Today on the Augmented Ideas show we're talking about how AI is transforming the landscape of technical teams and business efficiency.

We share insights on how companies, like Turn It In, are already hiring straight out of high school, with AI-generated content making up 47% of all the code on GitHub. Listen in as we examine the potential for AI to supercharge teams and increase efficiency, as well as the opportunities this presents for those who can add value and make the process more favorable.

IBM Comments

Making Intelligence Accessible | 90-Minute Books | YourPodcast.team

Stuart Hey buddy. How are you?

Aalok I'm great.

Stuart Good. We say every week single week goes fast.

Aalok It's just getting faster and faster. I mean, we're here on the 10th of May. And I think last week, we were talking about how CEO of IBM was talking about 30% less jobs potentially from non customer facing roles. I just saw a couple of days ago. This company called turn it in, and they were saying that they wouldn't need 80% Less engineers in 18 months, and they would be hiring straight out of high school. Let's just look at that. I mean, they already recognizing that their need for the technical team is thinking of already and they're already have done some tests to understand the capability of some of these co coding tools like GitHub co pilot, I think 47% Of all the code on GitHub right now is AI generated. So you know, this is where we are right now. With the kind of larger companies and they're announcing those things.

Stuart So interesting to think about the cannabis business owners you think about the efficiency of things and making it effective and serving their customers needs. Whereas a lot of the other rest of the world I think about it just from like job job risk perspective, I think the opportunity, because we're so early in this, I mean, it's crazy. Six months ago, we weren't even talking about this, regardless of how many tools actually existed. It certainly wasn't in the they weren't as advanced as they are even in this short period and people weren't talking about it. But I think there's definitely an opportunity for that group of people who aren't the on the Luddite end of the spectrum and worried about just losing their job, but instead thinking about okay, well, how can I add value and make charge? Yeah, Supercharged. Exactly. Exactly. When you think about how much time is wasted, I mean, my coding skills are enough, drive me mad, but not enough to build anything that's displayable. So we've got like a number of systems internally, mainly built around Zapier, but using that code will build and get 80% of the way there but that last 20% takes forever. Now we're in a situation where a large proportion of the jobs not 80% of them, but a decent chunk of them are just spent with that busy work of doing stuff that isn't necessarily if that for the people who grab hold of it and add on the superpower just to really add the intelligence and not be limited by either their own capability or the time constraints that they're put on. That amplification of that and the trajectory of bigger and better things. Surely just has to be leading towards a pretty exciting time.

Aalok I agree with you. And I think that really the key thing here is like how to supercharge the team, how to support them more and I think that like, you know, why don't we look through almost like the p&l right like oh, the next let's use it to generic businesses. And then let's look at like how the different departments could literally be supercharged and supported to increase increasing revenue, efficiency, everything like that. And then we can go from there really, isn't it?

Stuart Yeah, there's some good examples. There's lots of things too, within that to dive a little bit deeper on and just start people thinking I think this is definitely going to be over the next however long we do this for definitely over the next six months. It's going to be very kind of strategy and his little his little his little because it can be so much consolidation and new stuff coming out. I think in terms of giving it practical advice for people it's really 90% of his start thinking about in this way and then find it rather than just use this tool which

Aalok having a systems mindset to it right and understanding that okay, let's just say that any business is potentially dealing with people or a product or some kind of like advice or something like this, right? And then if you if you understand that generative AI has the ability to create language in written verbal form, you know, visuals, any kind of like product, product, demonstration documentation, and the same time also code, any kind of like program or customization things, if you understand those things, then the question is like, how do you support your team members? So, why don't we look at like, let's just say that marketing department is first department for example, right? You know, like, so, from your own experience, an easy one to jump off with? Yeah, exactly. Like, from your perspective and thinking it down. What are the kind of tasks that someone would normally be doing and how long would they take for example?

Stuart So for us when I think about what we do, so the main part the business apart from the coaching side of the business, the main other two parts are crane books and podcasts. So content creation, and one of the challenges in the past has been okay, the thing that asset is created, but now we're given a job or work to someone else to go and do stuff with it like we've created this thing. Now go and do something amazing, which isn't the worst idea. I mean, it's definitely worked up to this point. But the huge opportunity going forward is to be able to provide an assortment of things that people can do. So I was listening to a YouTube video the other day. Gary Vaynerchuk, talking about having 30 people on his team, just dealing with his social media presence, and that's we've been doing a lot of it so 30 individuals, so I think the broader conversation came around by saying they were talking about platforms and what should you do and he was saying, You think there were 10 major platforms, you should be on every one of them 10 times a day. Now if you can't do that, because of the practical constraints, this is where the, the business LT comes in. So he said Take me for example, I've got 30 people on my team just doing my stuff. And you see what I put out now the likelihood of other people having 30 people on the team, it's pretty, pretty slim. So to be able to kind of close that gap a little bit. So when I think about the like we do with this podcast, we've got the recording, we've got the video and the audio. Those are the two things that are created so we're using AI tools and human tools. So we're talking about this a little bit more internally about augmented intelligence or that combination of actual intelligence and artificial intelligence. So from those two seed pieces, we're creating a transcript that's been around for a while, but the AI ability to do it no other than human ability is better. From the transcripts. We're getting excerpts, the description, which used to be as part of the podcast process we used to say to people what as soon as you get off the call, hit record on a on your phone or something and just record an intro, because as soon as you're done you remember what you've just talked about. So everyone what a great episode today I was talking with Alex about the using AI in a real business case I recorded them and then we don't have to do that now because AI can give a good 80% example of what somebody should be the main talking points pulling those sound bites out from those sound bites, we can then audiogram the clips audiogram the video directly around the videos, three images from it. I was watching a nother YouTube video yesterday where they were. They had created a it was a GitHub project they had created a Google Docs script was the scripting language like the Google Apps Script thing, which plugged into so it was literally copy and paste change these couple of things here, mainly like the GPC API key, but absolutely follow along. So now in Google Sheets, you can just enter equals GTP the prompt and it will generate the prompt so now you've put 10 things in that list. So let's save the 10 or five five takeaways from the show, or the tool that we use creates keywords from the shows or five keywords from the show. stick those in, give me the GPT font, ask it to generate a paragraph of text around it all their quotes. And it's just the speed at which things can be created.

Aalok I think it's these workflows, right? Like I think the key thing is like yes, like you said at the beginning you've got this piece of content and I want to create a video and like I asked you for the YouTube link because I'm using an editor and what it will do is it will analyze the video to find the most interesting talking points and create a clip directly from it with traction and the colors and everything. I mean to have it took my guy a bit of time to do that. And I've also specify use this use this is this gives me 10 clips. To choose from. So you know that's one thing, the action point that we talked about the translations that we talked about, you know, being able to create social media banners, we're not doing that but I've got tools which can do that off brand and immediately from the content and if we were doing further landing pages, we could easily have those generated as well and this is taking what would have been three people maybe like a specifier designer, and then a coder and you just bring everything into one really isn't it?

Stuart And when you think about the job of work, what we're trying to do of any organization in any team is add value to the end users, the customers who have paid you money and creating all this stuff, the time that it takes to create all this stuff isn't necessarily adding the value to the end product. So if you can execute on that fast, it means that then the time that would have been taken to have that debate about okay, if we're fitting the video snippets individually every time someone would have had to come back to us and say okay, we do this one or this one or this one and is it this color or that color. Now we can spend time perhaps on the social media channel interacting with the people

Aalok love and more curation and more selection because like we now we can have like 10 clips as a version or different elements and we can then say okay, I prefer this one or this one. So we can actually use our creativity to choose the best moments, because otherwise it'd be impossible to say to the guy, please create 10 clips for me because it's a pure waste of human effort, right? Like his hourly rate and everything like that, you know, so I think marketing I think people can quite quickly get that that could, that could that could be improved. Why don't we move to the next department? What about sales? Because like we all want to be treated like individuals and more personalized, what could be done?

Stuart So that personalization, I think is the key and we're in a period of time at the moment where the absolute a I don't think he's quite there to create an ad hoc avatar with a perfectly moving mouse. Now if you dive into like the AI tools that are around there's several different individual tools that will do it, but it's not in an off the shelf product to be able to do something which is one step below. That maybe isn't quite perfect but it's kind of good enough. So we've mentioned since Cynthia before and each fund a different company is an example one I can pronounce. Anyway that company we've mentioned those guys a few times before so their model of mouth movement in their narrative their their their stock avatars is good but if we were full screen like this, it's not quite good enough. But it is good enough if you're down in the bottom corner. So if you're trying to do a video walk along and then scroll down here and there service allows you to put yourself in there as an image and train it that way around. That N word. Right. So that might be worth it because now you can tailor your message to each individual person. The things that we've talked about before in terms of the sentiment analysis of responses that come in dealing with customers who are frustrated or who are annoyed or being able to highlight the ones who are happy, and then reach out to those people for testimonials or case studies. The fact that you can much more quickly there's there's email, AI models that will sit and do immediate responses for you. Now it's probably not good enough to do a complete response, but it might be good enough to do a general holding response so people feel that they've been heard

Aalok 100% And you know what's interesting is like the two bits are coming from First we you started at the most complex one with the video in the face, right like, but like there's electricity company that's been using AI generated emails internally they said that customers prefer them with 60% more happiness. And it's actually a function score. And then then normal written ones because there's more empathy and more understanding so so that so the thing is, that's already there. And then answering your question about the personalized videos, that they've got examples of cart abandonment, where like someone left something in the cart, and then the founder has the video saying, hey, Stuart, I saw you left the camping kit in the in the car. I understand if you had a question, I'd be happy to help you. You know, like, those sorts of little nudge points, you know, like it's

Stuart something we were taught a couple of weeks ago was that people defaulted discount so I experienced I was in a shopping cart I wasn't really that interested. I was really just going through the whole process to see what it was. And but within like 12 hours of not completing it, there was like a 7% discount. So people automatically go to that discount thing. But imagine that you had a personalized video from the founder saying, Hey, I saw that you were looking at our cups. I just wanted to share a story, a backstory with you about the company because people don't realize something about this design is uniquely positioned so that it looks good on

Aalok paper as well. Right? There was there was yeah, there was that people were they they literally, I think they took pens or something like this. And they had them they listed them on eBay. And then they listed the same pen but with a story about the pen. And then they found the same thing for like normal items, and they found like a 30 or 260 or 100% increase in the price that was available. To do the purchase based on the story that came from it. So what you just said there is like giving a nudge point which is personalized, but without an immediate discount code which builds trust. I mean, you subtract that from all the discount codes use annually how much revenue saving is that?

Stuart Yeah, exactly. And building like you said, the relationship that rapport with people, it's not just a financial transaction, you're actually building that connection. I mean, we jump back to we're probably going to do this a lot because we both got a strong marketing background. We jumped back slightly to marketing. You can imagine like a customer service message that and a personalized response. That says Hello, thanks for the message. We're just looking into it now. I just need to speak to a couple of other team members but don't worry, we'll be back in touch soon as opposed to him and nothing and it just been in the void

Aalok as an audio as an audio note,

Stuart right? And audio is very easy to do in the in your actual voice. I mean, that is straightforward.

Aalok And that and that is so personally you send an audio note on WhatsApp. And it's exactly about what was supposed to be at that time. You're much more engaged. And you know, I don't know whether you've noticed that I've had a trend where some people are sending me more voice notes now and I'm fine with it. And it just also helps me gain context I get a different understanding rather than reading a long paragraph, right. So using those things to nudge and always build trust and invisibly, really

Stuart and the multi channel piece so something you just mentioned no infuriates me receiving voice memos from people because it's immediately them giving me the job of taking some notes on some random thought that they just had. Late at least in text. I can go back to it now you've just given me homework. But imagine a scenario where it doesn't happen yet. But if the voice memo came through, and the transcript was there straightaway, it's actually a tool

Aalok so both worlds, the Kindle

Stuart version and it's the backup is there.

Aalok I'll get a link for it. I'll put it in there's a tool which basically was hilarious this guy made it and you just forward the voice notes to this this number and then transcribed it and send you a summary back. And the thing I loved the most was that the guy had written in the questions it says, Do you listen to my voice notes? And then you said you don't even listen to your voice notes. Why do you think

Stuart yeah, maybe I should and the work might get done.

Aalok You know, I was just won't buy second clips like you know, like little nudges and stuff like this. But but those things add adds so much value.

Stuart Yeah. And that multi channel approach was kind of like when we first started saying to be able to deliver something. So the likelihood of everyone consuming this pot. So when we think about all of the things that we put around this podcast, audio notes, LinkedIn stuff, other social media stuff, they'll probably be clips a little bit further down the track the YouTube channel. It's easy to think of us as the creators or business owners trying to do it as our this is a lot. There's a lot of stuff here like do I need to do all of this stuff, but the reality of any one customer any one end user only thing you know, they're only going to see that one thing. So by being able to generate things that across multiple channels just means it's more likely that the one thing will will hit them,

Aalok right it's a it's a process. You basically create a system where you know your input goes here and then it splits out into those different areas with literally AI agents and I just thought of something. Life is cyclical, what is old becomes new again. So people said people said blogs are done. What is big podcasts. So if you turn your blogs into audio snippets, or short audio segments on this, and if you send an audio note saying, Hey, I got a summary of like the top five things you need to know about your new garden office, for example, right? You know, maybe you didn't want to read a long thing, but it would hear the summary like here's the five points. Here's this. Here's that in the voice of the founder, how much how much more connected are you to that company versus reading the blog from that company?

Stuart Right? Yeah, it's just more of a like the more I remember Tony Robbins things from years ago, the more stimulation points like visual cell audio touch the movement, the more connection points there are, the more embedded it become. So trying to leverage some of that

Aalok you can totally so you can totally leverage this tip from this. You can totally leverage all your old blog posts, create summaries of them with AI and have an audio note which is like, Hey, I've got this audio note for you. You might be interested listening to it. You can listen to it here, or you can click the link to read it. So all those things kind of like add in the kind of like personalization of that sales experience basically, isn't it

Stuart imagined trying to do so. So you're a company that has a lot of written content, but you don't have a podcast? So you think okay, what do I need to do as a podcast? It's some barrier to entry to get started. But imagine putting all of the content into a generative model and say, Okay, I want to do so what would a podcast every fortnight that's probably the minimum cadence. He wants 26 episodes. Here's all the stuff from this stuff. I'm gonna do 26 podcasts. Give me the subject. Well, the 26 and then there was a people GPT service that I saw recently, which actually wasn't exactly what I was hoping for. But anyway, people GTP so now you've got the GTP GPT. Now you've got the body of work or the written stuff that you did. You've got the agenda for the next year, because it's so most of the content, no, put it into people GTP Okay, I need to find other people who have been have an interest in these particular areas. Now the guestlist problem is sorted out the subject, the amplification and the reuse and the multi channel options.

Aalok That's what it that's what explodes now, basically isn't it? Right. So I think I think like the takeaway for a business owner is you need to have a process in place before you need to have people is like you talked about like, you know, with Gary Vee, right, you need two people. Now you don't need that. 20 agents or three agents chained together in a distant basically. Yeah. Yeah. That gives that gives those bits if you go one further down into customer support, or even consultation and different elements like this, and I was talking with someone who actually is he's in the health sector, like specialist orthodontist, and he actually consultants a lot of training in person with many dentists. And he was saying, oh, there's so many opportunities that with AI and I said, Yeah, I said, um, do you have videos or audio of your lectures? He goes, Yeah, I got videos. I said, Well, you could have all that uploaded. And then you could have like, basically, a, you know, an agent made which answers questions the way you would answer them, basically, right, you know, and he was like, really like yeah, you understand, you know, like, so the people who've actually already been creating the content, you can now make it almost expertise on demand via your proprietary platform and knowledge and everything like that. And I think that's what becomes interesting cuz it's your information on demand. And everyone now only wants to learn what I need to know now. I don't I don't want to learn ahead for the future. I want to know now how to fix this now. And then the next bit I'll deal with later on. Basically, they go Have you noticed that like, it's like waves turn left turn right. You didn't really know. You don't know like six miles from now. What I need to do basic use and yeah,

Stuart immediately, I think it's a knock on effect of just the busyness of life, like 30 years ago. You could plan a trip and pour over a map and kind of ingest it all before you left. Now there's so much going on. They just haven't got that bandwidth, what you were talking about in terms of the personalization, we've been having a lot of conversations with people recently, because you'll see videos out there of get AI to write a book for you and all that type of stuff. But the problem is, is it's generic information. So what we're saying to people is it's your unique perspective and take like financial advisors as an example, for all financial advisors work from the IRS rulebook, there's only I mean, it's big, but the rules aren't. The thing is the interpretation and the nuance. That's the thing. And that's what you bring to it as an individual. There's no AI that's going to substitute that. So rather than worrying about trying to learn a put effort into learning an AI thing, just to take the then take the shortcuts, instead, think about the actual value that you're adding and then just use some tools to amplify it's still at seed material. That's the unique piece

Aalok the way I would think about it. Is like aI lets you build a cake. Essentially right you know, like whatever it is, it will create a standard cake of whatever it is right? And then whatever you customize it with your toppings, your flavors your this your that that's what people are actually going to buy they don't before it was difficult to make a cake. Now the cakes can appear whenever you want so the question is like, what makes your cake different basically. So I think exactly like you said, it's like the kind of mechanical stirring of the bowl and the thing and that's done now, basically. So the question is, what do you bring uniquely to that to that element essentially isn't

Stuart a small business owners were actually have an advantage in certain ways over big companies. So I was listening or reading some things last week where they were talking about large companies preventing their employees from using services because the disclosure the privacy models are very unclear. Like if you've got a whole load of proprietary special code or client information or medical information in you probably almost certainly break breaching some rules. And then there was another talking point about saying, Okay, well, that takes example cake appears. Where is that? Cake being? What information is that cake being created form?

Aalok Or do? Do I own that cake? Like, right? Yeah, yeah.

Stuart Always that cake, the proprietary information of whatever the dataset that it was trained on. So the example was image creation thing, but using the journey and some of the deeper and the other one. Yeah, the name is escaping me. But they were using that image, big companies, but their legal counsel was saying, No, you can't use it because this is untested.

Aalok And that's my Adobe and a few other ones like now I've got I've got really completely licensed models, isn't it right? You know, but But I agree with you like, on the

Stuart other things, so images, and maybe the first thing is this model, but as small business owners, we've got the opportunity to get around that because we're less likely to run into problems because we're dealing with a much smaller set as opposed to B Corporation. So one of the few times where maybe we've got an advantage, because the big guys has to be a little bit more. Yeah.

Aalok And agility is the killer here, because it's not about I think in the past, a big company had the value, there's more resources, so they could invest in more complex moats or technology or software. But now it's the opposite. That's actually a problem. If you've got a very complex deep system, that means it can't change with the world as things upgrade and change. So you actually want to have lighter, less technical debt, more agile kind of solutions, basically, which is where, you know, smaller companies kind of like can can can come into play really

Stuart Yeah, a little bit easier. What was that I derailed us a little bit. What was the next?

Aalok The next one? The next one was like, let's say in operations or in HR for itself, management, right. So management. Another element would be, you know, using meetings, for example, with AI note taking tools with action summaries, and then the points that we need to look at directly, but you can add two layers. So for example, I think I mentioned that if you've got the meeting, and let's say other meetings that happened in marketing, let's say there was four groups of meetings happened in parallel. You could then have a word cloud, which basically will show for each of those four meetings, what was discussed, you can see, do they line up with what I think it should show is that the big concepts and things so if you're the head of marketing, and those four different teams meeting, you got an idea of like, how aligned or how structured is it without having to go into the nuance detail and then you know, you can eliminate unnecessary meetings or different elements and you know, make things a lot easier than the same thing for HR. You know, you can use AI to engage in pre screen candidates. So let's just say for example, you want to remove your own bias, you say okay, and record a video explaining why you're a good candidate for the role and your how you would approach this scenario, and then the AI can then upload, upload and analyze all the videos that come from there. It can then rank them for clarity of structure of the of the messaging, it could then even potentially, sentiment analysis or for energy positivity and all that kind of stuff within the voice. And then you can just see the top three and then from the top for you go into further details and everything so

Stuart interesting. There is a cat and mouse game between the technology and the the intense and by intent, the intent of the organization and the intent of the employee or the prospective. There was a tool that I'd heard people talk about last week, a couple of tools, talking about AI detection tools. So you upload a paragraph of text and it will give you like a temperature score on how likely it is to be aI written. Now, the likelihood of that going. I mean, let's just think about that for a second. So what are the the benefits and the downsides? So the the, the benefit to the organization is that you get a read for what's coming through the door. And again, it's just another tools in this cat and mouse game of candidates just as staff versus you trying to get what their actual feelings and then for the people on the other side, again, it comes back down to there's an equality of opportunity that maybe not necessarily an equality of outcome, because people aren't the same. Intelligence is a is an average agenda of people on both sides of that, for better or worse,

Aalok even even not just intelligence, like character traits, you know, like determination, consistency, all that kind of stuff, attitude, all those things isn't here.

Stuart And there'll be a group of people who just want to AI something and just chuck it out and then complain that they're not getting anywhere, because they're doing the bare minimum group of people who are using it as we started off by saying, as a superpower, they're strapping on some additional capability.

Aalok I mean, it's a car or electricity now basically, right? So the question is, like, everyone's gonna use it or like, some people might say, I'm gonna walk everywhere and do everything natural and organic, and that's fine, too, you know, like, but I think the key thing really is that like, even if someone is using, let's say, AI tools for everything, the minute they detach from it, your the clarity of their thinking, and the ability to express themselves verbally, will not be there. So you would you would detect that very quickly. You know, an eloquence mismatch.

Stuart Like you start seeing people.

Aalok Yeah, so So I think there will be like, if people aren't paying attention and doing things in a thorough way, there will be those things people that maybe get through but but I don't think really because everyone's going to be using these tools in that way. But I think today, we just want to kind of give them concrete examples of, of where, where we can kind of see no immediate value to be created. And like we're talking about within a week, we're not talking about within six months or a year, which is most technology products or projects would take time, like even just doing the audio note thing that we just talked about, or even turning some of the blogs into, you know, little podcasts or different things that need to be discovered in a different way. These things are quite light touch really easy

Stuart and easy. So again, started off thinking about the strategy in what you're trying to achieve and then assuming that there is a technological way of doing that at scale and faster and more consistently. It's, we were at some point, we'll talk about Zapier as a tool, which is kind of like this very accessible, middle layer tools

Aalok linking workflows, right. So I think I think maybe we can go a bit deeper detail next time and, and actually show like, or talk about how you would create this course on AI first marketing department, right? Like what would be what would be all the different elements within that, like what goes in and what do you get out over what time period or something like this?

Stuart Yeah, yeah, yeah, give a perfect example. And then people can pick and choose the elements that are kind of timely or or seem achievable for them. But yeah, give the big picture.

Aalok There's always so much Stuart, like, I can't wait to see what next week brings but this week is already full of stuff and then we got them. By the way, we've got an event into the month 25th of May in London, so funerals in London, and UK, we've got aI boardroom, which is basically a business update for people that want to know about more about how to apply this when you're in business and get it a 90 day action plan. We'll have Piers Linney from Dragon's Den joining us along with some other expert speakers. And so yeah, if anyone's interested in that we've got the details in the show notes. But um, exciting times, you know, you just have to

Stuart keep an eye out for that if people are just listening to have a URL that they can go to.

Aalok Yes, we do. So it's near cloud academy.com forward slash London hyphen events, but we'll put that in the in the show notes as well. For sure.

Stuart Yeah. I'll stick up the image so people can easily see it. We get AI to do a flashing button HTML so that can see where it is.

Aalok Exactly. But listen, mazing to catch up as always do.

Stuart Yeah, thank you. I will speak to you next week, which will seem like in five minutes

Aalok absolutely have a great one.

Today on the Augmented Ideas show we're talking about the rapid acceleration of AI technology and its impact on jobs, business, and even the film industry.

Join us as we explore the power of AI in unlocking new opportunities for business growth, from creating AI agent profiles to streamline financial reporting, to chaining together different AI tools that map an organization's culture and communication to its goals. We'll also discuss the exciting future of AI in the film industry, where AI-created films and personalized viewing experiences are becoming increasingly possible, challenging creatives to adapt their skills to stay ahead of the curve.

IBM Comments

Making Intelligence Accessible | 90-Minute Books | YourPodcast.team

Aalok Hey, Stuart. I'm good. Thanks. How are you?

Stuart Another weeks passed by you've had an eventful last seven days or so.

Aalok Eventful is the word. Yeah, we did an AI for business event intensive. So that was really good. And yeah, like the the world is moving moving fast. And I think one of the reasons why we keep the weekly cadence for the podcast is because there is so much to uncover. So why don't we start where we are right now. Right? So we're on Wednesday, third May, literally this week, IBM announced nearly 7800 jobs, they put a hiring freeze on on the CEO of IBM basically said that he can easily his words, he can easily see 30% of jobs being replaced by AI. So let's just deconstruct that for a second. He was talking about non customer facing roles, non revenue producing roles, so operations and back end. And he said, easily see, so we're in May, probably since February, everything has been kicking off, right, like so. Within that short time period, they've already taken the decision to freeze hiring from any non revenue producing role. And to also look at these elements. So if they say easily 30, there's a lot more there, what what are your thoughts on that?

Stuart That was the surprising thing, it was within such a short period of time. It's just okay, we'll start with 30%, we'll start with the hiring freeze across the board with the

Aalok with snake level AI, basically, like my the way I talk about it is like a snake on the Nokia. Basically, what we've got right now is sneak on the Nokia it's the worst it's ever going to be. And we have a younger audience with snake level AI. School game on the Nokia with a green screen with that level 30%.

Stuart So listen to a podcast from a week or two ago, and someone who asked the host, the tech podcast, someone to ask the host, who were kind of our age, what does your computing experience growing up as kids? How does that influence what you're doing today? And they were describing how kind of starting in the 80s, late 80s, early 90s on computers and how the the speed and the slowness it makes you feel they would describe it as like a depression era competing idea, you kind of desperate for resources and desperate for setting it up in the way that it was. And the idea that you would keep a computer for one of the guys was talking about how to compute his first computer for five or six years now and that acceleration seems insane, there's no way you'd have a five or six year old computer American, it'd be redundant. But back in the early 90s, that was not uncommon. So when you translate that to the AI level, and this conversation we're having now the acceleration of that just off the cuff, okay, fingering, yeah, let's put Hold on 30% of things. Or we can anticipate 30% of things, the speed at which that changes, once you start actually sitting down and looking at it. We've been playing around with a few more tools over the last week or so particularly around the podcast side of things. And even the acceleration from adding probably, I mean, December, it wasn't really on the radar for maybe some text based stuff around chapter UTP. And just kind of amplifying some stuff, or accelerating some stuff there. But the tools that have just been released in the last couple of months, are exponentially faster than they were. And then I was talking to one of the services talking with like account director type people saying, Okay, well, this is what we're really looking for. And this is where the gaps are. And this is what we want. And everything that I mentioned was on the roadmap already imminently on the roadmap, and then they were suggesting some other things for that. But out of the box, expectation, it's gonna be this amount, but then we'll actually start diving into it, that's going to be the real. The real game changer.

Aalok No, but like, I think that the key thing is like, it's already affecting things, it's already changed, like changing stuff. And then like, just recently, so obviously, like all the all the big companies are like putting in a lot of money into generative AI because they can see that anything which basically involves any form of consulting any form, like knowledge management for back end, all of that stuff that can be, you know, done using AI in different ways. Now, you'll still need humans in the loop. But the key thing is humans have to upskill like we've got to, you've got to basically augment your work with AI otherwise, it's not gonna it's not going to work. And a couple of other things that I kind of noticed is like for example, just recently, for example, and open aI have released code interpreter for chat GPT is not available for public release yet, but before if you thought chat GPT was powerful in being able to, you know, construct, analyze Deacon strucked any form of text, now, it's got data scientists built into it. And basically what you do is you just drag in a 20 megabyte Excel file, I imagine how many numbers are in that right, you know, and that, you can then say, give me some high level graphs, which will best illustrate this data, and then it will do that. And then if a trend if a trend comes from it, you can say, Please give me the supporting statistics for this, and it will do that. So, yeah, data scientist is done. You understand, like, you know, like that, that level one data scientist, you know, like that, yeah, every

Stuart time that's the good referring to is level one data scientist, I think that is talking about where we are today, that's the opportunity that people have got, it's kind of similar to the conversation we had last week, like an understanding or the limitations that you put on things before because it was impractical or difficult or time consuming, that has gone away as far as text or amplification of content goes. Now applying that to the data scientists that we have. We're a small business, we don't have like CFOs on staff, we've got an accounting, we've got bookkeepers, and CPAs, looking after the books and submissions, but at best, we may be checking with them once a year. And then that type of standard or that type of thing. But now imagine being able to just upload your financial reports for every month and say, okay, as we've got these broken down by categories of products, give me some insights into those numbers, when the strengthening that, right, something that small businesses, I think can kind of grab on to and understand and use that as an example of re AI, post AI. This is reversed, and I think, understanding,

Aalok I think everyone's going to start creating their own let's call it an agent profiles, like AI agent, which is like, let's just say you're going to play an agent is my business. That's a CFO, for example, right? And you're going to receive the monthly data dump of all the customers and all the transactions, your job is to identify the actual bits I need to look at. And any meaningful changes, which is more than a, let's say, a 5% variance in this. So once you give it that, that those parameters, it's then a Sentinel, that will just look for those bits, basically, right? That's

Stuart such an opportunity as well, because you kind of think, okay, 30% of jobs on hold. Everyone's default is, Oh, that's terrible. And that's a problem. But having your imagine a scenario where you're a CPA or CFO type person, you're looking to generate your own business on the side of a corporate job, you've got your approach for doing things. And if you can not even write the code for the bar, but even write the poem. Based on your understanding of a new client

Aalok engineer, you create an AI first assistant and workflow, and then basically that because the question is not like, what is there? The question is, how do I change that? Right? So So you will then shift from Ai telling you the what, for example, right? And then you'll need the people to help you with the house essentially, because it'll

Stuart happen that augmented how so you're the person who has the understanding, you've gone to school, you've got the knowledge right now you've got the ability to write fonts from your perspective for other people. So if I've got a particular unique way of analyzing Small Business Financial Reports for people in the taxi,

Aalok your formula is your algorithm basically, isn't it? Yeah, because the the x plus has DT expert sees detail the amateur sees like like blocky you know approximations basically. Yeah.

Stuart And you as the taxidermist, I don't know why I'm the you know, co working space in winter has been an eye on the wall above the fireplace is this big stags head that as I was looking over an example that kind of came through, so So as the taxidermist, you don't want to get involved in any of that. But if you can tap into the expertise of someone else, and that someone else can give you in day one that prompt but in day 10, the bot that just plugs in, everyone gets

Aalok except gets access to their own AI consulting arm basically, isn't it like almost a mini AI, Accenture or McKinsey? Or what are you gonna call it right? You can have those lenses scaled down. So I think I think that that makes it quite, quite interesting. And then what I thought like from this is if you look at where those opportunities are, so we ran a workshop this weekend, where there was 12 people from business that came for all intensive in in Lisbon, we're gonna be doing one in London end of this month. And what was really interesting was like on day one, it was all about discover and he was implement. So day one was basically like horizon scanning, understanding what's going on and we were just showing so many different examples. And then what we started to do We started to chain together different API's. So I'll get so we started to kind of explain to people that like, look, level one is what we kind of just talked about, right? Like the data scientist. Level two is when that then informs something else, which displays in this way or that way. So I was given an example, like, we use like an AI meeting tool all the time. And what it does is it helps summarize identify action points. But it also then shows you your own thinking, clarity, how structured was the meeting, you're going to you can audit those things, even like what kind of language we're using, is it customer centric or not, you can analyze all that, right? Because he got like the whole thing. But then I brought something up, I said, what you could do is if you had your strategic priorities on one side, which is all the things you need to work on, and these are all the missions and the objectives and whatever, for this q1, and then on the second side, you're all in meetings in aggregate, that was strategy meetings, and then you extract word cloud from it. So I said, like, so imagine you've got like a dynamic word cloud created, which is basically any word or phrase semantically meaning basically mean, the same, will make the word appear bigger. And what? So what you can then see is like, how directly is my culture, communication, mapping to our organization goals? Because if there's a big difference in those two, you know, you know, you're not going to hit nothing you understand, you know, like, yeah, and what it also then allows you to do is like, observe what's going on. So what are we started, like, explaining these kind of, like, let's call it like recipes, or like these kind of like, kind of solution layers where you can apply analytics that you couldn't apply before, people's eyes really started kind of like, you know, unlocking in their minds start unlocking on, like, what was going on and what the opportunities were. And it was really interesting, because like, we had people from either from loss of manufacturing to really innovative schools, to universities, and one person has to does the marketing for five different, basically medical departments. So there's like pharmacy, medicine, dentistry, whatever it is, and she has to then analyze podcasts from each of them. So she was spending five hours listening to podcasts. And I showed her like an AI summarization tool, basically, that's insane. Yeah. And then I was explained to me, you can actually also send back to the person the podcast, and guidance diabetic podcast, having structure veteran things like this, you know, and she was like, he was like, so happy that they you know, like, I mean,

Stuart you get the time saying exactly that as an amplifier for we I recorded a show with Dean a couple of weeks ago that I think will go up on the bookmark podcast this week. So we were talking about the AI. Everyone again, in this in this snakes age, everyone's thinking, I can just put a quick prompt into the chat GDP, and then it'll spit out a book, which obviously isn't, isn't the case. But we were getting into a little bit. And I was saying that even if that is the case, at some point further down the track, there's this idea of kind of quality versus quantity and quantity has now been solved, because that's a done deal. But quality is still an issue, whether it's kind of better prompting or refining what comes out, or whether it's the uniqueness is the uniqueness of ideas in the first place. So this person's time, go into the low 20s. Exactly, yeah, increasing the value of the upskilling.

Aalok That's the upskilling it because the thing is, what I realized is that if you're creative, you have unlimited potential, basically, right, you know, like, it was just a question of just increasing that creativity. So what I saw from the workshop was really interesting that they got those things. And then we took people through a tool I called the process qognify, which is basically where you where you look at any, any process, and you're looking at, like, what's the emotional outcome I want to happen? So I wanted people to feel more understood or more confident, or whatever it is. And then underneath that, like, how would that be done, they receive a personalized video message or this or that whatever point, and it's, let's make it better. And at the bottom, it's make it cheaper. And then it's like, okay, like, what can you do to make it to deliver it on time, it will be automated by this, we'll use a video which recorded once, and then it will have like the lips and the mouth synced based on the voice that like based on the customer's name, all that kind of stuff. And then so you gotta make it better make it cheaper, but you start with the emotional outcome. And when I started giving people this, when we were going through on day two, how to implement it, how to do it and put together a 90 day roadmap was really interesting, because by them going, going deep into the technology and coming back out again and go looking at like, what's the emotional outcome trying to make happen? And what will that do as a business case, it gave them the kind of like language and simple message to go about conversations in their company, because they had the guy who was the CIO, Chief Information Officer for quite a big company that's listed in London on the stock exchange. And he was saying that you're what I realized is I can do anything. The question like, you know, like the question, yeah, and also how to, how to bring evidence along with me, that was the key thing. And so then we started going through more about like, how to implement it within the organization. And that's where I can see there's a lot of opportunity for helping organizations with implementation basically, and that's something that we help with, but But it's like how to drive that kind of like aI Knowledge Hub, how tools like create your policies and your roadmap, because you want to be proactive on it. One person said, there, I see that it's AI will bring chaos. But then he paused and said, but that's a good thing you understand. And I said, exactly, because it means that you can actually re engineer and rethink literally everything in the business. But then I said that you need to be the one injecting the chaos. Because if you're on the defensive, and someone weaponizes against you, you're, you're gonna be you're gonna be

Stuart on the backfoot. And in a time when I mean don't necessarily have as much opportunity to be on the backfoot, as you would have done in the past. That was the sort of the Dean last night and he was talking about. Or we were talking about contents again, and like the explosion of content. And he was, there was a junior Strategic Coach meeting last week, and Peter Diamandis was talking about the realization that the, the, the ability to create the production is exponentially ramping up. But the consumption side of it humans, there's a limiting factor there, it teaches that we only get exactly we only processed after 60 minutes an hour. I mean, I've done podcasts that like 1.3 1.4. But that aside, it was still limited. The point I was making there, even today, the amount of content on YouTube, as an example, is massively more than any one person can consume. But it doesn't matter. Because all we're trying to do as business owners, as entrepreneurs, as creators, is trying to talk to one person at a time. And as long as we can get that one person's done the same with the disruption and the chaos, there's the risk, and then the interruption, there's a risk that you can view the the whole AI space as a problem and a negative and a downside. But if we tie it back to what are we trying to do? What's the job of work? Who am I trying to engage with? And then how do I bring along the people who I want to bring along either internally or externally? It makes it much more much less daunting? And yes, there is a lot of other there's an exponential amount of threats now, because the production is shot up. But our capacity, we can augment that, and then just deal with kind of what's in that sphere of influence.

Aalok No, I agree. But I think like the business owners that want to put their head in the sand, you can't do that. I mean, one of the things I said at the conference was they can AI is a bullet train. And if you don't even know the bullet train exists, and then someone's got on the bullet trains traveling for five days to call you. And then you even if you get on the bullet train, you cannot catch up, you can catch up, cannot make that distance up. Because the thing is like, as they get more competent, and it's third, using those tools, they will progress faster. Someone in the day one was asking us, well, everyone's gonna have copilot inside Microsoft Word and PowerPoint stuff. And we very quickly showed people that like, they're not thinking of the three dimensions of AI in terms of like, you know, the the interface, the robotic process automation and the Cognifide decision making because the world doesn't exist just in Word, right. It's about workflows, you know, like and even if you use teams and things like this, there's still customizations and layers and things you can put on top of it. And if you got those things in place, you can do things much quicker. I mean, just as one tool, I've been posting videos on LinkedIn. And all I did was I literally use this AI summarizer. And what I do is I put the one hour video from the session I just did on the weekend, and it selects the most engaging part of the video to make 32nd clips automatically transcribes it has the subtitles on automatic rally, and ILS it predicts like, based on the interest angle of what's going on. And what I'm trying to say is like, I used to give that to a video person who would edit it, do this, I'd have to say choose this second, choose that one in the new do through them a lot of time that would go in that basically right. And now I can. Yeah, I can sit with Georgia did a presentation with so I sent him a couple of videos and you could post as well. So what I'm trying to say is that like the speed of output just massively engages. And like those bottlenecks are gone.

Stuart I was watching. So I drove down from home in Pennsylvania down to the office here in Florida on Monday. So it's a 22 hour drive. So I'm kind of backup. Yeah, yeah. And that's when it's working. So hard drive electric vehicle. So that actually is 22 hours if the infrastructure is working perfectly, which again, we could have a whole other podcast on, on the technological advances when or lack thereof in charging infrastructure anyway, so one of the things that I do is backup or stack up some YouTube stuff in some podcasts, because I know that it's a good consumption space. So it's listening to a couple of Gary Vaynerchuk videos and they've posted over the last month or two. And it's interesting to not really watch to them in real time, but kind of collect a couple together over the past three or four months, because you get this kind of six month condemns chromatically. You can see what so you can

Aalok see the trends at the transition and Exactly,

Stuart exactly. And in fact, what hasn't changed as well. So that commonality over that period as well. And one of the things that really stood out was the point that he was making boasting, I think there was like a real estate summit that he was, there were a couple of like, one on not one on one, but like small group meetings, and there was another kind of slightly bigger group meetings, but still for corporate clients. So that's kind of like that high level presentation to a big group to individual clients to companies that they were working with as part of VaynerMedia. Anyway, the thing that stood out from all of them was this point that he was making, particularly at the corporate level of saying, you're losing if your structure is still the same as it was five years ago. So you've got a marketing budget for a campaign, that budget is a million dollars off that million dollars, you can refine all these ideas to pick the one that you really like, yeah, all of this video ads, creative shop for it, back it up with all of these print magazine ads that go with it. So you've got the I forget the name of turn, but you've got this collective campaign approach of video social from all of these things going off this one idea that sales, because you picking that idea, you don't know what you have to do, what you have to do is just put out 10 things a day across every single channel and the one that resonates? Yeah, then double down on that. And just exactly what you said that telling a designer to go through and pick out these two or three sections from a video, hey, you know what you're doing, you might get lucky, you might have an above average hit rate,

Aalok but not really, like, I can't go through an hour video and think and think, where's the interesting bits. And what was interesting is, the two videos that are created with videos, I never would have picked one was actually a participant making a point. And, and that was actually a better, that was actually a really nice clip. Because he was explaining like what can be done. And I never would have picked that because they would have grown, my brain would have consciously thought I'm not speaking or Georgia isn't speaking on this one,

Stuart right? Or they might make it an obvious point that to you as the industry insider, it's too basic, you skip over it because you're thinking about the the the 10th level of

Aalok slight biases or perspectives or you're tired, you're gonna look at the first 15 minutes, you're not going to look in the last 45 or whatever like that, you know, like, all of that goes, what you just talked about before was like basically that old blockbuster model, like where they try to make a hit film or a hit drug or anything. And it's a waterfall, isn't it? Like you're trying to make everything work here? And if it doesn't, it just falls basically right? You know? Yeah. Yeah, there

Stuart was a news story from the other day that just popped by and it was the headline was, TV is about to get weird. And it was talking about this tailored approach, potentially, I mean, he was going a little bit down the track a little bit but this real personalization of you even see it today. So the Netflix thumbnails that you see for shows and movies change all the time. Yeah, cuz they finally do that upload. Imagine now that you have a preference for female means or blank characters or guys with beards.

Aalok It'll be it'll be what you want basically, right? You know, like, and you can choose the film as you want it I saw on a sort of video which was a fan created Star Wars like a Star Wars spin off basically. And they had like famous actors like Adrian Brody and for people it was all created in mid journey and and scripted in chat GPT and the audio done by like an AI engine. And what I'm trying to say is that like, it looked pretty good, you know, like, and that's with snake AI basically, right? So people said well, the AI generated films will be here, they said that like

Stuart right, it is crisis. But then again, you think about it in terms of the difficult trying to finish one thought at a time. But this is the problem with the show there's like so many ideas that just escaped from the talking points. When you think about the AI generated movies an initial thought might be Hey, that and what does that mean factors that means that they've got their work but or models Yeah. But what the difficult thing that it means is that the top tier people who have a following or personality or a certain perspective, opinion, yeah will always be fine. And models the same a unique look something that that in that top 10%

Aalok is listening to audience is linked to audience right isn't

Stuart what it means is difficult for is the background characters selected last on the TV series. They're all of those audience characters in the football stadiums are all generated. So I mean, obviously that's at scale, you would never have like 80,000 Next It's the extra is just behind you.

Aalok Yeah, but this is the what we just talked about, everyone needs to upskill, right? Like, if you were at level one, whatever job you were, you cannot stay there. Because AI is one already, and will be at level two soon. So you've got to figure out like how, like, I think analogy I kind of think about it is like, if AI is basically a floor that keeps rising, basically, right, you know, like, you've just got to figure out how to stay on top of it basically, right. So you can then increase your productivity, like we talked about in previous episode, it's like intellectual submarine, you can go deeper, deeper, deeper, and produce better and better quality work. I mean, one thing I was thinking about, and I wrote a little article on it is like, basically, most people's thinking is quite simplistic. And we have a lot of opinions and things without a lot of knowledge. And they kind of go with gut feel. So I kind of look at that as like low resolution thinking. And it's a bit like black and white TVs, or blocky TVs. Versus nowadays, like if you've got like, a lot of information from like, lots of videos, but imagine you get summaries of all those videos, and they say five different viewpoints, you can then build up in the same amount of time will take to watch one video, which is like the low res thinking, you can develop a much more nuanced understanding of what's going on. So almost like high resolution thinking, and then you can improve your work that way, you know, so I think the key thing here is like you have to upskill you have to look at new things, and kind of go from there. So I think I think today's been quite an interesting kind of like deconstruction of where we kind of see things basically. And they can I think the next things that we can look at is like, what is going to come? What's gonna be released soon, and how things will go. And I think we're gonna touch on Zapier next time, isn't it? Right, and Ryan, and other ways that people could be them start implementing and creating some elements within this as well.

Stuart Yeah, definitely. One tooltip. At one point that you were talking about the AI video, and the using that to insert names and have it personalized, there was a service that we used, I don't know that I've mentioned it before. But for people listening, it's worth checking in synthesia.io Unfortunately, pronunciation, but that has a service, it's not perfect, but it's look at the personalization element of that, to dive into it and just see where it is today and the snake level. That I think for anyone who was intrigued by that, as you were talking about it, it's a great tool to just jump on board and take a quick look at because it's really slightly eye opening. And even those guys, they've got some standard models, but you can upload your own images.

Aalok And show them the workshop. Like where there was one company that used them targets all the people who've abandoned cart with a personalized video from the founder, which was like, like, hey, Stuart, I saw you didn't check out and you left this there. I totally get it. Yeah, let me know if there was a question you had about it. What my team will be happy to help you know, so that having like a high resolution touch point, you know, via WhatsApp or whatever, like that can really can really, you know, expand things that maybe I think that yeah, this is like a good thing we can think about next time like how you could upgrade particular experiences and also build some stuff so we can kind of go into a bit right go through examples on on that one, basically.

Stuart Yeah. Fantastic. Well, by next week, who knows where we'll be.

Aalok That's, that's the fun thing there and look forward to finding out so have a great one.

Stuart Fantastic. Take care. Thank you.

In this episode, we delve into the rapidly changing world of technology and its impact on businesses, particularly in the context of AI-driven tools through the lens of the 2014 book "Exponential Organizations" and its relevance to small businesses today, as well as how AI is helping to improve processes and reduce costs. We also explore the opportunities and challenges that come with adopting exponential thinking, as well as the importance of personalizing customer experiences and leveraging AI solutions for various tasks.

Get the book: Exponential Organizations

Making Intelligence Accessible | 90-Minute Books | YourPodcast.team

Aalok: Hey, Stuart, how are you?

Stuart: Aalok, how's it going buddy?

Aalok: Very good 24th of April, another week is gone.

Stuart: It goes fast. Blink and you might miss it.

Aalok: Absolutely. So let's talk about where things are now. I think there's like, a good quote we can start with I think Mark Zuckerberg has been laying off even more staff. And because he they're going through the year of efficiency at Meta, or Facebook. And I think one key phrase he said is, we're in a different world now. Right. And I think that's, I think that's a point to just reflect on. Because all of us if we're in business, we started our businesses five years ago, seven years ago, even two years ago, and the world was a very different place, based on COVID, or cost structure or staff. And now in this AI first world, or this cognitive first landscape, things have changed. And this just one bit, I want to touch a bit on that we can kind of go into a bit more detail, as we always do, talking about a book, which can actually help give some answers on this as well. Right. So on the Olin podcast, literally just from last week, and Chamath, and they were looking at funds, and he was basically saying to himself, like, I don't know, if I want to raise a fund now. Because before I would have raised a billion or whatever like this, but maybe I need to have a 50 million fund or a smaller, and I need to write lots of 100,000 checks or 5000 checks or something because the cost structure needed to do a new business, a technology business startup has changed. You don't need 10 engineers, 20 engineers, if engineers can use tools like auto GBT chat, GBT, copilot other things like this, even Amazon have come out with their own code version of it. So you don't need as much staff as much cost. So maybe you know that there's a lot more innovation that can take place. So I think, this phrase of this different world that we're in now, and even companies that are looking to start now, because I think they were also talking about these companies, which are at Series C, which is basically when they've done two rounds of funding beforehand. Normally, some big investor put some loads of money. And they were saying the Series C investment has actually dropped. Because no one wants to be putting in those big amounts of checks for legacy cost structure businesses, like if you're creating a business, they basically called you a zombie corn, because like, you're not going to go anywhere, right, like, and so I think that that becomes quite interesting, because it's all about now having a much lighter, leaner, more exponential organization, what are your thoughts on that?

Stuart: The speed of change, and the ability, so even had a personal experience that is even in the last week. So we manage a pretty, not massive, but it's a number of podcasts for different people as part of the your podcast team brand. That organization was set up mid COVID, a couple of years ago, or early COVID, I guess, a couple of years ago. And we had some exponential opportunities using some of the technology at the time. And since then, we've lost some and brought some on. But we're pretty much using the same setup our show last week, because it's kind of mean you do it. We did it pretty quickly. So I just set up first one I've set up for a couple of years, because usually, I've got the team doing it. Exactly, yeah, you kind of put something in place, you kind of build that mechanism, and then hand it off and move on to the next thing. So it's a little enlightening going back in and now, I mean, probably it's only 18 months, but 18 months later looking at some of the tools, which almost look like legacy tools. They were cutting edge a couple of years ago. And some of the things that we were using for the show notes and the setup that we've done for this one, would you've only been around for a couple of months now. I mean, that speed of change, and having that different mindset. So again, we're not a VC funded size for for that project. But I can completely understand why people will be looking at investments and saying this company was a fantastic idea 18 months ago, but now, do I want to put another massive money into it? Not in this world, right. So that speed of change, and the what exponential means like, so we're gonna look at exponential organizations, the book as a lens to kind of judge it. But that was 2014 That book was written. So I think as we get into a little bit, it'll be really interesting to see just how quickly that has changed. So that means the mentality of us as business owners. That is the thing that needs to fundamentally change. And it's very dangerous now to sit back on something that's worked even in the in the realm.

Aalok: I mean, like in that bin or in podcasts, they were they were also talking about like, one guy that they said he was quite cutting edge in AI, he literally had spent six weeks training a model and he let go of like, you know, maybe like a, you know, I can't remember exact percentage, but it was a significant centage of staff, right, like, so it's not about letting go of people, right. But it just being clear, but the point is, if tasks can be done more efficiently through technology, and don't have variance or quality issues, then your your team can be reallocated to other things. But it's become quite clear that like many tech companies, and many employees we're not doing so much isn't, you know, so I think I think this having this kind of like, zero mindset of, if I were starting again, would I do what I would I would I do everything that way, I'm doing it now. And I think having that kind of like almost beginner's mindset of like, every 12 months, rethinking everything in your organization, because literally, the tools and the possibilities are upgrading week by week, and it's not question of like, just get confused. Just make a cost saving. And then, you know, Theory of Constraints go to the next constraint basically, isn't it? Right? Like, I think, I think that's the framework. So exponential organizations is quite an amazing book, really, that came out in 2014. And that was the whole that was about, like, the Uber ification of everything, and like how to build these kind of like faster businesses, which are like they say, like, why new organizations are 10 times better, faster and cheaper than yours, and what to do about it? And I mean, let's start there, right? Like, how does that relate to like, small business? Because we have with us in like, 19 90%, the business of the world, like small businesses, basically. Right? So I think is completely irrelevant. But like, I'm interested in your viewpoint.

Stuart: Yeah, me too. And I think I perhaps think it's maybe more relevant now to us as a frame to judge where we are against then it was when I first read it in I was looking on, on Amazon, and it popped up and reminded me, I bought it in, I think it was February 2015. So I mean, eight years ago, now, it was crazy. But I remember at the time reading it and thinking, this is a I can see where this is coming from. But it's a bit like blue sky thinking. Because

Aalok: you don't resources to implement some of those things, isn't it? Right? Like,

Stuart: yeah, it was too big. All of the examples that are given our big organization example. So I think,

Aalok: millions and all that kind of stuff, like Yeah, so yeah,

Stuart: so it was it was an interesting theoretical concept, but it was not particularly applicable or accessible as a small business owner. I think now, there is that accessibility, because some of the tools, it's easy to dismiss them as just big tools, like the label of big data. But when you think about, Okay, what does that mean for small organization? A years later, it's much more addressable. So a couple of notes that I was taking the book itself, if you haven't read it is split into kind of two chapters, or two sections. The first part is kind of describing what exponential organizations are. And then the second part talks about building an exponential organization. Now that second part, the examples there, I remember going back to that get ready for the show. I remember at the time, that was too big, it was very, it was big, Earth changing scale, which didn't really resonate

Aalok: more like ways versus like Nokia, or like, you know, like, like, if you're, you know, you're a business, you're not gonna be getting your app onto like, millions of handsets. And it's just not realistic, isn't it? Right, like, but I think, I think if we talk about the kind of like framework, and then we can kind of look at how it's relevant to your business because like, for example, this morning, I was watching a video where they've they've linked chat GPT, to computer vision software, which basically watches YouTube videos, and the chat up ticks. So then the Siletz was a picture of a panda, like a video of a panda like lifting the arm up and stuff. And then it was sort of the prompt said, what is happening in this video? And then chat, GBT looked at it through the interpretation from the computer vision saying, it's the panda is eating bamboo. And it's like, why did the hand raise its hand to get bamboo? You know, like, it will eat all the bamboo? No, it's unlikely to. And then it was like showing a lady doing yoga on a roof. And it says, what's here? So it's like, it's a lady doing yoga. And it appears to be on a roof. And so like, what makes you see that? Well, I can see the sky and I can see this pot like it, you know, that's now.

Stuart: Yeah. And the explanation, its ability to explain what's happening. I think that is an element that isn't often talked about, like a lot of the videos, you're talking about the sorry, a lot of the videos that you see talking about the capability just talks about use cases and instructions going in. Some of them talking about as you're prompting, asking for confirmation, the system understands which I think that's useful as well, but it always seems a little bit. Like the answer is always yes. I'm sure the answer wouldn't always be yes. If you didn't understand that in the examples. It's always yes. So okay, what's it?

Aalok: Like here? It was actually like giving more DNA to describe?

Stuart: Yeah, and for ulcers as people who are trained to interact with the system and understand what he understands, I think that's essential. So when you think about trouble talking to someone in a foreign language when you're just learning, going slow taking bite sized steps and making sure that there's feedback all the way. Yeah, that is important. You wouldn't just blurt out a whole load of things that you learned, and hopefully the other person understood because you know, as a foreign language learner, there's probably going to be some misinterpretation there. So it's easier to deal with that in bite sized pieces. So helping us as the AI language learner understand what's going on? Yeah, very helpful.

Aalok: So exactly. So like, so I think in this in that framework, there's a really nice image, basically, where he talks about on once on the one side is like ideas scale, basically, and your massive transformative purpose, which is basically like, what your vision is, and what you want to, you know, dramatically impact and for the kind of, like scale side of it, like you've got, like staff on demand, community and crowd algorithms, leveraged assets and engagement, and like staffing demand as contractors, basically, right, and using like, you know, these Upwork, freelancer, all these different places have worked. But now you've even got AI agents that could even do this that contractors were doing before, isn't it? Right, you know, so that, that adds another element to it. And then community and crowd we all know very well about, you know, like having forums, open source communities. I mean, the whole AI movement is actually spun by, you know, auto GPT was a community project basically. Right, you know, so that that was kind of like coming out in that way. Algorithms and leveraged assets, I think were the ones where I thought, something accessible to a small business, but now it's not because the ability to essentially create your own or almost like, your own programs, your own algorithms, and like to make it simple, like, how do you answer customer support emails, you've got your own templates already from all your hundreds and hundreds of emails that you've sent out. Now, using different systems, you can actually use that as a fine tuned data set. So your emails would all automatically go through that area. I mean, that's huge to already have that bit coming out now.

Stuart: And things like an easy one. So a lot of people that are asking comes up in conversation, this idea of algorithms confuses the small knots, which confuses but small business owners don't necessarily see the use case for it. So the one that I've used often is to just explain it, or to make obvious how accessible it is, is kind of off the shelf sentiment models. Because we always say, of big companies can build big algorithms, that's fine. But me as an individual business owner, or small business owner, where does that come in sentiment analysis is an off the shelf product, now the you can just load the input, and it gives an output or case by case it will give an output. And that's very easy to understand. So you can imagine a scenario where the support tickets that initially come in to your feedback channel. Yep, and then automatically go to sentiment analysis. So the either on a agent by Agent case, you can just deal with the, the dissatisfied people rather than the happy people, or at an organizational level, you can get that kind of metric or or monitor of, of how much is happy versus how much is sad. So there's definitely off the shelf more and more off the shelf models that become

Aalok: and you see people in an off the shelf we're talking about, like literally, like Zapier is like you do require no technology, you just create the account, you just click which program you want to connect to which program based on what action, and then it's literally like If This Then That Right? Like and then it just, it just runs, you know, like I mean, I for accounting A while ago, I made like the email that we get all our invoices to I just made a zap where anything email with a PDF automatically saved into Google Drive. And that was the invoice you know, like, and then the accountant just looks at those things. So it's, it's like completely accessible at like, next to no cost now, you know, like in these sorts of in these sorts of areas. And I think, I think that's, I think there's one kind of like idea that I'm looking at more and more is like, how to go through a process and I'm calling this tool, the process cognitive fire, where you're literally doing two things where you're looking at, you're really looking at whatever process let's call it sales or customer support or whatever. And you're thinking in two parts, how to make it better, in terms of like, you know, more personalized, more engaging, more timely, you know, whatever, through video, you know, sound whatever like this, and how to make it cheaper. So how do I like, you know, automated parts of it, or have it pre packaged or pre filtered to the doctor, the doctor, the dentist, the customer support person spends less time and I think that that two elements of like, make it better, make it cheaper, you know, like you can you can literally just go through your whole customer journey in that way. And then that's where you get into this whole new cost structure, which is the whole opportunity really here isn't it right, you know, to kind of increase your quality, but cut your cost structure, and then you're gonna be in a much stronger place basically, isn't it you know,

Stuart: I think will stink the the image that you were running through that exponential organization formula image from the book, we'll stick that in the show notes. I think that's, that's fair use. And then we'll link to where people can get the copy of the book as well, obviously, but going through the bits that we're talking about, it'll just be easy for people to kind of see where they sit. But that point they're making about reducing costs. I think often times, particularly non business owners, I guess, we're mainly talking to business owners, it's probably less of an issue. But certainly when you see the news or hear people who aren't responsible for businesses talking about it, they see the bad side of staff reduction and think of cost cutting as profit maximization. But the reality is that we're, I mean, particularly in the US now. So we're, I mean, we've probably been teetering on the edge of recession for a nine months or so. But we're, I think we're potentially officially in recession, depending on how they change the definition of this month. Semantics. Yeah, exactly. But that is an issue. So cost reduction isn't about profit maximization. It's the Bane live. ByVal. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's

Aalok: hemorrhaging blood, you can't lose. You can't keep losing blood. If you're losing money. You can't just raise the money, right?

Stuart: Yeah. Yeah, maximizing one staff position into something more automated. That's unfortunate for that individual. But if that means that the organization survives, then, yeah, it's, it's a necessity. So the the, the efficient use of capital into away from things that are manual tasks and repetitive there's that saying, eliminate automate delegate, in order, like eliminate what you can using this as an opportunity to not only address it in an automation sense, but in an elimination sentence,

Aalok: and then need to be done. Isn't it? Like I agree with you?

Stuart: Yeah. Yeah. How many of the things even from a perspective of kind of the AI automation? When you think about AI, I can't speak from a turn back. And when you think about AI automation, the initial thought I think for a lot of people is automating the manual tasks that things are already done by humans. But then when you get to the stage of thinking, Okay, well, why are we doing that job for humans? So filing PDFs in an email? Are we doing that because it's then easier for the humans to at a later date? Go back to what do we even need to do that? Now? I mean, I don't know how your mailbox looks, but mine looks horrendous. Because anything because I just searched something. And the robots in the email surface it

Aalok: agree, like, who was I talking? Like, I remember, like, everything has kind of changed in that regard. And I think the key thing is like, you need to kind of like relook at what you are spending money on, and see where you could reallocate that to better usage, or reallocate people who are creative and understand things into like, rather than a repetitive task into something much more creative. And that's where that kind of opportunity is, and I think, on the other side of the ideas scale, we talked about scale, basically, like your the interfaces, dashboards, and experimentation, and autonomy and social media, basically. So interface is just like ways of interfacing but it could it could be like chat, GBT is interface right? You know, like, so it's making it easier for people to kind of like, do stuff use stuff? Or it could be a voice based interface, or having a dashboard about showing that? Okay, these are all the customer support emails that came in today? How many of them are angry? How many of them, there's how many of that, you know, like, and then seeing their experimentation, like, you know, like, trying, you know, okay, let's send a video greeting message to all of our new customers this week, and see, you know, does that change the perception? Or is this so many things you can actually do with less people? So you can actually do it quicker, basically, you know, that's the kind of, that's the thing now

Stuart: that I'm very biased toward Zapier because we've used it for many, many years. Fantastic, and reuse it pretty extensively. So there are other tools out there. But I wonder if maybe it's worth doing a slightly deeper dive on Zapier at some point in the future for those people who don't know it, because I think it's the most accessible, firstly, at all. So when we're looking at things like leverage assets is one of the exponential the scale opportunities. So leveraging assets, this idea that you can have a system that takes the one source piece of material, but then create several different things from it, and then bundles that together and then sends it out of the door. So we are still doing this somewhat manually. I guess. It's it's an opportunity for us to make a difference. So on the book business, so 90 minute books, our key asset that's created is that is the book itself. And then from a design and a social perspective. It's the Cover, Once the cover is done that then feed is the visual element that feeds into everything else. But from a leverage assets opportunity to take that cover to push it into one or two of the mock up creation tools to push it into mid journey to create variations, to then pull all those into a place, and then have that place monitor to then send out an email when you're

Aalok: adding more illustrations, right. So if they if they've got like a story type book, where they're like, basically, it's like a business book, but they're giving a story where you could actually have illustrations as part of that, that becomes additional service, which can be done, isn't it? Right, you know? And then, and then then you've got like, from that you can also go audio books we talked about as well, isn't it? Right? You know, that's, that becomes like another thing, because now with trained voice, you can actually recreate that person's voice, you know, digitally, you know, so you don't have to read out all the audio books, all the messages, and it can still be done in the way you want it to be done. You know, like, I think I think it's nothing strengths. Yeah, exactly. And I think I think the key thing here is that, like, people just want a more personalized customer support customer service experience. Like that's what everyone wants, and they want it as quickly as possible. So if technology can help you filter it, and help people focus on where it needs to be focused on, that can only be a good thing.

Stuart: Yeah, I think there's so many opportunities to leverage and streamline and scale. One of the things that's always interesting, and I think it's maybe again, a personal bias, like so much stuff is because I don't engage that much on social media, I'm trying to get better, just in terms of a channel to market but it doesn't come naturally. So say biased against it, this idea of the crowdsourcing element. So 2014 like to say when the book was written way years as a as a counter to what was the big navigation, like the back end Legion system, and Nagi, what the one that kind of sits behind it, NaVi. At now. Yeah, it was a behind the scenes one. So most people wouldn't know the name, but a lot of the maps were powered by it. So this idea of that company, going down and mapping all the routes individually and putting sensors on all of the routes to deal with traffic flow. Like he used to see it in the UK all the time, you'll be on every bridge on the motorway, he's on the freeways, there was like the little radar sensors that weren't speed traps, but they were just traffic monitoring, compared that with the crowd source element of ways, which is just the massive data going around. So 2014, that was a big thing around crowd and community is that idea at scale. But now when you take it to 2023, and a smaller scale element of it. So one of the things that always makes me think about small businesses being able to manage community is this idea of polarization. And particularly since like 2016, managing your community and having a community manager and making sure that it doesn't go off the rails, it's very interesting. But that's where something like, they're gonna keep going back to sentiment analysis, just because it's I think it's the easiest way into an AI algorithm world, having a social platform built into your environment, to bring customers into the family to make them feel involved, to give them access to you as the business owner to give you a conduit to share your unique perspective and skills and personality, but then layering in sentiment analysis so that it very quickly traps the negative or traps, the trolling, some reasonable communities, being able to add in that extra element. So I think we've started off by

Aalok: we'd have to have like someone who was like, literally on call to catch the troll, isn't it right, like, and now now you can have like, if a sentiment company, if a comment comes in, which looks majority negative, it could automatically be like held in that list. It just changes the allocation of attention really, isn't it? Right. Yeah.

Stuart: Which goes back to the point that you first started off within the call when we were saying about it's a mindset switch now. So the biggest thing, the biggest takeaway, I think, from exponential organizations is not necessarily the nuts and bolts. Yeah, it's the mindset. And the fact that in 2023, that mindset that need to adopt a learning mindset is Gionee accelerated. So some things that you might have dismissed in the past is as too difficult or too time consuming or out of scope. Now is the time to reevaluate those and think again about okay, well, is it now essential? And is it now achievable in a way that is, is something that we can actually do as an organization? Because that metric has probably changed?

Aalok: Yeah, and the thing is that if you don't do it, your competition someone someone will do it, you know, so, so fast. They want to quicker and cheaper. So I think I think the key is like, having the time to like rethink, and so almost like document and think, Okay, where are we kind of like slowing down? You know? And where could we speed up? And then from that, by applying technology to it, it automatically organized around costs, you know, improvements and and that kind of thing. But I think the key thing to think about is like, how can you make it better with technology? Because this technology will automatically make it cheaper now at the same time, right? You know, like, I think I think that's the thing. That's the kind of like framework.

Stuart: When I was Googling around for something last week, I saw there was a website that popped up in a search result is there's an AI for that.com. So always remember, again, probably 20. So the iPhone, what was the iPhone 2008 2009, I think I got my first one in 2011. And back then there was that website, there's an app for that, and it can became like a meme. Well, now there's an API for that. So whatever you're thinking about before you dismiss it, just search, and there's almost certainly a project that's out there.

Aalok: I think that's the key thing, really, I think, like, what we're trying to do here is that, like, I think one, one concept I came across is like to be more creative, you need to almost increase, they called it like, I forget what it called, but like, it was like intellectual space. It's like the space of ideas, and the number of disparate or separate ideas you've got in your head. And the thing is, the more you kind of get exposed to wow, that's possible, this is possible, this is possible, then you you've got that link of that space to move within. So you can think that, okay, you know, I'm a small business, I've got this, and I want to do that, and I need to manage this, how can I do that? Well, I could start with this part. Maybe it makes maybe that saves half the time of somebody, basically, then they could help with something else or do something else, like whatever it is, but there's, I mean, it's all coming. I mean, I shared the other day, that McDonald's that's that was like from December 22, they were announcing it were had no staff, you know, like no staff, you know, like, and, and so, it's, it's all going that way, you know, like so it's I think the question is like, you still want team members to apply creativity to enhance things, but you need to be thoughtful about where you're gonna allocate those people to really make the difference really, isn't it? Right, rather than absorbing all the creativity and energy in tasks, which technology could do better?

Stuart: Yeah. Just said, it's not even so much that if you don't do it, you might be behind the curve. It's if you don't do it, someone else is going to, and if the organization could suffer if you don't make these decisions now to stay ahead, because it's not, it doesn't it's surprising how quick things change. So an almost the the speed of change doesn't capture it, but it's like, this is fine. This is fine. This is okay, this is okay. Now, what's wrong and it doesn't work. And vegan avocado.

Aalok: It's like an avocado. Basically, you've got like a no, no, no, yes. No, no.

Stuart: It was like my studying as a kid in school too early, too early, too early, perfect. milliseconds. Oh, well, no, it's too late. It's not worth it.

Aalok: So I think I think so, highly recommend people definitely just look at the effects. So formula which will put like on there with the visual, but then also like, you know, read the book, scan it and dig into the bits, but I think the key thing is now start thinking about like, you know, which which areas are you interested in and looking at it I think what we can do, maybe in our next episodes, we can start going a bit deeper, like you said, into actual search, you know, natural process at some actual tools and, and what kind of improvements are possible from that, basically?

Stuart: Yeah, I think because it's definitely accessible by starting slow, and there is a window of time where you've maybe got a little bit of opportunity to start slow but that that window is going to change. And I really don't know how short that is. I mean, just look for the last few months that book it this has been an interesting exercise going back and looking at the book I was reminded how when I first read it, it was too big and broad. But now taking it again and looking at the opportunities of which there are many more so just that that put a different pair of glasses on to to look at it well worth it.

Aalok: Yeah, you put your exponential glasses on right? You really look at your but listen, great catching up with Stuart as always and look forward to our next conversation.

Stuart: Fantastic look forward to seeing everyone is you're listening or watching check out the website go for it. Augmented ideas don't show because we will have the image that we were talking through and then the video of the recording clear. And she has a message I'll put some contact details on the on the website where if there's anything that you're struggling with or a particular thing that you want us to dive into, shoot us a message and we'll we'll incorporate that

AI Tools Used:

In this episode, we dive deep into the world of augmented age technology, discussing the rapid pace of change and the incredible opportunities it presents. We explore how AI is impacting business performance, training, and improvement opportunities, as well as the power of real-time feedback and organizational knowledge. We also touch on the importance of adapting to an augmented reality for businesses to stay competitive.

Join us as we delve into the book "Augmented" by Brett King, which focuses on four key areas: artificial intelligence, experience design, smart infrastructure, and health tech. Don't miss this fascinating conversation on moving fast and avoiding fear in the ever-changing world of technology!

Get the book: Augmented

Making Intelligence Accessible | 90-Minute Books | YourPodcast.team

Aalok: Stuart,

Stuart: Aalok, how're you doing?

Aalok: I'm very good. We're in a very exciting time now, aren't we?

Stuart: It is. We were catching up last week and kind of the conversation started off. So what better way of capturing the conversation and recording it for everyone in the podcast?

Aalok: Amazing. So how long was it go 10 years ago, or 12 years ago that we did our last podcast?

Stuart: Scary. I think 10 I'm gonna say 10? Because it sounds less daunting than 12 or 13.

Aalok: No worries. Well, at that point, we were looking through businesses from the lens of the mobile age. Right? Right. That was all about the amplification of everything. So we weren't, we zoom up to like 17th of April 2023. And now we're in the cognitive vacation of everything. So this time that we're alive in is quite a unique point in human history. You're in the States. I'm in Portugal, London, Europe, how do you see things from your site? Like, what are the moments, you're observing

Stuart: the speed at which things are changing? I think that the thing that kind of sparked off our conversation to begin with more recently, but also, it's the thing that is potentially catching everyone off guard, but also given this huge opportunity. So when we're talking about this idea of augmented ideas, and augmented age, the opportunity to do almost like strap on superpowers as you need a desire superpower, a monitoring superpower, a, an understanding of comprehension, superpower, the speed at which things are changing. So even in the US where the majority of that's probably wrong, because the US bias I've got already, I was gonna say that the majority of this is happening, but it's lies, the majority of the podcasts that I'm listening to the majority of the videos, I'm seeing the majority of the people I'm even talking about here. So it's probably a bit of a local bias. But it's the two worlds, there's the world where everyone understands what's happening, and what will be happening and is looking at it now. And then a small part, very small part, and then there's the rest of the world, which is maybe reading about it occasionally in a New York Times.

Aalok: But they're gonna, they're gonna experience it because like, yeah, essentially, where we are now on the exponential curve. So the exponential curve is where you've basically got something which is doubling in whatever period of time, so then that's actually like rapidly increasing. And that's why you see this hockey stick like growth, isn't it? And I think we were talking about this before that, like before, we were traveling in a train along the exponential curve. And then I said that we're now in the elevator. And then I think in our conversation, I was saying, Actually, we're in a rocket ship, because like the speed that it brings doubling now, it's creating unparalleled opportunity and consequences. So I think in this podcast, we want to be very specific, and very concrete. So the point is, this is gonna be like a kind of 30 minute like, essentially, like mental stimulation, and we're going to be going through buying this cognitive vacation element to existing business books or frameworks serve as a jumping off point really to trigger out new ideas, different elements from there, because that now you can actually, now that you don't need as many people for launching a new business doing a different thing, sales and marketing support, and you know, customer support delivery, your cost structures can be different, which then means you can price differently and still be profitable. So, you know, I think that Jason Calacanis was saying that, like the opportunity now is in one way to go after stripe with 110 of the people. And at 1/10 the cost, you know, so that, you know, and I think like, yeah, when you think about

Stuart: all of the opportunities, or problems or pain points in the business, yeah, and things that have just been difficult to do in the past, because either there's been a technological gap or human gap or a practical gap, the opportunity to revisit a lot of things you've potentially dismissed in the past, because it's just not feasible to do. It opens up a whole new world, let alone and of course, the all of the new opportunities that come up because of worrying.

Aalok: So I think one of the best things that I think about is like, a long time ago, you know, Jeff Bezos said, like, focus on the things that will not change. Right? So like, so like, we look at like, Oh, my God, software's changing hardware is changing. But the wetware ain't changing, right? Like the brain is the same people think and react emotionally. So in this area, what we want to focus on really is like, what's not going to change? And what a good frameworks look at it. So why don't we start with the first book that we're going to go and talk our way through? Which book is that?

Stuart: So augmented by Brett King? What this is, I think this was a great and your suggestion, I think this was a great idea, because 2016 came out seven years ago. I know seven years. That's scary. So when you look at where we were then on the AI journey, there were some eight I transcripts, so some AI monitoring, very early steps, but the framework still, to your mind, the things that Yeah, exactly, still applies. It's just now the opera. changes in the rate of change in the speed and the way that we need to urgency in which we need to address

Aalok: this extra impact. Just when 10x basically Isn't it right? Like, I mean, the thing is like, this is such a good book. What I love about it is that it really carefully thought through the different dimensions, and what were the kind of four themes that you saw basically from this.

Stuart: So I think the for the it's kind of built around these ideas of artificial intelligence, experience design, smart infrastructure, and health tech. So those four areas, so fundamental to the world. Yeah, exactly, exactly. There's the building blocks of everything. Almost every business has some element that falls into one of

Aalok: them has an experience, everything has a customer experience, a digital, customer experience health, you have a digital patient journey, if you're a good hybrid organization, if you're Amazon, you're offering a one click or whatever like this, you know, like so I think the experience design is fundamental. And artificial intelligence is now just electricity.

Stuart: Yeah, right. Yeah. Excuse me, it's a series of switches, you can turn on and off, depending on what the experience is that you're trying to add to it. I think some of the things that some of the things back then that really stood out this idea of big data and the opportunity to collect a lot of information

Aalok: and mine across it, basically, isn't it right,

Stuart: like the thing that's changed. So looking at the 2023 oriented lens now is that back then it was very much big data was very much a big organization opportunity.

Aalok: And like Hadoop, and all this kind of crazy stuff. We went to some workshops together, and it was quite inaccessible to like a kind of business guy, basically. Right? You know, yeah,

Stuart: the Small Business implication of what would happen day to day was pretty limited. I mean, you could see the opportunity, and there were little bits and pieces that you could grab ahold of in terms of using datasets or allowing access to other people's work to build off. But from just the day to day practicality point of view, and building a difference. It was too much too much. And the cost was too much. And overhead to

Aalok: resourcing even just to start a conversation with a data scientist would cost you 1000s, basically, isn't it? Right?

Stuart: Right. But you look now at some of the larger learning models, and again, it's not exactly off the shelf all the time. But the accessibility in relatively easy ways to say

Aalok: Lego Lego, you can build it to games.

Stuart: Yeah, yeah, that's such a great analogy. Think about it as Lego blocks. It's not the necessarily today buying a finished model off the shelf. But the building pieces to stick it together there. No, I

Aalok: agree. And I think like one, one way that I've been looking at AI is I've been thinking about it a bit like an intellectual submarine. So kind of bear with me. So if you're like on the surface, and you're very bad swimmer, like, if I'm hold my breath and try and like go down as far as I can, maybe for like, a few seconds, I can go down and then I've got to come back start coming back up, right. So my depth, the depth to which I can kind of discover things is limited, basically, right? You know, but like with AI, the amount of data you could aggregate. And then you could analyze even for like weak signals, like imagine in an ocean you were looking for, like, tiny particles of the compound trace compound, basically, you would never detect that from like one liter of water. But you could detect that from like, I don't know, like a huge amount if you have the right sensitivity of things. So I see this AI tools is like really an intellectual submarine that we kind of go to a depth and discover new things like I remember reading a long time ago about like, they were looking for breakthroughs in breast cancer detection. And normally in pathology, when you are analyzing an area, you basically have the you cut away the tumor, but you exercise and you ignore the transition cells, which is basically not tumor, not healthy tissue. It's a bit like when you're driving a sunny area drive to a rainy area, you go into that gray bit, right? Normally, you cut that bit away, you ignore it, because it's not tumor, but actually, when they analyze that zone that had all of the progenitor and all of the prognostic information within that. So what I'm trying to say is that like our kind of like cut and paste, or standard ways of analyzing the world are due to our feeding it through our cognitive lens. But if we've got aI on it, we don't have to discard anything. Now, we can put everything into it, because we have unlimited bandwidth and processing power, which can be done in quite a low cost way. And I think it just means that we're going to discover a whole load of new things basically, right.

Stuart: It's that transition pieces, great way of thinking about it, because there's processes and procedures that we will do in our business that maybe we don't try and push the edge off, or we make sure that the black and white is very separated from the gray. Because as the humans dealing with the system, we need that separation or thinking about some Yeah, exactly. It's that there has to be something or not something, the gray areas where things really slow down or get inefficient or the it will change from time to time it's to kind of subjective, which obviously in some areas you need at the very kind of High touch points. But for the majority of the business process is that Black and White was a lot more was a lot more essential, because you just needed to be able to tell people how to do the job in a repeatable way. And customers needed to know what to do with the ability to make that gray area a little bit more discernible and reliably discernible. So one of the things that you were talking about when we were chatting the other day was that some of the sentiment analysis that was being done on call recordings, you were talking to someone about some training staff? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So net promoter score was a great black and white idea. We ask people questions, we

Aalok: give them recommend to a friend or family, isn't it? Right? You're asking someone to think about their experience after they've had the experience? And reflect on it? Versus if you actually analyze and have analytics on the conversations, like the voice conversations? Like, are they actually engaged? Are they enthusiastic? Are they happy? Was there measurable evidence of a happy positive outcome? Because why? Ask about the thing when you can measure the thing? Isn't it right, you

Stuart: know, so? Exactly that movement away from a black and white, I'm just asking you for a score to a reasonable analysis of the gray in middle real time. Yeah, analyzing the tone. So for organizations who have relied on that a lot in the past, taking the call recordings, and pushing those through the AI sentiment analysis models, is going to be a great way of getting that real time feedback on how not only individual agents are performing, but how the organization is going overall, you can imagine a scenario where you switch from eye level net promoter scores, just at the end of an experience to granular sentiment promoter scores within the experience. So okay, onboarding,

Aalok: exactly. How likely is someone to churn or drop out based on like, how well that experience went so far, isn't it right?

Stuart: And which part of the experience they're pleased with versus displeased with? And it's not necessarily a reflection on the staff, it's a reflection on the process?

Aalok: Is it hard to understand is the readability of the language too hard? They seems like they're, they're talking quickly, then suddenly, they drop interest and you the ability and the thing is, like with this kind of like analytics on top of this, it doesn't even need to be a person. If you create the right filter, you can filter your, you know, your recordings, your text, your whatever it is through these things, isn't it? Right? So you almost have like a kind of AI agent, which is able to analyze and have everything on it. I mean, I was talking with building your idea, like I was talking with someone in financial services, and also in someone dentistry, the same conversation, because professional services is human to human. So your variance is gonna be based on how you talk. Right? So what'd you say? The ideas, you say? What do you say them in, and what you propose completely changes the dynamic and the size of the transaction and the acceptability and everything. So he's very experienced, and he's like, been doing it for like many years. And so he's got his own language and patterns and everything like this. And I was explaining that, like if we took that, and we kind of like, looked into a knowledge graph, and then also figured out okay, like, what are the core themes and ideas that you repeatedly use? What are the analogies you use? And then compare that across different places to the recommendations you have versus another person to see like, what they got? And then you can look at the kind of like the delta between those two, isn't it? Right, almost like, then coach the other person about it using the right language? And how aligned are you to our company values and training? I mean, the opportunities for improvement and coaching, I think it changes training completely as well, right? Like, yeah,

Stuart: because you get in that not only the speed of the real time feedback, but the organizational knowledge across a larger set, that would be difficult to do, person to person level, the I'm thinking like some practical examples at the individual business level. So we use have done for years, I never really thought about it as an AI technology, but I guess it is to a certain degree. So TextExpander is a tool on the Mac that just expands little short snippets. But there's a team's version. So you can use the same language across multiple people. So organizationally, we would have used it in the past of coming up with the term of phrase that we wanted for a particular situation, our businesses, we help people we're marketing company, we help people write books. So we've got depend on what people ask in those early stages. We've been doing it for 10 years. So we've got some pretty standard replies. Using TextExpander as a team tool just makes that consistency across the board. But now, there's a situation where we can look at the sentiment analysis of how people are responding to those conversations, because inevitably, an email turns into a conversation that call can be recorded. So we've got the opportunity to look again now at the language that we're using and thinking okay, well, not only did we pick one version that we thought was good, we can now get the feedback based on what the sentiment is around actual.

Aalok: Exactly, exactly. And I think that's the key. That's the key thing like it because communicate ation is, the meaning of communication is not what you transmitted. It's what was received, isn't it? Right, right. And so in that situation, I had a call today where I was talking to someone about something, they used a particular framework to describe it. And to me, that sounded clear. But to that person, they said, You mean this? And I was like, No, I don't mean that you understand? You know, like, and I was like, Okay, I need to like, that phrasing has too many hooks attached to it, right. So I need to, like, figure out a new thing. So, but all these things, you know, like across sales conversations across training, you know, there's people that are doing it right already. And the question is, like, how do you use that to get other people to do that? Because ultimately, every employee wants to be successful, right? They want to win their game, isn't it right, like, but they just don't know how to make, what to do, really, isn't it right, if the tools

Stuart: will provide. And this actually bridges into the topic of the threat versus the opportunity, so we should probably touch on that in a second. But it provides the opportunity, it's an augmented reality going forward. It's not none of the tools. Today, none of the tools today can take a plaintext instruction and go and take over the world. Now, it's not about the Lego blocks who've built things together. So for the business owners, employees who wants to advance and excel, the opportunity to take some of this big system learning or big system analysis, there will just be very impractical for them to get themselves. So for the employee who has an opportunity to do something better, they can either be annoyed at it and think of the robots as controlling what they do. Or they can say, oh, you know what, that is something I wouldn't have gotten to.

Aalok: With this. We're kind of same age like see, you remember aliens, right? Like, you remember when Sigourney Weaver had to fight, the big alien goes in that big. We had a big mech suit. So it's still got for two arms and two legs, right. But through that she her actions have like leveraged to the enth degree. So she can then lift things much more power that much more heavy, move things. So it's an amplifier. So basically, AI is a cognitive amplifier. So the question is, what do you want to amplify Right? Like, you know, like, and that's where it comes into the experience design, like basically like process design, what's going on in your workflow right now? What can be commodified? What can be made cheaper, what can be made better, all that kind of stuff, isn't it and I really liked this book by augmenter. Because he really paints a nice picture in a way to think about it, which then going back over it, you can then start to see where things are going. Because really, you have to have a vision for your company as a augmented organization. Because there'll be two levels now, there'll be augmented, and then it'll be basically the equivalent of no electricity and offline like, like, like, kind of, isn't it? Right? Yeah.

Stuart: Because no business exists in a vacuum, and everyone has competitors. And if you don't have choices today, you're almost certainly gonna have them tomorrow. And they're going to be using the tools. I was watching a YouTube video over the weekend. For some reason I'm not. I'm not that much of a car guy. But there's a couple of car building channels that I watched for some reason. So the guy there was historically a derby car racer like demolition derby. So he was talking about a car, they said, Oh, we're going to do some stuff. And we're going to be close to the line. He said, I always was, I was told one. So I was used to think that if you get to the check in point of a derby race, and the marshals just let you straight in, you've got a problem, because everyone else they've been sent back because they need to take away some of the modifications, because everyone else is pushing the limits and trying to take every advantage that they can. So if you turn up and just waltz in and the marshal say, oh, yeah, that's fine. You're underprepared. Yeah, exactly. underprepared. And everyone else in the playing field is going to come in here and harder. And that's a little bit. That's why I think this is a great opportunity for people to revisit the book now because reading it originally, and actually, it was

Aalok: funny when I was given those things, then you could just think about it

Stuart: right when I was Googling for a link to the book to make sure that we had some resources for people afterwards. The second or third result is the actual book page itself, but it's augmented Colan by futurist Brett King and life in the SmartLink. I love that one, right. Yeah, exactly. Which actually, that's a nice amplifying subheading as well. But the fact of futurist is up there front and center in 2016 kind of sets the agenda for the book. This is a great futurist view of what's coming up. Today. In historian. Yeah, it's what you need to be doing. This was the view in the past, but this is what you need to be doing now. Because the rocket ship like you say that a rocket ship is taken off, and other people are going to be coming to the party with different tools and different expectations. The four frameworks that we were talking about within the book are the four ideas those The fact that AI exists, it's an opportunity. The experience design, despite infrastructure in the Health Tech, I guess health sector a little bit is, unless you're in the industry, I don't know how, as, as an individual, as a person super interesting, as a business owner, unless you're in that

Aalok: this, you're in the health bit like you're using different things, you're not going to be doing it. But I mean, for example, there's so many things that can be done with chronic disease management, you know, he's looking at how different things are with wearables with aura ring with like, non wearable wearables, like even like you and me talking on camera right now. And we could actually extract outside the visible framework of the colors that we can see, I could take my pulse rate, my blood pressure, my articulation in pockets and screening, all that stuff can be done from it right, you know, so that's Health Tech. But if you're looking at like infrastructure, sent by, like, your fridge could tell you so much about what's going on, on buildings, right in like, How are people using the building? Are they in this part of the shopping center or not? What trends what other opportunities to kind of improve? You know, that you maybe you could have Dynamically Responding buildings in some way? I don't know, you understand? You know, like, I think

Stuart: the infrastructure framework. So the way that I was looking at when looking back again, at the kind of summary that I had previously, from the book, this idea of infrastructure opens up a whole new dimension as well, because historically, I would probably have thought about infrastructure as like lighting and water and the actual building and office itself. With online company, staff and remote, we don't have office space where people come into so it might have been one that previously would have dismissed. But since 2016, so we use Zapier as a middle ale tool that glues together everything have done probably since. I mean, maybe we were using it back then. But thinking about it in a different way now. So thinking of that as the infrastructure of the business. So going back to your Lego blocks analogy, you took Domino's

Aalok: now in its dirt, right, right, wait for the dominoes to fall down. Well, how far you want to go?

Stuart: Yeah, and the connective bits that stick them together? So it's almost like maybe not Domino's. But what was that a game that you had as a kid that was wasn't mousetrap. But there was like layers of track, like a car track. But you had Domino's omelet, and you would like send them what I think was maybe like mousetrap or something. But anyway,

Aalok: that's trapped. Yeah, what's mouse trap, trap, then the trap came down like the other way.

Stuart: And it had there was one section of it had the Domino's on it, but connected tracks together. So when we think about it like that, it's that connectivity, the infrastructure becomes the connectivity of the different blocks.

Aalok: Generative AI is now connected tool, because before you'd have human to it computer interface by a keyboard right? Now you can have voice walking, talking, you can have direct interface in that way, you can have an agent, which sounds Irish sounds, Japanese sounds, regional, Yorkshire, you know, like, you know, I won't do the accent, but like, and it's like locally relevant. So the biggest opportunity is to make it invisible technology, you know, like, in a non tech setting, like on a phone call, or this or that, but it's technology that it becomes the glue, you know, and then you've got the ace EPs and everything like that we can go through there, basically. So

Stuart: I think looking back at the booklet, each of the elements and health take is the one that's the least ring presses any buzzers for me, because I feel the least connected to it. But I'm sure there are elements that would make sense, but revisiting it in a 2023 framework. And instead of thinking about it as our this one might be something interesting in the future, thinking about it, okay, today, this really is gonna make a difference in the next someone's gonna do it period of time. Yeah. And the, if I'm not looking at it, then my competitors are, it really gives another opportunity to dig out some of that you've maybe read in the past, revisit it through this frame. And even if, as we're talking in April, there aren't some immediate things that springs to mind that will come up in the framework. Yeah, having the framework regularly checking back in.

Aalok: We're on maybe floor 50 Now, right? Give it a few minutes, and we'll be on floor 150 Instead of like, you know, so the question is like, if you know right now, okay, this idea kicks in at floor 622. And gonna be that long,

Stuart: right? Yeah, exactly. I think this is a good talking about it. We were going through and as we were talking about getting the shows, put some notes together and thinking about whatever has been the holding back point from the last few years. Now is the time just exactly. Now's the time to write down revisit what that was, and have it on that post it note next computer because

Aalok: it's straight before it's not constrained now, isn't it? No.

Stuart: And if it is today, then it won't be tomorrow. So don't just think

Aalok: this is really exciting catch up, Stuart. I think like we're gonna be going through other frameworks and other business books that are there. So we're always keen to hear from people that what they would actually like to go and look through and kind of go from there. Where can people find to find out more?

Stuart: Yeah, so this is the augmented ideas showing So head over to AugmentedIdeas.show as a URL. We are going to I mean, talk about moving fast. We were. It's Monday morning with me. It's Monday morning. We were talking about this on Friday, and we just wanted to hit the ground and get it out there. So I'm pretty sure we're gonna put this on YouTube. There's gonna be a podcast feed the website, obviously. So AugmentedIdeas.Shows the main bit what I would give people as homework. And again, this was your idea from Stein off last week, but I'd give people's homework for next week. There's an all in podcast episode that talks about the acceleration of this a lot is episode 124. So as a kind of primer for the speed of things working, I'd give people that as homework to check in on and then listening to next time and and we'll check out that next framework.

Aalok: Amazing. Well, listen, Stuart, it's been a real pleasure and massive dose of stimulation, so I really appreciated it.

Stuart: Perfect Note. Well, thanks for the idea. I'm glad that we jumped back on board and excited for the next one too.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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