AI Automation Without the Hype. Real Nearshore Workflows That Scale

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Welcome to another episode of the Nearshore Cafe Podcast.
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I'm your host, Brian Sampson.
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And if you're interested in how AI and Nearshoring are merging, this is going to be a really good episode for you.
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Learning about operational, upside workflows, efficiencies, ways to improve.
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It's going to be a really educational show.
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Before I do that, let me thank our sponsor.
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That's Plug Technologies P L U G G dot tech.
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Great way to connect talent from all over Latin America with U.S.
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companies.
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Welcome Marvin Martinez, CEO and founder of Bansall AI.
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Hey, thank you, Brian, for having me on your show.
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It's a pleasure.
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So I want to be transparent here.
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I was so impressed working with you, Marvin, for the last year as a client that I've decided to invest recently into Bansall.
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I think it has this really exciting arbitrage opportunity of all that we already know about Nearshore combined with AI.
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I think about this phrase double bonus arbitrage.
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Tell the audience what is Bansall, what does it do, types of customers it works with?
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Tell us all about what's going on there.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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So Bansall AI, it's a project that started last year.
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It was a really good opportunity to merge the experience of being an operational leader and just adding AI to it.
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It was just amazing and eye-opening, to be honest with you.
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And basically, what we do is that we help companies understand how their workflow actually flows.
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We help them identify the highest impact manual work and we automate it in a very practical way.
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Basically, our focus is return of investment, not the AI hype.
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We have worked with uh multiple companies from home services all the way up to staffing companies, staffing firms.
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And uh some of the common use cases and the things that we help them automate and get a lot of return of investment in is speed-to-lead automation, no-shall prevention and scheduling workflows.
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We have done some automated invoicing and status updates in multiple CRMs.
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We have done social media automation and customer support automation.
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But that is not the best part.
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Those are the things that we have already ready.
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After we just understand your business, we can just plug it in.
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But we also work with custom workflows and automations.
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So that means that if your process is unique, if what you do is completely different than what everybody else does, so we help you automate that process.
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We help you map that workflow end-to-end, identify bottlenecks, and just deploy solutions quickly on your current infrastructure.
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So I think that's the best part that we can make this AI implementation only yours.
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No one else will have it.
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You said something that I think resonates a lot.
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It's 2026, but even the last two years is AI hype.
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It feels like everything, every newsletter that I get is about AI.
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Every investment opportunity is about AI.
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It feels like everyone is using it, but very few understand it.
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Tell us what does this AI hype mean to you and how are companies maybe like kind of paralyzed by all this?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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When you think about AI hype, that means people trying to adopt AI just because they want to say, I have AI in my business, without even understanding how AI can actually help them just to get a better return of investment or increasing their revenue, reducing errors, even.
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There are two types of people from what I have learned in this time.
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First, the early adopters, which are like the visionary people, those ones that are willing to take risks just to get competitive advantage.
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And the other piece is like early adopters, those are more pragmatic.
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And what they want to do is they want to prove return of investment, repeatable results before committing.
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So there's there's this uh chunk of people that are already making money and reducing costs using AI because they understand where in their workflow, where in their process, AI fits.
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It's not just, you know, just putting one AI tool because everyone else is using it.
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I think those are the ones that are making money right now.
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And the early adopters are those, again, that they understand that AI needs to be in their business, but they still don't know how to do it.
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And that's where pensaw AI helps.
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In short, I gotta say that more leaders are now willing to try AI, and the mindset has shifted from curiosity to urgency.
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But the truth is just only one.
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If you don't use AI in your company, then you are at disadvantage.
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But you gotta know where to put it in.
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Yeah.
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Can you talk about?
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I think a lot of people, even myself included, over this last year, I've been trying to understand like AI tools versus automation versus agents.
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Can you just kind of help us understand like the definitions of that?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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And I want to keep it simple for you.
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When we talk about tools right now in this 2026, there are two different differentiated buckets, like very clear.
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The first one is the bucket of buy coding.
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These are like software tools where you can create things like websites, internal tools, even mobile applications just by using natural language, plain English.
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You need to know how to describe what you want, and the tool helps you build it out of nowhere.
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It's gonna take like five minutes, and you don't have to be a coder or software developer just to do this, right?
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And the goal of these type of tools is just getting a speed and validation of your project and your idea.
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Personally, the the tool that I love is lovable.dev because it has uh a lot of integrations built in, very easy to use, just a simple prompt.
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There are other tools in the market, but for me, lovable.dev is the most powerful.
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And the other piece of it is the automation platforms.
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So yeah, you got it.
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You got your app bycoded, you have the user interface, you really like how it looks, but what happens when you start to use it?
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So the backend is built in these automation platforms, which are pretty much tools that connect systems, move data, and trigger actions for you.
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My preferred tool is end because it is flexible and strong for building production workflows.
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There's one mistake that people do and that most companies do.
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They treat these two as separate experiments.
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But the truth is that the right approach is to treat it as one system.
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You use the byte coding tool to create the user interface, very simple, very easy to use, and you connect it to the back end, to the automation tool, so that it delivers value at scale.
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So the rest of the tools that you will see in the market is just a combination of these books.
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So very simple to understand in that sense.
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Marvin, when people say AI agent, like what does that mean?
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You know, are these like little robots that are doing stuff?
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Is it really N8N and people are kind of, you know, they're confusing what it is?
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Yeah, that's a very common question.
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Let me let me just explain the difference.
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We have workflows, we have workflows with AI, and we have AI agents.
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Workflow is when you have a very well-defined process, conditional logic, if then step one and step two.
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You don't need AI for that.
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And surprisingly, 70% of the workflows that we build for companies, that's only what they need, just having a clear structure.
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Workflows with AI, it's there's a point in that process where logic is not the only thing that defines the next step, but you need to have uh like a gatekeeper, something that uh makes a decision.
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Like, for instance, if you get an email, how do you know what type of email is that?
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That's when you implement AI in that workflow because the AI can help you understand the content of the email.
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But that is not an AI agent yet.
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So that workflow becomes an AI agent when you provide access to a tool to that agent or to that workflow.
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So for instance, you get uh a workflow that identifies the type of email.
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It classifies the email based on the intent of the person that wrote it.
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But if you allow AI to draft a response, to even send an email to classify in your environment, that's an AI agent.
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So it's basically an AI workflow with the capabilities of interacting with tools.
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Now, the other piece is how do you make it look beautiful?
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That's where the bycoding tool takes place.
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Got it, got it, okay.
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Okay, good.
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When I hear about companies that were automating using Zapier, which is I think is like the most well-known API connector, you know, automation.
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Can you help us understand, like, in what case is it better to use Zapier?
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And what cases should somebody look at N8N or something like that instead?
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Yeah, Zapier, it's like uh one of the first, as you say, you know, it helps you connect uh similar to N8N, but because it's been in the market for so longer, it has more integrations.
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So think about integrations as tools, software.
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For instance, Gmail is an integration, Trello is an integration, ClickUp is an integration.
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So what Sapier does is just to help you with the connection to all those tools in an easy-to-read format and an easy for someone with little knowledge in technical stuff.
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NARN on the other side has less connectors, they call it nodes.
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So if you want to connect a tool that is not built in, then you need to have more technical knowledge to actually connect that tool.
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For instance, if you want to connect Trello and you need and you don't have all the passwords and API and stuff, so you have to go into the API documentation, look at how to write it down, create an HTTP node.
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And I don't want to go to technical, but in essence, it's easier to manage.
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So if you're learning, then Sapir is the way to go.
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But if you know what you're doing, then NAN is the best tool.
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Yeah, yeah, good, good.
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Tell us more about the types of customers that Bansall is working with and able to work with.
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Are you looking at small businesses, founder-led companies, mid-market, larger?
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You know, what like what's the right type of customer for Bansall?
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Yeah, Bansall ideal customer is either a founder-led, small business or mid-sized business that they want to scale without adding headcount.
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So basically, what we do is to amplify the process that you already have and then just add in AI to make your process faster and to reduce errors.
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So when thinking about the right customers that we serve is small businesses, mid-businesses in any area.
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It doesn't matter if you're home services, it doesn't matter if you are a plumber, a cleaning company, even if you are a high-tech company, we can help you as long as you have your processes well defined and you have with your SOPs up to date.
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Even if you don't have all that in place, no worries.
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Because we are can help you map those processes for you.
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And that's when I get in.
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Because I have a like a very nice background of operational experience.
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Yeah.
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Do you think companies right now are maybe trying to evaluate do I need a virtual assistant, say from the Philippines, or do I need AI?
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You know, how do how might you advise like when you need a person versus when you could use an agent or a workflow?
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Based on my personal opinion, you will always need somebody who is going to oversee your AI process.
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But don't get me wrong, you might need less headcount than what you think.
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So probably you are thinking of hiring two people to manage your social media, just to give you an example.
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But you can actually automate your social media process, your posting, your meta ads if needed, and then have AI doing that for you, and then having just like a virtual assistant who can oversee the quality of the output and can start also teaching the AI what's wrong, what is not so good, and what needs to be changed.
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So it's a combination of both AI for amplifying your processes to making them faster and better, and just a person that can oversee all that on your behalf.
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Yeah.
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As a founder of a couple different businesses, I can maybe comment on something that you were able to build that I think I got a lot of value out of.
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In professional services, we believe that consumption drives conversion.
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People want to look at your content a lot.
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They want to read it, consume it, digest it.
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And then when they're ready, you know, they reach out.
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I think the thing that nobody talks about is it's kind of exhausting to come up with content all the time and use the stuff that I've built in the past.
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So there was a LinkedIn automation tool that you built.
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And I was hoping you could explain that to the audience, like what the thesis was, and then how you went about building that.
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Yeah, it would be a pleasure.
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So uh we built this for actually pod technologies, which is one of our clients.
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So what we did is to explore the process.
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How do you how do you initially do this process manually?
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How do you plan for your content?
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And then what we did is to use a byte coding tool, which is lovable.dev, to build the user interface.
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And what's most interesting about this is that we could build like a database of content built from the plug.tech website just to feed our AI agent.
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So that way, the content automation tool would work the following way.
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Number one, it's gonna be triggered by an email that it's running to the founder every day.
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The founder can access that UI that we built with lovable.dev.
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And from that UI user interface, the founder could from topics that were already on our website, just to write down a social media post on LinkedIn because it was specifically for LinkedIn.
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But not only that, but we also gave this AI tool instructions on how to craft and how to create that uh that post.
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That post goes to the founder for validation.
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Again, I think it is really critical that a person can, you know, just oversee the whole process.
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And if the person, in this case, the founder, would agree to it, he would just approve.
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And that I was connected to his LinkedIn profile and the um and the post was going live as soon as he hit approved.
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So it was just amazing.
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He was saving a lot of time on ideas, and he was saving tons of time per week when it comes to just creating the content.
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Yeah, I'll I'll echo that as somebody who would wake up and then almost feel the stress of like, what am I gonna write about?
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Trying to get the post exactly right.
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And then now it's really three clicks, and I've got a post that feels like it's in my voice because it's pulling content that I've already created, and it's easy, saves a lot of time.
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But I also think, you know, there's this kind of too good to be true mentality a lot of people have.
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Like if it if it's really easy to do or it saves time, all right, like there must be a drop-off in quality.
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But I haven't seen that, you know.
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There's embedded videos, clean writing, proper tags, impressions are still right up there.
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So I think it's been a success story.
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It's been more automated, more time-saving, really without the quality drop-off.
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Yeah, and that's and that's actually the uh, you know, the end goal.
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Make life easier for business owners and people running, you know, uh their companies.
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We want to give them time back so that they can focus on what really drives growth, like taking those strategic decisions in their companies.
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I think maybe three, four, five years ago, it was common for say virtual assistants armed with a Canva account to create social media posts.
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And you know, similar to what I went through, there's like a little bit of a stress, like what I'm gonna write about, I gotta make everything proper and clean and pretty.
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Tell us about how companies are using AI for social media posts.
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So the use case is very easy as long as the process is uh is fully mapped.
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AI can help you, number one, come up with ideas of content.
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And number two, AI can help you actually create videos for you and make the connection coming from all the way from the user interface to the automation piece to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.
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You can actually, did you know that there's a tool that you can actually post up to nine social media platforms at the same time?
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And yeah, and that's not the best part.
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The best part is that each social media platform, you can actually write the content differently.
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So you can train the AI to do it.
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So I have seen a lot of companies just taking pictures of their product, just enhancing the picture and creating new designs just by telling AI what to do, even creating short videos from that picture.
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From uh they call it UGD videos, like people using your product and then just uploading that to AI.
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And uh, I've seen a lot of companies being successful, just getting new followers, getting new likes, getting a lot of traction in your social media, which also creates trust.
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When you actually go to Facebook, Instagram, and you see a company that's been posting consistently, then you say, hey, this company is active and can really drive results.
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And that's what we do with AI.
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And that's one thing that Bensall can help you build.
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Yeah.
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I think the last part of the process I wanted you to dive into is sales, lead generation, you know, all this world.
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And we've seen, you know, HubSpot and all these different tools and Apollo, and it feels like it's noisy.
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It's already kind of easy to do that.
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But maybe there are other ways to do this more inexpensive, but equal.
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Fully as efficient.
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Can you talk about AI tools and other ways that companies are leveraging that for uh Legion?
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Yeah.
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And uh I don't know if I have to go too technically into this, but you know, this is what I love about AI.
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How many tools are available now?
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But there is one tool which is called, and it's a website, which is called Appy.
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Appy has multiple actors, that's how they call it, that can help you do uh a lot of things.
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One of those things is scraping for new leads.
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So you can actually use those to go into Google Maps, go into Facebooks, go into LinkedIn, and look for people based on the criteria that you provide.
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And that's just one tool.
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Then once you have all that information, you can parse that or you can move that information from Appy into your backend, which is NADN, right?
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From NAN, you can use AI, an AI agent that can actually go deeper into the web.
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And with the initial information provided, you can actually research on one specific need.
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So for instance, we can go into your LinkedIn profile and look at your experience, your posts, everything that you've done for the last years.
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And then AI can actually give a summary of you, what you do, and the companies.
00:21:21.519 --> 00:21:28.799
And then we can use that summary to create a personalized communication for you, either email, DM, or whatever you need.
00:21:28.960 --> 00:21:35.519
And then we can connect that to your CRM because we want to keep track of all the leads that we have targeted.
00:21:35.920 --> 00:21:46.720
So that's the beauty of AI, and that's another way where you can get new leads, personalized messages, and keep them up in your CRM up to date without you making huge efforts.
00:21:46.880 --> 00:22:00.000
You can pass this list on to your sales agent afterwards, maybe somebody near shore, right, that you hired, and then uh that person can start making more targeted calls to those people.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:04.319
So there's so many ways that you can plug AI into your business.
00:22:04.480 --> 00:22:08.000
You just need to know where exactly in your process AI fits better.
00:22:08.799 --> 00:22:09.599
That's the key.
00:22:09.759 --> 00:22:14.480
If you want to get a quick return of investment, don't make it complicated.
00:22:14.559 --> 00:22:16.559
You don't have to go with the hype.
00:22:16.720 --> 00:22:23.599
Just uh let's look at your process, let's see how you do things, let's plug AI and let's get money back into your pocket.
00:22:23.759 --> 00:22:24.880
I would really love that.
00:22:25.119 --> 00:22:26.160
Yeah, I think so.
00:22:26.400 --> 00:22:31.599
What does it mean right now to be in Latin America using AI?
00:22:31.759 --> 00:22:41.759
And and maybe let me give some context to this question because you know, I think sometimes people in the US can feel like they're the only ones on the forefront of technology.
00:22:42.000 --> 00:22:46.480
Are people in Central America, South America, are they using the same tools?
00:22:46.640 --> 00:22:50.960
Are they using ChatGPT and Gemini and N8N?
00:22:51.039 --> 00:22:52.319
Is it is it more rare?
00:22:52.720 --> 00:22:56.559
Tell us about the the adoption of AI in in Latin America.
00:22:56.880 --> 00:23:04.960
I have a lot of people in my network that are using AI and that are located in Central America, and you can see two different types of people.
00:23:05.200 --> 00:23:11.519
You can see the people that is targeting the US market, so you know, uh they try to keep up the pace with the US.
00:23:11.680 --> 00:23:17.119
But in Latin America, there's the other pass of the other part of people that are just learning.
00:23:17.279 --> 00:23:26.480
So when it comes to AI adoption, I hate to admit it, but uh Latin America is just one step back, like one step behind than the US.
00:23:26.640 --> 00:23:29.039
But this is not because of lack of talent.
00:23:29.200 --> 00:23:34.720
There are clear visionaries here, people that understand that AI can really make a difference in their business.
00:23:34.960 --> 00:23:45.680
The bigger issue here is that uh most people are still stuck in the curiosity and learning phase instead of applying AI into real workflows.
00:23:45.839 --> 00:23:53.039
Maybe they are afraid to move on, maybe they don't trust 100% of AI, so they are in the process of discovery.
00:23:53.279 --> 00:24:02.400
I'm pretty sure that once we understand better and start implementing AI into our businesses, that's when the adoption is gonna accelerate quickly.
00:24:02.480 --> 00:24:09.839
I think it's gonna take uh maybe six months to one year before we move on to the next stage in Latin America.
00:24:10.160 --> 00:24:11.440
But there's a lot of noise.
00:24:11.599 --> 00:24:14.960
There's a lot of noise here when it comes to automation and AI.
00:24:15.200 --> 00:24:18.799
But there's a lot of teaching, teaching courses.
00:24:18.960 --> 00:24:22.960
That's where we are standing at compared to US, where we are already implementing it.
00:24:23.200 --> 00:24:24.480
Yeah, yeah, I think that's right.
00:24:24.720 --> 00:24:26.319
Tell us more about Managua.
00:24:26.480 --> 00:24:34.559
You know, what is it like living in Nicaragua, doing business there, working with the US, the business climate, the culture?
00:24:34.799 --> 00:24:35.759
Tell us more about that.
00:24:36.079 --> 00:24:44.799
Yeah, well, living and working from Managua, it's like uh a contrast between intensity and balance, to be honest with you.
00:24:44.960 --> 00:24:50.160
So, one of the things that I really hate about Managua, it's traffic.
00:24:50.319 --> 00:24:55.759
Traffic is a real challenge and it can be heavy pretty much at any time of the day.
00:24:55.920 --> 00:25:08.319
So if I want to go out to the street, I think about it twice, to be honest with you, because driving just five miles is gonna take me anywhere between 30 minutes to 45 minutes, and I am not joking.
00:25:08.559 --> 00:25:18.720
So this forces you to plan your day with intention, because if you do not manage your time, then the day is gonna manage you, right?
00:25:18.799 --> 00:25:20.160
And that is so crazy.
00:25:20.400 --> 00:25:27.839
But once you beat the traffic in the city, right, the lifestyle that you can experience is just another level.
00:25:28.000 --> 00:25:34.160
In Managua, the beach is like about 45 minutes away after you get out of the city.
00:25:34.400 --> 00:25:40.720
So it's possible for you to disconnect without doing long road trips.
00:25:40.960 --> 00:25:41.759
Very easy.
00:25:41.920 --> 00:25:55.279
There's also a bunch of restaurants, there's new restaurants every day here, and there's a lot of places where you can go to enjoy, both personally, if you want to take some time with yourself, which is okay, or with your family.
00:25:55.599 --> 00:25:58.160
Lastly, the cost of living is not that bad.
00:25:58.240 --> 00:26:01.039
So that's create a lot of flexibility.
00:26:01.200 --> 00:26:06.079
So it's easy, it's easy for you to build a comfortable life here in the city.
00:26:06.319 --> 00:26:06.559
Yeah.
00:26:06.799 --> 00:26:13.519
Tell us about the the food, the music, the culture, you know, for for those uh listening who've never been to Nicaragua.
00:26:13.920 --> 00:26:19.039
Well, so food you will find like different traditional dishes.
00:26:19.200 --> 00:26:25.039
So you got places where you can get American food, like hamburgers, hot dogs, and stuff like that.
00:26:25.279 --> 00:26:36.000
We also have places where you can get Chinese food, where you can get food from these countries that are very, very traditional, like Peruvian food and that style.
00:26:36.319 --> 00:26:43.519
But there's also like a lot of these places where we sell typical food.
00:26:43.680 --> 00:26:45.440
We call them fritangas.
00:26:45.599 --> 00:26:50.160
So fritangas is typical food, callopinto, carne asada.
00:26:50.640 --> 00:26:57.680
Uh, and you can find an open fritanga every day at night, Monday through Sunday.
00:26:57.920 --> 00:27:13.039
So if you're hungry, then just go out, take a walk, and just go to a fritanga where you can either eat in place, which makes it better because you are, you know, in the street looking at people, or you can take it home and uh then just be relaxed.
00:27:13.119 --> 00:27:16.160
But that's that's the best part of being in Manawa Nicaragua.
00:27:16.319 --> 00:27:17.440
Yeah, I mean that's great.
00:27:17.680 --> 00:27:21.920
Well, Marvin, uh, this has been a really educational show.
00:27:22.079 --> 00:27:27.759
I think making AI easy to understand and not intimidating, you know, not scary.
00:27:27.920 --> 00:27:31.119
You know, that was a big goal for the show today, and I think you accomplished that.
00:27:31.200 --> 00:27:31.599
So thank you.
00:27:31.839 --> 00:27:32.559
Thank you, Brian.
00:27:32.640 --> 00:27:34.559
It's been a pleasure to be here with you.
00:27:34.799 --> 00:27:40.240
This podcast is sponsored by Plug Technologies, P L U G G dot Tech.
00:27:40.559 --> 00:27:43.599
Great way to connect talent from all over Latin America with the U.S.
00:27:43.680 --> 00:27:44.160
companies.
00:27:44.400 --> 00:27:49.440
Thank you again to Marvin Martinez, CEO and founder of Bansall AI.
00:27:49.680 --> 00:27:52.960
We will see you next time on the Near Shore Cafe Podcast.
00:27:53.200 --> 00:27:56.559
Next week for a new episode featuring another special guest.