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Join for freePosted: Mon 7th Sep 2026
Headcount isn't the only way to grow.
Join this Lunch and Learn with Lamees Butt, the founder of RISER, who's spent the last decade working in AI, for a masterclass in scaling your business without the traditional hiring spend.
She'll share the tactics she uses to grow today, without hiring the traditional way.
How to apply AI across your business to unlock real growth, not just busywork
How to nail your first hires the moment AI hits its ceiling
A tactical, take-home plan to start seeing results today
Lamees is the founder and CEO of RISER™, the app where connections that transform careers are not left to chance. RISER operates on its proprietary AI model, Verified Gut Feel™, which deeply understands you to power genuine human-to-human connection.
A recognised thought leader, Lamees has been honoured by the United Nations for her contribution to the Gender Equality Sustainable Development Goal through her top-10 careers podcast, In Her Shoes.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today.
For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I'm pleased to introduce Lamees Butt, who is the founder of RISER.
In this session, Lamees will share the tactics she uses to grow today without hiring the traditional way.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session.
Today's webinar will be recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Lamees.
Lamees: Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here and to meet you all.
I'm definitely one of those people who loves to interact, and I appreciate I probably can't see or hear you. If there are any questions, we've got the chat function open.
My name is Lamees. I'm the founder and CEO of RISER, which I can get into in a little bit and tell you what RISER does.
Today, I was really excited to come on this Lunch and Learn and share how, over the last 17 years I've spent in the tech industry, a decade of that has been spent in AI. That's why I've now been able to build an AI company, but also apply it to how we've grown the business in ways that I think you, as business owners, might also find quite interesting.
You'll see the title on the screen right now, which is Liftoff. The reason this was called Liftoff is because, over this summer period, we've been running programmes to help business owners like yourselves understand how they can use human plus AI to grow their business.
There's a question that I typically like to start with. If you're in the chat function right now, please feel free to answer the question. If not, ponder on this question because I do like to ask it as we first start the session.
How many people do you currently think are actually using AI?
I ask this question because a lot of the time, we seem to think we're always really behind. The news will tell us that everybody is using it and that, if you're not already there, you've missed the train.
But actually, I'm here to tell you almost the opposite. There is a very small proportion of people today who are actually using AI.
What you're seeing on this screen is an infographic. Each one of these dots represents 3.2 million people, which is ultimately the human population worldwide.
If you can see right at the bottom-right corner, that white dot is the people who are using AI as systems or infrastructure within their business.
That should really give you hope, drive and motivation, because you are essentially in the less than 1% of people who are going to be using AI for its real benefits.
There's still a long way to go for AI adoption and getting people to use the technology in the right way.
People today use ChatGPT or Claude and just ask questions. Then they think, "I use AI." But actually, there's so much more to it, and there's so much more benefit that we can get from using this technology.
It's interesting. I did mention this earlier, that in the news, we're hearing quite a negative rhetoric, which is AI is the reason we're all losing our jobs.
AI is going to produce robots, therefore there's going to be no need for humans.
I'm not saying these articles don't have some truth in them. They absolutely do. But I think what's really important, which is why I'm so glad you're even on this webinar today, is that you as humans harness the power of this technology.
Because if we can harness the power of this technology and drive it in the right direction, these things won't happen.
However, if we take our foot off the gas and let everybody else drive how this technology should work for us, then we will end up in some pretty difficult situations, I would say, in the next decade.
So it's quite important to centre ourselves around the evolution of how we got here because history has a funny way of repeating itself.
There are some key themes that you can take from all the way back to the Industrial Revolution through to the AI boom today.
Through every piece of change, people have questioned. There have been camps of sceptics. There have been camps of optimists.
But ultimately, through change, there has been some goodness that has come from it. It's about understanding what that goodness is, so we can use it for our benefit.
So, a quick synopsis. Back when we were doing the dial-up internet boom, everything was powered by keywords. That should be no surprise to anyone.
When you use Google and type a sentence into Google, what it was doing was mapping keywords to scan hundreds of thousands of web pages to show you matches.
What that was really limited in doing was understanding full sentences. So let me give you an example.
When you would use Google before and type in, let's just say, "Bon Jovi's blue guitar", it wouldn't understand that you were actually looking for those three things simultaneously.
What it would show you is pictures of Bon Jovi, pictures of blue and pictures of a guitar. Because, actually, his guitar might have been turquoise.
Because Google at that point didn't understand something called semantics or context, it couldn't surface the right page or the right solution.
So as we evolved, what the internet did do was unlock connectivity.
We were able to speak to people across the world almost in an instant, and that really gave rise to the dot-com boom, where we saw things like social media start to rise.
This allowed us to enter that new era of amplification and discovery as humans. But again, it was all still very much keyword-driven.
We then obviously saw the rise of smartphones, and now we find ourselves in this AI boom where everything is really about context.
The problems we faced back when I was explaining the Bon Jovi blue guitar example, we would now no longer face because the intelligence that lives within these AI systems is so incredibly vast.
That is because it has been trained on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, depending on which model you use, of datasets.
So the AI is only as good as the data that it absorbs and uses for its machine learning.
With all of that said, to give you a bit of context, RISER, the company that I created, is essentially the video hiring app that killed the CV.
The reason I created this company was because I'd spent the last 17 years in the tech industry, both across start-up and corporate, and my biggest problem in both of those was hiring.
I couldn't find the right people based off a CV. They all started to look the same.
I'm not sure if you're finding this at the moment, but even more so in the AI boom, everybody's CV almost looks like a carbon copy, cookie-cutter identical. So I'm seeing garbage.
The issue is I have to get to an interview before I can really assess whether that person is going to be right for this role or not.
Over the last 10 years, the AI company that I worked for was in product discovery, and we used a very specific AI model to help consumers understand what product was going to be right for them.
What was really interesting was that you could apply that very same AI model from product discovery to human discovery.
What I realised is that this evolution and change curve of hiring and discovering humans for a role or an opportunity is now no longer about assessing skills or keywords.
So I now no longer necessarily care if you've got the right skill in, let's just say, finance or social media.
What I do care about is that you have fantastic problem-solving skills and amazing decision-making.
These are the human skills that actually require a lot more synthesis, and they need to be analysed in a very different way that can't be done off a CV.
What we've created is RISER, which is powered by an AI model called your verified gut feel.
That is the feeling you get when you get into a room with somebody and, within minutes, you get that feeling of: "I think you're my person. This is really interesting."
The conversation would develop and deepen. We've actually been able to quantify and bottle it. Well, I should say we've algoed it. We've built it into an algorithm with behavioural scientists.
Whether you're a networker, someone who is actively networking, looking for the right people to help you unlock your growth or your business, or talent looking for a job or an opportunity, or you're a hirer, you can use RISER by uploading a 60-second video.
Verified gut feel, our technology, will help match you based on behavioural science to the right person for whatever it is you're looking for.
Now, the title of this webinar was all about how do you grow your business without hiring?
You're probably thinking: well, you've built a hiring app, but how do I actually get people in, or how do I grow my business without having to hire people?
This is where it starts to get quite interesting because we are a very lean team, and I want to share that with you.
We're currently a team of six, having built this business, but we operate like a team of 25.
We're able to do that because we really understand each segment in our business. Essentially, our growth funnel, how we go from awareness all the way through to conversion, and then how we retain our customers.
Because we understand every one of those phases, we understand what parts of those processes are repeatable and what parts of those can essentially be done by an agent.
Because we're able to do that, we can now start to onboard agents and train them so that the people we do hire are almost the squad leaders of these agents.
So a bit of an example here for you. I wanted to put this up because this is a free resource that I wanted to give you, which is a way to set up your first agent.
I'm really conscious that we don't have a long time on this call, but this is something that we were helping every business owner on the Liftoff programme set up.
If you give that QR code a scan, you'll be able to access this free worksheet, where it'll give you a step-by-step on how to set up your first agent in Claude Code.
After this webinar, please let's connect. If you have any questions or struggles, you can just reach out, and I'm more than happy to help.
I think this resource, if there's one thing you take away, is going to be a huge help to you, from how do I even set up an agent, to then actually training the agent and getting it to do some work for you.
Now you're probably thinking: how do I think about this? How do I think about what agents I need to set up? How do I do it? Where do I do it? Is there a cadence?
I'm a very visual person, and I like to do things visually, so I wanted to make it as simple as possible for you.
At the top here, just imagine yourself. You are here as the business owner.
Typically, what we've done in the past is we've hired leaders or managers, and then we've hired people, juniors within those teams, who report into those managers.
The way I want you to imagine this now is that the layer underneath you, the leaders of each business unit, let's just say, can all still be humans for now.
Because I think to help you get along, you still need human interaction and human governance within your business processes, and I'll explain why in a moment.
But underneath each of those leaders, you can have squads of agents.
What's really important is that the people you do hire within your business actually have those human skills to understand, one, how to build agents; two, how to manage them; three, how to train and make them all work together; and four, how to take all of that data and reporting, which is going to make your job a lot easier, and roll it up to you.
Now to start off, it's quite hard to think: I don't want to create 25 agents straight away. That's absolutely the right approach, and it's why I shared the resource that I did on the previous worksheet.
You start by setting up one. Once you've done your one, you can then start to grow from there. But what's also really important is understanding your mapping.
I mentioned earlier that the reason we've been able to operate like a team of 25 is because we understand exactly what happens in every business unit.
We understand the north star of our business development team. We understand the north star of our sales team. We understand the north star of our customer success team.
Each one of them has very clear KPIs and a business process. If you scan this QR code, it will give you access to this money-making mapping process, which will probably take you about 10 minutes to map out.
If you sit down and map out each of your stages within your business for how you essentially win a customer, you can then start to look at which of those processes are repeatable, or could be repeatable, and don't necessarily affect the customer or have a negative effect on my business with the customer.
What do I mean by that? I want to give you an example.
Just before we started recording, we spoke about this necklace I'm actually wearing. The example I want to show you is about this necklace because I have been obsessed with the brand that sells this necklace for a very long time, probably about seven years.
I have spent so much money with this company because I am absolutely obsessed with them.
However, this year, I wanted to buy something quite special. I bought this. It's a locket, and I wanted a picture of my mum within this locket. My mum actually passed away 18 months ago, and I wanted to have a picture of her with me all of the time.
When you're buying a locket, I don't know if any of you have ever done this before, but you can get them engraved. You can add a picture and do all of those things.
I was buying it, and I made a typo on the engraving. When the necklace arrived, I saw the typo and I messaged the team. What was really quite upsetting was the response that I got straight back from them.
This was almost an immediate response. It wasn't thought through. There was no human interaction. It was an instant customer support response.
I share this with you because this is one of those things where AI has the power to truly hinder and erode trust within your business.
So as you are mapping out your processes, as you are looking at things where tasks can be automated or potentially replaced with an agent, it's really important to ensure that you also have checks and balances in place, so you don't erode trust that has probably taken years, maybe months, but a lot of the time decades, to build.
The issue with getting an email like this for me was that they lost my trust in seconds. I don't want any of that to happen to you.
So I share this as a really important use case, so that as you're mapping out your process, you think about where the concept of trust is really important.
You can codify this within your business. Trust can be built. It's three things: authenticity, empathy and logic.
If you can take all of those three things into your systems, especially as you're applying AI, that's really going to help you.
I want to give you one last example as well here because this, again, is quite important for how things can go very wrong when we think about applying AI into our business.
This actually does relate to RISER.
We were working with a candidate who had been applying, like lots of people are currently in the job market, using application systems and careers pages. She was spending a lot of time applying for over 100 jobs a week.
She was getting auto-rejected, hitting apply and then, within half an hour, getting a rejection response back.
This very same candidate published her 60-second video onto RISER. Within six minutes of publishing that video, she got matched with the hiring manager for the company that auto-rejected her.
She thought it was a mistake, and so they started the hiring process. They had the conversations. They had the interviews. In less than two weeks, she was hired.
She was absolutely the right fit for the role, but her CV and resume didn't show, or didn't keyword match, to what this ATS system was doing.
Again, it's really important, as you think about the future of your business, that you're not just looking at old processes and thinking, how do I just automate them?
It's about really thinking: what does the future look like, and how can I really meet my customers where they are?
I have just shared a lot of information with you, and I do want to save some time for questions. So I'm going to pause there for a moment.
But before I do, I want to share one last thing with you, which I know Caitriona can share in the chat.
As a gift to you all for joining this webinar today, Ideas Fest, which is the Glastonbury for business owners, is happening on Wednesday and Thursday this week.
Simon Squibb will be there. Victoria Prew, the founder of HURR. Vivian Wong, the founder of Little Moons. Some incredible people to brush shoulders with.
I would love to gift two tickets to two of you on this call today.
You can very easily enter. I think Caitriona is just going to pop a link into the chat.
If you download and sign up to the RISER app as a networker, I will be choosing two winners, and you will be notified today by 6pm.
Then, hopefully, I'll get to meet two of you in person on Wednesday and Thursday at Ideas Fest. So I'm going to pause there and hand back over to you, Caitriona.
Caitriona: Thank you so much, Lamees.
One person had a question around having the email link as well as the QR code that you had earlier on in your slide deck, please.
Lamees: The email link for the worksheets?
Caitriona: Yes, sorry. Just a link as opposed to QR. Sometimes people join on their phone.
Lamees: Yes. Is it OK if I send them to you?
Caitriona: Yes, I can add it to the follow-up email. That's fine.
Lamees: I can send you both of those.
Caitriona: Perfect. I haven't seen any questions from here, but let's see where we can start. What are some real examples of how you use AI to drive growth at RISER?
Lamees: Some real examples are, back in the day, you'd have to hire business development people or salespeople to do a lot of the work, especially when it comes to growth.
But when you look at business development and the actual tasks required of a BDR, a business development representative, a lot of those tasks can actually be automated.
I'm sure a lot of you are the same, where on your LinkedIn right now, the amount of AI slop we receive in our inboxes is obscene, and you want to definitely avoid that.
You don't want to be sending out automated emails all day every day.
But what you do want to be doing is ensuring that you're not wasting time or spending time procuring a target list, a very clear target list of your ICP that you want to go after.
That is something that can be done using AI.
An example for me is that before I wake up every day, I have an agent that scans multiple different systems across the internet, and it gathers me a target list of people I should be outreaching to.
As of yet, I'm still not completely comfortable with the AI drafting the email for me and then sending it out because I have seen some horror cases of emails I have received, and I don't want to be in that situation just yet.
When a business is growing, you really need to nurture it and take care of it.
But being able to solve that super top-of-funnel target list, and almost have work being operated and done while I'm still sleeping, allows me to then turn up at my laptop and have a very clear list for me to start going after.
Caitriona: Thank you. If anyone has any questions, please do post them in the chat.
I suppose the common theme among small businesses and founders is that they're quite time-poor. So if a founder has limited time and budget, where should they focus first?
Lamees: It's a really good question. It does depend on what stage you're at, but I would say that when you're in the early stages of building a business, don't worry about the process part of it.
Really try to start getting some credibility and building trust, and that comes through action.
When we first started building the business, we didn't have all of these processes in place because it didn't necessarily make sense.
We saw the growth of our business in three phases. The first phase was this lighthouse MVP approach, where we needed to win at least 10 customers to prove that this concept would work.
I'll be honest, that was quite manual. I didn't use AI in those processes. I didn't use AI in any of the outreach.
I didn't because I needed to make sure that I fully understood exactly how that end-to-end process worked.
Once I'd done it with 10 customers, I'd nailed it. I'd seen the trend. I'd seen the pattern.
That meant that, coming into phase two, where we're now thinking about growth and expansion, especially into different markets and different industries, I can now apply those patterns and trends to agents to train them.
So I would say that in the very early stages, don't worry about process.
But as you're then thinking about growth, it's: how can you outsource the tasks that don't affect the customer, that don't affect trust, but that allow you to free up your time to think strategically about how you grow the business?
Caitriona: Thank you. How can businesses make sure that AI is creating real growth rather than just more activity?
Lamees: That's a good question. The way we do it is that all of those processes that you saw, all of those different business units and all of the agents that we have, roll up into an internal dashboard.
That internal dashboard is connected to our north star KPIs of what we want to achieve every quarter, and we use this as our guiding light in our Monday morning meeting.
Every Monday morning, we have questions that we ask for each business unit that tell us whether things are performing well or not. That dashboard, that data gives us that insight.
A trick or a hack to help you figure out if your agents are actually doing the work for you, or if they're just creating more noise, is to roll it all up into a dashboard that is connected to your KPIs as a business.
If you're monitoring that, you'll be able to see whether it's distracting you and taking you on different tangents, or if it's actually rolling up and delivering results to the things that you want to see: more visitors on a website, more conversions, more calls booked.
If you're seeing those numbers increase, you know things are working.
If you're starting to see other things that don't roll up into those north star KPIs, that's just noise, and you know it's creating more distraction than focus.
Caitriona: That's good advice. Thank you. What's one AI workflow every small business could implement this week?
Lamees: It really does depend on your business because some of you might be product-based businesses, some of you might be service-based businesses, and it's slightly different for each of you.
I've given you one example with business development. I would definitely do that, and it is so easy to do. You can actually follow that worksheet to set up a BDR agent.
The second one is something I think a lot of founders feel the pressure of at the moment, which is building in public.
How do I grow my business and be present and be a face and do all of these things when I'm just trying to make ends meet and grow revenue?
What the agent can actually do for you is help gather lots of information and data that relates to your industry or the thing that you need to be talking about.
So I would have an agent working for me again on a daily basis to come up with relevant news and data that I should be talking about.
If you are present on LinkedIn or TikTok, even better if you ask me, video is really the way to connect with audiences.
This will give you almost those nuggets of information that will bring you into that thought leadership space as you grow your business.
Because we can all create workflows, but we live in an attention economy right now.
The way that you do need to grow your business is by building trust. The way you build trust is that trust triangle I showed you.
You can definitely get AI as a workflow to help think about what those categories or topics could be that you could talk about, but you still need to be the one talking about them.
You can't outsource that to AI. But if you do it in the right way, you will absolutely see growth in your business.
Caitriona: Thank you. We had a comment from Julia, who said: "Really good questions and answers. Thank you. Looking forward to looking at the worksheets."
Then we had a question from Leo. They've said Claude ran out of tokens quickly. What's your suggestion to best use our tokens in terms of cost and productivity effectiveness?
Lamees: Such a good question. If he's able to, just tell me what model he's using.
For transparency, I use Sonnet and Opus. Those are my two models that I jump between.
I don't use Haiku. I don't use Mythos because a lot of the time, it's a marketing ploy from the companies as well. They want you to use the latest model because it will absorb more tokens.
I find that Sonnet works really well for building agents and the daily work that they need to do.
Opus works really well if I'm connecting different systems.
For example, we have built an app. To make the app work from a product development standpoint, there are lots of different systems that we use.
One of them is Figma, where everything gets designed, mock-ups are made and workflows are tested.
Once the designs have been iterated and finessed, they need to move to something called GitHub, which is where the code is then developed and implemented.
By the way, none of that happens by a person anymore. All of that is done by an agent, and Opus connects all of those systems. It connects Figma to GitHub, and it all works autonomously. Opus is a lot more powerful in doing that.
How I keep my tokens down is I write lengthier prompts that are really clear and very human in language.
That allows one prompt, which has probably got maybe five or six tasks within it, to run in one go so that I'm not going back and forth and using lots of tokens.
Caitriona: Thank you. Just to confirm, Leo said they're using Opus as the model in the chat.
We're coming towards the end of the session now, but we do have time to take this question from Julia.
They are saying: "I use paid-for ChatGPT and feel that it has a wealth of background about me, and so feel this prevents me from moving to another platform. What is your suggestion?"
Lamees: There is a way to export all of your chat history within ChatGPT and what you've done so far.
By the way, I'm not affiliated with Anthropic or Claude. They do not pay me to say this, but I have used both.
Claude Code, especially for setting up agents and workflows in your business, has delivered unparalleled results for us, more than ChatGPT.
I still use ChatGPT now and again for ad hoc tasks, but every day, our go-to is Claude Code.
My suggestion would be to export all of the data, all of the conversations that you've currently had.
Then all you need to do, when you follow that worksheet and download Claude Code, is set up the first project as "Learn about me".
You can then upload either that PDF or that data dump, and it will learn all of your context and then say, "I know exactly who you are. Now tell me what you want to build."
Caitriona: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your presentation and for joining us today, Lamees.
Thanks to everyone for joining us. We'll share the recording and further resources in the follow-up email this afternoon.
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