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SPEAKER_00Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Dagle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started.
SPEAKER_01Hey everybody, welcome to today's podcast. Our guest is Mike Alton, and Mike and I have been trying to have this podcast for at least almost two months now, I think. The holidays got in the way and all that good stuff. But um I Mike was gracious enough to have me as a guest on his podcast. And after that experience, I realized that it would be a great opportunity to bring his wisdom when it comes to using AI at work to our audience. So, Mike, before we get started, maybe just let everybody know kind of your journey of how you uh became an AI expert, whether you want to call yourself that or not.
SPEAKER_02I would definitely not refer to myself as an AI expert, but I have certainly had the distinct pleasure of talking to dozens of folks like yourself on my podcast. And that has been an absolute mastermind for me over the past 12 months, less than 12 months really. My journey with AI started in 2024. I wasn't an early adopter. I'm a content creator, I've got a blog, the social media had I'd written about AI like probably two times towards the end of 2024. So not nearly to the extent that many other people have, but I was listening to some people like Paul Braitzer, who I'd known for a while, and some other folks. And I was listening to them from that lens of as a marketer, what is happening with AI? Because as somebody who has been writing about marketing for over a decade, I've covered all the trends, all the social networks, networks that you folks have never even heard of, never messed around with. And I've often told businesses, look, keep the new stuff at arm's length. Don't dive into the brand new social network that just launched last week that all the people are buzzing about because we don't know as businesses if that's going to go anywhere. And we don't want to invest time in something that's going to end up being a waste of time. Like, gosh, think about all the people that, you know, created an entire clubhouse marketing strategy 24 months ago. And it's basically gone, right? So we want to avoid that as businesses. And I've often tried to be that voice of reason for people. And that's why I kept AI at arm's length for as long as I did. But late 2024, I was listening to Paul and he was talking about Sam Altman, who had specifically said at some point, I think he said within the next five years, 95% of marketing job is going to be handled by AI. And it was, it was that moment that I stopped in my tracks and said, wow, okay, I really need to pay more attention to what's going on with artificial intelligence, how it's going to impact me and my role as a marketer. And perhaps even more importantly, I was concerned for my friends and colleagues, people that I developed relationships with in this industry for a decade. And I knew many of them had been doing exactly what I had been doing, which was to ignore AI and just focus on their normal day-to-day jobs, which a lot of us have to do. Yeah. Right? It's it's it's insane sometimes how much new stuff there is in the industry, technology, tools, and so on, and how easy it is to get distracted by that stuff. I said, this is different. And I quickly recognized that artificial intelligence is the fourth industrial revolution and it's going to change everything, not just marketing. And that's when I committed to uh educating myself. And within a few short months, I mean, like I said, this was late 2024. So Q1 uh or late 2023. So Q1, 2024, I was immersing myself in AI, listening to podcasts like yours and the artificial intelligence show. And by Q2, I said, look, I need to really double down on this. I'm gonna start writing about it more and I'm gonna start talking to people. So I started my own podcast, and that's when everything changed for me.
SPEAKER_01So I I remember that episode. I'm a big fan of what um they're doing over at the Marketing AI Institute for sure. That's a great podcast for those of you who don't know about it. I think now that's called the Artificial Intelligence Show. Um great resource. I remember that episode where he said uh he was quoting Sam. Um I remember where I was standing in my kitchen actually when I heard that, and I was like, okay, like hopefully individuals are paying attention to this because it's not just marketing. Marketing is very easy, and I think that you know, since you're deep dive, you've realized pretty quickly all the ways that generative AI can really make that marketing team a lot smaller. What are you telling to your peers, your clients, your co-workers who don't have the enthusiasm or haven't committed the energy into AI literacy like you have? What do you tell them?
SPEAKER_02That's a great question because the response kind of depends on my gut check of where they're at and what they're thinking. Because some folks need to be told, look, your role could be replaced by an artificial intelligence agent or operator, uh, or just somebody like you who knows how to use AI quite a bit better than you do. And some people need that wake up call. They need to understand uh if I'm not using AI today, I really am behind. And I'm you know being passed up by peers, colleagues, maybe the competition. Other people, that might not be the right approach, right? Other folks, either they're already on edge and they don't need me to set them off even further. Or maybe that's not their concern at all. So for other folks, I might have them start with something a little more simple and just say, hey, look, I I know you don't really get this whole AI thing, but let's let's start with a basic thing, a task, an idea, and let me show you what AI can do for you to help you personally and professionally, and then go from there. So it might be as simple as, hey, look, why don't we try a perplexity search instead of a Google search the next time you want to look something up and see what a difference it is in approach, in answer, in mindset to not have to, you know, click through a bunch of different links, but just have the answer right there and then be able to have a conversation back and forth with what feels like somebody who is an expert on that topic already. And again, it could be something non-professional, although in my line, I try to start with professional things because I know a lot of the people I talk to are the kind of learner like myself who we need to know the why before we're gonna go into the how and the what. I had this fun conversation uh on the podcast once with a lady who's all about play and and she loves playing with the tools and she's encouraging people to go into AI with this mindset of play. And I was like, that's very contrary to me. I I don't play with tools just to play with tools. I gotta understand the why. You know, so I might have somebody, you know, open up uh Gemini and say, look, I'm thinking about this new direction in my side hustle. Here's what I'm doing today. Here's who I'm helping today. Ask me questions and let's have a conversation about this new direction I'm thinking. Or maybe I'm feeling very flat and stagnant in my side hustle and I need a new direction. That's probably even even better example, right? Because we can then have a conversation and a discourse with what's going to feel like an expert in our domain for free uh and really get some interesting direction out of it.
SPEAKER_01I think perplexity is a great place to start because people are already used to search. Yeah. And to have that small little oh, I'll just go to a different domain to do my search, but to see the uh the impact on uh search results through the filter of a generative AI uh model like what they're using is a big wake-up call for people for sure. So I think that's a great place to start. Um I'm always curious, and I think everybody listening is as well, uh, when it comes to tools, right? The theory and and process and all that stuff is equally important, if not more, because the tools are easy, but that seems to be a great place to get people talking about it, right? Like, and for me, I'll ask somebody, so what are you using? And it kind of helps me understand kind of where they are, right? Like if they're using tools I've never heard about, I'm like, oh, tell me more. In your case, what is uh what's kind of like your go-to tool stack for Gen AI?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and I'm gonna be very the opposite of a lot of folks because like I said, I don't like to play just to play uh for tools. I just don't have that kind of time. Uh I work full time for Goropulse and then I do the AI stuff as a side hustle. So I'm working seven days a week as it is. Um and it's the same approach I have for businesses. I like to keep that stack simple. So when it comes to Gen AI, I'm using the core tools. I happen to use Gemini more than any of the large language models. I use Claude a lot for writing. Um, I've used ChatGPT. It's not amongst my top uh sources at the moment. The thing that I do the most, the tool that I use the most is one called Magi. So I don't know if you've talked about Magi on your show. I've listened to about half of your podcast. So I know there's a lot that I've missed with you that you've talked about with past guests. Um, like, I mean, you had a great conversation with Jonathan Mast recently that I just loved. He's fantastic. He's fun. Um Magi, M-A-G-A-I dot C O. And Magi's a rapper. And if you're if you're listening, and the question you keep asking yourself is, what tool am I supposed to use? Which LLM am I supposed to use for which scenario? Magi's a great solution because for 20 bucks a month with Magi, this is gonna sound like a sales pitch and it's not, but for 20 bucks a month with Magi, you get access to paid ChatGPT, paid Gemini, paid Claude, Meta, Grok. You can even use Mistral or Deep Seek. You can use all the LLMs. You can use the image and video generators as well, all within that single wrapper. And I love this because I can be having a strategic conversation about, say, a marketing campaign or a business decision using Gemini, you know, 1.5. And we get to a point where, all right, now in the conversation, I need to create some actual content. And I know that Claude is a better creative writer than most of the other LLMs. I can in the same chat switch to using Claude. And it's got all the context of that chat, and I can just proceed. Okay, cool, Claude, now let's create an email or a blog post or whatever.
SPEAKER_01So in the same thread, you're able to change models.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. And then, I mean, uh I know you've talked about custom instructions. We can go into more depth here because this is one of my favorite topics. But ChatGPT has custom GPTs, Gemini has gems. These are personalized instances of the AI for folks listening who don't know, where you can have told it what you want to do. Magi has the same feature. It's called a persona, same exact thing. You give it a name, you give it a role, you give it all the instructions, attach files, whatever you want to do. Within that same chat, you can have a persona that you're talking to. You can change the LLM if you want to change the kind of output that you're getting, and then you could change the persona. So all of a sudden, you can shift from using one personalized, customized AI assistant to using a completely different AI assistant within the same chat thread.
SPEAKER_01So, you know, we've been thinking about agents a lot. We are building agentic solutions for clients, we're teaching that within our community. This kind of reminds me of agent architecture, where you've got a specialized agent, subagents, let's call them. One is the editor, one is the copywriter, one is the proofreader, all that stuff, right? And by isolating the activities of those agents, there's higher integrity output. It's got one task, does that task put feeds that output as input for the next task? Are you able to do that in Magi with the personas? Uh essentially, like you've got, okay, now I need this persona, which is a specialist at non-technical business writing. Interesting.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it won't be as automated as an agent, right? But still, you got access to it. A process in mind. Like, for instance, let's give you a basic marketing example, a blog post. Before you write the blog post, you want to have thought through strategically who are we targeting, what's the purpose of this content, you know, what's going to go into it, what's the what's the keyword research, you know. So there's some specific pre-writing tasks that you're going to want to go through. And you might have a persona or an agent who's who's set up to help you through that stuff. And then there's the writing part, right? And then after you write, there's promotion, which is a whole different set of tasks. You need to understand social media marketing and email marketing and paid advertising, not writing, right? So you could easily see switching back and forth between two different LLMs and three different personas or assistants through that one task.
SPEAKER_01I I haven't used it, but for those listening, I would recommend you test that out because that will allow you to do everything really in one environment rather than skipping back and forth. My my personal experience use Chat GPT. It's open on three or four tabs plus the desktop currently on my Claude. Yeah. Um not as much because with any of these models, you have to understand the nuance. Oh, this one's good at this, it's better at this, you know, this one's better at that. And with Claude, I just haven't I haven't been impressed enough with the output to invest. Gemini, we have, you know, and our our companies run on G Suite, we got access to 1.5, rarely use it. And so I'm intrigued to find out why that's your go-to.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I have really fallen in love with Gemini. And the why is it's unrelated to the LLM. It was I was doing a uh two-day AI in-person boot camp in Philadelphia in November 2024. And it was me and my partner Chris Carr, who runs an agency in Philly. And we were getting about a month or two out from the boot camp. And he came to me and says, Mike, I'm in Chat GPT all day, every single day. I don't use Gemini or Copilot. Could you learn one of those and be able to speak to those to our group? So I said, sure, I'll tackle Gemini. And ironically found out that I was already paying Google 20 bucks a month for my you know regular Google account, and I just had to switch to the AI One account, and now I have full-blown access. Back then that meant access to 1.5. Now it means access to two and deep research and notebook LLM. And so when I started using Gemini more and realized I had easy access to those kinds of tools, particularly deep research, that's when I fell in love with Gemini. It was fantastic. Now, obviously, OpenAI just came out with their version of Deep Research, cleverly called Deep Research. It's similar, it's got some differences, some areas where it's better, uh, but of course it's not free. Uh it's a, I mean, that I think you got to be on the $200 a month plan to use their deep research. Right. Whereas with Gemini, I'm paying $20 a month and I've access to deep research and the notebook LM Plus. Uh, and I'm using those extensively. Again, as a content creator and a business owner, sure. I love being able to start with deep research, really flush out a topic, export a document that I can then import into a new chat, either with Gemini, or maybe I'll bring it over into Magi and use that as the basis for doing something. So I researched competition for the business that I was starting, or I might be researching topics to create a piece of content, something like that. Very, very functional.
SPEAKER_01So you're using deep research to develop, I guess, kind of almost like the knowledge base for a new chat. You're extracting that deep research and then starting a new chat in a perhaps even a different model. Yeah. And having that chat reference that deep research as kind of context for the rest of the conversation.
SPEAKER_02Right. So I'll give you an example. I started doing the AI content as part of my blog, The Social Media Ed, which I've had for over a decade. And about six, eight months in, I realized I am trying to turn this entire site into an AI site. And I know SEO, and I realized that was a mistake because I had over a thousand pieces of content on the site that are about social media marketing and SEO and those kinds of things. So over the holidays, 2024, I decided, all right, I need to spin all my AI work off into a new site, in a new business. And so I had deep strategic conversations with Gemini about what direction that should go. And one of the conclusions we came to together was that I needed to be talking specifically to local businesses here in St. Louis, where I live. And I should be looking at organizations, association meetups, those kinds of events, reaching out saying, Yeah, I can come in and talk to your event about AI and using that to spin off consulting. You've been there, you know how that works. But as I've lived in St. Louis since 2007. I'm not connected here in St. Louis. I'm not plugged in because I've always worked remotely full-time for other businesses. So I haven't really needed to. And one of the things I needed to understand was what is the makeup of St. Louis businesses? What kinds of industries are here strong in St. Louis? I could not have answered that question authoritatively in November 2024. So I turned deep research and I created a research project. You know, for those who haven't used it, you just put in a prompt. What is it that you want to know? And I, my prompt was, I want to know what businesses are prevalent here in St. Louis. What are the top like five industries? You know, what kinds of industries are having events here? And it created this research plan. And I said, Yeah, that looks fantastic. Go do it. And it scoured over 100 websites and came back to me with a really thorough document that said, look, Mike, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, these are the top three industries in St. Louis. And then it went into more depth of, you know, example businesses. I think I asked it for how are they using AI or what are some of their struggles that they'd be going through, kind of unique to that industry, that AI might be able to help. And at the end of the end of the end, I have a 15-page PDF all about the industrial makeup of the businesses here in St. Louis and how they could be applying AI. And I exported that as a PDF. And now that's part of my default instruction set when I'm thinking about content, when I'm thinking about presentations, anything about how I might expand my business here in St. Louis.
SPEAKER_01What was the processing time for that research? Oh gosh, minutes.
SPEAKER_02Okay. It really did not take long. And that is one of the big differences between OpenAI's deep research and Google. It takes a while. OpenAI is a little more extensive, but it's also time can uh takes a lot of time. Yeah. Yeah. Gemini, uh typically five minutes or less. It will depend on how many websites it's viewing. It's not always a hundred over a hundred. I've done uh research on like personal interest topics that it might be 25 to 50 websites. So it's gonna be a little faster. Um, and then you can also go back and forth with it like you would in any other chat, right? You might ask it follow-up questions, it might want to go do more research depending on those questions. Um, so that entire process for me in that example might have been 45, 60 minutes to understand all of the major industries and businesses in this space. Um, and now that's part of my um AI chief of staff, which is which is my go-to persona. It understands my voice and my target audience and my market.
SPEAKER_01I like this idea of of building in Magi conceptually. I'm gonna have to mess with that. Um I don't think I have time to play with tools, but I gotta do it anyway. Um one of the things you mentioned, so you know, uh the business that that sponsors this is chief AI officer, and we train non-technical business professionals to kind of upskill and be that AI expert in their community or their peer group or whatever. Um we did a survey recently, and one of the top things that people were interested in was, you know, even if I like my job, I'm realizing that with this AI skill, I have something that is in high demand. How do I do something, you know, outside of my typical job or role as an AI subject matter expert for my business? And a lot of people that have had success in our community are doing exactly what. You're doing. They're speaking locally. Right. And they're building the network. And even if it's a free thing at Kawanas or Rotary, they tell me, doesn't matter how big the room is, as soon as I get done, there's always people that walk up after and saying, Hey, can you do this for us? Right. Right. So for those who are out there that have these skills, want to develop these skills, but they they don't have a book of business to go to, um, what what has that experience been like for you with kind of targeting local AI literacy efforts?
SPEAKER_02It's it's really interesting and effective. It's not an approach that's new. In fact, this is something that as a longtime speaker, I'm I'm very familiar with. I just hadn't applied it to local businesses and local organizations. Uh I'd I'd followed and worked with a guy named Andrew Davis, who's fantastic. He's a pillar in the marketing community, he's a one of the best keynote speakers I've ever seen. He's just so entertaining. He used to work for NBC and The Muppets, and he brings that level of creativity and entertainment to talks about marketing and business, right? And it's one of the things that he always taught was whatever it is that you want to talk about, figure out who your target audience is as a niche, and then try to understand how they're organized. Are there industry associations, are there business groups like Kawanis and Chambers and so on, and talk to them and go to those events and outreach to them. The key is the outreach effort has to be successful in order for everything else to work, right? You can't just raise your hand and say, hey, I'd like to speak at a Kawanis, and they'll say, sure, Joe, come speak to our Kawanis meeting. You you've got to be able to bring something to the table. And that's where I've found it's particularly helpful to have a large body of content to point to. Obviously, if you're just starting, you don't have that. So you have to think about how can I create a body of work that I can show to them. And a podcast is an easy place to start, I think, because it's it's fairly low lift compared to so many other things. You can bring on guests and they're creating a lot of the content for you. Um, you can create blog content if you want to. You can start a video uh YouTube channel if you want to. But the key there is to have something that you can point to and say, hey, look, I'm doing more and more conversations and and talks on this topic. And I'd love to, you know, just come to your group and and help them understand this. No charge. That's how you got to start. Free is the magic word. Uh, because a lot of these groups they are looking for speakers and they often don't have large budgets, particularly if you're, again, starting relatively small with local groups, but you still have to come with value. You still have to be able to demonstrate to them that you know what you're talking about. Another way to think about it is analyze your own existing network. Who do you already know who might be leading a community or a group of some kind, even if it's a private membership that you could potentially speak to, that you could talk to and say, hey, Joe, you know, I don't know if you realize, but I've been really digging into AI a lot lately. And I know you've got a group of solopreneurs who are in this Facebook group. Uh, I don't know if you've had anybody talk about AI, but I'd love to come in and just share my experience over the past six months and how I've you know come to that end. So that would be another way that I'd recommend thinking about getting into this niche.
SPEAKER_01If you're enjoying this episode and want to learn more about how to start using AI at work, we've made it easy for you. For just one dollar, you can have full access to the Chief AI Officer community, which will give you additional training, custom software, daily training calls on AI tools, using AI automations, getting more from your Chat GPT sessions, and the business of being an AI consultant. Simply go to ChiefAIOfficer.com forward slash insiders to accelerate your AI journey. Now, back to the episode. You know, just for your own personal interest, um, it seems like a number of our folks have been able to attach themselves to SCORE, the service corps of retired executives from SBA. It's kind of like a business support thing, as an outside subject matter expert. So just for your own stuff, that might help you plug in. Um, and I totally agree. Uh anybody who wants to go out and speak, offer to do it for free. You learn every time you get up on stage, you learn about the audience. Because you and I, who are immersed in this, we think, oh well, everybody knows this. There's still people that aren't like perplexity, isn't as big as Google. There's still people that have no idea what perplexity is, right? So as you're speaking to these groups, what is your understanding of kind of like everybody's temperature on using AI, at least in the St. Louis market?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and that's where it becomes really hard as a marketer because marketers tend to be further advanced in technology and adoption than almost every other industry. So as soon as I get out of the marketing bubble and I start talking to people who are in HR or sales or product development or you know, anything else that's not marketing, you're right, the adoption is cratered in comparison. Folks who you know have never tried customizing an AI before. They're they've probably, at this point, most everybody's opened Chat GPT and probably had a conversation with Chat GPT, but most of them had no idea that you can customize it by editing the memory or editing the instructions in the chat GPTs, uh, and had no idea the pure level of really, really customized and personalized output that you can get from a basic LLM. I mean, not even talking about the thousands of really, really interesting and specialized tools that are out there. So, yeah, to your point, today, you know, we're this is February 11, 2025, when we're recording this, uh, you know, the adoption and the understanding is still really, really low.
SPEAKER_01So that's encouraging to hear. I live in my uh bubble. We've got a startup here, and I don't, it's based on a ranch, and we don't leave the ranch very often. So everything that we get exposed to, we don't have the opportunity too often to meet with individuals who are average business owners or you know, executives or whatever that are are just doing their thing and and haven't had the the opportunity really to dive in as deep as you and I have on this stuff. And I just assume that so anybody listening to this stuff, if you know, maybe you learned something on this episode, maybe you're like, oh, I knew all that. I think it's important that you recognize that nobody else does. Most people are, and if they're using Chat GBT, they're trying it out like maybe like a Google search, and they're like, eh, it's okay. They don't really get it, they haven't had that aha moment yet. So um, and I know that the guys at at Marketing AI Institute are very big on AI literacy, but that's a like, how do you do that? I mean, like to show somebody a tool is one thing, but you know, in our ecosystem, we call it thinking in AI. It's like when somebody has that aha moment and they're like, oh, wait a minute, can I do this? Can I oh it that means it can do that? Like they really start making those connections and it just seems to be like a flood, and like that person is there's a quote that I've heard, once expanded, the mind cannot contract to its original state. Right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So these individuals start thinking in AI and they can't go back. So uh a big effort, at least for you know, in our community, is to help people have that that aha moment where it it triggers, like the dominoes start falling. Um with the the direction that you're taking with the the AI content, are you taking like a basic AI literacy approach? Are you taking more like, hey, here's some tool stacks that I'm using, or here's a process where I'm using? Like, how are you approaching that with your content?
SPEAKER_02Well, I love where you were just going because it's so accurate. AI is not a tool like Canva, where if you've never used Canva, I can say, hey, this is a tool to help you build graphics. Yeah, and you probably already have a pretty good conceptualization without ever opening the app. Well, AI is not like that, it's an underlying technology. And so our minds crave examples. I have to be told and shown, well, how am I actually going to use this in my day-to-day to make it worthwhile? So, my focus with almost all my content is use cases, right? Here as a business owner, this is how you could actually use AI in general or this specific tool here as an HR manager. You could use this to import and ingest your handwritten, photocopied employee onboarding manual from 1995. Yep. Yep. And then update it and bring it up to 2025. Uh, that was what a lady in my AI bootcamp wanted to be able to do. She showed us this, you know, photocopy of a photocopied old employee handbook, right? And needed to understand how do I make something useful out of this? Well, AI can help you with that. Um, and so I love being able to walk through either how I'm using AI or how my guests are using AI or clients or just people I talk to, uh, because the more we as business people understand the applications of artificial intelligence, either at the LLM level or at the specific tools, the easier it's going to be for us to really say, oh, okay, yeah, I could do that in my role. I could use AI to translate my English success stories into Spanish, French, and German and start to really quadruple my total addressable market for my business because now I'm creating content for that target audience.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01You know, it's interesting. One of the things that we started last quarter that is gaining a lot of momentum is coming into companies and helping them at least identify initial pilot projects, get those off the ground, educate the team. And we like to introduce that. We have a training called Thinking in AI that we bring into companies because we want people to understand that that's a thing and then say, Oh, you know what? Let me just try it on this, right? So that they're they're not needing to be pushed or coaxed. Um, and one of the things that I'm surprised, like, man, when we first started doing this, I was like, oh my God, like fear of the unknown, like how robust are these pilot projects going to be? Are they just gonna be like this? I'm excited because I get to learn, but are they gonna be just these massive heavy lifts? And the reality is that most businesses, they want to digitize the the the book from 1995 and update it. They want to um, hey, we'd like it if our leads got contacted faster, but we take the weekends off. So like things that once you start thinking in AI, you may not know the tool stack or the exact architecture, but you're like, oh yeah, AI's got no problem, right? So for any of you who are out there listening and you um maybe you haven't started using AI throughout the the business or your team or anything like that, um, and you think you're behind, the reality is if you're listening to this, if you're reading Mike's blogs, if you're listening to his podcast, you are ahead. Even if you're not a power user, you are still so far ahead of probably anybody in your company, most people in your company for sure, and most of I would say the world. So um that was a great point. Like, so I'm I'm interested in these uh boot camps. So how often are you doing them?
SPEAKER_02They're a little sporadic at the moment. The goal is to do them every quarter as an in-person event, which in-person obviously creates some additional wrinkles. The first one was in Philadelphia. Uh, like I said, where Chris was based. Uh, we're looking to do another one in Orlando, coming up probably in Q2, and then Q3 might be Anaheim. Notice that Disney connection. The idea was that we would give folks training at a location that they would want to go to and spend the following weekend, just add a couple extra days to their stay and maybe bring the family down and that sort of thing. And Chris and I both love Disney. Uh so that was the initial idea. These might, you know, expand to the Caribbean and that sort of thing. Um, probably what I'm doing even more often is three-hour workshops uh that could be in person here in St. Louis or remote. Uh, I did one for a Canadian agency uh just recently. They work with uh dental practices throughout Canada. So they're like a marketing operations agency working for dentists. Uh yeah, three-hour remote uh workshop for their entire team, probably very similar to the kind of training that you're doing. And it's always interesting, all the eyes that get opened up right during these trainings. When you walk through everything that AI can do as of this moment, yeah, not even talking about what's coming six months from now, but everything that you could do right now. And then you start to talk through how they're doing their day-to-day jobs and where AI can help them and save them time and free them up to focus on much more important, strategic, creative, lucrative tasks. That's fantastic.
SPEAKER_01So, what is the format like what are you what do you think somebody needs to learn in three hours that will help them start that transformation when you do these workshops?
SPEAKER_02I I start with spending like just 30 minutes or so, like a broad overview. Here's here's what AI is looking like today, here's what it can do. Like we talk about image generation, video, yeah, translation. I I touch on all these things. And then I spend the next hour and a half on prompt engineering. I spend the next hour and a half on how to talk to the large language models, how to prompt them. Um, I teach them a framework uh for good prompts that are kind of like training wheels, right? I mean, you and I probably aren't using a framework every single time we talk to the LM today. But for folks who this is where they're starting, well, let's use a framework so you understand. Yeah, I probably should give it a roll every time, right? And then we talk about memory, and then I get into custom instructions, which is my favorite, you know, being able to customize and personalize that AI. So that's, like I said, about an hour and a half, which gives us then about an hour to just workshop. Okay, here's what everything you learned. What ideas did it spark? What are you doing in your roles today? And we kind of go round Robin, uh, you know, everybody who's attending, what is their role? What are they trying to do on an everyday basis? What are some of those repetitive, mind-numbing tasks that they wish somebody could take off their plate? They hate doing them anyway. Yeah. Yep.
SPEAKER_01Um, are are you noticing when it comes time to them saying, okay, I feel comfortable, I'm gonna play with the tools a little bit during this workshop. Are you finding patterns in the types of activities that people are wanting to start with?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. My favorite thing to do, because it keeps coming up often and often, is training a strategist, like a co-pilot, that can sit alongside them, that understands not just their business and their audience, but their role and their goals. So, like I I think I'm I teased a moment ago, I have an AI chief of staff. That's my go-to strategist for my side hustle for the AI hat. And one of the things that my AI chief of staff and I determined together was that I need to focus on St. Louis businesses. And I put that back into the instructions. So it knows that. It knows my goals and strategy for this year. And it's funny how often that comes up. I do a weekly newsletter and I've been doing it for a long time. So I've got like 40,000 subscribers to my weekly newsletter. And these are people from all around the world, mostly marketing professionals, but all walks of life and so on. And I'll say, okay, it's sign for the weekly newsletter. I call it Clue, C L U from Tron. So Clue is my AI chief of staff, and I'll say, Hey, it's signed for our weekly newsletter, and we want to brainstorm some topics. And it immediately tries to focus on St. Louis businesses. And I have to actually reel it back at that point, be like, no, I want to do that, but 39,000 of my 40,000 subscribers are not from St. Louis, and they don't care. So we got to be a little more broader. Um, but it's still so good at understanding what I want to do and helping me stay on track and focused for what's going to actually move the needle for my business. And any individual in any business could have that kind of assistant, that strategist, whatever role they're in, that can help them answer questions, think long term. I mean, one of the things that I often got dinged on at uh my full-time job uh in my performance reviews was I was being told I wasn't thinking strategically and long-term enough. And there was usually pretty good reason for that. I was being pushed in different directions and I'm focused on day-to-day stuff. But okay, what if I had somebody sitting next to me who could help me think long term?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So you help them build these uh what custom GPTs or clawed projects or gems or something exactly right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we'll we'll do like a little mini workshop. If everyone kind of feels like that would be something really helpful to them, we'll do a you know a quick 15-minute workshop. I'll show them, you know, basically here are the things that we're gonna want to start with. You might not have a voice document or a brand style document. You can create that later and upload it. But for now, you need to give it a role. It needs to understand who you are and it's going, its role that it's going to serve in relation to you. Yeah. Give it your goals and objectives. You know, if you're a marketer, great. Tell it what channels that you're working on. You know, what are the social networks or the the you know, your email subscriber base or whatever it is, give it all that information and it will be such a huge help to you.
SPEAKER_01I like this a lot because most people, you know, in the day-to-day, they don't have the luxury to contemplate strategically. There's deadlines, there's soccer games that they got to rush off to, that sort of thing. And in my experience, without the assistance of AI, a strategic consideration is not something you're gonna do while you're you know waiting for the courage to make your coffee. It's it's gonna be like a sit-down, walk the dog, think about kind of thing. To be able to give any employee in the company the ability to have a partner that helped them think strategically, but it only took them asking a question or whatever, I think that's so much value to any company. If you could go into that company and say, hey, we're gonna do a little session, we're gonna do my three-hour session, school people, and then the outcome is gonna be they're gonna have their own AI knowledge partner, thought partner as um Jeff Woods calls it. As long as you got adoption and usage of that tool, which uh they built it, so they're no longer afraid to use it, that is massive impact. That's a great idea.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it it's like having that paid consultant for every single role in the company. But the difference is, unlike a paid consultant, your AI is not going to get impatient with you asking the same question, right? I mean, I I know, Chris, if you asked me to give you 10 blog post titles, I'd do it. But if you asked me to give you 10 more and then 10 more, because you didn't like the first 10, then you didn't like the second 10, I'm like, dude, Chris, come up with your own blog titles. You know, I'd be done with you. The AI doesn't have that, it's infinitely patient. And the beauty here also is you could start a chat while you're waiting for your Keurig to brew, then go back to what you were doing and come back to that chat later. I literally did that this morning. I was in the car after dropping off my youngest at school, which is only like a mile or two from my house. So it's a fairly like it's a five-minute car ride. But I had an idea on the drive home. So I opened up Gemini Voice, gave it my idea, and it it went on at length. I was at some point I found myself looking at the phone, like, are you still talking? Because it went on for a while. But the point was I gave it the idea, it came back with me response. It finished right about the time I was about to pull into my driveway. And at that point, now it's time for me to get out of the car and come to work. That chat's just sitting there now, waiting for me to come back to it later when I've got time.
SPEAKER_01And what I like about that is that it's on demand. If I'm doing something and boom, I get an idea, like I can immediately say, you know, how do I do this, or what should I do about this? Rather than having to find the expert or, oh, when I take a break, that's here's what I love about this stuff. You and I, we've both been doing it for a while. We've talked to a lot of people, we've really spent a lot of time thinking about how AI is impacting our own lives and businesses. But you come onto a podcast, and that that idea is not like it's not Einstein's theory of relativity, it's not a difficult concept, but I hadn't thought about the impact that that would that could have across an entire company if everybody just had. Somebody or some AI body that understood their role, had context on their industry, had context in their specific company, had context on you know the education I had or my experience or whatever. If every single employee had one of those on their phone, uh on the desktop, and could on demand clo like a stat that blew me away when I first started studying AI was that um knowledge workers spend 20% or more of their day looking for the knowledge to work with. Right? They have to go search for something, they have to go do research. But to be able to say, I wonder if I could do this, hey AI buddy, can I do this? Yeah, Chris, here's how it's done. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Like the friction that gets removed from just an overall process within a business is from a sent from something you can teach somebody in I mean, you don't need three hours, but in a three-hour session, you could transform somebody's performance incredibly. That's and for any of you listening, if you haven't done that, I hope you understand the concept. Do that. You can build it as a gem, you can build it as a project in Claude, you can build it as a custom GPT. Um, I mean you could just build it as a series of prompts, but that's not going to be as effective because the idea with the the the project or the the gem is that that conversation could be lasting for months. And it's only learning each time I have that breakthrough within that that gem or that that project. This is that's a gift right there. Thank you, but any more nuggets like that for me?
SPEAKER_02Um Well, I was just gonna say that that's that's a big part of why I like Gemini too, because so many of the businesses I work with, they're already using Google Workspace. So all their team members already have access to Gemini. They're not using it, but they have access to it, and we can fix that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And that's a whole nother issue. Like people aren't even aware that they show up at work, they log into their work account, whether it's with Microsoft or whether it's with Google, G Suite, and they don't even know that hey, if I spent 15 minutes, I could really be getting some power out of this stuff. So adoption, I guess, is that's for another episode. Right? So Mike, I always like to ask of the things that are happening, the developments with Deep Seat coming out and talk about GPT-5 and all that kind of stuff, are there any particular news threads um that you're uh curious to see how they play out? Like just this morning, you mentioned we've we've talked about Paul and and his podcast a number of times, but the episode was about hints from Sam Altman indicating that GPT-5 was it's ready. It just hasn't been released. Um what does that look like? I don't know, but uh are there any particular directions on this broad spectrum of generative AI and its developments that have you particularly interested?
SPEAKER_02I would say my interest is more as a historian. So, folks who who you know don't know me, I actually went to school for history and computer science. I was supposed to be a computer science major, but I hate math. And so that only got me so far that I realized I need to switch my majors around. So I graduated with a degree in history and a minor in computer science, which allows me to kind of take a step back and understand where the stories are going. It helps me understand which problems need to be solved. And then the computer science part is actually solving problems. And I use that to great effect throughout the past 10 years when it comes to social networks. I was saying for years, folks, don't worry so much about which particular social network because eventually they're all gonna have live video, they're all gonna have communities, they're all gonna have short-form video. And sure enough, they pretty much all have those kinds of individual features become ubiquitous because there's a business behind each social network, and they want their business, their network, to be interesting to everybody. And it's the same thing with the large language models OpenAI, Google, Meta, X, they all want their large language model to be everybody's preferred large language model, which means when somebody comes out with a feature that's really, really interesting and powerful, you know the other ones are going to follow suit. So, what I find interesting is when we have a really cool feature like Operator, uh, you know, Claude had their own kind of dumbed down version even for before that. I know Google's coming out with that. I know it. I'm not worried about it. Uh, I'm I'm not gonna panic and shift my entire operation to a different LM because of one feature. I'm just gonna be patient. You know, if I wasn't so embedded in in Gemini, if I if I was a chat GPT guy looking at notebook LM, I'd be like, well, I can wait.
SPEAKER_01Fingers crossed LM soon enough.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you know, because it's it's just so popular to have that basically at your fingertips, rag platform, yeah, it'll come. Um in fact, you know, there's ways that you could actually build that yourself right now with in in Chat GPT if you really, really wanted to. So that's kind of my perspective. I I love to see the innovation, I love to see the new features, I love to see uh you know new models coming out, whether it's new versions of the existing models or new models like DeepSeek. You know, I I didn't get freaked out uh when DeepSeek came out like a lot of folks did, because it's competition. And you know, again, that historian in me looks says competition is a very, very good thing for the consumers.
SPEAKER_01So I think that's a great perspective for everybody in that the one of the number one concerns with when I work with business people is which tools do I use? And that's pretty much my response as well. It's like, look, pick one that you like working with. Uh well, this one's got that. Don't worry, this one will too. Like it's just a matter of time. So for anybody listening, um, if like tool overwhelm is an issue that you deal with, find one, uh spend 15 minutes and you'll probably figure out how to use it. And at this at that stage of like your usage anyway, who cares what other function you still got the basics to figure out, right? Like, don't worry about the bells and whistles. Um it's fantastic. I'm like, I'm still uh uh stunned by how the simplicity, but the impact of that co-pilot concept. And it's not just like that I you I have something similar, blah, blah, blah. But teaching somebody if that was their first project that you had them get hands-on with it, that will like you you can show them, hey, I'm gonna type something in, and now there's a picture. Well, that's cool, but I gotta go back to work, right? Right, exactly.
SPEAKER_02I can say that's exactly how I felt when Mid-Journey came out three years ago. I was like, okay, whatever.
SPEAKER_01Interesting novelty, but no application to my life. But to help somebody, if that was their first breakthrough, I think that is an like a an accelerated path towards thinking in AI. They're like, oh damn, what else can I do? So thank you for sharing that, Mike. Um, I I'm interested in AI hat. So what what can you tell us about what you're doing there with that?
SPEAKER_02So with the AI hat, um, it's mostly from a from a uh like an outside resources perspective, it's mostly about the podcast. I've got articles there, uh, but uh I got so far ahead in recording podcast episodes. Like I don't even think yours has dropped yet. I think that's still coming. Um I'm now publishing two a week. Um so I'm not creating any additional content there because that's that's a lot of content to put out. Um and even then, I've still I've I've recorded to the point where, again, we're recording this in February. I'm already recorded out until April. Um and with as fast as things change with AI, even though we don't talk about AI developments and news on my show, I still feel like I need to get that out. So that's the focus from a content perspective. Um, and then of course, my my long-term focus is helping local, mostly local St. Louis businesses. Obviously, I work remotely for anybody, but I want to do these workshops and help them unlock what you've unlocked today, the capability to use AI internally to really level up the business.
SPEAKER_01Well, for anybody listening that wanted to do one of those three hours, how do they find out more about plugging into that for their company?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so go to theaihat.com. There's a big button at the top that says AI training. Uh, and there's a lot of documentation there. There's uh feedback that you can see that I've gotten from past students. You can learn more about the curriculum. Uh typically, like I said, it's about a half an hour. What is AI today? An hour and a half on prompting, and then an hour of just bespoke workshop time. But I can customize that. I've got some other modules I can plug in. So we'll do like a you know 15, 20 minute discovery call and learn, okay, what does your business actually need today? Maybe you guys already have a good hand on what AI can do. We don't need to do the whole AI bit at the beginning and we can just jump right into prompting. Whatever that is, we'll figure that out.
SPEAKER_01So for anybody listening, if if this is a topic that's been happening at work and you don't have an answer, I think something exactly like what Mike is talking about with his three-hour session, if your people could understand it and no longer be scared of it, then they can learn how to actually talk to the models in an effective way through the prompting training and then put that into practice by building their own co-pilot. Whatever he's charging, you would see an ROI, especially if you got adoption and people are using those things within a week. Like instantly people would be, and here's what I know morale will go up because they're able to get answers to like the things that are frustrating them and their role. Uh productivity, uh, all the studies show obviously that that's the case. But again, that such a simple solution, but so profound. Well, Mike, I'm glad that we finally got on. I wish this conversation would have happened sooner. I would have been noodling on this a little bit longer. But um, so I'm gonna put all of this in the show notes, obviously. And uh we're not booked out till April, so your episode will be coming out probably pretty soon. Um I'm like, I got all these plates spinning. I'm like, oh, this, you know, I'm running here. Everything we do is almost just in time, I guess. But um I I'm excited to see what you do with the AI hat. I'm uh excited to start listening to more of those episodes as well. And if there's ever obviously a chance for our two ecosystems to collaborate, I think the way that you're approaching things is very much in line, aligned, in line with um like uh our position and our approach on look, you don't need to know how a neural network works, you don't need to know, you know, understand deep learning, you need to understand the kind of stuff that Mike shared on this podcast. So um without any, I guess any closing remarks, any last bit of advice for those listening? Last bit of advice.
SPEAKER_02I would say if you aren't already using an LLM, like you said, pick one. If you are, that's great. If you're thinking about what else AI could do for your business, take a look at the other tools that you're already using. Like maybe you're already using HubSpot or Salesforce. Well, they've got some fantastic AI capabilities that you probably aren't using to the fullest. So if you're in a Google workspace environment and you guys are using Salesforce, those are two great AI solutions that you're already paying for. You just need to learn how to use them a little bit more and go explore some videos and some interviews to see what are some specific uses. Like I'm not a Salesforce guy, so I couldn't tell you how to use Salesforce and how their AI, I just I'm familiar enough with it to know because they've been talking about it non-stop for the last year, how much they've infused AI in their in their tools. Einstein. So go consume some content and figure it out. Uh, like a podcast, maybe. Yeah, like a podcast. Awesome. Go back and listen to some of Chris's older episodes. I know he's covered this.
SPEAKER_01I'm excited to catch up on those. So uh thank you so much for taking the time um and being flexible and getting this scheduled. This was uh exactly what I was hoping it would be. So, all right, everybody, we'll see you on the next episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you've got friends who could benefit from this, please forward it to them. Uh, if you like what you heard, um, we always love the feedback. A review wouldn't hurt either. But um, thanks for listening, everybody. Talk soon.
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