up with a reply. And that whole activity is what makes us who we are, right? So I feel like we're kind of losing that part of our brain. And it's weird for me to say, because I've been promoting AI for like the past four years. And a lot of AI companies have paid me a lot of money to promote this message. And now I feel kind of like Oppenheimer, where like, I want to undo the damage that I've done over these last four years, and kind of spread the other message where I'm like, look, AI is great, obviously. It is an amazing efficiency tool, but it should be efficient at the slave work, the stuff that's like, you know, the execution that we don't want to do, things that are menial tasks. But the thinking, the creative function, coming up with ideas, processing information, we should retain that. And it's a hard thing to ask people to do. I'm trying to do that myself, where, you know, if something comes, I try and sit down, think of it myself, and then give AI the instructions to do it afterwards. But at least I thought it through. I don't want to outsource it immediately. It's easier said than done. But that's kind of what I've been noticing in myself. I don't know if you have, but a lot of my audience is as well. And it's only going to get worse. However, it also does pose an opportunity, right? If everybody is so reliant on AI, they're basically becoming zombies, right? This now becomes your competition. If you are the one that can maintain your thinking and your ability to process information, you're going to be a step ahead of everyone else. So, you know, I see it as almost my moat now or like my advantage that, you know I'm going to preserve my brain the best as I can if other people want to zombify themselves because you know they're lazier that's fine but this is the way the world is headed and I've noticed that amongst me my friends my peers and it's a scarier reality that's coming so what I am doing and just to avoid that is I'm kind of going back so it is kind of you know I say working from your hands I didn't work in moving companies but now in this day and age working from your hands is like, you know, not using AI too much. For example, we had a new contract come out. What I did, I actually went on a blank page and started writing it from one line to another one, right? And I'm saying, okay, this is because I want to write, okay, I'm sending this to a human, I want that person to sign is one of our people that we want to hire right so how can I make it so easy that you know the point number one is not most important for RepStack it's most important for the person coming in so that's how I wrote it and I'm like I felt you know like it was a different feeling to just write it down I know it felt like you know I was doing hard work but it felt like so you know I loved that feeling and but also on the other side again you know with ai it is really hard when someone says okay you know write an essay and but if with ai you get kind of first draft built if you can manage up to that don't trust the ai to the complete end-to- end package then you're okay you know first rule what we say here at ruckstack is you know yeah use ai but don't trust the ai and that's the one thing right you want to shorten your learning curve do a little bit of research and development but at the end yeah and also like I've been doing these like abandoned carts that we had so our team was not there so I'm like okay I can send another automation but I'm like can you send me the list I'm gonna call these people right and it was amazing on Friday after I got done early and I just started picking up a phone and calling I'm like okay what happened can I answer any question why did not you move through and I just heard like you know those 10-12 calls I learned so much more than I would have done in listening to maybe hundreds of calls. It's just your experience that comes in when you do things. So, yeah, AI, you know, is good. But, you know, you've got to have kind of a hybrid model. 100%. Balance in place. Yeah, that's exactly right. I'm actually building a tool that does that. It's like ChatGPT, but you ask it a question. Instead of giving you the response, it'll say, hey, let's work through this together. And it'll break down the task for you. and you actually have to give it something to get something back. So that's what I'm building now. What I do with my prompt, I don't know. So we're trying at RepStack, actually, we had a call. We're coming up with redesigning all our roles, right? So it is media buyer is, for example, is now an AI strategist, for example, right? CRM person is an AI automation CRM specialist. Has to be there, right? If you don't have it, people don't want HighLevel, they want someone who has connected HighLevel with Claude. All they just came out two days ago or, you know, whenever it came out, they're like, he should have two years of experience. That's what we're trying to redefine on our end also, because everything still need. And I was also reading this magazine ramp, it's actually a report, it comes out on business spending on AI. And in 2025, the top of, you know, 10% of the companies that spend the most money on AI, they also grew their human resources. So people were not let go, they actually implemented more. And on average they were spending 7,500 per employee per month on AI and that's how much investment they're doing but what they needed is they needed more people yeah not the other people maybe you know it was before they had the coal mines right they need to dig it then the tractors came so I think AI is the same thing you will need human you got to have that check and balance that yeah it has you have to have you so what I ask again with ChatGPT is can you ask me questions to make it clear before you answer me right what 10 ask me 10 questions so I think what you're building I'll be the one to pilot it of course I would love your feedback I think you know just being aware that this is a problem is like the first step and then those people are going to succeed right because now we're using it the way that it's supposed to be yeah I suppose yeah I like how azhar you know he's you know he's also in toronto and niagara falls he always says like iron man I'm like it's not gonna be something that's gonna you know take over but it's gonna empower the human more and that's how you should use it so that's pretty neat great great time I know but we wanted to make it even a little bit of a quick and short 30 minutes I had one last question for you hamza you're gonna be on stage this time Of course, you have your billing agencies, you're teaching students, you're doing your SaaS, right? And of course, a lot of experience with HighLevel before when it was an all-in-one CRM tool, and now it's an AI automation tool, right? They have redefined itself. What are you bringing on stage to HighLevel for whoever's coming on the October Summit this time around? Yeah, so we're actually going to be revealing behind the scenes and behind the curtains of how I was actually able to win the Diamond Award, how I actually run and automate my own SaaS business. Because a lot of people will be surprised that I only have one full-time employee. The rest of it is completely automated and we have agents running the entire business from content to CSM to the sales funnels we have, my sales managers, AI. So a lot of these functions are just AI and over that is me and my employee just managing all the functions. So I'm basically revealing behind what agents are running, what do they do, how do they help me scale, and then where are the humans involved, what are the limitations of AI, and where do you need humans to step in at that point as well. So it's a cool, unique position that I'm in because a lot of people, when I go on stage and I meet the other Diamond SaaSpreneurs, they've got teams of like 30 to 50 people, right? And that's absolutely fine. But I did mine in a unique way where we relied heavily on AI and automation to automate a lot of the ways that we were able to scale. so I'm showing that behind the scenes on how we did it that's you you did it with one person that's a lean team that's actually how everybody is right now looking to build agencies everybody you know as you said everybody is building it and but they can't sell it that's I guess it's going to be very very in demand I'm going to come listen to you october 26th the 29th ghl HighLevel summit. Once again, Hamza, thanks for taking your time. Loved getting all my questions answered. I had a lot more AI. I had to pull myself back. But I guess we have at RepStack also have a booth. Please do stop by. We love to give you some merch from RepStack. And until then, we'll see you in a couple of weeks in Dallas then. Sounds good, my friend. It was a pleasure. Thanks a lot for your time, man. Take care.