365 Beyond the Hype: AI-Powered Productivity Tools for Busy Executives with Jeremy Caplan, Founder & Creator of Wonder Tools

In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Jeremy Caplan, an expert in innovation and productivity and the author of "Wonder Tools," shares transformative insights into how leaders can leverage AI to amplify creativity, streamline processes, and empower their teams. As the creator of the popular "Wonder Tools" Substack and a thought leader in using AI to enhance productivity, Jeremy offers a practical and inspiring approach to integrating technology into leadership.

Throughout the conversation, Jeremy dives deep into the practical applications of AI in the workplace. From improving strategic planning and communication to fostering creativity, he demonstrates how leaders can harness AI to enhance their decision-making and drive impactful outcomes. Part of the discussion also focuses on the wide range of AI tools available for executives, offering actionable ways to boost productivity and simplify complex workflows.

Listeners will hear about Jeremy’s unique approach to using AI as a "cognitive sparring partner" and how leaders can foster a culture of experimentation within their organizations. By highlighting real-world examples and actionable strategies—including recommendations for tools that can transform productivity—he provides a roadmap for leaders to navigate the ever-evolving technological landscape.

Actionable Takeaways:

• Discover how AI can act as a cognitive sparring partner to expand your strategic thinking and enhance decision-making.
• Hear how leaders can overcome barriers to AI adoption, including time constraints and fear of complexity, and create space for experimentation.
• Learn why fostering a culture of shared learning and collaboration is critical for unlocking AI’s potential in your organization.
• Find out how AI tools can elevate creativity and productivity by generating multiple solutions and enabling higher-quality outcomes.
• Explore Jeremy’s top productivity tool recommendations for executives, from email management to presentation creation, and learn how to simplify your workflows.
• Understand the transformative power of AI in strategic planning and how it can help leaders avoid common pitfalls.
• Hear practical examples of AI tools that can streamline email management, enhance presentations, and improve team collaboration.
• Gain insights into the AI adoption curve and what it means for leaders navigating the technological shift.
• Discover how to use AI for high-value tasks, like board communication and competitive analysis, to save time and improve outcomes.
• Learn about simple, actionable steps to start experimenting with AI today and why dedicating just 10 hours can make a significant difference.

Connect with the Jeremy Caplan

Jeremy Caplan Website 

Wonder Tools Substack 

Jeremy Caplan LinkedIn 

Connect with Mahan Tavakoli:

Mahan Tavakoli Website

Mahan Tavakoli on LinkedIn

Partnering Leadership Website

Transcript

***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***

[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: . Jeremy Kaplan. Welcome to partnering leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. 

[00:00:05] Jeremy Caplan: I'm excited to be here. 

[00:00:06] Mahan Tavakoli: Jeremy, I love Wonder Tools, what you have been doing, what you've been writing about. Can't wait to get some of your insights on where we are at with AI, all the different tools and opportunities for executives and organizations.

But before we get to that, we'd love to know a little bit more about you, Jeremy. Whereabouts did you grow up and how has your upbringing impacted who you've become? 

[00:00:32] Jeremy Caplan: I grew up in Boston and I lived for a while in Chicago as well where I picked up my favorite sports teams, the Cubs and the Bulls and the Bears, loved playing sports, baseball, football, basketball, swimming, tennis, you name it.

 I loved to play table tennis. I was really also into violin. So the violin was my primary love growing up and has still remained one of my primary applications and what gives me great pleasure as well as reading. So those are some of the key things to me my life. I spent the last half of my life in New York City in the center of Manhattan.

where I live with my two daughters, who I love dearly, and my wife and we enjoy the culture of New York City. People think of it as a crazy busy city, but we think of it as a culturally vibrant hub of museums and theater and classical music and dance and all sorts of other culture. So I love living here and I, grew up in Boston, went to a private boys, Latin school, then went to Princeton university.

Then went to Columbia for business school and for journalism school on a night Badgett fellowship, and then a weaker's fellowship. So did some studying and then decided I loved being in school so much. I wanted to stay in school and switch sides. And at that point in time. This was around 2010, the Sydney University of New York had a brand new graduate school of journalism.

The first public graduate school of journalism the northeast of the United States. And there was an opportunity to be part of a new center on what was being called entrepreneurial journalism, which was a new term at that point. It was a great opportunity to combine my interest in business and entrepreneurship and technology and education and journalism and all these things I loved, and to help build a new program.

So since 2010, I've been here at the city university of New York at the Newmark graduate school of journalism, helping run the entrepreneurial journalism programs, and now serving as director of teaching and learning, which basically means I can support all my colleagues and the faculty and help us all do the best teaching we can do because teaching's at the center of what any school does really.

And it's a craft and an art and a science And a joy and a challenge. And so my daily task, my daily opportunity is to try to empower all of colleagues I have to collectively be a strong, a team of teachers as we can be and learn from each other and support each other and teach as well as we can teach.

[00:02:53] Mahan Tavakoli: What a beautiful way to end up where you're at, Jeremy. First of all I could have. Three different conversations and learn from you about them. At some point, we do need to have you on and you have to play some of your violin and show your artistic skills.

I think AI will impact education drastically and real potential there. And then there is journalism. Which as a result of social media and technology has gone through evolutions and AI will impact it as well. But what I'm curious for this conversation is you have all these interests, all these focus areas.

What got you so focused on AI and AI tools right now? You have an outstanding substack wonder tools. You're doing a podcast on it. What got you interested in AI, Jeremy? 

[00:03:47] Jeremy Caplan: If I told you 10 years ago that I would give you this little device and it would be a magic wand and you could type in a few words and magically get the computer in front of you or the device in front of you to do magical things you could never imagine it would do.

That's essentially what AI empowers us to do. It has incredible capabilities that augment what we can do with our And that's incredibly powerful. , I really consider it to be a magical set of tools. It's not really one tool. It's a whole category of new kinds of tools and capabilities. And we're just at the beginning stages of this.

And so  when I started to see the incredible power of AI tools, not just to remove background, Noise from audio recordings, not just to suggest automatic edits and videos, not just to generate some text automatically for social media posts, not just to, help me fill in a form automatically a bureaucratic kind of form that I have to fill out routinely, but to actually strengthen my capability to imagine.

Ideas and possibilities. So when I'm teaching, rather than just thinking about one or two possible lesson plans, I can now think about five or seven or nine different possible ways of teaching something rather than just explaining to students using the first analogy that comes to mind, I can prepare five different possible analogies and consider which one is best.

I can consider how. To present this information in five different languages for students who need supplemental language. I can give the students who need a transcript of anything we're doing, a summary of anything we're doing. I can have them dream up lots and lots of different possibilities to practice their, editorial skills and thinking skills and analysis skills by critically evaluating 10 different possible headlines.

I can do so many things that are exciting. As an individual, not to mention generating images, right? I don't have the skill of drawing effectively. , I've always wanted to draw well, but I've never had that skill. I've tried to work on it, but now I can sum it up.

An AI generative AI tool to create any image I can think of. Imagine including text, including any kind of scene and realistic image, a 3D image, a photographic image, an illustrated image, as many of them as I want in whatever dimensions I want. can have the AI help me with generating infographics of various kinds slides of various kinds, even now video clips, gifts.

There's just a new exciting possibility. Every single week. And this opportunity we have is not just to capitalize on what these tools can help us do, but to share it with other people. And that's also really exciting for me as someone who loves to teach and to learn, this is an incredible moment for learning a lot and then sharing that with other people, which is what I love to do through the newsletter.

[00:06:30] Mahan Tavakoli: That energy and enthusiasm comes across the screen and the microphone, Jeremy. Because you are excited in learning yourself about the tools, using them in helping other people learn now. I love that at the same time I have clients and I've interacted with some even in the educational space where the professors have not even touched chat GPT, let alone use some of these tools.

And I would transfer some of that to some of the organizations that I see. There are some executives and organizations that are running really fast. There are others that might have played around with a couple of the. Large language models, primarily ChatGPT or Claude, and there are others that are totally clueless and haven't engaged at all.

What are you seeing with respect to people's engagement with these tools? And what do you think is keeping people from engaging more? 

[00:07:35] Jeremy Caplan: People are swamped with all of the responsibilities they have in their professional lives and their personal lives in the world. That's chaotically flowing around them, right?

We have so many responsibilities. We have so many meetings. We have so many emails. We have so many tasks, so many Slack messages, so many documents, calendar entries, . We have so many things that are just coming at us, right? Day in, day out. Wherever you live, if you're in the digital world in any way in your work, you're seeing all of this information pour at you day after day.

And as a result of that , many people I'm generalizing here, of course, because many people may be completely calm and at ease and in a Zen mode, but more often than not, the people I encounter. Are struggling to cope with all of that and to manage all of the existing information flows that I just referenced, let alone adopting a whole new set of tools, a whole new set of capabilities.

So I think part of it is just bandwidth limitations and bandwidth, the available time, energy focus that people have to adopt, to explore, to experiment with something that feels very new and different. it is. So that's the number one challenge. I think that prevents some people from diving in 

number two is. People have bad associations with information technology, with computer screens. , many of us feel a need to, and I myself feel this quite a lot, to get away from screens, right? We want time away from technology. We want to have a tech Sabbath, for example, which is something I really like to do.

We want to have less connection screens and more to people, right? We want to spend time talking face to face, especially after the pandemic. We want to spend time with actual people and humans and Learning and talking to people. So that also works against this idea that, we're going to spend more time diving into something new.

And a third challenge is just the speed, right? People feel like this is a race boat that's flying across the water and they have to jump on. And it's a little bit intimidating given that. It might not be clear where to start or what to do, right? We're invited to these tools like chat, GPT and Claude and Microsoft co pilot and Gemini, they all have this interface, which is basically a blank box.

And so we're enticed to think it's it's like Google, but it's really not. It is like Google in the sense that there's a simple starting point. You don't need to master a complicated interface or a complicated set of instructions or have any specific technical knowledge or expertise. So in that sense.

It is similar, but in many other respects, it's not. And as a result of the fact that it's not, people don't know what to do with it. Or they use it like Google, which it's not a search engine. And that is a challenge as well. So those are a few challenges that make it sometimes hard for some people , to dive into this magical new world of AI.

[00:10:33] Mahan Tavakoli: It has been a struggle for many. Now. When I saw I was mentioning to you earlier, I read A. J. Agrawal's book Prediction Machines about six years ago. That got me fascinated about AI. But when I saw like a lot of other people, I imagine you end of November. 2022 when I saw chat GPT, I said, wow, our world and knowledge work is going to be transformed.

However, if you ask me, Jeremy, two years later, I see much less transformation with respect to the way many executives get their work done. And the way many organizations work. So for those of us who are spending a lot of time on the tools, trying to understand it, use it, the transformation seems to be going at a very fast pace.

For most other people, their lives haven't drastically changed the way they get their work done now from two years ago. So why do you think that is? And what do you think will take four? More people to understand and be able to use the potential of this technology. I 

[00:11:48] Jeremy Caplan: think it takes two more years. So if we look back at the history of technology, recent history of technology, typically the adoption cycle requires a few years for people to really understand the capabilities for the UI, the user interfaces to develop a little bit.

So it's clear what people are supposed to do, how they can do it. The technical hurdles surmounted a little bit. User education happens. The literacy grows. So I think we're about two years away from that kind of mass adoption where  we all essentially are using AI tools much of the time for much of our work in the same way we're using the Internet, or the same way we're using  various social platforms or we're using mobile devices. And if you look at each of those three Big moments of adoption. Let's take Google as an example, google was founded in 1998 and wasn't really until a couple of years later that Googling became a verb, that became a really widespread phenomenon.

It took a couple of years of adoption. I remember those early years because I was out there giving talks and leading workshops saying Hey. There's this new thing and you can search and find the stuff you want online without going through individual links, like with Yahoo. And people would say, really, do you mean?

How does it work? And what do you do? So we had this period of transition similarly in 2007, the week I got married. I remember this well, the first iPhone was launched, that's a demarcation point. That was a major milestone in the history of modern technology is the iPhone and the idea of this portable device that could do all these things.

And yet it wasn't really till a couple of years later, 2009 into 2010, that I would argue it reached a mature phase where it was really widely adopted. The interface and the app store, for example, didn't launch initially. And so in all of those cases, similarly with social media platforms, whether it's YouTube, Twitter, Facebook many of these platforms really took a couple of years to reach widespread adoption.

So it'll happen is my. Bottom line here, it'll happen. It's just a matter of time. It's also a matter of the interfaces improving. Initially when some of these tools came out, people didn't know what to do with them. And the engineers were masterful in their ability to create these capabilities, but they weren't always masterful in their.

In the skill of conveying to user, what are all the different use cases? And maybe they didn't know in many cases what the use cases could or should be. But they really didn't communicate that sufficiently such that, many people misunderstood what this was all about and they thought it was just a new version of Google. 

And so I think it will take a couple years for that. And it'll take the leadership of the cutting edge people, to be doing things and showing their colleagues and saying, Hey, did you see that? I save an hour a week doing this, did you see that? We don't have to have that person taking manual notes every meeting to file it into this folder and spend, X number of hours per month doing that manual work.

Okay. We can actually use an AI tool to assist us with that particular repetitive task. So it'll take that leadership as well as a period of time. 

[00:14:59] Mahan Tavakoli: It's funny, Jeremy. I see some of those people in  organizations, but they're keeping it quiet. They're not telling other people that this is what I am doing.

To reduce the amount of time it takes to produce the same outcome. So it takes a certain kind of leadership, certain kind of environment to encourage people to both experiment and share about those experimentations. . So for people who are listening to this, they might have opened up chat GPT, but as you said, they've been overwhelmed with so many other things.

 What would you tell them to do in order to be able to on board and use some of these more generally available tools best. 

[00:15:44] Jeremy Caplan: So the first thing is to ask for reverse interview. You want to get the AI to interview you rather than interviewing it. You basically give it a little bit of a context and what you're focusing on and what you're interested in.

And you ask it to interview you basically to elicit your own insights, a lot of times people assume that what we're trying to do is extract from the computer. Some kind of knowledge, but actually what we really want to do is use the computer to extract knowledge from ourselves, because sometimes we need that guide, that nudge, that assistant to pull that out of ourselves.

So that's the first thing that people can try. Second thing is to basically think about. Providing a starting point, something you're thinking about, something you're working on and something where additional perspectives, ways of looking at this question or this opportunity would be helpful in augmenting what you can do.

So for example, we use step ladder or a crane, to reach things that we can't reach with our human hands, it expands our capabilities physically, and we can use the AI tools in that manner. So we can say, this is a. topic I'm exploring. One of my projects for 2025 or 2026 is going to be to do X, Y, and Z.

And I'm really interested in reaching goals, A, B, and C. And the key outcomes are going to be F, G and H. And I'm going to really want to address these three questions and. The AI can be really helpful then answering or kind of giving you guidance on what are five different creative approaches to these questions?

Or what are five perspectives I could take? What are five lenses through which to see this opportunity? What are seven core questions I should be considering when I'm facing this decision? So essentially giving the AI space to expand the realm of my own thinking. It's not giving me the answers per se.

It's giving me some of the questions, some of the possibilities so that I'm using it as an assistant. As an under Lord, not an overlord, to use the language that Descript uses for AI multimedia editing. You are the overlord. It is the under Lord. It is assisting you. It is guiding you, it is giving you some nudging questions.

A third common usage you can use early on is to give it some texts that you're writing. All of us, no matter who you are and how far you are on your writing journey. Almost all of us are doing some kind of writing. We're writing our own presentations, we're writing our own emails, we're writing documents, we're writing reports, we're writing all sorts of different stuff, speeches, whatever we might be writing, scripts and we all can continually improve our writing.

There's no one who has reached the state of perfection as a writer. It's a craft, it's an art that we can always continue improving on, expanding our possibilities and ideas. And so we can use the I to give us some of that feedback, some of that objective, neutral. Instantaneous, actionable, constructive feedback.

And we can direct it to give us the feedback that's useful for us. So it's like having a coach that you can tell exactly how to coach you. You can say, give me questions to answer that my piece of writing hasn't answered. Give me a blind spot that a critic might say, I've missed. Give me a section of this text.

Tell me about a section of this text where it's a little bit boring. Or where the language is a little bit bland. Or my Verbs are passive or I've repeated the same words or phrases or an idea of one of the sections of this where it would be great to have an anecdote or where adding additional supporting evidence would be helpful in strengthening my argument.

So you can give it some direction. Or you can use an AI tool that already has some of those pre cooked kind of instructions and prompts, like lex. page is an example of that, which is an AI tool made for writers that has some pre cooked prompts in it already. And then the AI will become, , your assistant, in this case with a writing process, regardless of what it is you're writing.

Could even be you're just writing social media posts. And again, I want to emphasize here, it's not doing the writing for you. In this case, it's giving you some feedback on your own work and helping you strengthen your own skills, empowering and augmenting you as a human, not replacing you. So those are three initial uses.

 There's many others. And we can get further into other use cases as well. 

[00:19:56] Mahan Tavakoli: I love the examples that you share, Jeremy, because I find as I interact more the way you talked about it, or I get some executives to do that same thing. It expands our thinking. So it's not producing the end outcome of what we are looking for necessarily.

It's a cognitive sparring partner, expanding the way we look at whatever it is. It might be a competitive analysis or perspectives on branding or messaging or communicating even with the board.  I have some of my CEOs share the communication that they want to send to the board and ask, again I primarily have them use GPT or Claude, ask it.

What do you think the board members will take out of this? What else should I be communicating? What are some of the strengths, some of the weaknesses? So that really helps, but it does require, I find a certain discipline to spend consistent time on it. Because if you do it for five, 10 minutes, you get disappointed.

And then you've proven to yourself, these things are no good. And then don't visit it for another six months. 

[00:21:13] Jeremy Caplan: Absolutely. 10 hours is the minimum, 10 hours is the starting point. Ethan Mollick, who wrote a great book, he's a Wharton professor, wrote the book Cointelligence noted that 10 hours is a good kind of minimum.

I agree with him on this. You need a certain amount of time experimenting, exploring, trying things out, getting results that don't quite work, aren't quite useful before you get to the good stuff, the really helpful, constructive input. And once you reach that point, that makes a huge difference.

I'll share another area where I've found it particularly useful, which is using my voice. I think a lot of leaders and executives might relate to this. There are many of us who think out loud and by talking, we think through our ideas, particularly if you're a kind of person with charisma, which many leaders are, executives are, there's a lot of power in their voice, but when it comes to sitting down in front of a blank screen, and tying to type things out, it gets a lot harder.

Your voice allow you to dictate something and you can, I'm dictating now. I pressed a button on my keyboard. It's now going to do an automatic, what I call bionic dictation. So it's transcribing my words, but it's also going to transform them. It's going to clean up some of the punctuation. It's going to clean up some of the ums and ahs.

For example, if I want it to, depending on which tool I'm using, it can put it into a transformed. Format. So let's say I'm using it as my journal or my instructions to direct report, or maybe I'm using it to outline a presentation or speech I'm going to give, or a report I'm going to give to the board as you referenced.

I can ask it to do any of those things and transform my words, which I'm just speaking out loud, Into the appropriate format. And so in this case, again, we're not having the AI generate its own language. It's basically cleaning up my language reformatting, reorganizing my own language and enabling me to do more of, and be better at the things that are already naturally my capability.

So again, it's an augmenting kind of technology, a supporting and assisting technology, not replacing me, not writing the report for me. those cases. 

[00:23:27] Mahan Tavakoli: So I've also been saying from the beginning, Jeremy, that AI becomes a powerful augmentation tool. Rather than replacement for humans. I don't know if you saw it or not a week or two ago. A study came out of doctors some that had been using chat GPT. Some that GPT was giving recommendations and some that were not the best recommendations.

, were actually the ones that GPT had produced without a doctor. Because in many instances, the doctors were unwilling to accept the thoughts that GPT was augmenting them with. So I don't know if you've seen that study or not, but it made me think, wait a minute, we're talking about the power of AI and augmentation.

It sounds like at least in this small subset of individuals, AI was not augmenting because the humans were overriding the AI's augmentation and recommendations. 

[00:24:38] Jeremy Caplan:  have seen that and I was struck as well by the idea that our reaction or our use of the AI responses is as important as the AI responses themselves.

So that's really an interesting insight. , in this case, we're talking about  specific context, which is a sort of context of judgment and decision making under uncertainty and This is a case where humans are notoriously limited in their capabilities at making decisions under uncertainty and subject to all sorts of biases and heuristics.

My mentor and thesis advisor Daniel Kahneman wrote about this. We tend to fall back on these heuristics like the recency bias, something that's most recent in our mind, if this could happen to a physician or someone in any field, something that's most recently in your mind is going to. have a heavy influence on your judgment, whether or not statistically speaking, that's a common occurrence and most likely to be an a Bayesian sense, the base rate the most relevant phenomenon to be thinking about.

 So this is a case where AI is able to, at least in some instances provide some analysis. That can be polluted as it might be by human judgment errors or heuristics that are problematic that humans tend to fall prey to. So I think that there is that kind of subset. other thing I would say is that Increasingly, we can use more advanced versions of AI that are trained on data that we've provided, insights that we've provided, our writing, our insights, our examples.

I'm thinking of tools like Claude Projects in particular, NotebookLM, Perplexity Spaces, even custom GPTs from ChatGPT. These are all instances in which we can essentially provide documents, examples, data, cases that Allow the AI model we're working with to focus on a particular subset of information and to use that information to inform and provide context for the answers that it gives us.

 So that's a case where we can have the best of both worlds. We can have some AI engine power and forming the language that is effective language based on billions and billions of instances of language that it's analyzed, but we can also ground that in our own information, our own context, our own style, our own set of preferences and judgments and so forth.

And I think in many cases, That is ultimately where we're moving towards so that we won't be using generic AI just from a blank starting point, but rather AI that's been grounded in our perspective or our approach. In some cases, that may be problematic, it's a bad actor who's trained the AI with negative examples are problematic or, unethical kinds of uses that can be problematic or if it's somebody who is getting the AI just to parrot something manipulative or whatever, but in most cases, when people are using it for positive purposes, it'll be very helpful to have the AI that knows your style, knows your preferences, understands the context, understands what's relevant.

For example, if you're a teacher. Understands what age you're teaching, understands your style of lesson plans, understands your learning objectives, understands the common core objectives you might be having as, part of your context or whatever your field is, right? The similar set of rules and guidelines, company policies, , corporate manual of rules and regulations and so forth.

And that's where I think you get a really great opportunity to, capitalize on the relevant information that we as humans have, but to power it with AI's capabilities. 

[00:28:32] Mahan Tavakoli: You actually went to where I wanted to take this where beyond that initial interaction as a cognitive sparring partner, the opportunities, whether with clouds projects or notebook LM 11 labs now has put on a more customizable.

It's incredible how fast these things move. A month ago, I thought Notebook LM was going to revolutionize and it did. And now 11 Labs comes out with a better version of it a month later. But what you can do in essence is customize the knowledge base that you are interacting with, which ends up becoming more powerful.

How else can people who have spent the 10 hours are using it as a cognitive partner? What are the types of areas, functions within the organization, roles, tasks that are performed? Things that lend themselves at this point best to use of different AI tools, Jeremy? 

[00:29:34] Jeremy Caplan: Yeah, share a few thoughts on that.

One is planning. So we can create a cloud project and essentially give it some of our objectives our operating context, and have it help us think through a plan for Q1  based on these objectives. We can even tell it the different role players we have, the stakeholders we have. We can have it essentially help us start to put together the skeleton of a plan, including Communications, milestones, goals, possible hurdles, strategies for overcoming those hurdles, including the necessary communications internally to, goals.

So planning and thinking through the steps that we need to take. Along the way so that we don't miss something, a lot of times planning falls short because we've left something out. We've forgotten to consider something and we haven't fully analyzed possible ways that things could go wrong, or we've left out a person or , an aspect or a part of the goal or one of the challenges or one other contextual element, and so it can help us be more comprehensive in our thinking about planning and it can help us do that very efficiently so that within a half an hour or an hour, we've got an exhaustive detailed plan for Q1.

And , it includes all the different elements we want. So I think it can be tremendously helpful in that. And that can be a single player kind of thing, or it could be collaborative. So with perplexity spaces, for example, you can have a handful of people who are collaborating on that space and that project essentially, and have access to it and can benefit from it and share it.

Or it could be a solo project for an executive or for someone that's a direct report, who's managing that. Another areas is specifically in the realm of communications, right? There's so much communications we need to do internally and externally. And the AI can really help with that in so many different ways from using tools like gamma or beautiful.

ai or pitch, which allow you to create slides with AI's help much more efficiently, or if you don't want to have the AI create the slides, it can just help you improve the slides, clean up the old death by PowerPoint. Bullet point slides and turn them into something really elegant informative persuasive powerful and visual without having to spend a lot of money hiring someone or spend lots of hours doing that.

And we can get the AI to generate many possibilities and just choose one, so we're still having agency , in that process. And in addition to the slides, we can have a generate images, representing our vision, representing our, posters with the phrases that are core to our Q1  projects or whatever, or images that will go in our newsletter or go on our internal communications or whatever we're creating, generating text. We have an email we're going to send out to people, but we want to make it a little funnier. We want to make it a little lighter, more human. Maybe that's not our skill.

And, certain executives are better than others at this. And the AI can really help with that can give us three different possibilities. It can give us a version in Spanish or in French or in German or Japanese for a part of our team that's overseas. So all of those different communications things.

And it can help us think through, not just the language itself, but what are elements we should be communicating about that we haven't yet. included. So it's not just the words. It's also the kind of vision, the ideas, what we're including, who we're communicating to. We can create different kinds of communications, different lengths of communications.

 So that, can be Tremendously helpful. And then finally, video, video is such a powerful way to communicate internally and externally, it used to be that we needed a video team massively expensive software and training and lots of resources. And now we can use new AI tools and platforms to create video really efficiently, quickly, effectively.

And engagingly. So I'm thinking to be specific tools like hypernatural as one I use and recommend for creating short social videos. You can give it a link or an article, a newsletter post or a website, or you can give it some text, you can give it some audio, you can give it virtually any starting point and we'll create an original video for you.

It will generate images and generate video that matches the material you have, and then you can edit it. You can put in your logo and your colors and it's really customizable. So again, you retain agency but it's very fast, it's very efficient and it's very affordable.  Other tools like Descript, which is a great editing tool.

Lots of organizations are starting to use it, allows you to edit multimedia like you would edit a document just by changing the words on a screen. Just like you'd edit a Google doc or a Microsoft word doc, which makes it accessible virtually anyone. And then new tools like Eddie, I'm writing about as we speak, which allows you to edit a video like you would talk to chat GPT.

You just give it a prompt. For example, I took an hour long video and cut it down to an eight minute highlights video, just by instructing Eddie into what sections were most important, just using natural language. So I didn't touch any wave forms or do any manual cutting of the video file myself. I just used my natural language to direct it, to do that.

So those are a few tools that you can use. And there are many others. Augie is another good one. There's many other video editing tools and audio editing tools that allow you to just do more. impactful , human kinds of communications and multimedia communications, whether you do it yourself as an executive or whether one of your reports or colleagues does it.

The organization is empowered to do just more , but also work more creatively. So it's not just about saving time. That's one of the myths. People think it's just about working faster and doing more. Actually, I think it's about doing higher quality work. Because you've considered five different possible video storylines as opposed to just one that you had the bandwidth to think about.

Now you have the bandwidth to think about five and choose the best one. And same with any of these other things that you're exploring. You're able to choose from a wider range of possibilities and therefore the quality increases the impact increases and the ROI increases and so forth.

So I'm very excited about potential for people to empower their workflows individually and as teams, 

[00:35:33] Mahan Tavakoli: what outstanding list of recommendations Jeremy, couple of thoughts about it. One, you were talking about getting feedback. I find it interesting that as humans, when we want to give feedback to each other, and I, Have worked over the years with managers and executives giving feedback, soliciting feedback.

It's very hard. We take it personally, even when people do it. Take it personally when people get the feedback from AI. They don't take it personally. So , you can ask the AI to be as critical as possible. AI can be totally critical and people don't take it personally. So there is value in that.

 One of the tools you mentioned is gamma. Most of the CEOs I know. Still have someone in their PR or marketing department generate their power points. And one of the CEOs I'm working with a couple of weeks back was doing a presentation to a board. And I hate these power points that are bullet.

I put it in gamma. And within 10 minutes I sent them back this Beautiful presentation. And his mind was blown. And until people actually use these tools, they can't visualize the opportunity, the potential. And one final thought for the listeners is that some of the best teams that I've seen, Jeremy they find a way where on a weekly or monthly basis, people get together and share some of these useful tips.

And it's celebrated. So if Jeremy has used a video tool that I need to use, I haven't used it before. Jeremy talks about it behind becomes curious and then he goes and experiments and everyone says that's awesome. Jeremy, thanks for sharing it as opposed to Jeremy doing it on the side. Maybe he gets his work done, but the other people don't benefit from it.

So part is the experimentation. The other part is making sure everyone shares those successes. So more people in the organization can benefit from the tools as well. 

[00:37:38] Jeremy Caplan: Absolutely. I think it's a great idea. I think having a sandbox that you play in collectively and share having A beta and booze kind of thing where you get together over drink and talk about what each other is doing or over pizza at lunch.

People learn from each other much more than they learn from, an outside person coming in and saying, here's what to do. And so anytime you can get your colleagues to talk about what they're doing, it's really powerful. And you need to make a space for that. Because people are so busy in their own lane, doing their own thing.

There's a reason why Bloomberg and Apple and these companies have those collective hallways, right? They have food in the shared spaces that people bump into each other. And it's not just for that. Hello. How are you conversation? It's how are you solving this problem? What are you exploring? What's new that you're using?

And we need to find out. Foster more of those conversations, whether through a physical space that they share or these community events, right? Community managers within organizations are super valuable for those that are able to have them because they do convene people and they draw out people's insights to share with one other.

And those just don't happen necessarily by themselves. They really do require,  agree with you on this. They require that extra effort of getting people together. And there is a little bit of a stigma around AI. It's a little bit like a sex ed kind of thing. People don't necessarily want to talk about it.

It sounds a little dirty or naughty or bad. Maybe I shouldn't be using it. And certainly there are bad uses of it. Just like there are bad uses of any technology or any tool for that matter. You can burn something down with fire. You can cook something you can use the phone to call in a bomb threat, or you can use the phone to, console a friend and you can use AI constructively poorly.

And so people are often focusing on. The plagiaristic uses or the negative uses, problematic uses of AI. And what I think we need get people to do is to open up around the positive uses so that we take it from the shadows, something people don't talk about, but they do quietly and, in their own computer a little bit and bring it out more into the open.

Where we can share, okay, what's working, what's not, which tools work for our organization, which ones maybe do not, because there are dozens of tools every week that are emerging. So part of the conversation going to be about which of these tools is most relevant for us? Cause we don't need all of them in wonder tools that, I write about basically one thing, one primary thing a week.

And over time, that's a lot of different tools and possible applications and platforms but for most people, you don't need all of them. Just like you go to the grocery store, you don't need one of everything. You just need a few items to feed your family, right? And so same thing with tools. You just need a few of the right tools that resonate for you.

And picking them requires a little bit collaboration, a little bit of, understanding what the needs are and talking with colleagues and learning from one another. And we do need more of that. That human side as well. 

[00:40:21] Mahan Tavakoli: One of the things I find Jeremy is that it's beneficial with the executives rather than experimentation for the sake of experimentation to think about things that are either of highest value in their roles.

It might be strategic thinking and planning or might take the most time for a lot of CEOs that I interact with. It's the communication with the board, clarity of that communication. So to use AI tools, To make their lives easier. a space that would drastically benefit them. It's not just for the fun of it.

It actually has a significant impact for them. So one area I would love to get your thoughts on tools as well is on productivity. I get a lot of emails and questions with people saying, okay, I've seen these different AI tools. Are there any? That can help me become more productive where at the beginning of the conversation, Jeremy, you talked about the overwhelm a lot of people are feeling and that's absolutely right.

Are there tools that can help with productivity and that overwhelm? 

[00:41:30] Jeremy Caplan: Yes, there are. Starting with email. So most of us spend at least two hours a day, all told on email. Many people spend more, some people occasionally spend less. We spend a lot of hours. on email and we get hundreds of emails every week and we send in many cases more than 100 emails a week.

And that takes a lot of time. There are new tools that apply AI to our email in helpful ways. The top one in my book is shortwave. Another one is superhuman. And what shortwave does very well is allow you to use natural language to find things more easily in the voluminous, collection of emails that we have.

The built in email in Gmail, for example, does not actually work very well unless you know the exact keyword. And sometimes you're barraged with 50 emails that match that keyword and you can't find the real one you want. So there's a huge amount of time lost in companies, a lot of research on this Not being able to find emails shortwave helps with that dramatically.

It also helps with summarizing email messages, finding collections of emails that refer to a certain topic and summarizing them into one simple place. So it's very useful for that. And just generally it makes email much more efficient. I think email products in general will have more AI built in the next couple of years, but shortwave leading on that.

Another is on the search side. So on the consumption side, we're finding information. And then we're consuming the information when we're finding information, we often use Google and Google is a wonderful company and broke many barriers and has done tremendous work, but it also basically dumps hundreds of links at you when you do a search, right?

And you just have to crawl through them. It's like you go into a library and they just said, Oh, it's over there somewhere. And look at that huge stack of a hundred books and you'll find something somewhere. Perplexity on the other hand says, okay, what are you really trying to get at? Let's you put a multi part query with complex set of.

And then it gives you a concise summary, like a presidential brief. And for executives or leaders or people who are very short on time, this is immensely useful in getting up to speed on anything. It could be consumer patterns of behavior in a particular region. It could be some international trend on some other sector.

It could be really anything. And it's using search technology, but then AI to understand your query, AI to summarize your query. And it gives you the citations. So this is the key factors, the citation. So it's not chat GPT or any other AI model just hallucinating and making stuff up.

It's actually drawing material from specific sources and citing those sources. And that is a huge time saver for anyone who's looking for information. And on the consumption side, if we're listening to podcasts, for example, know a lot of executives listen to podcasts and snipped. is one I highly recommend.

It's an AI powered podcast tool that lets you summarize, it summarizes for you essentially all the podcasts you might subscribe to. So you can decide what you're going to listen to. And so that you can get a summary even before you listen to it and you can share excerpts and basically collect insights over time so that you actually retain some of the ideas that you explore in those podcasts for reading.

I recommend read wise reader. So if you're reading a lot of newsletters and blogs and websites and all of these materials, it allows you to highlight things and store them in an efficient way. And apply AI in terms of getting summaries. So if it's a 10 page piece in a magazine, you just want to get the essence to see if it's something you really need to dig into, it'll give you a very concise, quick summary, and you can use it on any device that you have.

So those are some kind of productivity tools that I find particularly helpful. And then on the phone, I also would recommend these bionic dictation apps. Literally is one I'm using at the moment. Oasis is another one. audio pen is a third. They're essentially similar products that what they do is they allow you to dictate, but then again, they transcribe and then they transform your material.

So you already have an outline or you already have a summary, or you already have a script or a blog post draft or a report to your executive board draft or whatever material you already have that draft without having. Just by using your voice and they're very reliable, very affordable, very easy to use.

You literally just press go and you start recording and then you essentially tell it what format you want it. So it's your own words, but rather than spending an hour typing it all out and figuring it all out, you spend a few minutes. Essentially dictating. So it's like we have a magical assistant, a secretary as it were.

And that's very helpful with productivity from my perspective. It helps me do a lot more on a given day than I would otherwise be able to do. 

[00:45:59] Mahan Tavakoli: What? Outstanding recommendations, Jeremy, and what I find is that over the years there has been a massive increase in surge. In the noise that comes across our desks, emails in our ears.

So it's important to look for signals. Some of the things that you mentioned point out the signals. And one of the things I absolutely love about what you have done with wonder tools is. Is the signal that is in there where you are looking at the tools, you're looking at the application, you're making the recommendations in a way that transfers and translates to the users, not just people who might understand or be curious about the technology.

So I absolutely love and highly recommend that. You shouldn't snip it. You should just Listen to and subscribe to wonder tools. How can the audience find out more about you, Jeremy, and follow wonder tools and your work? 

[00:47:06] Jeremy Caplan: Thank you so much those kind words.

My website is Jeremy Kaplan. com is with a C and wonder tools is that wonder tools. substack. com. So it's all one word. Wonder tools. substack. com. And I'm at the city university of New York, the Newmark graduate school of journalism here in New York city. And Co teaching a workshop on AI for media professionals, but really for anyone else who's interested as well.

If you're interested in that you can reach out to me about that as well. And I am just. So excited about what's ahead for us in 2025. I talked to a lot of founders over the course of, exploring their various tools. And one of the things that is really exciting from my perspective is that there's a real Renaissance in creativity and innovation around this AI boom.

Yes, there's a tremendous amount happening at open AI Google Microsoft and Apple and big organizations like that. But there's also a lot of these three people, teams around the world. All different places around the world who are creating these new organizations.

Products and services, many of them layered on top of the foundational models, AI models, but providing a much different user interface or user experience, or serving a particular use case for executives or for lawyers or for doctors or for people in any range of fields. And that is really exciting.

It's this really fun period of growth and experimentation, exploration, and a lot of these tools are very accessible. So we can just. Start trying them. It's not an area or an era where we have a lot of barriers. There's not a lot of cost barrier. There's not a lot of technology barrier.

The devices we already have, the smartphones, the laptops, many of these tools have free onboarding periods. So the opportunity to explore and experiment really an exciting one. And I would encourage people just to dive in and enjoy the fun of it. To me, sometimes it's like, Being back in kindergarten, I have two young daughters one is still in elementary.

One is just started junior high school. And,  they get to have art class and play around draw things and just use their imagination freely. , I'm, testing these things out, I feel like it's. being back in elementary school in a way just playing around coloring on paper and seeing what happens and seeing magical results, that just show the power of how technology has evolved.

And that's very exciting. 

[00:49:22] Mahan Tavakoli: And that's what makes you such an outstanding teacher, Jeremy, you are enjoying your own learning, your own experimentation, and through that, sharing those brilliant insights. With your wonder tools community . I look forward to learning a lot more from you.

Thank you so much for all the great work you're doing and this conversation, Jeremy Kaplan. 

[00:49:46] Jeremy Caplan: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.