362: Turn Disabilities into Unique Abilities with Dave Goyal

Dave Goyal, Founder and CEO of Think AI Corporation, is driven to Turn Disabilities into Unique Abilities by using technology to empower disabled entrepreneurs and help businesses unlock the value of their data. After contracting polio as an infant, Dave transformed physical limitations and early adversity into a passion for solving business problems, building companies, and giving back to society. Through Think AI, he helps manufacturing and healthcare leaders use data and AI to generate real-time insights, improve productivity, reduce costs, and create new opportunities for growth.

In this conversation, Dave introduces The 3G AI Augmentation Framework—Gap: Where are we losing time, quality, ability, or capacity? Grow: Apply AI to augment people and improve that work. Glow: Institutionalize the solution so humans and AI collaborate effectively. Dave also shares how his private second brain and AI executive agents save him up to 80 hours per month, why human control and security must remain central to AI adoption, and how authority, trust, people, customers, and culture drive business growth. He also discusses his book, Real-Time Business Intelligence Mastery, and his vision for creating a venture studio for disabled entrepreneurs.

Good day. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint. And today my guest is Dave Goyal, the founder and CEO of Think AI Corporation, which helps CTOs and CIOs in manufacturing and healthcare turn siloed data into real-time insights and automation, creating reduced downtime, increased efficiency, and going from weeks to days in project launches. Dave, welcome to the show. 

Thank you for having me, Steve. 

Well, I’m really curious to learn about you and your company, Think AI Corporation, but first I’d like to ask you about your personal why and how you are manifesting it in your business. 

So thank you again, Steve. I’m really excited to be on your show. I’m in the data and AI business, and really tech innovation, for the last 30 years. In this particular company, Think AI, I have a partner, Manish Bhardia, and we both have been working very actively with Microsoft partners, the Microsoft ecosystem, and implementing data and AI solutions for midsize companies and manufacturing companies. You went on why, which is amazing. 

My why: I’m a disabled entrepreneur. I have this hunger for building businesses. I’ve built nine businesses. We can talk about it later. And five of them were miserable failures in my books. Not all of them were that miserable, as I say. But five of them were failures, and I learned a lot from them. And I’m really motivated now to expand it further, to give back to small businesses. 

We’ve been working with midsize and enterprise clients, but to midsize companies, and then motivate—I have a 15-year-old kid—so motivate young people and also small businesses to make use of the power of their own data and use and consume AI on a day-to-day basis. That’s my why. 

Wow. So, to learn the power of their own data and use AI, why is this important to you? 

The main reason is I am passionate about technology. Everybody is good at something. I am really good at solving business problems using technology. Being a disabled entrepreneur, I did not have a lot of luxury initially, even walking. Eventually, I started using braces, started going to different countries. So the passion became really the source of energy and motivation, and that passion is now going to a level where I want to motivate people like me who are disabled entrepreneurs and want to go into this kind of business. So my real passion is technology and giving back to society using technology, to sum it up. 

Wow. So you mentioned this disabled entrepreneur. I’ve never heard this term. I mean, you talk about minority entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs, you know, veteran entrepreneurs, and actually the government recognizes these categories, but I never heard about disabled entrepreneurs. So would you mind sharing a little bit about what happened to you and how you got into this entrepreneurship? 

Sure, yeah. And that’s really good, by the way. I don’t see anybody else using that term but me, so probably I should keep it with me as a copyright term. Just joking on it. But having said that, every disability brings some kind of ability. That’s why sometimes they call it differently abled. When you have these abilities, you don’t know the source or the channels to use them. So, for example, blind people, they may have a lot of great listening power. That’s why they are into music most of the time. 

Sometimes they have amazing reasoning and critical-thinking power, but they don’t know how to channel it, so they fight on a day-to-day basis with these issues. Bringing it back to me, I have polio. When I was six months old, I got hit by the polio virus. Initially, for a few years, I had to just lie down on the bed, had a lot of physical therapy. Then I was able to get up and sit, at least. Then my father was carrying me to school, and I could see the kids were going out and playing. I got beaten up because of that, too, because kids don’t understand. No fault of theirs that I’m not throwing the ball at them and they are playing. 

And so that brought a lot of negativity in me. Eventually, my grandfather and my father helped me get over that, and I started channeling that into building businesses. So I started teaching music. I learned music through some of my friends. I started teaching music during my college days and started making money. And I had a blind friend, and he needed money because he was abandoned by his parents, so I had to help him out. I started making some money. I was doing well with my family, so I could just pay everything back to him. So that seed got planted there, and I didn’t know what to do back then, right? 

Still a 14-, 15-year-old kid or a teenager, in this case. So I started getting into that mindset of, how about I build businesses for me and then start helping out the community? I’m still not there yet. I’m going towards helping that community. But I want to identify disability in three ways, not just physical. So those three are physical, but the bigger one is mental. A lot of people are really mentally blocked, and you see people, you know, “Oh, I can’t change anything in my life.” People die by suic*de. Kids get into depression. This is a form of disability, by all means. 

I don’t think education, parents, and community are doing so much about that other than having a cliché thing that, “I was a victim of depression, so I’m doing that,” just to show off. But really, to help out the community in a methodical manner, that doesn’t exist. Second, physical disability, like I said, given by God sometimes, like war veterans and others, then you feel really limited. So what to do with that? And I come into that category, so I know that really well. Third is financial disability. So a lot of financial disability is in the mind, too. I’ve heard a phrase called, “You don’t die by hunger; you really die by indigestion.” 

So you would find ways and means to make money even if you’re a completely disabled person. So I don’t think finance is an issue in general. So these three areas, to me, are the real disability areas. I’m obviously only working on one today, which is physical disability: how to identify the potential of people who can create something different within that limitation and then make a change in the world. So that’s the motivation. That’s my Life 2.0, where I’m moving now.

Love it. Love it. So how did you have time to build nine businesses? 

I started it in 1993, ’94, I believe, or ’95, I think. And they’re one at a time. Today I have about three. I sold one. And yeah, I did not have time. One of the big challenges when I built these three in the last six, seven, eight years, the biggest challenge I faced is I do not have time for working with customers, which I love to do—talking and listening to their business problems, solving those problems. I end up doing a lot of operational work. 

Post-2020, and it’s a very blunt thing to say, people got lazy. They want to change jobs, make more money, do moonlighting, do multiple things, but not work hard like we did back in the days. And that kind of pushed all of us small businesses to do a lot more management of resources, especially human resources, in a distributed environment. I have teams in India, the Philippines, Canada. So that became a bigger challenge. But having said that, AI came as a savior. In the last 18 months, AI has changed quite a lot. 

And if you don’t go into a debate of whether AI is good or bad, or you’re a skeptic or an enthusiast, AI can really help you if you really put together how it can help you. It should not replace you, but it should give you an additional helping arm. In my business, I started deploying C-suite. So I still have a VP of operations. My business partner is into sales. But then I started filling in other functions, like a fractional CFO, as an example. My fractional CFO is monitoring my top line and bottom line. I call him Felix. I have to give names to AI agents. 

So Felix is actually looking on a weekly basis at what invoices are billed, if we have vendors or employees, what we need to pay, where our expenses are going, what’s the monthly or maybe six-month cash flow run. Are we within limits? Do we have borderline cash availability so that we can survive? So it started to do a lot of things. But not only that, because we are feeding our own data, our own mind, I have built my own second brain. It started to read off of that and started giving me insights that a human would not give me. And even if I hire a fractional CFO, he will only hear what I have to say, look into some of my books, and then give me some blanket suggestions. 

Here, this is really tailor-made to our problems, our situation, and it worked phenomenally well. So I’m building that as a product now. It’s not done yet. Then I also deployed my own CMO called Sasha, and she started to look into my marketing angles, my branding, my voice, my identity. I love writing, but now AI can help me—not just create a blanket AI post or something, but really read how I write, what I write. So I create ideas. It helps me research, does a factual check on it. So I give 100 words. It can take those ideas and then expand into newsletter articles or a big campaign. 

I can start building different case studies for our customers, proof of concept, building podcasts such as these. So this started freeing up—I only talked about two executives, and I have seven of them—but they started to help me free up my time. And believe it or not, I am getting about 40 to 60 hours, and in good months, about 80 hours per month. So 30 to 50% of my regular time is freed up. So that time is now going into this movement that I’m thinking about, which is disabled entrepreneurship. 

Wow, that is impressive. So tell me a little bit about this. This is a podcast of frameworks. So do you have a framework for maybe launching an AI agent like that? 

I definitely do, and I want you to expand on it. But in terms of what I have, I look into three things. Where is the gap in terms of human? Where I see either performance issues, quality issues, or availability and capacity issues. So what are those things which don’t hit my security side of things, don’t interact with my customer, and still help me in my operations? That’s the gap we look into. How can we use and fill that gap to grow what we need to work on? And then last, so I use three Gs with my last name, Goyal, right? So Gap to Grow to Glow. 

So now how can we use this in our business to glow and create an environment where even humans can interact with this AI persona? So we are always big on human-in-the-loop or human-in-control with any AI solution. So it always starts with the gap. Where is the gap? Where is it taking time from one of the human sides of our team? 

I like that. I like that you isolated those things which are less risky to develop, because I think a lot of people are held back by this idea that it’s a black box, you don’t know what you’re getting into, you don’t know what you don’t know, and it’s risky, and then they don’t do anything. 

But you actually isolated that customer interaction is a risk you don’t want to live with right now, and security is another one you don’t want to, which, I mean, it’s obvious. But if those are not hurt, then really what is the risk you’re running? So I like it. So how do you fire up an AI agent like that? 

So in terms of technology, I’m using a few things. I’m using Claude Code, the full Claude environment. So we build it off of that. Back in my days, I worked as a white-hat hacker, so the security angle we mentioned, I’m always so worried about hacking and security. So I have a completely isolated environment at my home on a Mac Mini, a really powerful Mac Mini, and that cannot go out on the internet and do things. And nobody can inject anything. 

But then I still need to feed information to it, so I have another machine where the only job of that machine is to provide information to this system. So I have my own second brain mapped into Obsidian, which is a note-taking application, but it’s really organized. So I first fed all my knowledge. I’ve recorded lots and lots of audios and documents, and it has learned. So I built that system first, like Dave’s second brain. And my second brain has learned everything about me. Nobody can see it but me. That’s my initial basis, right? 

After that, I built a working memory for my agents, for my company, and I’m doing it for one company at a time. Think AI is not completely live on the system, but Data & AI Studio is, which is a solo entrepreneurship business that I have. It is learning everything about that business as we speak. Even the transcripts from these podcasts and other places go into it, and it learns from it. There will be some insights which it will find, so it retains them. So Claude Code, Mac Mini, Obsidian—these are the basis. And then I’ve deployed my own personal models, like DeepSeek, and that is sitting locally on that machine. 

So the model is local. The downside is it’s not getting updated, so I only update it when I feel that it’s right. Not risk, it’s really the downside. There’s no risk in it. So you’re not on the latest and greatest, but you don’t have to be on the latest and greatest all the time. So Claude Code is on the latest and greatest, but when we deploy, it may not apply certain features that Claude Code is making available. And that’s fine. That’s the risk I’m taking. That’s the trade-off I’m taking. And the system is working great for the last six months. 

In the last 18 months, even though I started AI about 28, 30 years ago, the last 18 months is when I learned the new-age AI, and the last six months is when I started building this in an iterative manner. And it is pretty stable now. It can do a lot of things like I mentioned.

So your agents are running on your Mac Mini off the grid? 

Yes. 

And then you’re feeding information with another computer to it to essentially give them the raw material from which they can build stuff, right? 

Right. A good example there, if I may expand: we use QuickBooks in our accounting system. It cannot read QuickBooks directly, but we, being a Microsoft partner, understand technology. I can write a job which can push data into the Mac Mini. It doesn’t read off of it. My Mac Mini, which has the agent, doesn’t know where that data has come from. It has the data, so it’s already synthesized. 

It cannot communicate with others. So that’s the calculated risk we take, right? Getting the data from one angle, one way, and then it’s synthesizing and analyzing data and getting insights out of it. So that’s the balance of systems that I have. 

I love it. That’s very clever. And what is your main business anyway? Because you talk about three businesses right now. What is your core business? What is your flagship business? 

The flagship business is Think AI. It’s a consulting organization, a three-time Inc. 5000 winner in terms of growth. We have our own team, but then we also use a lot of vendors which are qualified by us throughout the world. And we are Microsoft Advanced Specialization partners. What that means is we are in the top 2% of the worldwide partners within the Microsoft ecosystem, which is about 500,000 partners. And we work mainly with midsize manufacturers, and sometimes healthcare if they are okay and open to AI, and if not, data. So we go in there, look into whether they have a data and AI strategy. 

If they do, we work on their initiatives. If they have the initiatives. If not, we create the initiatives for them by doing some POCs and whatnot. And once we get engaged, we do deliverables like consulting services. But it’s not like typical consulting services where you place a resource. It’s really a value-based delivery model where we try to understand two business imperatives. One is what can help them make more revenue. And if we cannot find that, what can help them be more productive and have cost-cutting in one way or the other. 

So these are the two main business imperatives we work on. When and if we align with that, then we give them a roadmap, a phase-wise approach, which they can do with us or with somebody else, and then we keep delivering on it. So that’s the whole model. 

So what drives growth in the Think AI business? 

I mean, finding more customers, to say the least. And that becomes difficult because today everything is becoming a commodity. So one good learning, by the way, I need to share with the audience here. When you’re a small business, you think your brand is the value that you have. It’s the founders who are the brand. So it’s Manish and me. Manish, my business partner, is really big in productivity, project management, and that kind of thing. And I’m really good at building solutions using tech. And together we have about 55 years of experience. 

And then our key team members are ex-Microsoft or MVPs, Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals. So we hire a really strong key team. And the team below, we can either fill with our members, hire our own members, or go to the vendors also, and we tell it to our clients also. So our delivery model is we are the ones who are delivering. The guarantee is taken by Manish and Dave, not by Think AI. We have gotten into that situation. We are about 95% successful, so there’s a 5% failure. And the failure is either because we have the wrong team member, the communication between the client and us was not clear, the scope was not clear, the definition of value and done was not clear, and we have learned from it. 

So our business model is towards that, and that brings us growth because we work with a number of partners. Manish is part of a lot of Microsoft channel partner networks. We provide complementary services to those partners. So one channel is we work with a lot of partners because the trust is there. Authority and trust are the two factors we have understood which establish your business, and it’s the founders’ authority and trust, not the company. Company will build on its own. So we started building our own authority and trust, and that gets us growth. It’s not at the level we’d like, but we are happy. 

You are happy. Okay. So what is your vision? What would you like to make out of this? 

So we have an exit plan, at least on Think AI. And like I told you, Manish has his own. That is up to him. For me, I want to create this venture studio for disabled entrepreneurs, get the funds from here, and then harvest, go across the world. So three hobbies I have. 

One is travel. Second is reading, writing stuff, books. And third is music. And entrepreneurship comes in this whole surroundings, in this whole ring, so it’s the foundation of it. So we’re going to build this disabled entrepreneurship venture studio with a little bit of funds from our exit, and hope to grow there and hope to retire or die with that thinking. 

Love it. Love it. It’s fascinating. So you have a book that is on your LinkedIn page, Real-Time Business Intelligence Mastery. So tell me about this book. Why did you write it, and what’s it about? 

Sure. So we went into a coaching program. Up until 2022, we were arrogant enough to say, “Oh yeah, we can do everything on our own.” And then slowly we realized we need help, and we started taking help. We went to a couple of coaches in India where they were coaching us either on how to manage operations and operational excellence, and then another coach who’s like a life/building-your-brand marketing coach, and he inspired us to write a book. 

Now, I’ve been writing in my own native Hindi language, songs and compositions, but writing a book was a dream, and I thought it’s a big undertaking. But with their little bit of motivation and help, not in writing, but in the angle of what a book can bring. So I have a lot of experience working in midsize manufacturing organizations, working with CTOs and CIOs, and business intelligence is delayed. So it’s either a one-day delay or a week delay or a month delay, and it’s more reactive in nature. 

So the book was more about how you can build a real-time business intelligence culture so that you can get the insights from your data, make actionable insights, take actions on it, and grow your business for those two imperatives I talked about, which is grow your revenue or increase your productivity and decrease your cost. 

So are you writing about some of the things that you talked about? Leveraging AI, building AI agents? 

It has more about—so I wrote it in 2022, I believe. It has a lot more detail about. AI was not as popular, right? I mean, I did write about AI in it, but it was more about building a data culture than AI. It does talk briefly about AI because real-time is going very closely with AI. That’s the enabler for AI insights or data insights through AI. So it does talk a little bit about AI, but it talks more about tech leaders like CIOs and CTOs. What do they need to do? How do they need to build a culture around harvesting data, bring the data, build the team, where to take it? So it has those details. 

Okay. That’s fascinating. Who is this book for? Is it for founders? Is it for C-level executives? Who is the target? 

Like I said, it’s for tech leaders, CIOs, and CTOs of midsize organizations. 

Okay. That’s awesome. And these are the people that are your target customers as well at Think AI? 

Yes. That’s our true ideal client profile too, and that’s whom we have worked with all our lives. So they’re close friends, target audience, and customers. Future customers and current customers. 

All in one. All in one. That’s so nice when you write a book to your friends. That’s a very cool concept. So let me ask you this, Dave. If you had a magic wand, you’ve done a lot of things in your business, you built nine businesses. You learned from some of the failures that you had, which is part of entrepreneurship, and now you created AI agents, and then you have a second brain, and you’re leveraging all that technology. So if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would that be? 

I wish I had more senior leadership. Any business works with delegation. We have a couple who are really amazing, and they wear a lot of hats. But growth depends on three things, right? Being in front of the right customer, having the right team, and having the right product. Our product is people, unfortunately and fortunately. Customers, we are very happy and excited, and they trust us. We know how to get to them. We know how to create value for them. We are very satisfied. Everybody would say, “I need more customers,” and we would do that too. 

But I think more important is what product you are offering. So then people are what we are offering, and we are competing against big ones like Accenture and Avanade and Cognizant of the world in our business, the tech consulting business. But then we are not competing against cost; we are competing against value. So how do you create value? You find a valuable customer. They understand our language. The next level is, where is the product, which is the people? And that management becomes quite difficult. And harvesting and getting the right people in place is a job by itself. 

So kudos to those large companies if they’re harvesting one, although that’s debatable because when we go to the client, they complain a lot about their resources as well. So harvesting the right product and the right team is the key. And how do you do that? If you have the right leaders on top. Two partners alone cannot do that. So building more leaders underneath is the key. We are able to build a few, and I wish we could build a lot more. So when you have the right core team, your growth comes in, is my belief system. It could be different for everyone else. 

No, I think it’s a very deep insight, and very few people actually talk about this idea that the purpose of a business, especially in today’s AI age, is to build leaders. That’s your purpose, because people will take care of everything. They’re going to run your AI agents. They’re going to manifest your vision. But you can’t have just AI agents in a company, right? 

Because then the mental load is so much on the leader, and then the single-person dependency becomes critical. So is this what you mean by this? Where do you come from with this idea of harvesting people and leaders in the business? 

Absolutely. You said it well. Building leaders doesn’t just apply to an organization, whether small, medium, or big, but even to countries. If you don’t have the right leaders in place, it’s going to bite you back. And all cultures, some of the top management consultants will teach you to go into succession planning. That is what they really mean by that. 

It’s not succession planning by, okay, replace a CEO with a CEO. It’s the mindset. Apple is a great example of it. Steve Jobs hired Tim Cook from Compaq, from that world, and he had that vision. Obviously, he had a mission, but he had the vision—who to take, where to take, and what they would do. And that legacy continues even today. So Apple didn’t change a single bit in their model. And people would argue and debate, and that’s fine. 

But when I see it from my eye, he built a great leader. When he did that, the company stayed the same, right? So it’s not about what products Apple is creating today, whether it’s iPhone or iPad or Apple Vision Pro or some of the other things that they are doing, but it’s really that leader. Same thing went with Google, or Microsoft, Satya Nadella. And you see the right leaders were built by these founders. And by any means, we are not that big, and hopefully we can get to some place which is pretty good in our books. 

But finding and building the right people, it gives you a lot of satisfaction, happiness, bliss, if you can give it back to somebody who’s capable enough. And I’m always in hunt of the right people, building the right team in place. 

It’s so interesting you mention Apple because when Isaacson came out with the Steve Jobs biography, he said, basically, I think it’s in the preamble of the book, that Steve Jobs wanted people to remember him not for the products that he created, but the company. So his biggest contribution was creating a company. And I didn’t get what he meant by it. 

But if you witness the last—since he died 13 years ago—the last 13 years, this company has gone from strength to strength. Ninety percent of its market capitalization has been created since he died, right? So it keeps growing and keeps going from strength to strength, and that is the culture and the people that he built. This is the company he built. So it’s quite an amazing idea. 

I was about to comment on company. Something came back to me or reminded me that companies generally build on three pillars: customer, people, and culture. And if you don’t have the right balance of it—so, the right people, but if you don’t have the right culture, they’re going to run away. If you don’t have the right customers, you should have the ability to say no to certain types of customers too. Like Apple never targeted small, cheap products. 

And when I say cheap, meaning which doesn’t have the right quality in place, not about the cost. It’s always cost versus quality. So they have really struck the right balance in those three angles, and I think that’s the right way to do it. Some are able to do it, some are able to push through to do it, and some are not. But that’s where I think the focus needs to be if you are a founder. Find that right balance of people, client or customer, and culture. 

Yeah. 

And that is your core values too. 

Yeah. I agree with you. That’s wonderful. If you are listening to this conversation with Dave Goyal, and you would like to learn more about him and what he does and Think AI Corporation, where should our listeners go to learn more? 

Thank you for this opportunity, first of all. And people can find me on LinkedIn by my name, Dave Goyal. I’m very active there. I recently started a YouTube channel with the name Dave Goyal, so you can find me on YouTube. And mainly on LinkedIn, I have a newsletter on AI, and I’m pretty passionate about what’s happening in AI. 

So I even publish AI news this week, but with a different angle, a builder’s angle in mind. And last but not least, you can connect with me through LinkedIn for a 15-, 30-minute call. No angle there. I will just come and help you if you really want to do something with AI. I can listen to your challenges or your fear of missing out, if that’s the case, and tell you if AI is the right fit for you or not, and what you can do on your own also. And if you need our help, we are happy to. 

That’s fantastic. So take Dave up on his offer, which I think is very generous. And obviously, Dave, you know what you’re talking about. You built a second brain. You’re running AI agents. Your C-suite is chock-full of AI agents, which is very impressive. I’d love to learn more about this myself. 

So if you’re curious about that, make sure you book a call with Dave or check out his stuff. Where is your newsletter? Is it a Substack? Where can people find your newsletter? 

It’s on LinkedIn. It’s called Data & AI Demystified in my profile. 

Okay. So that’s easy. So we can go to Dave’s LinkedIn profile. And if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Give us a review because every week I bring in a couple of exciting entrepreneurs like Dave who share their favorite frameworks with you. So Dave, thanks for coming, and thank you for listening.

• Dave’s LinkedIn
• Dave’s website