Ep 29 - Embracing AI in the Workplace: Challenges and Opportunities

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Ep 29 - Embracing AI in the Workplace: Challenges and Opportunities Podcast and Video Transcript

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Dave Dougherty: Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of Enterprising Minds. We have the whole crew here today and Ruthi has the topic. So jump on it. All

Ruthi Corcoran: right. This topic was actually inspired by some text threads that I had been reading from you guys.

Exploring AI's Impact on Marketing Jobs

Ruthi Corcoran: And the big question is, is AI coming for our jobs?

And this is coming from you guys have read or seen. I'll let you extrapolate. Some articles or some speeches from different folks about hey, how you know Ai is essentially going to be replacing most marketing functions within the next couple years or a lot of what we do today is just It's just going to be almost non existent and my initial thought was pretty skeptical but i'll hold on maybe talking through some of my my additional thoughts until you guys maybe can give a better Intro into what you are seeing or or what some of the conversations Were out there on the internet about ai coming for our jobs,

Alex Pokorny: right?

Yeah, I think the quick with the quote And then maybe we can run into it and then we could kind of take it more generically as well That work?

Dave Dougherty: A lot.

Alex Pokorny: Go ahead. You got something.

Dave Dougherty: Well, so I was just going to say you know, like a lot of marketers, if you're paying attention recently there was the Sam Altman quote from a podcast where he said, you know, 95 percent of what marketers and consultancies and whatever else are doing today can be handled by AGI for free and almost instantaneously.

So on the surface. Like everything on the internet, people were immediately flipping out without paying attention to priority words in that sentence. You know, but we're far enough away from that statement that I think it makes sense to have the conversation now because we've got some distance.

We've had some time to think about it. And yeah, that's the context behind the text chain. But Alex, do you have the quote up? I know you were, yeah, you're searching. Yeah, you're right.

Alex Pokorny: Because there's a quote from a book called Our AI Journey by Adam Broadman, so they interviewed, Sam Altman, you know, owner, basically the head of OpenAI slash ChatGPT.

They asked him what AGI meant for consumer brand marketing and he replied, Oh, for that, it will mean that 95 percent of what marketers use agencies, strategies, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly, and at almost no cost to be handled by the AI. And the AI will likely be able to test the creative against real or synthetic.

Customer focus groups for predicting results and optimizing again all free, instant, and nearly perfect images, videos, and campaign ideas, no problem.

Dave Dougherty: So what's your initial takeout since you're a more measured human being?

Alex Pokorny: Well, I kind of went back and forth. I mean, I There was always that instantaneous, you know, punch-in-the-face reaction. And then after that, you kind of start to like take apart the details of it and start to kind of work through it.

The Evolution of Marketing in the AI Era

Alex Pokorny: Right off the, the, the bat, it looks extremely like an attack on marketing. Right. But I don't know if that's actually the case. I think it's more of a transition point of marketing. It was something I had brought up with my teams in the past about basically talking about change, saying how we did marketing a hundred years ago.

Okay. I mean, it's way different than the way we're doing marketing today. I mean, even 20 or 30 years ago is different the way we do marketing today. I mean, digital marketing is a thing, which it wasn't. Billboards were the thing, which they aren't. I mean, like outdoors and a tactic. Absolutely. But you can have digital billboards, not hand-painted ones.

We don't have typewriters anymore. We're not shooting around memos. We're shooting emails. I mean, like everything changes. If you take a broad enough perspective, you're going to have huge changes. Over time and very small, minute changes, you know, from year to year. So this is a process that is expected, right?

So when we're talking about the timeline of AGI coming out, the artificial general intelligence that can handle lots of different things, not just text generation or image or video generation. That's, that's a different timeline really than today and even next year. So if we move out far enough to hit AGI, I would expect changes to happen at that point.

So that's a big piece of the quote. I think you went in on there real quick of there's some qualifiers in the statements and they're definitely our first ones is a future foreign environment that AGI exists. How will things operate in this future? Not chat GPT today, you know, 4. 5, that's soon going to come out.

So that, that's the first piece. I'll let you guys hit that one. And then I've got a deeper piece on the 95 percent part.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, I think for me, it was that thing. Okay. We are specifically talking about the AGI, the artificial general intelligence, which we don't have today. Right. And we might not even hit right.

Because, or if we do, it'll take a long time. Yeah, there's a lot of debates. If you talk about, you know, like the introduction of a new technology or, you know, new product curves, or, you know, pick your favorite bell curve, you know, it takes not a lot of work to get to like 80%, but to get from like 80 to 90 is a ton more resources, a ton more work.

And I think we've already moved beyond that. Aha. Oh my God moment, right? That was November of 2022, at least for the early adopters of the, the world has changed. There's now a pre-post, you know, GPT kind of thing. But with the introduction of AI into things that more quote unquote normal. Every day people will be using, right?

Like Copilot is now in the new Windows books, whatever they're called. I was going to say Chromebooks, but that's the wrong company, but you know what I'm talking about? The surface tablets. There you go. So it's automatically in, in those computers. Gemini Google's offering is now part of the Google app.

They also have the Gemini help me write. In the Chrome browser. So for everyday people, you know, you talk about sucking up data, like that's going to be brilliant for them. Since they have the majority of the internet browser market, as well as the majority of the search market. So I think. Where we are right now.

Yeah, we don't have to worry so much. It will be, you know, like I said in the early days, I think this will boost what you're good at and provide you a better way of doing that. But it will, it will change the roles. I think the specialization of marketing might be a target. For companies, if you have, you know, tools that will help you assist all of those things, that's kind of where I'm sitting at now is what does that look like for the specialization of marketing, right?

You might not have an SEO and a social person and an ads person and a whatever you might just have. Go, you know, go back to the more traditional roles of brand and brand communications or product marketing or those types of things, Ruthi.

Ruthi Corcoran: Yeah, related to that point. So I was reminded of a conversation with Tyler podcast with economists who have mentioned before he had a discussion with the historian Roy Foster.

And one of the quotes from that conversation stuck out to me. In the context of this conversation, which is the best history is written when we realized that people acted in expectation of the future that was never going to happen. And the reason that comes to mind is because as I technology shift and advance and adapt, we will adapt with them.

And so it may be the case that much of the activity that marketers do today and the types of activities can and will be. Done With agi technologies much more quickly and much more rapidly But we're not we're not Sitting in a vacuum and we don't we're not at a constant we adapt and we evolve with it And so I think to your point dave The focus of marketing will shift.

Maybe it goes back to the basics. Maybe it alters into something we've never seen before because consumers and marketers alike are using a very different set of technologies that allows us to interact and dialogue in completely new ways. I've got a few more thoughts on this. I want to know about the 95 percent piece before I dive into some of my other initial reactions.

But I think that's, that's one of the, the first things I think of when I hear statements like this of we don't sit idle, we change and with this new technology. And that's kind of cool.

Dave Dougherty: There's one thing to point out with these sort of statements for me is really if you identify yourself by what you do, you may be in more trouble, right?

Like if you have the thought of I'm only a PR person, don't ever make me do that. You're going to have a harder time because you're going to be less adaptable. Right. I think we talked about this with the sort of communication style leadership podcast, right? Of the, you have to change your communication style based on who your audience is.

Are they millennials? Are they Costa Rican? Are they Ecuadorian? Are they like, what? You know all of that changes the context in which you do your, your work and the work you. You know, put out so adaptability will be the important piece. I think for sure, you know, we will change with it, but are you doing it fast enough?

Any final thoughts, Alex, before Ruthi jumps in with her? Oh, I'll hit that 90 percent piece.

Go for it.

AI's Role in Different Business Sizes and Marketing Specializations

Alex Pokorny: Kind of ties together a few different points that you brought up actually already. But talking about kind of like the changes that happens, but there's also kind of a split of changes that will happen to different groups as well.

Just thinking like small business, medium business, large international corporations, they're going to be affected by AI in general differently. Mm hmm. Their small business roofing contractor doesn't have a whole lot of time for marketing in general. So they will be probably most affected by the tools that are out, the systems that are out that end up affecting them.

So for instance, there's a lot of sites out there that if you need home repair work, you put in, Hey, I'm in zip, this zip code, and this is my job. And it goes out to like five contractors who have all signed up to receive Those inquiries from that service, you submit your info to the service. The service then is charging these contractors for these leads.

Like that's the system. Does the contractor really know exactly how this website is promoting itself doing anything? No, no, no, no. It doesn't matter. They're getting leads and whether or not they're of value or not is the question, right? So that's a very different view of marketing versus a corporation, which might have an entire marketing department, a CMO on down large scale, specialized groups and individuals who spend 15 years in a special area, a specialized area versus much more in the general marketing area, which kind of medium-sized business, you'd probably much be more than general, where it's a couple of different hats and does a lot of different things to some degree.

Just not so specialized in any particular one. Right. So it's as these tools change. You have some very different effects on marketing overall, because those are very different environments to be working in the 95 percent piece actually kind of hit me because I, I was trying to play around with. I was like, okay, what, what, what would it take to actually hit that?

And I think what it would take. And I think we talked about this prior to the text conversation, but it was if you're using heavily HubSpot, Salesforce, some kind of system like that for your leads, for your lead capture, for your website creation, for your phone numbers. I mean, who knows that that all-encompassing system could definitely have an AI or AGI component to it.

Because you would be paying your flat fee to HubSpot for your small business website and along with your flat fee, you signed up for the search marketing, advertising checkbox, and payment package. And how is HubSpot managing hundreds of thousands of campaigns? Well, they're using AI to do it. I mean, they're generating the copy from it.

They're going to run the ads with it. They're going to optimize the ad campaigns with it. So, yes, you are now having search marketing being replaced with AGI. In that instance, and if that's the way that marketing goes for a lot of companies that they're basically outsourcing to these very large kinds of umbrella corporation style companies that Salesforce could easily become, I mean, it is to some degree something with HubSpot for smaller businesses, Salesforce for larger.

I mean, if they buy SEMrush, I mean, a couple of other companies out there, you can pretty quickly put together the tools that it would take to even have the data, have the teams, have the internal expertise, technical know-how to basically be doing a lot of these different elements to it. And just, it's just another package and part of your HubSpot subscription, your monthly fee.

And then with that, sure. 95%. Yeah, we can hit that. Small businesses would sign up for that all day long because they don't have the people, time or resources to dedicate to marketing. Corporations will want that. You know, much more specialized services, but also we have large agencies, like, you know, just working with a subsidiary of Dentsu and search marketing related tasks around them, huge, huge agency.

And absolutely, they could be using AI and lots of different manners. So. Sure. It could be there. Is that my client contact? No, that's a human being who he and I talk frequently, like that. So 95 percent sure, but 100 percent not quite still a human element there at some point.

Ruthi Corcoran: I think you bring up a really good element of this topic in this conversation, which is that the rate of change is very different for small businesses versus enterprises versus startups.

Like we've got a very wide range of that rate of change. And one of the things I think about, especially at the enterprise level is there is a lot of drag on that change because of the existing infrastructure and technologies that are in place. I think all three of us have experienced the How hard it is to replace existing technology and existing infrastructure because of all the people in the process and the various hoops and such you have to, you have to jump through and that's one of the things that really comes to mind as I start thinking about how quickly we can adapt to the new and incorporate a lot of the differing AI technologies that are coming online.

I know Mark Andreessen thinks about, like, the glue, which, when I've heard him talk about it, it's much more about, you know, the regulations, the licensing boards, et cetera. I think there's very much this glue here in enterprises, enterprise at the very least, of we've got ways of doing things, we have technology we already use, and until there's interfaces between those technologies and AI, it's going to be very hard to bring those into the fold.

Of the existing tech stacks that we work within the last thing that I just wanted to sort of share on that on that topic. I've been reading this book. I don't know if I've mentioned it yet, but the economic consequences of us mobilization. For the second world war light reading before bed. That's what it does.

What's really cool about it is he talks about us capacity and potential capacity prior to World War Two. In particular, like in the early 1900s. There's about a 10-year period where the entire manufacturing base went through this huge shift of electrification. They switched to electricity from the prior, right?

It took about 10 years to make that shift from, you know, when the technology started to be available to when the manufacturing base was fully utilizing it, right? And he called up Ford in particular, went through this. It was something like a six to nine months. They just stopped producing anything so that they could bring their.

Bring all of their production facilities online with this new electricity-based technology for how they manufacture cars to me. Maybe it's not 10 years, but there's something there, which is there's this stickiness and how fast we can evolve and how fast we can shift gears in sort of the regular way of working.

For us to really realize the potential of all of the AI technology shifts so that's some of the stuff that's been sort of in the back of my mind over the last couple weeks since this first came up

Dave Dougherty: That's an interesting point because i've always thought like it's been possible It's been a pain in the butt to do it, but it's been possible for years to have Your, you know, Google ads tied to your supply levels,

but you

Dave Dougherty: haven't necessarily seen that on the B2B side for that very reason.

Right. You have that infrastructure, you have to like redo everything, but like, this is where, for me in my thinking about these types of things, if you look at the way marketing is split today, you either have like the front end of sales and sales development, right. Or the digital marketers are sort of like.

In the closet of the it guys, right? We'll keep them over there. They do a thing, but really it's it that makes all the technology decisions. And marketers, you just get to deal with whatever we decide to give you. Which is a horrible way of doing it, but. You know, that's what some people have decided to do.

I think for future-proofing yourself, you should go on either side of that, either the hyper-technical I can bring together these backend functions to the front end, go to market piece, right. And really have that end-to-end insight, or you have that sales development. More out front, more customer-focused, kind of traditional marketer, right?

And, and sales development piece, both of them, however, will need more technical abilities and knowledge of the technologies that exist, how they work, how they interoperate between each other to know what's possible to make the proper recommendation for whatever, you know, size organization you're representing or working for.

Ruthi Corcoran: Dave, I think that ties in nicely to some of the things that Alice was talking about, too, with, you know your choice of technology might bring AI along for the ride so that you don't actually have to do it. And, and the small business may not actually need to know the technologies involved because they can have some sort of software as a service that brings it along for them and sort of does the job.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. And I think we're, we're seeing that a little bit. I think AI will, I'm not, you know, this is not an original thought, but I think, you know, AI is going to go probably the way a cloud marketing or the cloud IT services kind of thing, right? Like, so you're going to, it will ultimately go to the big The big organizations, but like, if you look at the, how the big companies are investing in the AI startups, you have your Microsoft lane, you have your Google cloud lane and you have your Amazon, you know, web services lane.

So, okay, great. If I do my Amazon web services package, then I'll get an anthropic license and I'll get Amazon's Titan and I'll get, you know, those types of things. Or I'll get the open AI and Microsoft Copilot with Azure and lovely. Right. So you just go great. These are my things. I'm just going to do that because it, it, it's vetted legally and, and it security wise and, and all those things.

But yeah, I was, it's interesting. You bring up the size piece. Cause I was thinking The other day when, while I was cooking about some of my older clients when I was on the agency side, and some of my favorite ones were those small, like manufacturing companies that you would never know about them unless.

You know, you were introduced to them and they made a living for the families for however many generations they've been around, but never going to be a household name. And those types of companies, I mean, they were hard enough to sell on, on marketing services, let alone, you know, artificial intelligence.

So that's where really that idea of, okay, if you could tie. The manufacturing process is that they're used to, you know, looking at and thinking about and trying to optimize to their ability to, you know, sell and develop new business, then that will be the that will be the main thing there.

Ruthi Corcoran: You bring up something important as well, Dave, like.

You mentioned the security, the security and the legal side, and I do. We might have highlighted it before, but I think it's an important point to reiterate. That is a huge source of drag, especially at the enterprise level for the ability of using a technology. You've got to be vetted. It's all new. People are uncomfortable with the new stuff, so you don't want to move fast.

And so that's a huge sort of that's a huge way that it. Small business or startup can sort of open a wedge in that enterprise-dominated market.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. And it's, I have a love-hate thing with the the CRM piece. Cause I personally, I love marketing automation. I, I like having that, that end-to-end view, but it is so dependent on everybody doing it properly.

You know, so then that's where it's the, okay, let's pour gasoline on an uncontrolled fire. No thanks. No, let's not because the fireworks are sitting next to it too. Let's just need the AGI to

Alex Pokorny: fix all the name convention issues and all the data mismatches and data pieces.

Dave Dougherty: And God forbid, you know, five John Johnsons.

Alex Pokorny: yeah, there's a lot of pain there.

The Future of AI in Marketing and Beyond

Alex Pokorny: Let me, let me switch this real quick, and maybe we can just offer a few quick comments on AI in our current life, current career, next six months, next year. Do you see it as a threat? Do you see it as a benefit?

Dave Dougherty: It's for me. I find it really interesting that a lot of people are, you know, thrown around that line of, you AI than somebody who is will replace you, right? It's not necessarily going to be the AI. It's the AI-enabled human beings that will, and they're not wrong. The thing that I worry about the most is somebody who's trying to be smarter than they are in a leadership position, making strategic decisions.

Making a dumb decision and saying like, you know what, we can just get a tool. We can have AI and you know what, let's just get rid of 20 people because we don't need, you know, we don't need that many full-time employees. Now we have these tools and, you know, we go through these. Problems anytime there's a new tool, a new shiny thing that's there, right?

You have the accordion of, okay, we're going to expand the company. Nope. We're going to shrink it. Now we're going to span again. We're going to go shrink it. So as part of the business cycle, but at the same time I feel like AI is allowing for a lot of really smart people to make really dumb decisions, thinking they're well informed, but it is so nuanced as to what these things are capable of and how.

human nature allows you to use them properly, right? That I really hope that people will take the time to, you know, have an understanding of what it's really like what it's really capable of before they make huge sweeping decisions.

Yeah,

Ruthi Corcoran: next six months, let's even to a year. I mean, I'm an optimist. I see benefits. Just in general, are there, are there going to be some downsides? Of course. Do we know what they all are? No, but in in sort of my sphere of work in the industry and realm that I'm in like there is just a ton of upside To having added intelligence and added efficiency into the things that we do, and perhaps we can spend less time and resources on some of the tedious, trivial stuff, you know, and we can really unlock people's ability to do more and greater things.

I think that from where I'm sitting at the moment, it seems like. AI has a huge opportunity to sort of lift all those. I mean, I think that. Yeah, he added benefit. Is what I'm seeing in the short term.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, I don't disagree. I think there is a lot of positives. I am pro-AI. With a full understanding of how it could be misused and how it is being misused and misunderstood, but like for the small day-to-day things, the biggest pain point for me has always been project management tickets and Kanban things.

Like there's a t-shirt from Formula One racing from a particular driver who is mad at his engineer who says, I know what I'm doing. Just leave me alone.

And there are days where I, I feel that statement, whereas I'm just, I know what I need to do. Just let me do it and let me get it done. And then I'll come back and tell you what, you know, what's been done. I know that doesn't necessarily work when you're trying to coordinate huge big things, right?

But, you know. Everybody's human. You have those days. I find my, the most immediate thing is to get a general project description for what it is. I want, you know, the task done. That is a beautiful use of AI. Cause then you're not typing it out forever. You have a quick rough draft, change it a little bit, submit it.

And then you inevitably have the kickoff meeting anyway. So that's where you tell them what you really want. With the guidelines of, you know, what the ticket says. So that's a big positive change for me, at least not having to write project management tickets,

Ruthi Corcoran: Alex would be thinking,

Alex Pokorny: Oh, that kind of gets backed.

I keep calling like I was beginning with 2022. I was calling it a blank-page killer. And that's kind of where we're still at is that the rough draft that blank Word doc, that blank email. It gives you something to react to, but it's not the completed product and it's actually where I'm stuck with it, to be honest, is in the next 6 months to a year.

Some of the people who are kind of kind of the thought leaders of AI kind of areas talked a lot about, like, the video creation and how this might be the year of video finally getting a really big boost. We had diffusion kind of proper prior to that, but even like maintaining the same image and the same character and three different prompts was difficult.

Like now we're getting more consistency and video creation, which has been really cool to see, but it still isn't contextual enough. And that's the same problem that I have, honestly. through most of it is I could ask chat GPT for, you know, give me a policy on whatever. And it'll give me this very long-winded policy that 50 to 75 percent of it doesn't apply.

25 percent of it does the rest of it. I can kind of react to it and say yes or no to it. And maybe modify it a little bit, but honestly, it's a pretty small chunk that's actually going to end up in the final policy. In the end. So yeah, it kills the blank page if I have absolutely no idea, but typically with a work task, I, you know, have some idea already.

So it's not that, not that helpful yet. Same thing like video creation, fantastic, but I cannot get it to make a YouTube ad for me because it doesn't have my product in the ad and it doesn't have my product being described in the way that it needs to be, you know, branded. Yeah. Et cetera as well. So it's like, yeah, I can create a really cool video.

That's a screenshot or a flyover shot of a busy market in Morocco. That's, that's cool. That's really cool to see. And in fact, that's only, I created in the seconds that it took is fantastic. That's not an ad and that's not copy. And that's not content that I can actually publish. So essentially B

Dave Dougherty: roll

Alex Pokorny: killer.

Yeah, that's what actually I was thinking about it because I was thinking like, man, maybe I can get it to use a general product as long as it's. Common enough products and somebody having like an in-between shot of them on there, you know, using it, maybe holding it very, very quickly, like a few seconds.

So you can't quite tell that the brand name isn't on it because the logo won't be right because the design of it will be slightly off,

you know,

Alex Pokorny: like little things like that, which do matter. Everybody will have 11 fingers. Exactly. I know. It's like, hold this product next to your, no, no, no, no, too many fingers.

Ruthi Corcoran: I mean, the value of 360 videos just went up, right? Like now having 360 videos for your products and being able to utilize those. I'm curious to see how that plays out. Cause I think to your point, But can we use it today? No. Could I see it being usable in the next six months, especially if you have a proprietary version or a local version, that's where things start to look cool.

Alex Pokorny: I still think that that's the big ticket basically. When it can start accessing all of my data and all of my co-workers’ data, and then we can start asking it questions. I mean, we're, we're already getting there. And I think OpenAI might be about a year ago, was talking about a business version with those exact same qualities.

Basically, it'll be a standalone, won't be part of the training sets, not a general chat GPT training set. And so it'll be just your data. It'll look through everything. And then you can ask, Hey, You know, tie together my, you know, organic keyword from Google search console downloads all the way down to my sales force and what kind of pages are converting well and organic standpoint or something.

I don't know questions,

Dave Dougherty: but there are a number of things on the consumer side, right? There are a number of companies that have created the, you know, sort of AI therapists or AI scheduler, whatever. But the big question is, if the capability is out there, are you comfortable with giving up that much of your data privacy in order to enable the functionality that you're looking for?

Right. This wins, man.

Ruthi Corcoran: Okay. That's a, that is a personal question, which I think we all need to answer for ourselves.

Alex Pokorny: Yes.

Ruthi Corcoran: I have a really exciting business use case, though, that doesn't get us into murky territory like that, which I'm a little nervous about myself. Do you have

Dave Dougherty: a hard time with feelings, Ruthi?

I

Ruthi Corcoran: do. I do. Unless it's excitement. I'll keep it to myself.

Dave Dougherty: That explains the economics book at night.

Ruthi Corcoran: Okay, I'm going to share this here.

Onboarding and Business Use Cases for AI

Ruthi Corcoran: I know I could take this idea and run with it, but I really want somebody to just create this thing so that I can use it selfishly. Which is,

onboarding. Wouldn't it be amazing if you could take your team notes, team discussions, you know, all the little things that we keep track of in JIRA, all that jazz. That in is that our data. So that as you have new people coming on board, be they on your team or even better, like other teams, managers, they come in with a million questions and you know, it sucks.

You can't send them a SharePoint because no one wants to sit and read through a SharePoint. They want their question answered. And so you can instead send them, you know, onboarding GPT to say, here, ask all your questions. Maybe there's a sourcing capability. I don't know exactly what that looks like. How amazing would that be?

Because it's easier even than sending an email to the person who might know the answer to the question. That's what I want.

Alex Pokorny: If you had it really strict, I Like if it doesn't know it needs to say it doesn't know before it starts to extrapolate because then you're not checking that statement nor adding context to it.

Like if you gave like new people start they want to know the download on a project part of it. Is the data points of this is the project. This is the timeline. This is what we're doing. The other part of it is the context of this matters because this VP said this in this meeting and now we have this timeline on it.

So we're stuck, even though yes, it's a dumb project, we still have to do it. I mean, like there's, there's always that context on top of it that. How many

Dave Dougherty: of the PowerPoints are actually important? Right. Right. So just because you can query all the PowerPoints doesn't mean, yeah, the timeline's a joke. We put it in the joke and we all know it like

Alex Pokorny: the reality is, I mean, there's pieces like that or like the missing data points in between, like, that's a really good question.

I don't think anybody's asked that yet. We should check that assumption before we say the thing that seems obvious. We should actually ask about that and make sure that that's actually the case. Yeah. It is a really good idea though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is. I mean, man, that's Had some people before when they talk about like, you know, adding a team member because they're overwhelmed with work and it's like, well, yes, but that's like a plus one-third, like, or a reduction of one third, like a task that they should be doing the work that you were doing.

It's not an offload off of you, like you yourself, you have now a coworker. You're not taking 50 percent immediately. It's at best a third.

Yeah.

Alex Pokorny: Because then there's that extra chunk, which is all the questions that they're going to have about that project. So they can get up to speed so they can get going on it.

It's, it's always like, yeah, you're overwhelmed now, but adding a person is actually more work, which is frustrating because, in the long term, that's helpful, but man, it's still going to be painful. And if it's painful already, it's going to get worse.

Ruthi Corcoran: Or how many times do you go through the process of, of training new people on a technology or a platform?

And the questions are similar, but they're not so exact that you can just do an FAQ that somebody is going to want to read, you know, it's like. It may not solve every problem. I think you guys bring up really good comments about like, oh, this VP decided this thing and therefore this is the timeline. But for some of the more practical day-to-day things where the questions are nuanced, nuanced enough that you, you kind of need to ask somebody that's kind of, that's like the sweet spot.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah,

Ruthi Corcoran: I'll keep you updated if I figure out how to do this on my own. Maybe that'll be the enterprising minds branded onboarding

Dave Dougherty: AI.

Ruthi Corcoran: Yeah.

Dave Dougherty: What other use cases are you looking for? That would be an interesting yeah, all the different pain points. Cool.

Ruthi Corcoran: This is why I'm such an optimist.

Wrapping Up: The Optimistic Future of AI in Business

Ruthi Corcoran: I know you're about to sign off Dave, but I'm just gonna put this in because I think of stuff like this and it's like, yeah, it could replace things that we're doing, but also man, think of all to your point about the negative one third.

Okay. Now that's time you freed up. To do the next cool project that you didn't quite have time for or wasn't quite possible and it's sort of like the next cool project that this enables is the thing that's so energizing for me.

Alex Pokorny: I think one of the cool ones for me is data connections of just kind of a random thing, but like, if you ever look at like AI designed. Whatever building bicycles and you name it. It's very organic structures that look very, very different. That actually can be done with like a lot of CNC tools and 3d printing today.

But it's not a way that we think about things. We think about things in geometric shapes with 90-degree corners to them. And that's how we build buildings, the rectangles, we build bicycles in their circles. I mean, it's like, we're very, very basic in that knowledge, but we don't really push beyond that.

And that's instead of this iterative state that we're in. Making those big leaps is the piece that I was, I'm excited about with AI, like from, I don't know, material science to saying, Hey, you know, this molecule, this molecule, you never think about it because it's one of the billions of trillions options.

This makes something kind of cool, like stuff like that. We're not going to run through manually. We're not going to run into it because our frame of reference is geometric or frame of reference is the periodic table. Like, we have these stuck things and stuck systems, but as we start to break out of that and start to have these systems that can just be broken away from that and think in a different way.

I think that the creativity that can happen from technical tools is actually amazing. Like, that's such a strange combination, but man, I'm excited for it.

Dave Dougherty: Well, good. I'm glad we could end on a positive note, given the weight of the topic. Maybe, but it'll be cool.

I go down in blue flames, regular ones. No, I think it, it is, it is an exciting time. And. I'm more optimistic for, you know those of us who are actually engaging in these thoughts and these topics and trying to figure it out. Because yeah, I think the, the adaptive, the probability of being adaptive goes through the roof when you're actually.

You know, thinking things through. So lots to think about between now and the next episode, let us know what you think we would be curious to find out about the other use cases or, or other ideas that you'd be willing to share on Pain points and everything else that you'd want to use these things for.

So until next time, we'll be thinking a lot about this and hopefully you will too. So join us in the next episode. We'll find out what we talk about on Enterprising Minds. Take care.