EP796: Roman Bodnarchuk - The Future is Now, And Its AI!
"The excuses are over. More millionaires and billionaires have been created through AI in the last 40 months than through any other industry we've ever seen — and this is just the beginning."
Two brothers. Twenty thousand dollars. No employees. Using twelve AI tools that cost roughly twenty dollars each per month — tools any of us could be running right now — they built a business selling GLP-1 medication online and generated $400 million in revenue in their first calendar year. This year, they are on track for $1.8 billion. No investors. No staff. Just two people who understood something most executives, entrepreneurs, and technology leaders are still missing: AI is not a buzzword you manage from a distance. It is a tool you pick up and use.
Roman Bodnarčuk has been obsessed with artificial intelligence since 2017, when a meeting with Dr. Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto showed him what was coming. He started an AI company that year, got outbid on talent by Google and Facebook, eventually sold what he had built, and spent the next four decades going deeper than almost anyone outside the major labs. What he has found at every conference, in every boardroom, and with every senior executive whose phone he has asked to see is the same thing: people know the vocabulary but are not actually using the tools.
The gap, he argues, is not about intelligence or access. It is about setup. Most people open ChatGPT, type a vague question, get a generic answer, and conclude the technology is overhyped. What they have not done is tell the AI anything meaningful about who they are, what they are building, or what they want. They have not personalized their settings, connected their email and calendar and documents, or given the system the context it needs to produce genuinely useful output. Fix those three things, Roman says, and the experience changes entirely.
In this conversation, Roman walks through the exact steps live — including a real-time demonstration with Nicky setting up his own ChatGPT personalizations on camera — and explains why connecting your AI to your existing apps, files, and data is the single most important thing most users have never done. He also describes using AI to navigate the Canadian healthcare system in real time, arriving at Toronto General, getting through triage in minutes, and receiving a diagnosis that matched exactly what the AI had suggested hours earlier.
The picture Roman paints is not science fiction. It is already happening, and the people who understand it are moving very fast.
Roman Bodnarčuk is a Toronto-based AI strategist, founder, and CEO of N5R.AI — one of Canada's leading AI agencies. He began working in artificial intelligence in 2017 following a conversation with Dr. Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto, and now advises and educates businesses on practical AI implementation. He's a sought-after speaker and trainer who works with executives and entrepreneurs to help them move from AI awareness to genuine AI capability.
Expert action steps:
1. Personalize your AI immediately. Go into the settings of whichever AI you use — ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — and fill in the custom instructions, occupation, and "more about you" fields. Ask the AI itself to generate optimized versions of all three based on everything it knows about you; each section should be around 1,350 characters.
2. Connect your data. Link your email, calendar, Google Drive, and any other apps you use regularly. The AI is only as useful as the context it has access to; connecting your real data transforms generic responses into genuinely relevant ones.
3. Talk to your AI every day. Speak rather than type — it is three times faster and more natural. Use it as a thinking partner, a coach, a strategist. The more you engage with it and ask it to remember what matters to you, the more useful it becomes over time.
Learn more & connect:
https://www.N5R.AI
Resources mentioned:
ChatGPT — https://www.chatgpt.com
Claude (Anthropic) — https://www.claude.ai
Gemini (Google) — https://gemini.google.com
HeyGen (AI video and avatar creation) — https://www.heygen.com
Super Whisper (voice-to-text app) — https://superwhisper.com
Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.