Episode 16 - Our Most Creative Things and Responsible AI Policies
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Episode 16 - Our Most Creative Things and Responsible AI PoliciesVideo and Podcast Transcript
[Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI using a tool called Descript, and has not been edited for content.]
Dave Dougherty: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Enterprising Minds. Dave here,
Alex Pokorny: Alex here, and Ruthie
Dave Dougherty: is on mute.
Ruthi Corcoran: Hi everyone.
Dave Dougherty: Alright, so today is um, kind of a grab bag episode. Um, Alex, what do you, what do you bring into the table?
Alex Pokorny: We've got a fun one, kind of a personal story thing. Um, just asking. The two of you on the most creative thing that you ever attempted. So it was something that you tried and others didn't maybe immediately get, but you were passionate about it.
Ruthi Corcoran: I'm going to talk about AI chatbots and I want to explore to what extent they can fix bad web experiences.
Dave Dougherty: I'm taking an interest in, um, responsible AI manifestos or AI policy guides that, um, some companies and organizations have, uh, have recently put out and, um, wanted to see what you guys think of these things. Uh, are they useful? Are they not? Um, should we adopt one? So, um, that kind of, that kind of stuff. So, um, Alex. Why don't you all right?
Alex Pokorny: Sure, so I'll talk a little bit about the one that I picked for myself and then I'll leave it up to you guys of wants to go and kind of talk about theirs. So, um, long time ago, heard about DARPA. So the defense basically research arm, and they Try some really cool and some really crazy things. If you look at some of the past inventions There's a whole range to them and they're very sci fi y kind of stuff that they're trying to make into reality So it's it's pretty far out there sort of things not just like let's get the version 2.
0 This is something no one's ever done before and there was a project that they had created Trying to figure out the date on this, but I think it's like 10 15 years ago Was basically the idea of cooling people down and how can you do it faster? Um, there's different kind of applications. Of course, it's the defense advanced research projects agency.
So it's defense related to thinking about soldiers who are wearing tons of gear and they're in a hot, humid. Potential climate or just tons of gear and they're just really hot because of all that stuff and running around What's a good way to kind of cool them down, you know, how can we combat heat exhaustion?
How can we deal with things like that? And then as it turns out with this it's a little bit further into How can we also enhance people's ability to recover from fatigue? And that's where this cooling mitt thing came from, and I'll, we can throw the links in the show notes. Um, but somebody on Instructables started tearing one apart.
The product is available. It is like three or four thousand dollars to buy one of these cooling mitts. What it is is basically like a vacuum container that you, a vacuum jar that you shove your hand into and you wrap your hand around a metal rod and the vacuum helps your blood circulate basically faster and bring it to the surface and the rod gets cold and it basically works as kind of a thermal and it's supposed to cool you down super fast by cooling down your bloodstream from your hand.
It's a really crazy idea and I always thought like, maybe this works, maybe it doesn't. Um, So I tried building one from this Instructables, uh, Of course he's not. Oh man, it was fun going to like random like junkyards and stuff trying to find parts for this thing because it's like it's a random, random bits trying to make this thing work.
Couldn't really get the vacuum to hold, the pressure to hold well enough. Um, people have done some really crazy things trying to make one. Um, since... I mean, many years since there's been a lot of questions of whether or not this thing would even actually work or not. I mean, it's not like it really took off, um, but it was a fun project and it was just something that I kept kind of exploring and kind of playing around with.
And it was something well beyond my, you know, crafting engineering skills. But it was, it was, it was a lot of fun and it was just a great exercise in creativity. So what about you two? What's something that you've at least attempted, maybe didn't succeed at it, but something that you attempted that was creative and maybe people didn't get the purpose for it right
Dave Dougherty: away.
I think that describes my career actually.
But Ruthie, why don't you go first?
Ruthi Corcoran: All right, I'm going to take 1, perhaps not the most creative. I'm going to have to think about that 1. Maybe we'll come back in a future episode, but on the ambitious side and sort of 1 that I got definitely a lot of eyebrows raised on, um, in our previous house, um, we bought a house with a lot of lawn and, um, a lot of sunny space with the intent that I would sort of create a garden within it.
Definitely a passion of mine, big interest. Um, and. In order to do this, right, the question is, how do you take lawn and turn it into garden in an effective way? Um, for a couple of years, I had been looking, watching YouTube videos. This guy named Charles doubting who talks about no dig and he just is like, yeah, just put 6 inches of dirt on it and immediately start planning into it.
And I was like, that sounds genius. Like, why would you ever do anything else? Um, So I ordered 8 cubic yards, I think, just a lot of dirt and had it sort of dumped on my driveway with this huge red truck and the driver was on a hill. So it looked like when they were dumping it, that the whole truck was going to fall over.
didn't, everything was fine. Um, and then the process was to put the dirt onto the grass. Lots of eyebrows raised, particularly from, from my mom, also my neighbors, but particular from my mom, because she had grown up in a world where no, you have to dig up the dirt. That's how you, like, you have to dig up the grass.
You're going to have to pick up all the turf, et cetera, et cetera. You're going to have to put plastic down. Yada, yada, yada. Um, and I was, I was pretty determined. I was like, no, we are just, we're going to put dirt down now. They did rightly point out that you have to have a way of keeping the dirt from falling down the hill.
So they were fair on that point. You know, we solved it with a couple of things. Um, but the dirt thing worked out and. The creative piece of it was, how do you turn that into a garden? How do you think about that? That was probably the process of over a year of me just looking at that space and sort of thinking it through and figuring out where the pathways might go and where you want height and where you want lower spots and how that relates to the sun and the wind, et cetera.
I think what sort of. Stands out about the entire process wasn't that it was particularly out there creative or anything right? Putting a bunch of dirt on your lawn widespread popularity on the Internet, like, not something new, but it strikes me as something that's interesting within within the age we live in.
And I had noticed this before, which is. Being part of different internet communities, watching different YouTubers puts you in sort of a curious bubble outside of your normal social circumstances. And it gives you sort of a lens and a way of thinking about the world and the way of talking about the world that you share with the community on the internet.
But not necessarily within your, your physical community around you. And then there's a divergence when you're doing the thing that the internet community is all about. In my case, putting six inches of dirt on my lawn to create a garden. The people around me who weren't in that internet community, who are sort of have a different way of viewing the world.
They raise their eyebrows and they go, that's weird. And so I think this is something that. Maybe it's sort of an undercurrent of a lot of the interactions in our life, which is we have these communities online, which sort of serve as the jumping off point for things that we do or things that we believe.
And there's a distinction between, um, maybe the, the communities that we have in the real world. Um, and sometimes there's a tension there. Sometimes it's sort of feeds and has a really cool reaction. Right? My mom. Now we did the same project in her lawn to expand some of her garden and they worked out.
Great. Um, but it's just sort of a curiosity that, um, we now live with every day.
Dave Dougherty: That's actually a perfect cue for what I was going to talk about, actually, um, because through our conversations in previous episodes, you know, going deep into, um, thought leaders like Clayton Christensen or, um, Rory Sutherland and, you know, the behavioral economics and creativity in general, um,
those things, as well as a particular quote that's in a book that I'm, um, An audio book I'm listening to right now called genius makers, where it's kind of, um, it looks at the 70 years of AI, um, building up to the point of where we are now, like where it was just this super niche thing on, you know, punch cards.
And, you know, uh, military research labs through to, you know, early two thousands, when all of a sudden all the researchers had these consulting gigs with the, the tech companies, you know, or created companies that they then sold to the tech companies based off their research. And one of the quotes from, um.
One of the computer scientists who, you know, kind of falls into that professor, um, consultant role commented on how, you know, they like Google or Facebook or any of those guys would purchase these AI capabilities and then when they would show up to the, the corporate headquarters to then do the thing that the companies bought their company for, they would find computer systems that weren't to their You know, like they had the, they didn't have the GPUs.
They were using standard chips. They were, you know, so then the first thing they had to do was to say, Hey, all of you that were doing this previously, get rid of what you've done and, you know, do it, do it our way. Cause they just bought us for, you know, 200 million.
But the quote was essentially people are always focused on how to do the thing that they're doing better rather than looking at a way to change what they're working for a future state, like what things could be capable of. Right. And that's where I think that. mismatch of, you know, like the innovators dilemma or looking at behavioral economics rather than traditional economics and traditional financial metrics for businesses.
And, you know, why are these companies failing underneath good management principles? Well, it's because you're iterating rather than disrupting yourself, right? Um, the definition of creativity for me has changed, right? Like, I think the knee jerk reaction to what is the most creative thing would be something like, you know, Jackson Pollock, where, okay, painting was going one way, and then all of a sudden, boom, he's on the scene, and now all of a sudden, you can do these, you know, um, freewheeling expressionist kind of things, um, And there's this new form of whatever medium it is, right?
But that's not necessarily the case, right? I think, you know, Ruthie, your example is kind of perfect of creativity can take many, many forms, even if it's just challenging what the knee jerk reaction would be for, I need a garden. You know, no, I don't have to tear up everything because you know what that work sucks.
Why would I do that? You know, just you know challenging small things sometimes can give you huge benefits on the flip side like I've I've found myself Anytime Anybody comes at me with well, this is the way we've always done it I say back to them great. You have just given me license to do the opposite thing because Once the culture falls into, this is the way we do it, something needs to happen because that's just going to be status quo and poor form, you know, moving
Alex Pokorny: forward.
Ruthi Corcoran: Lightning round. You still have to give an example. What is the creative thing?
Dave Dougherty: Um.
I don't know. I will have to think of some, because to your point, the definition of it, there are a lot of different ways I could go, right? With the creative writing background, with the music background, all those things are obviously creative. Um, but they're creative in their own medium. Um, So like the most creative business thing, um, okay, we'll find thinking out loud the knee jerk thing.
The first comes to mind would be, um, back in 2014, I had said to the agency leadership that I was working for at the time and doing the internal marketing for, I said, Hey, we're doing all of these like custom. You know, custom events for our top clients, you know, these like breakfast and learn kind of things, why don't we just record them and, you know, or create courses based off of the industry research we're doing and charge it as a different product line.
It's a different revenue stream. That's. More capable, you don't have to, you know, constantly be doing this new business, like, you know, company churn kind of thing. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's just weird. Why would you do that? 10 years later, that is the exact go to market model. Every single creator is doing.
And it's just like, you know, I kind of wish I had the confidence in my abilities that I have now back then. You know, but I think this is the case with any, any career, right? You, you see certain opportunities where you're like, man, I should have pushed harder. Um, that's one that I'm like, particularly proud of just because it was the like, okay, yeah.
Vindication. Cool. I didn't know what I was talking about.
Alex Pokorny: So Alex, you've been sitting patiently. Oh, that's it. I mean, that was just kind of the. This is kind of a get to know you kind of question. I mean, to be honest, and then just the piece that always kicks off from that, I think it's always those interesting conversations of why you stuck with that path or why you felt that that was the right path to do when others didn't, or it's easy to go along with the flow and it's easy to get peer pressured into things.
And when it's the times where you stand against the tide, I think is the most unique. So it's just a
Ruthi Corcoran: skill to be able to recognize like, Oh, this is. This is the time where I'm going to be standing against the grain and if I'm just gonna I'm gonna do it I'm gonna continue and with the recognition that sometimes going against the grain like Maybe doesn't work out.
So well, maybe Right, you end up with scuffed wood, but in some cases, right? in some cases, it does make sense and And you just gotta stick with it.
Alex Pokorny: I will one of
Dave Dougherty: the biggest learnings from going from the sort of a more creative environment, you know, releasing my first record at 16, you know, through to now being the, you know, traditional marketer kind of role.
I am just, I've always been shocked. At how hard it is for most people to just try something, right? Cause I, you're talking to my musician friends. It's just the, Hey, you know what? I want to do a project with you. We should do it this way. Or you and I both like this particular artist. Why don't we do a project like that?
It might not go anywhere, but let's at least try it. Well, you know, we don't know if we have chemistry or not, but, you know, we're friends, so let's try. And then you discover that, Hey, you know what, I'm, I have a better friend chemistry with you than, than, you know, the musical language. So we're just not going to do projects together or, Hey, this is really fun.
Let's, you know, let's gig with it. Um, like that it's such a simple mindset, but just so many people stop themselves from just trying something because they can't see the end of the road, you know, from the beginning. Which is, you know, again, one of those management things where it's just like, yo, if you want to be a good leader, you have to like, take some risks, you know, um,
Ruthi Corcoran: I think there's an angle of that too, which is the just getting started and just try it super simple example.
We got these little paper stars. A couple years ago, I saw in a, one of those nice little British magazines, these lovely little paper star sort of garland things for Christmas. And I was like, that's wonderful. I could make that. And I stared at it probably for a couple months or something like this. And then I finally...
Just was like, okay, I've got a little bit of free time. Like I'm just going to pull up the YouTube video and make the darn thing. And just sitting down and making it one super easy to felt really great sense of accomplishment afterwards. Look, I made a star. That's amazing. But it's, um, it's. I think the most, the thing I always keep in mind is just like how easy it is to drag your feet on the little things like that, even just watching and replicating a five minute YouTube video.
That actually takes a fair amount of just inertia to get yourself over that. And once you're there, hey, I've got garlands. I've got lots of little stars everywhere. Turns out you can sell these babies for like 20 bucks on Etsy if you've got three of them. It's like really a bizarre niche market. I haven't entered into it, but just for anyone watching, paper stars.
But now that I've gotten myself over that hurdle, now I can make little hearts. Now I can make little butterflies and it sort of opens up a whole new world. Whether or not I want to pursue it is a different question, but. Just, I think the more that we do and the more that we just sort of push ourselves to get over that inertia and getting in the habit of doing that, um, that's a good life skill to acquire
Alex Pokorny: and try to figure out those barriers.
I mean, trying to actually look at those a little bit kind of out of body experience, a little bit 3rd person to say, what's stopping me from actually doing this? I thought about that with cooking. That's always one that always kind of gets to me because I enjoy it and I used to be very, very intimidated by it because you have these, you know, amazing allotted chefs and then there's me and my, you know, bowl of mac and cheese or whatever kind of most basic thing that I'm making on a daily basis or, you know, routine basis.
And it's like, my gosh, there's such a gap between me and them. I'll never be able to cross this chasm. But then you realize most of cooking is, you confidence, small load equipment, small load ingredients. Most of it is just confidence and you can basically tackle any recipe.
Dave Dougherty: 90% of people can solve their cooking problems by not trying to cook with high heat and do it quick.
If you let things take. Time and try to have a good result.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you chop really slowly fine prep it Is that all your ingredients up ahead of time? You'll still be able to make the thing knife
Dave Dougherty: skills come with practice And what's interesting too if you if you talk to chefs Um, and you ask them like, Hey, what, what do you eat mostly?
Like when you get home from a shift, they'll be like, I probably have popcorn like three days a week. Yeah,
Alex Pokorny: I'm mad. It's always the same thing. I've asked him like, you know, what's in your fridge? And they're like, uh, there was a beer and a thing of mustard. And then they're, you know, it's like, I drank the beer.
I'm like, okay, think just a thing of mustard. Cause I eat, eat at work. Three times a day. And when I get home, I don't want to do crap. So I don't do, it's like frozen pizza, maybe, or I'll order out. It's like, oh wow.
Dave Dougherty: Mac and cheese with a bag of frozen peas. Like, yeah, it's like, cool. I'm not alone. I
Alex Pokorny: would seriously be damned, man.
Dave Dougherty: God. All right, Ruthie, uh, since you're really good at, at queuing up my topics, why don't you cover your AI chatbots and then we can go into, uh, ethics and responsibility.
Ruthi Corcoran: I totally missed the good segue too, because the prime example for mine is jello and cooking. So you're ready for this. All right, we're gonna, we're gonna kick it off.
Okay. So. I've been to the beginning, um, thinking about a chat box. So I'm going to talk about a bit of an experience. I had about a month ago. Um, and then I want to open it up for, like, where's the use case for these things? When are they going to be valuable? When are they not? And how can we think about it?
So, um. About a month ago. I endeavored for the first time to make dirt cups for those listening outside of the United States if you mix Jell o cool whip, which is like a way of using whipped cream And this is pudding Jell o chocolate pudding Jell o with cool whip There's probably some other ingredients in there, which I'll get to bunch of Crushed up Oreos all together.
It resembles dirt. Tastes fabulous. And then you can put in, um, gummies like Gummy worms into the mix. And then you have a dirt cup with worms and the children, the three year olds love it. Fantastic. Okay. So this is what I was endeavoring to make. All right. Fourth of July, we're making these things, right?
So I thought I had all the ingredients and it would be ready to make it during nap time. We're going to be, we're going to be ready for the event. Fantastic. I did not have milk. I only had soy milk and almond milk. And I was like, shoot, because sometimes in baking, it's a one to one swap. And sometimes it actually matters and your amounts can really change it.
So first thing I did, I was like, well, let's go to the internet. And the internet said like, yep, you can sub in your almond milk or soy milk, but use less. liquid, but not fantastic information on like how much less. Um, so as it happened, I checked out the side of the Jell O, the Jell O pudding box. And it said, note for directions using non dairy milk, go to www.
jello. com. And I was like, sweet, that's awesome. I should have known better. Um, I go to jello. com. And of course, like there's nothing on the homepage about using non dairy milk. Like why would Kraft ever put anything on the homepage about this? Related question, why would they put on the box to go to jello.
com? That's a, that's a sort of, we'll get to that in a minute. Okay, so I'm at jello. com, limited navigation, there's nothing on the homepage, the recipe section was pretty much useless, at least for what I was trying to do. I finally find the product page for this jello pudding product. Nothing. There is not even a mention of non dairy milk, right?
So I'm like, okay, sweet. That's a terrible experience. But maybe. You know, I'll Google jello. com with like non dairy milk, right? Okay, found it. Kraft Heinz has directions for non dairy milk. It's not on jello. com, it's on the Kraft Heinz website, which is another situation in and of itself. So here I am, I think I find it.
Now all of a sudden there's a pop up. AI. Oli, that's their clever name for their ai for Kraft Heinz to play on aioli ai. Get it? Okay. They have an AI chatbot and I was like, oh. So I like, now I'm on a tangent because I've been interested in this topic. So I go look and I take a, I take a look at their about, it's powered by G P T 3.5.
And so I was like, all right, well, chatbot, like chat GPT kind of knows answers to the questions. I will ask chat GPT. So I said, I want to know how to make jello instant pudding with non berry milk. I get step by step instructions for how to make jello. With non dairy milk, except that it uses the dairy milk amounts.
So it's not even the correct information using the chatbot that is on the Kraft Heinz website. So I go back to the Kraft Heinz website, I find out, I get the exact amount, I make my dirt pudding. So in the end, we got there. But here's the thing. Kraft Heinz has spent, I suspect, a fair amount of money. On this project, project to stick an AI chatbot on their website, they've come up with a clever name.
They had clever brown branding. They had a very curious set of instructions on how to use the AI chatbot. Like, they've spent a lot of time and effort on this. But me as a customer and as the future customer of Kraft Heinz, all I wanted to know, or all I wanted was the information that they claimed on the box was on their website.
And so I think this to me is sort of a classic case of, you know, we try to we try to do cool things on their website. And sometimes that gets in the way of what our customers or what our users and visitors are actually trying to do. And I think there's a tension there. But also, I want to explore the space where AI chatbots can be useful.
So that's kind of what I wanted to open up to you guys is where the cases and like, what are the circumstances in which a chatbots can really improve the cost user and customer experience on a website and where are the spots where it's like, oh, that's like, that's detraction. That's, that's not helping.
That's just something that looked cool to executives
Alex Pokorny: as a wide range there. I think one of the interesting parts about that, especially which is from the packaging standpoint, I'm imagining, let's say I'm consulting with Kraft Heinz right now and trying to fix They got a myriad of problems that you've outlined, but one of them is a content explosion, which I think is something we're all running into is it's really, really easy to create content, but there's also packaging out there.
There's old vanity URLs, there's expectations that has been set from. Who knows what event flyer, newsletter, coupon code, I don't even know that's out there somewhere. And we need to somehow figure out where all this stuff is, pull it all together and have some understanding of how on earth is the user experience going to still exist when we have this much content that's out there.
And I kind of wonder if one, It's a chat bot internally to try to sift through all this content to say, Hey, find me all the references to non dairy. Okay, let's get a non dairy section that actually is useful to people. And obviously, if they're using non dairy product with this, we should also outline saying, Hey, by the way, we have a whole line that's related to this, or you might be interested in this, you know, other kind of stuff.
I'm trying to pull that stuff together and then trying to figure out, okay, from all of our stuff that's out there, you know, what's all the, the random. Vanity URLs and links and all the rest that might align to this sort of copy that has this kind of copy around it or what kind of copy is near our vanity links and vanity URLs based upon all the Google image packaging photos, all the other kind of internal photos that we have pulled from all that, try to figure out what on earth all these vanity URLs were supposed to be used for, because we can tell from analytics that they came in, but we have no idea what the expectation was.
I mean, there's always these like pieces all over there that I just keep thinking of is It's content, and it's this, how do you organize when you have that much content? Um, the second piece, which I think is really where they're not useful, is if you're again part of the Google Labs, you've been starting to see some of the search generated experience, you go to certain sites and it says, here's a summary of the page.
Um, the X button, by the way, does that work? If you scroll and it finally goes away, which Google, um, but what it'll do is try to give you a very quick summary of this very, very, very long article that might have, you know, 20 different points that you're trying to be interested in and learn about, which I searched from something I landed on the site.
What I was interested in is probably is one of those 20 things that they mentioned on the site. And Google has given me a synopsis about the random company that happened to create the page. Okay, again, this is just extra verbose content, not useful. This is not towards my purpose, not towards my intention.
This was not towards my original journey that I was trying to get to. It's not giving me to my answer faster. So that those two pieces together, I think create the inherent problem chatbots, which is. They are very simplistic and they don't have a good enough understanding of a customer journey experience education level, the kind of content that we do have and don't have the kind of products and expectations that's that basically our products create not only what they do and what they serve, but also, you know, what they create because of what their claim to do or where they're been used.
It's not good enough. And that's the problem is you have like the frustration with customer service. This is that. This is that just in text form, it's the first call where you're wondering, my gosh, are we ever going to get to the answer that I'm asking for? And chatbots seem to be just
Dave Dougherty: the same thing.
Well, and it's interesting because the change in strategy, once you go to AI, right, requires that you have one big massive data set. So like, I haven't necessarily heard yet of a company that has like a multi domain strategy that is also using. AI to cover all of them, right? Most of the ones are, I have the single, single website.
It's got all the multiple languages. I've got all the, you know, whatever else that we're training this particular chat bot on, and that particular model seems at least at this point in time, you know, August of 2023, that seems to be the way that if you want to train these or leverage these tools.
Especially if you're an enterprise level company and you want to only have it on your particular data set and not necessarily, you know, what the rest of the world is saying, um, you need to build that. Um, so that's thing one, because that's going to change the way that your content strategy, your go to market, you know, occurs.
Um, Because that is, you know, if if a is going to be fundamental to your tool stack, you're going to build everything else off of that. And where a I, in my experience, it really has had that benefit, you know, to what you guys have talked about, you know, are the things that are just kind of well known, right?
That you may have forgotten about. Um, so those simple, those simple tasks are, are definitely there. But when you pose the question, I immediately thought of a, um, an article that Robert Rose wrote based on a discussion he had in the, this old marketing podcast where AI's false conclusions. Might be the best indicator for where an inbound marketing strategy or a content marketing strategy could be beneficial for your particular organization.
And the example that he uses is really niche B2B markets companies, you know, like maybe, maybe it's a healthcare company that. You know, only does hearing aids or only does a particular heart thing or, you know, whatever, whatever it is. Um, if AI is always putting out false information and you know that AI is being trained on the available data, then you have an opportunity to put out your perspective and have your perspective be the one that trains the bots on your niche topic.
So then when you circle back to the new. S G E, you know, search experience that Google's doing, or, you know, the new, the new Bing chat experience, search experience, um, your site, your content, your resources will be the ones that will be cited with those generated ones. So that's a really good opportunity, you know, for AI to be additive.
And still be fundamental without, you know, destroying the jobs or, you know, it, it prevents, it provides an opportunity, a traditional marketing opportunity that we would typically go for, um, if you take a little minute to, you know, take a deep breath and say, okay, what is this actually telling me
Ruthi Corcoran: related lens? I think about is like, with this AI being additive piece, it's like, where is it? Where and how is it being additive? And I'm, I'm thinking about Alex, some of the things you said about the call center. Um, and Dave, some of the things you're talking about with the niche B2B markets. This could be true of the B2C as well.
And so there's, there's one instances in which we're saying we're going to use some of these new AI technologies to solve for existing customer pain points that arise out of, out of, let's be honest, a lot of our technical debt. So I think about maybe those multi domain issues where you've got information scattered across, but your customers don't care.
They just want to find the information. And so then potentially there is room for AI to serve. As the better call center, it's going to be really hard to pull that off, though, because if you're already having issues with technical debt, you might not have the infrastructure that would enable such an AI to solve for it.
So that actually might be a challenge that you can't maybe. Maybe you can't use AI, except in very niche scenarios to solve for that, because the inputs need to be in place for that AI sort of, um, call center chat bot to be successful. The other idea is like, okay, well, maybe I is additive in the sense that it's creating a new way of engaging with your customers.
That is, is distinct from helping me with FAQ type things. Um, and that could be another cool thing. Like, here's a new way you're interacting with your brand or you're able to, um, to have a new experience that you, you just couldn't with the existing technology in those cases. So I think yeah. You know, make sure it doesn't supplant the things that your customers are trying to do.
Like, if I'm just trying to find the answer to how the heck do I make Jell O pudding with non dairy milk, that is not the opportunity to introduce, we've got an AI chatbot. Like, so, so finding the right moments for those experiences, I think is also going to be crucial, um, to make sure that we're not detracting from good visitor customer experiences.
Um, but. But it's, you know, it's, it's being in the moment. It's responding to the, to sort of the needs and the desires of our visitors
Alex Pokorny: take it a little bit different. Let's imagine, um, the chatbots more of a guide. Yeah, so we have the world's largest FAQ page out there. Absolutely gigantic. Some users will do some kind of control F find feature to try to get to where they want.
Um, maybe a search engine will just drop them to where they want. Um, but maybe the bot is something that's more useful for guiding us through pages of the content that exist on the site towards the page that we actually want. So instead of trying to create a summarized snippet sort of response, instead it just guides you towards.
Where you should be going, maybe fixing a user experience issue that way.
Dave Dougherty: Although,
I think of the times when you are forced into still using call centers, you know, and you get the automated. You know, press one for this and somehow they've, these companies are always updating their menus.
Alex Pokorny: We've recently updated our options. I don't know what I don't care.
Dave Dougherty: Maybe if you stop updating your options, I could more easily find what I'm looking for now. But so when you get into those, those telephone centers. The good ones will let you press zero at any time to have that escape hatch to talk to a person right where I get really frustrated is when I press zero and there's not an escape hatch and I have the same mentality when I go to a website and I see a chat bot and it automatically comes up.
And, you know, usually I just X out of it because I'd rather, you know, try to find it myself. Um, you know, old habits die hard. But then when I do use the chatbot, I want an escape hatch. Like, design into the bot, connect me to a person. Like, on the top, so like, I can help you, I, the robot can help you guide, you know, here's our generic articles.
Or, just let me email somebody. Or, you know, Apple does a good job of this. When you, when you try to do their help stuff, you can just no put me in a call queue, you know, and, and let me talk to a real person instead of dealing with your robot. Um, because there are times when you're so frustrated, you just want to talk to a person who's a cooler head, right?
Um, So that's an opportunity. I think, you know, provide the automation, but then there's going to be a percentage of people that just want a person and they don't want the frustration of like, well, here's our 20 articles that might be of use to you. It's like, I don't have time for 20 articles. I want the answer.
Right,
Ruthi Corcoran: I think that's a there's a cool related point there to Dave, which is we have. UX best practices for websites know whether or not companies follow them different issue, but we have them right. We sort of know, like, these are sort of good practices. These are things to keep in mind as you're building your web experiences, even as you're building your call center experiences, um.
We sort of know those when it comes to A. I. We are in the experimentation phrase. It's total new territory. We don't know yet what the best practices around for are for A. I. Which makes this super challenging because we have to we have to figure it out. It's and it's going to take a lot of different companies, a lot of different individuals trying a whole bunch of things before we get to a point of like, Oh, yeah, this is generally a good idea.
And that's It's generally a bad idea, um, which, which is a weird spot for enterprise companies to be in in particular, because you have to make investment decisions. And um, where, where do you place your bets, um, to make a good experience, um, in that unknown territory?
Alex Pokorny: A lot of those best practices are just based on what were people's expectation.
What's your expectation? Where do they expect the button to be? Where do they expect to find this? But you're right. If general populace basically doesn't have an expectation set or this particular technology, not really much out there.
Ruthi Corcoran: Oh, that's a segue, Dave taken into AI policies.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. So, um, one of the things that. Hit me when I was first, you know, doing, uh, starting the deep dive into AI, um, like, you know, many of us have, um, yeah, the marketing AI Institute is a great resource. I know I've talked about it before. Um, they have, um, a, uh, I'll put a link in the, in the show notes, but they have a responsible AI manifesto for marketing and business.
Uh, and. This was a post that they put out on their blog, uh, January 28th, 2023. So like we, the early days where it was, you know, here are some guiding principles for how to use AI. Um, and when I first read it. I wasn't quite there yet to really understand, you know, what are the potential uses, what are the potential pitfalls of, you know, impacts to jobs or, you know, how are certain people going to use this versus others?
You know, there's always going to be a percentage of, of. You know, bad apples for lack of a better term. Um, and so I thought this was interesting where they're launching the, they launched this under creative commons. So you can, you know, go through the principles, adjust them as you want. You just have to cite back, you know, that, and I was reminded of it.
Um. because Jasper, another AI tool that's, you know, kind of risen to the top as one of the, the main, you know, AI tools for people to use. Um, and you know, full disclosure, I do pay for Jasper, but they just launched a download, a template for, uh, AI policies within companies. So it's at least a start for.
Organizations to have these discussions of how are we going to use these? What kind of data is. Good for us to use. What's the data? We don't want it to have, right? Like how much proprietary data? Um, are we comfortable, you know, segmenting into this stuff? Um, you know, because, you know, any anything can be hacked eventually, right?
Um, so I think it's just interesting to me to talk about it because all of them go into, you know, here's some guidelines for responsible AI usage. And I We want transparency. We want, um, we want the tools to be used, you know, in addition to the human capital that is in an organization, not necessarily as a replacement, right?
Cause there's a lot of pressure for a lot of leaders to just find efficiencies, you know, um, and, you know, can we do 75% of our copywriting with AI? Maybe, maybe not. I mean, if you're in a heavily regulated industry, I would say, please don't, you know, use it for ideas, but not necessarily the full copy, right?
You, you should still have that human touch point to make sure that things are great. Um, you know, we've focused so much on 10, 15 years, um, that, you know, the creativity part of it. Like what we talked about in the first part was that hurdle to launching anything, right? The, we can write a blog post or we can do six versions of a tweet or, you know, whatever else, you know, boost a Facebook post that creative stuff was that hurdle for a really nice brand experience.
Now with image generation, with AI that can do video, um, with all the text generation, the creation of stuff isn't necessarily the problem. The problem is citations and making sure that the output is actually correct. Or that it's within your brand voice or representative of how you actually want to, you know, present your company, your products into the market.
So it's more of that copy editing and brand guidelines. Now, that is more of the, the work, um, for certain organizations. So, you know, some of the principles, and then I'll, I'll stop talking to get you guys reactions on it. Um, so this is based off of the AI Institute one. And, you know, we believe in responsible design, development, deployment, uh, and operation of AI technologies.
We believe in a human centered approach to AI that empowers and augments professionals. It should, AI technology should be assistive, not autonomous. Um, and then, you know, we believe that humans remain accountable for the decisions, actions, even when assisted by AI, like these types of, these types of things, um, you know, and goes into, you know, use of privacy, strict adherence to data laws, you know, all of these things, but then at the very bottom, one of the things that I like.
Um, and I think more organizations might consider, you know, doing this just as a transparency or how you want your brand to be perceived. Um, there's a section called how we use AI and it's just that, hey, you know what? We're consistently experimenting with, with AI technologies. You know, that's just a good business practice.
Always vet your tool stack. Um, and then they list out in bullets. We have a collection of SAS products that use speech to text, content summarization, outlines, image, copywriting, ideation, you know, but none of the full output, right? Um, how does this line of thinking hit you guys? Do you think more companies should do, um, sort of, uh, um, a data privacy thing in the footer?
Uh, where they just say, Hey, here's our AI guidelines. You know, you see this in, in some media companies, uh, that have already done this with, you know, here's how we're using AI for our articles, for our editorial, just for like journalistic standards, um, you know, but that journalistic standard is in the pressure on most businesses, right?
They don't have that, that ethical industry guideline. So I don't know, I'm done talking. What do you guys think?
Ruthi Corcoran: I. I think that this ties in so nicely with Alex's last comment, which is why I had said like perfect segue because Alex was bringing up the point about we don't have yet the expectations, or people don't yet have the full expectations.
We have some, and they're evolving, um, and, and to Dave, your question about like How do we see these? How do we see these playing out? And, and how should enterprise or small businesses start to think about this? I think it pairs perfectly, which is as, as customers, as visitors, as people, as our expectations about AI evolve and how we're going to use them, um, that's going to inform how we think about these.
Um, these different policies, I really like to those sort of we believe statements because it kept it open. Like this is what we believe. We're not entirely sure how the cookie is going to crumble on, on this AI topic, but here's what we believe. And we're going to stand by it. And I think that's a really good way of jumping off into this, uh, sort of this new world of AI.
Using A. I. As part of the web creation experience. So that's kind of where my mind's at at the moment is. That's a good way of of getting the conversation started
Alex Pokorny: a similar thought. I mean, since early stage about this from like an executive leadership standpoint of thinking about A. I. This is a great jumping off point to talk about where are we going to use A.
I. Where do we see basically the benefit of this? There's a line in it, which I think is Helpful for any large organization to post, which is we believe in the importance of upskilling and reskilling professionals and using AI to build more fulfilling careers and lives. Don't run away. Don't be so scared.
We're trying to use this in a way that's going to be helpful. Um, I mean, just statements like that, just just try to think through and talk about of. Are we going to handle this and the open recognition of when you use AI, that's a really interesting thing. So journalistic standards aside, there is everything about like programmatic SEO and how massive amount of content you can create basically using AI tools.
And what point do you say that you're in using this tool? And there's copyright concerns of, you know, if you do or don't, there's also just do people trust and have one of their kind of beliefs around the validity or usefulness of this content is built with this, am I somehow signaling to Google that I'm not following their EAT kind of policy or well, best practices document that they have?
That's, that's a really tough line. I mean, that's a really tough point to start playing into saying, you know, what, yeah. What do we define as AI, and when do we disclose it? And then, I mean, the, the we believe statement is very helpful also from a legal standpoint, because some of the problems with AI, I mean, that are well known is, it has misinformation.
It isn't always right. And where it's getting its information is sometimes really opaque. Um, those things are legally tricky and having some kind of disclaimer statement is helpful. So this is a great stepping stone to that, but we still have the same kind of issues that are going on. So it's a useful document.
I think of other industries as well. Just to tangent one time is higher ed. Um. It's really difficult from a higher ed standpoint of how does a college handle AI tools. You can assume that a student who is not at their, uh, in the classroom is probably using at least a calculator at home, and of course Google, and then also AI tools.
You kind of have to create that given assumption, this exists, therefore I have to use this stuff. So you would have to come up with a document like this. You talk to your students, but also your professors and staff of this is our expectations. This is where we put our line. Um, we're going to change our curriculum to be more experience question based to basically make AI not so useful.
Um, we're going to teach our students and have them purposely use AI in time and try to take it apart and try to say, okay, what were the flaws so that we can be more educated in its use of it? When there's. Your industry, but you're, you're going to have to wrestle with this question. I think this is a great step stepping stone for those conversations.
Ruthi Corcoran: I think running with that to your, your little tangent, but an important 1, um, we're in a transition. Spot right now, so we don't we know what the expectations have been. We don't know what they're going to be in the future. So we're, we're trying to evolve. Um, and these policy statements are really good, um, starting point.
And they're, they're going to continue to evolve. But I think about your higher education, um, points, Alex and 1 of the things that I'm starting to see are, um, different professors posting curricula and here's how I'm creating a course around, uh, large language models and working with them and incorporating them in, which is.
Yeah. Which is a very different scenario. It's you are incorporating it into your course. So the, the usefulness of a policy that, you know, students sign, like, I remember that you used to have to sign a no cheating policy. Right? Is there like a, an AI policy that students have to sign? That that shifts the dynamic yet again.
And so right now we're sort of in this curious spot where we know what the old world is. We're sort of transitioning to the new one, but we also don't know what's what's going to be next. And it could be that, what, what is next looks very different from the world today, such that an AI policy statement while useful, um, has, takes on a very different character.
Um,
Dave Dougherty: So would you guys adopt a policy for your own? Sites, or would you need more time to think about what you would want to include in it? If you did represent it,
Ruthi Corcoran: I think so, with the perspective of keeping it, keeping it to the core of, you know, for a given organization or a different, um, given, um. You know, even if it's just an individual site, like, here's what we stand for. And as an extension of that, this is how AI gets played into it. I think that is 1 that seems strikes me as a good way during this transition piece of, of working within sort of the current expectations around
Alex Pokorny: AI internally. Absolutely. Externally, it becomes a question, um, depends on the industry. What exact verbiage you want to pull in, but we'll leave it with Rosie on this one. I think it's a great step forward. And if you had a, who we are about us kind of section, it's going to be a great thing to link, have a link to.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. I think it becomes a point of differentiation for organizations that, you know, um, are willing to put themselves out there. A little bit, you know, again, there are industry considerations and, and all of that, but you know, when you look at ways to differentiate your brand, to be able to say that, you know, Hey, we recognize that this is a business opportunity.
We recognize that this is an operations, you know, opportunity, um, but we want to do things in a correct way, you know, it's. Going to the same things where, okay, you want to attract the best talent, you want to show that you're, you know, an ethical organization, not only to attract talent, but also make it easier to, you know, get the capital you need to continue on as, as an organization, like these are, these are little things that, um, build up to a larger culture of the organization, right?
Um, Thank you. So I'll be interested to see like, you know, who adopts things and, and which companies start, you know, leveraging this, I think like most new technologies we'll see it in, in the smaller organizations first, um, and just as it's easier to plant a flag for, you know, creators or, or small businesses rather than, uh, the big enterprises.
Cause I could easily see somebody in a meeting, you know, in the larger organizations be like. Why would we put this out? Because then our competitors will know exactly how we're using, you know, a I was like, if, in my mind, I'm immediately thinking, well, if we're using it that way, they are too
Alex Pokorny: already grown.
Right? Yeah. Yeah, I was just thinking like, okay, and we're kind of also say that we're using Salesforce. I thought anybody's going to know it. Our competitors are probably also using it. Cause it's really popular.
What's so interesting?
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. If you're a company of a certain size, there's like a 90% chance you're using Salesforce. Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: I'll be surprised by this. Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: And you know, being the SEOs, how many times have you gone into the source code and then you're immediately going, Oh, that's your tool stack. That's interesting.
Alex Pokorny: I mean, just like plug it built with and all the rest too.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. And just the amount of people that don't even recognize that that information is already actually out there. If you're just, you know, if you know where to look, um, or all the different subdomains that you can, you can find for their mail provider or, um, Yeah.
Yeah. So anyway, this was a fun conversation. Uh, thank you for listening. Please like, subscribe, share, leave a rating and review for the podcast. It really helps, um, people find us and let us know which episodes you enjoy. Um, and any comments or feedback, we will, we will welcome that as we continue to think on these.
These topics and move forward into the future of them. So appreciate it. Thank you for your time. And we will see you in the next episode of enterprising.
