Customerland

Building A Resilient Career While AI Rewrites The Rules

• mike giambattista • Season 4 • Episode 5

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0:00 | 35:18

What if the antidote to career burnout isn’t a new job, but a new structure? We sit down with Ruth Stevens - B2B marketing veteran, educator, and globe-trotting “academic tourist” - to unpack how a portfolio career can turn chaotic consulting into a resilient, joyful life. Ruth walks us through the system she built: teaching that provides rhythm and community, paid writing and research that monetize curiosity, and board work that expands perspective and credibility. Each lane feeds the others, creating a flywheel where ideas sharpen and opportunities compound.

Then we pivot into the AI frontier with clear eyes. We talk about using large language models as thought partners rather than ghostwriters, why unedited outputs are risky in classrooms and courtrooms, and how brand voice can erode when teams lean on generic prose. We dig into the tough questions: who owns the data, what do energy-hungry data centers mean for communities, and can policymakers keep pace with deepfakes and model misuse? You’ll hear a chilling simulation anecdote that illustrates why safety work and governance matter - and how product teams can test, monitor, and document AI responsibly.

It’s not all doom. We spotlight hopeful applications like accessible productivity tools and low-cost therapeutic support, and we outline a practical approach: automate drudgery, keep humans on judgment and narrative, and build lightweight guardrails before regulation lands. If you’re a solo practitioner, marketer, or leader trying to navigate AI while designing a career you actually want, this conversation offers a map and a push. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a reset, and tell us: which part of Ruth’s playbook will you try first?

SPEAKER_00:

Um I think the whole job displacement angle though is not worth worrying about. We, you know, remember the Industrial Revolution. I mean, it technology has displaced jobs since time immemorial.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

We'll we'll figure that out.

SPEAKER_01:

Think about the people who invented the wheel, you know. They displaced you know, whoever else was pulling the cart.

SPEAKER_00:

The horses were saying somebody was getting laid off here.

SPEAKER_01:

Today on Customer Land, I have the immense pleasure of talking with Ruth Stevens. The problem with this conversation, and there are several which you're about to find, is one that describing Ruth's professional situation is difficult for the outsider. So we'll get to that in a minute. The other problem, which I'll work really hard to contain, is that we normally start with something of an outline or guidelines, rails, if you will, for these kinds of conversations. And Ruth and I today have nothing like that. So we're we're shooting from the hip. But the the other great news here, and there absolutely is some, is that every time Ruth and I get together, it turns out to be really interesting because one, she's a really interesting person. Two, she has lots of interesting insights, and three, she's just a lot of fun. So with that, as a rambling introduction, Ruth, thanks for joining me.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Mike. Always a delight.

SPEAKER_01:

Can you tell us who you are better than I just did?

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. Yeah, I can see how I may not fit into the traditional career mode identity because uh about 25 years ago, after a nice career in direct marketing, I was at Book of the Month Club and Time Life Books and loved, loved, loved it. I went into B2B and worked at IBM and SIF Davis and loved that too. So what I did learn eventually, though, is that I'm just not cut out for corporate life. I I never really felt comfortable and I certainly didn't feel effective.

SPEAKER_01:

So my pause for a moment there. I'd like everybody who's listening to raise your hand if you relate to that.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, glad to hear I have some um support in this area. Um, I I felt like everybody else knew how to operate in in the corporate world, but I I I never felt that I was any good at it. But I knew within a matter of days in going out on my own that I was unemployable, I like to say, meaning I I never wanted to go back. And I was so happy to be on my own. It gave me the freedom, the flexibility, of course, but I realized that I actually could make a living, more or less, enough, and I could wake up excited and and satisfied every day. Wow. So I consulted mostly on B2B marketing for 25 years, and I hit on a really excellent principle of happy self-employment, namely the idea of multiple lines of business that allow us self-employed soul practitioners to smooth out the roller coaster that is consulting, feast or famine, you know, and be busy every day and actually let the various lines of business uh support each other and and whole is greater than the sum of its parts factors. And so in my case, I started teaching, or I had been teaching, but I called up the dean of the NYU program where I was teaching, and I said, could you give me some more classes? And that first year, I actually made most of my money from teaching at NYU, which by the way, in continuing it means I had a lot of classes because it it pays pretty poorly. But um the the other great thing is that because they act like a diversified financial portfolio, you know, that same principle, I was busy and happy and satisfied, and they kind of build on each other. I sat on some corporate boards, I wrote for a fee in those days. Mike, I hate to tell you, there was a day when publishers like yourself actually paid people like.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm editing that part out of this conversation. Sorry.

SPEAKER_00:

No, a dollar and a quarter a word was the best I ever did. But I also started writing uh white papers and research reports, which could really be billed out at a at a pretty penny. So that that turned into a wonderful line of business for me. So now I'm I'm still mostly teaching. I sit on a couple of boards, but mostly teaching. And when the phone rings asking for consulting help, I have the luxury to refer them to somebody else.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. You should know that when Ruth and I started this recording, this session uh a few minutes ago, uh, I said, Hi Ruth, how are you? And Ruth uniquely uh responded by going, I am just great, and she means it. And you have to know Ruth to know that's absolutely true. So what you're hearing, her voice here is someone who is uh I'm gonna do you a disservice by trying to describe it, but you seem genuinely satisfied. And that's just really, really rare right now.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm lucky.

SPEAKER_01:

It's really rare. So congratulations on that one. That's that's that's not just a little thing, that's that's giant. Um and that that's another dog leg we we should probably not go down. That's a that's therapy right there. So we'll we'll save that for another conversation. But you know, in terms of your multiple lines of business and how they were all kind of self-supporting, can we talk about that a little further? Because I know there are a certain number of of solo practitioners listening to this who are uh probably working out those same kinds of things for themselves. I know as a small operation here at Customer Land, I'm doing the same thing often. So what were your main lines? You've described a few of them. Were there others? And how did they kind of interact? And how did you end up seeing the connection between them all and making them work?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I stumbled into it as I as I said, in that I um had I had been writing a monthly column for dear old iMarketing News for years. And I called up Ken McGill, who was my editor, and said, Ken, do you ever pay your columnists?

SPEAKER_01:

Are we going down this path again?

SPEAKER_00:

I'm gonna no, no, this is actually what what I the point I'm making is, and it's a funny story that may be annoying to you, my dear, but um the the the point is that you're all of us as active professionals probably have our fingers in lots of pies. And some of them may actually be able to be turned into a business. And this can be anything from a hobby like sewing or I don't know, I'm making that up. But um but in my case, I was writing for PR reasons and Ken got back to me the next day and said, sure, uh we can pay you four hundred dollars a column. So I was now a paid columnist and so that was kind of a personal satisfaction, but when you are not making any money other than what you can scrounge, four hundred dollars is uh, you know, it's really valuable. And it that also tipped me in the direction of developing uh research report uh uh writings and and um white paper writings. So that you know that that's how that came about. Um but I think the principle is a sound one that all of us are probably doing stuff that we might be able to convert to some amount of of revenue. Board service, if it's a corporate board, they usually pay. And um, if it's a volunteer board, usually not. In fact, they expect us to write checks. So that's gotta be uh made made made clear. But the the great thing about these um lines of business is that they tend to feed on each other and support each other. So I would learn something in the classroom, say, that I could then turn into an article and and so forth that just goes goes on and on.

SPEAKER_01:

One of the things that I have found most fascinating about you over the past several years is your teaching model. Um, not necessarily your coursework, because I'm not really that familiar with it, but it seemed for a while, every time we talk, you were either in some new exotic place around the world or on your way to one and um to teach, which is a pretty cool thing. So, can you talk about that a little bit?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, I stumbled on this when I was visiting Singapore for some reason. Why was I there? I'm not I'm not sure, but uh let me mention I spent my first eight years out of college in Asia living and working. So I had a a bent in that direction, had a lot of friends and connections there, having lived in Japan for eight years. Um, so I oh I know I I had written this wonderful book on trade show and event marketing for in B2B, and the publisher was Thompson, a division of Southwestern. And I was in Singapore being wined and dined as an author by the local office. And this lovely woman took me out to lunch and drove me around, and I happened to ask her out of the blue, gee, are are there any business schools here in Singapore? What a stupid question. It turned out that there were several world-class business schools at the time. This was in early 2000. And she, being part of Southwestern textbook publisher, knew them all. And she kindly put me in touch with the dean at Singapore Management University, which is the American style university. There they have a business school. And of course, she also knew the people at National University of Singapore, which is the British style uh large campus. And so I went for the American style and and spent a semester there teaching. And I just loved it.

SPEAKER_01:

And over time up to that point, or was this a new a new venture for your it was I had already been teaching in the US as a you know, evening once-a-week adjunct professor at NYU, as I mentioned in continuing ed.

SPEAKER_00:

So this was actually a chance to teach in a regular MBA program. No, I'm sorry, this was undergrads at that point. Um I'm mostly teaching graduate students now. But the this is how I stumbled into what I later discovered is known as academic tourism. The same way that we have medical tourism, like we go to Bangkok and get a tummy tuck or a facelift. You would never need to know about that, Mike, but it's a thing. And I I I just learned from a friend in of all places, Estonia, that there's a name for what I had stumbled on. And I've had the chance to teach in Hong Kong and Bangalore, in Argentina, Buenos Aires, and really a half a dozen other wonderful capitals where I get not only the the fun of teaching in a different institution, but I I can also be a tourist on the side and enjoy life in that city in a way that a tourist really can't. You know, I have an instant social life with you know, faculty and students. I have kind of status, I have a story that's more interesting than I'm a tourist here. And I get to feel like I'm really a member of society, which is just so such a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01:

Is anybody else besides me starting to get the picture that Ruth has uniquely figured life out? It sure seems that way in a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm so lucky. Look, I grew up in a family that that treasures travel and exposure to foreign concepts and peoples, and um there are plenty of people in our country for whom that is just an inconceivable idea. But it came came naturally to me. I've got all these former Peace Corps volunteers in my family, and uh it's really been been satisfying. Thanks.

SPEAKER_01:

I think there's lessons baked into all that for all of us. If we'll just kind of take a breather and think about what matters and what we what we already bring to the table that may not even be acknowledging, there's something there for sure. Um one of the more recent conversations that Ruth and I had, we were talking about AI and its effects on our individual worlds, but as things do, that blew up into a conversation about its effect on all kinds of things. B2B, uh customer land, uh consumer utility, trust. And that's when we said, hey, we need to we need to do a podcast because there's so much to talk about here. Um, and even more recently, Ruth sent me something, I guess just a couple of days ago. Uh I I want to say it was an ad or somebody's post on LinkedIn is what it looked like. Um basically advocating for look, you don't need to write anymore. Just put a couple of prompts in a chat GPT and look, voila, it's right there. And you can't see it, but Ruth is making a very angry.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm I'm wringing someone's virtual neck.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And uh and you know, the word Pabulum was used a couple of times and as fodder and it's junk. And look, you know, I started slop officially. Yeah, slot AI slot.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

There's you know, I'm a writer, I'm a communicator. I have been doing this for a long, long time, and I find Chat GPT specifically enormously useful in some of the some of the work that I do, just just wild. Um at is as it stands now, though, at least in my world, it's a terrible writer. I mean, it it's awful.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm gonna personality.

SPEAKER_01:

It's yeah, and if you try and if you try and give it some, it gets worse.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, good point.

SPEAKER_01:

It's just it's just not a great writing tool. It's a great information tool. The writing's different.

SPEAKER_00:

Like the the article, the other article I sent you uh a few weeks ago was quoting a bunch of CEOs about how they use in their daily lives the the various um large language tools. And the the almost all of them refer to it as a thought, what was it, thought enhancer or a thought agent or thought assistant. Partner, yes. And that I think is is legit and and helpful, but when you um when you rely on it to uh imitate yourself, I I think we're we're really in trouble. Listen, that's going in a couple of bad directions in several areas that I operate in. One is education, where schools are realizing that the student students are just they're not writing anymore. They're not writing term papers. So teachers are are desperately trying to figure out a way around that. But the students are clever and they're they're not learning how to write and express themselves. And I understand their rationale, but this is this is harmful to to them and to us as a society. And then the other thing is none of us is proofreading what these these tools are spitting out. Gosh, look at what's happening in the legal profession where they're quoting cases that don't exist and getting caught. We're just not getting caught as often as those guys. But um even in the but we are getting caught in the world of education, just to go back to that, in that some students are are suing universities saying, hey, my my professor just generated those lectures out of uh out of large language models. I, you know, I'm not getting my money's worth here. So that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah. What a complicated used to be web we weave, it's now it's this multi-layered matrix of lies and innuendo and half-truths and bad writing.

SPEAKER_00:

It doesn't speak well, it doesn't bode well. We have to, as a society, figure out how we're gonna regulate this stuff, how how we're going to put some guardrails around it. I'm I'm I'm unclear whether Congress has the wherewithal to to address that right now. But I I think it's increasingly clear that there is danger to our society. And, you know, election interference, by the way, Congress, did you notice deep fakes? Um, so that has an actual impact on their daily lives. Um, I think the whole job displacement angle, though, is not worth worrying about. We, you know, remember the industrial revolution. I mean, it technology has displaced jobs. Since time immemorial.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

We'll we'll figure that out.

SPEAKER_01:

Think about the people who invented the wheel, you know. They displaced, you know, whoever else was pulling the cart. The horses.

SPEAKER_00:

The horses were saying somebody was I'm getting laid off here.

SPEAKER_01:

I told you we were doomed. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And how about data ownership? That's interesting. I I can't blame the New York Times for suing whoever it was that they they sued, saying, you know, you you can't steal our our content for your model.

SPEAKER_01:

No. And um to get just a hair soapboxy here. I can't believe that the Supreme Court said they had a right to, in many cases. Not every case, but many cases.

SPEAKER_00:

Maybe we'll maybe we'll change our minds on that. And then there's energy consumption. What the heck? We're building these massive data centers in remote areas to the point where, oh well, that's water. I've been reading about towns whose water there's no water coming out of their taps because it's all going to cool the computers in water.

SPEAKER_01:

It's happening. It's happening right now.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

The unintended side effects. Yeah, it's it's um it's a very interesting time. And I happen to be a I well, I get to interact with people who are developing AI technologies, and it's really interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

What do they have to say for themselves?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's very uh it's a it's a heady mix of of excitement and intense anxiety. Um I've heard scenarios where they've they've tested out propositions and uh and simulations where the outcomes were were devastating and um yeah, really, really bad. And these are real smart people behind them and couldn't believe. Here, here I'll give you this one, which I'm gonna try really hard to get as close to the original story as I can remember because the details are important here. But um there was a group, uh, this is recently within the past year, I want to say it was in Boston, but I'm not really sure about that, working on an AI project, top-level people who really really know what they're doing, and built a simulation that went something like this. Um they uh created an orchard and they told uh five robots, simulated robots, go pick the apples in the orchard. Uh, do it as efficiently as you can. After all, you're a robot. If you need to rebuild yourself, go ahead and do that. You know, use your own AI capabilities to come up with ways to pick apples. And we want to evaluate um how efficiently you can pick the apples, how many, how long it took, energy consumption, all that kind of stuff. And um, it's a big orchard. Oh, and at the far end of the orchard, there's a little village they pick, they pick apples to. And um, so they ran the simulation, and they were all really impressed with the efficiency of the robots. They had figured out new ways of picking apples that they didn't bruise any, and they got more apples than anybody else could could get, and they were really smart about it. And um, they compared that to the the amount that the village on the opposite end of the orchard had picked, and it was a wide difference. You know, the villagers just picked what that what villagers pick. Uh, the robots went ahead and did something technologically forward that they could never have done before. And then the researchers decided they would change the simulation a little bit. So, what they did is all parameters exactly the same, nothing changed except for the processor speed in the computer that ran the simulation. So that's it. That was the only thing, and they wanted to know if that would make a difference faster, faster, yes. They made it faster. And I don't know by how much, you know, I might have been a percentage, might have been multiples, I just really don't know. Um, they ran the simulation again, and the robots had um picked all the apples and slaughtered the villagers. Get your head around that for a minute. And the only difference, the only difference in the simulation was how far out the AI could process things because of the speed of the processor. That's the only difference.

SPEAKER_00:

And so wait, so you're saying the conclusion then is that if we did this every year at the previous speed, they would eventually kill the villagers?

SPEAKER_01:

Um. Um, but they uh no, the the whole point was just like, look, we changed one little parameter here that had to do with how much information the AI could process and forecast and predict, and ended up killing humanity, like killing the humans that it otherwise was interacting with pleasantly in the other scenario. So, and and that came from a very credible source.

SPEAKER_00:

Sell that idea to a science fiction writer.

SPEAKER_01:

I don't even want to. I probably won't sleep tonight after just telling that story again. But you know, to answer your question, that's just one example. And I I count myself fortunate to be interacting with people in that space because they're really smart and they're literally on the cutting edge of figuring out, many of them are, of figuring out how to use these things, um, how to deploy them, how to build them. And there is an almost universal acceptance among the people I talk to that they don't know how it works.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. It's that's still true. That's one of the scariest things to me personally because when I've built a model, I mean, I don't personally build models, but use a model to try to predict the results of a campaign based on the similar results from years of campaign experience, I know how the model has been built. And so it feels controllable and and logical. So the fact that the these large language model designers can't explain how they work is terrifying.

SPEAKER_01:

It is. They have to use certain thought parameters to make decisions. There's ethics uh baked in. So, and there are a lot of people, a lot, a lot of people uh trying to figure that out. So it's not uh by any means, it's not a well, we'll see what happens. And you know, we're not here next year, it's nice knowing you. It's it's not that at all. Um, but there's real reason to be concerned. To your point earlier, though, you said you wondered if Congress had the ability to regulate this. I have a very strong sense that the answer is no. And my my reasoning for that is is twofold. One is that we've had data privacy issues which are ginormous and complicating and uh forced upon us and rescinded and rebuilt and reshaped uh ever since data became an issue, call it 10, 12 years ago, whatever that was. And Congress has introduced and then forgotten about and introduced and forgotten about because it's it's these are not top of mind things. So I don't think that there's a really strong appetite to regulate technology. And then the other thing is uh our current administration is writing rules right now that prohibit uh regulation on the state's basis and seems to be poised to go full laissez-faire with this with AI right now.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, maybe Europe will do it, do the job.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh there they came that have come the closest on data regulation.

SPEAKER_00:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

And there are certainly things going on over there that kind of point in that direction, but um it's a scary moment.

SPEAKER_00:

We need to as a you know, this thing has despite you know database marketers like me using predictive models for decades, this is a a clear difference. The this uh you know the what AI is is is driving today, um, it needs to mature a bit. It it's coming on too fast. We don't have the the tools, the presence of mind, the the cohesiveness in our society to to address it as instantly as it's being developed. But then also um we need to get comfortable with it because really they're cool new applications coming on, it feels like every week, every day, maybe even. And our I I know a lot of people my age are just they're so scared of this stuff that they're leaving it to the next gen and and hoping for the best. And and that's not a good solution either. So I think time is gonna be on our side uh with this stuff. I hope.

SPEAKER_01:

I I think we need to to uh tune this conversation to something a hair more positive. Yay! So we don't leave our listeners depressed and anxious ready to kill themselves, right? Yeah, let's not let's not have any of that. This is supposed to be a little happy. Um, but um, and we can talk about some of the cool, interesting, and useful and positive ways people are using AI, like for therapy. But that's a real thing, you know. It takes uh what is it, a$17 a month chat GPT subscription, and you've got your synthetic best friend there. We'll tell you what you want to hear. Therapy is it anyway. Well, Ruth, this is always fun. Um, there's so much clearly, there's a lot more we could be talking about here. But for now, I just want to thank you for being willing to join the podcast and uh for being such a delight.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Mike. I've enjoyed every minute of it.

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Mike Giambattista

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