This episode is brought to you by ChiefAIOfficer.com. Most companies know AI can slash costs and free up teams, but they get stuck on the first step. ChiefAIOfficer.com can identify your highest value use cases, train your people, and build the workflows that do the work for you. Book your free private 15-minute executive briefing by going to ChiefAIOfficer.com and scheduling a call. You'll leave with a clear, no-jargon roadmap for your goals. Now, enjoy the show. And a quick note before we start this episode. Starting August 29th through October 29th, we're actually taking our AI executive immersion on the road. This is a free, half-day, in-person, no fluff workshop for executives of lower middle market and above-sized companies. You'll leave with a 90-day plan, a simple AI policy and guardrails, and a personal AI stack that gives you hours back every week. If you'd like to bring your executive team at no cost, go to chiefaiofficer.com forward slash roadshow to see the dates and locations where we'll be. Seats are limited to keep it hands-on. Hopefully, this is an opportunity for us to meet in person and for you to learn exactly how we're teaching busy executives to take advantage of AI and their role and across their companies. Now, let's start the episode. Welcome 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. My name is Chris Dagle. I'm the uh host of the podcast. And today we have as a guest Peter Swim, and we'll be talking about Peter and his company Toilville and very interesting topics that we just discussed in the flu conversation. So Peter, before we get started, if you don't mind, kind of share a little bit of background about what the journey's been like to get you here today.
SPEAKER_00Sure. Um I've been in tech for 25 years, and that's a very circuitous path. Like I've worked in data centers, I've worked for customer service, I work for uh Fortune 500 companies and Fortune 5 companies and uh total five companies, people companies. And um the one connected thread in all that is really this concept of conversational AI. You know, like I'm constantly in my career been looking at ways to use computers to work uh smarter, not harder, and you know, avoid anti-grindset kind of like tech, you know, traps and like making smart choices, and and uh so it's very interesting time to be who I am, where I am now. Um, you know, I worked at co-pile uh Microsoft uh on their co-pilot products, helping design uh tooling for people used to like talking to chatbots and building applications, and LMs are like a whole new different animal. And I slowly start to realize that people don't have access to my experience organizationally, let alone in the industry. And so that's why I started a consultancy called Toyoville. And what we do at Toyoville is we help people on board, especially um medium and small businesses um who don't have uh the huge army they need to be successful as their dreams, and and they're leveraging these technologies to work smarter and faster and harder, and and also keeping that level of quality up and not like you know falling victims to all the headlines about you know filing legal briefs with Garfield in it or whatever, you know.
SPEAKER_01So, Peter, you mentioned conversational AI for the audience who may not be familiar with that term. How would you describe that?
SPEAKER_00Well, um, when I describe it, people are gonna always start to make a face because it's like when I call the bank and it doesn't want to push buttons, it wants me to explain my problems. And I think for a long time it's been very bad, right? Because it's like they tested in studios with people who speak California English, and you know, it doesn't handle people from other, you know, it doesn't help you when you're on your cell phone on the subway. And um, but in the last four or five years, because of companies like OpenAI and and Google and uh other unicorns out of the valley, the AI technology has gotten sophisticated enough that it's almost good. And being almost good after being awfully bad for so long is such a huge, like disruptive thing in the industry that people are making all kinds of wild pivots, and people who are rely on these products to do their work are kind of stuck in a quandary where they're like, Well, I I was just focusing on work, and now there's like a chatbot in Word, and how do I use it, and how can I leverage this? And they want me to pay 30 bucks extra per person for it, you know. Why should I do that?
SPEAKER_01So I I agree with you. Um, on the conversational side, it's it's an area of AI like like voice interaction with human and AI. That's something that once that becomes very good, I think it's gonna be a big unlock for a lot of uh businesses in the support side, certainly, but definitely on the sales side. So when you say it's it's not good, how far out do you think we are before conversational AI is indiscernible from a human interaction?
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, you see what people are tricked into believing are real online every day. So I hesitate to say like Turing test kind of things. Yeah. Um, for me, very good is something I would like let my daughter, who's 11 years old, talk to. Yeah. And so I don't I don't let her talk to any of these things, any you know, technologies online, because uh you need to develop a social sense to guide and shape them because it's very um reality disrupting in a way that is like harmful, especially to growing people. I think what is more likely to happen is what our sense of what good is will shift to be more aligned with what they're good at, right? And so like last week I did an experiment. Um, I did nothing but voice chat for a week, my whole business. And uh it was wild and painful and scary until I realized a certain way to do it, and then I shifted, I downshifted my expectations, and it was more like um, you know, I'm hanging out with a friend and I'm like co-working with them, and I just said, Hey, can you make this part better? And it's like uh try that. And it was just kind of like a revelation to me because I think people say, like, write me the grapes of wrap, you know, or they, you know, they like give they want to give these prompts, and you know, California's going crazy over investing in companies that claim to do that. But I think the value is is read this paragraph and tell me if it makes this point effectively, right? Or like, does this code operate the job it's supposed to do as effectively as it can, knowing that the real work happens in these other parts of code, so you don't have to work that hard. And like these kind of like, you know, as a person who's been a product leader, like to be able to kind of like just walk through scenarios before doing them and saving that time to kind of like you know, the whole like methodical pace of how LMs have to work well is uh you know, is planning and plotting, and you know, anyone who's like you know told a loved one to do a chore, you know, like telling your kid to clean his room or whatever, and if you don't, you know, they'll lawyer the way out of things, and these LMs will lawyer their way out of things just because they don't know logic or anything. You know, they're just like a pachinto machine based on like cleaning your room goes down these four steps. And yeah, if you're if your delivery requires those four steps, you're in business, and if not, you're in pain, right? So um, once I had that kind of like conception locked in, I came up with a startup idea in like two days, and uh I have an entire API mapped out, and I have my research plan, and and now I have all these things that like were all my ideas, you know. I know but they were like structured in a way very, very quickly that I can see the whole of it and like see like is this a good idea or a bad idea? And I think that's what's is the takeaway for AI is not gonna make like it's not gonna do your work for you, you know, it's not gonna do your homework for you. It's going to like allow you to do things like whiteboarding and like plotting out your novel and you know, like uh lose those 15 pounds, and you know, like and do to the way that is um agnostic of the tools, right? Because everyone's everyone wants a life hack, right? And you like, okay, my email's in Word, and blah blah blah. And this is now unlocks a possibility where you're like, hey, if I wanted to have one website that had my email and my text messages and my LinkedIn post, and uh you only showed me the ones that were good, and this is what it means to be good, and it's like, oh, okay, apps are dead, right? Like, because the whole concept of application is building a better mousetrap, but everyone wants their mousetrap. And having that kind of like ability on your desktop, I think is gonna be extremely disruptive for a lot of companies whose job is like experience for a little bit, and then they're gonna figure out, oh, I can now make a playbook, you know, like you know, just like uh watching those shows where they flip houses, you get ideas to do stuff. So people who are smart system thinkers are now going to be thought leaders and maybe selling the the prompt template and all those other fun things. And the people who are good at you know doing the research and putting together the bits and pieces are gonna be able to like find parts of the process that are repeatable and make it modular and just you know build it like we did last time, except for this chunk, which is the new requirement. And then, you know, you can do five projects at once now because you don't have to like yeah, um, you don't have to like figure out like the how and the why of the how and the why, you know, and I think that it, you know, as as a culture, we're still kind of wrapping our heads around that.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, there's definitely this kind of like stretch between the old way of thinking and then doing what we call think in AI, where you kind of ethanol concept of cyborg, right? Like where it's it's not like oh, I'm gonna go do I do AI later. It's like it's just something that happens. So this experiment that you did, I'm particularly interested in that because uh one of the things we do is is we train and certify non-technical business professionals to be an AI expert in their company, right? And part of that is it's a capstone project, it's a deep dive into a particular use case that they can apply in their business. And yes, they learn stuff from from you know uh putting together the final product, but the the when I interview people for their um certification, the real aha for everybody was I spent three days in one thread. Right, like they went really down, they weren't like skipping around ADDing and Chat GPT, they were going so deep in it that it was opening, it was pushing their their cognitive capabilities because they had to think of new questions, right? Um and that experiment that you did with only using voice AI for a week is very similar. Like you want to get good at using AI, use AI. You want to get good at conversational AI with what'd you use, Chat GPT?
SPEAKER_00Um, I used everyone and I landed and I landed on clawed code. Okay. Um, and this is for ideation or uh no, I I am building product and platform, and and the reason I'm building product and platform is because I had to, because there's no off-the-shelf thing to do the way I work. And and I think that's like, and maybe that's because I'm like, you know, I am a product person and a tech person, so I'm at the intersection of two Venn diagrams of distinctions. But like the thing that really clicked for me that where it stopped being frustrating was being able to see a little counsel on the side, how it was reasoning, and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, and be able to hit escape and like no, no, no, no. You when this happens, you do that, right? And then at the end of the conversation, I had it review the conversations like what did we learn, hey children, and became a list of what we learned, and we're like, oh, I got confused when this happened, this one, and I didn't know the environment. So, like, okay, now I have to build state. And so I go back because I built chatbots for you know for 20 years. I'm like, okay, I know how to build a state engine, I know it's a website. So now I the first two days I was building uh secretary to take the minutes of my conversation with the pot. And every time we had a new idea that was used more than once, it went into a big hopper and then became a script. And so, like, now I have a concept of like uh I call them rubrics and ruses, right? A rubric is is our process how we do it. Our ruse is what we do because the rubric sucks for this scenario, and I have to duct tape something together, right?
SPEAKER_01Like an edge case or variation.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but every edge case tells us something about the inflexibility of our rubric, right? So at the end of the project, I can look at all the ruses and say, oh, these three ruses wouldn't have had happened if this one feature was prioritized on my roadmap. And I think like that, that was like the like my work has now become my research vertical, right? Because every every day, you know, I think like especially people in tech, like uh you get used to, oh, I snooze a notification every time it's this guy, right? Or I snooze when I'm in a meeting and this happens and I don't come back to it because my brain is constantly being inundated by stuff. But now I control the flow of information and I have a schedule, and every time I get to the end of the task, I can say what's next, and it'll tell me what the next most important thing is, but also it has checked all my email, it has checked my voicemail, it has makes sure my wife's not trying to get a hold of me. Things that like, okay, this is George Jetson boss level stuff, and like, okay, I need to drop what I'm doing to do that. And now I don't have to do scroll, right? Now I don't have to like check my phone every five minutes because I know the system is watching and it I know I'm gonna take my lunch at 11, and I know I'm gonna take my walk at one o'clock because the system is instructed to shut down unless there's a fire, right? Like, and so like all of a sudden, like all the metrics of what makes successful things is clearly upended, right? Because now I'm in control, you know, I'm in control of my notifications and my lifestyle, and I'm not like pulled eight ways from Sunday, and which is essential because as a small business owner, my uh ability to pivot on a dime is my competitive advantage against 500 pound gorillas.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. So um after that experience, and and just for clarity for myself and for the listeners, you built this simply by speaking back and forth to AI for a week. There wasn't okay. Tell me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I I I did not I did not push, I did not type I tell I typed yes. Yeah, I typed and I typed like so you know, I I basically ended up typing uh a spec, but like all my specs were very Socratic, right? Like I was just like, uh what if we did this? Would this make this easier for you to do? What are the I gave you a list of requirements, um please re analyze them and see if I made it too complicated, right? Or if I introduce extra steps um and there's other ways to solve it, like use an MPM library, right? Or you know what I mean? And um the first like three days the thing made 3,000 scripts. Wow. And uh and that was until I invented my um my sifting thing, yeah, where uh you know, where like it will codify a script as a tool if it's useful, right? And so uh of those 3,000 scripts, there was 200 unique ones, right? And now it's 12 tools that have five functions, right? And so like now my little bot has like a little like toolbox that when I say good morning, it knows to check the mail and put on the coffee and you know, pull in all my notifications and pull the list of things I didn't do yesterday and then analyze it and see if that list is still relevant today. Um and it's like and it's completely agnostic except for uh using Claude API. Claud code. And uh and you and you can do this with the the hundred dollar a month account.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's incredible the the price of the access.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's well I I I so I did this, I I did this uh study of um so the they they have the consumer API and the market rate API, right? And so I put on market rate API and I did $150 in one day. You were cooking. Yeah. So so that hundred dollar thing is a trick and a lie, right? Yeah. Yeah. Someone's paying the bill and it's not, it's probably your data and all that. So, like, that's why uh next week we're gonna start playing with local models because they've been selling us co-pilot PCs and Apple Intelligence machines, and guess what? They can run models locally now that are getting pretty good, right? Um, Apple's gonna announce uh Apple Intelligence APIs that you can use in Xcode, so you can use the M4 processor with 32 gigs of RAM, which is not expensive. Yeah, you know, like you know, uh I I have that's what I'm talking to you right now. I bought it yesterday, um, and I did the benchmarks, and it's acceptable for probably 99% of the population to do work today. And you know, the only people that are gonna probably like scoff at this are like you know, like you said, data scientists or multimedia people or people trying to like, you know, uh prompt generate Casablanca or whatever, you know.
SPEAKER_01So yeah. So what model do you think you'll be running locally?
SPEAKER_00You know, I am benchmarking, I you know, it's like this whole like the her first five days were totally like reactive research, right? Like just like uh this thing is just like ChatGPT is a horrible writer. A horrible writer. Like I can't, you know, I can't stand it. Um even using the API it was bad. Um that's why I stuck with anthropic because it was the most it was a r I was able to say, okay, so the thing I used before was Notion, right? Yeah. And I was able to put Claude at Notion and to analyze my writing style and tone and make a template that runs every time it goes to write something, and then use all the same idiosyncrasies that I write. So when I write the draft, there's less for me to fix. Yeah. Right. And like, and I think that the relevation for me was oh, this is why m Microsoft Copilot and Apple Siri are having such a hard time, because they're trying to make uh take a general model and put a general thing on it that works for 99% of the population completely impossible unless you give it every single bit of your life, right? And I think like that's a non-starter for a lot of people, right? Like I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna upload my digital ID to to the Microsoft and the Googles of the world because they don't have a great track record, right? Yeah. And and I think then, you know, the then it comes down to is like, oh, okay, so we're just gonna carry supercomputers in our pocket, and we're gonna need a firewall type system to decide, okay, to answer this question, uh turbotax agent, you're gonna need uh 36 bits of information and you're not gonna get a single bit more, you son of a bitch. You know? Yeah. And it's just like cool. So and there's no BC in the world that's gonna fund that company, right? Because uh because we're talking about like a social contract. We're talking, you know, we're talking, we're talking, we're talking about like uh imagine if cookies were made for people, right? Yeah, and so and not for Madison Valley, you know, Madison Avenue and all that. So um so I'm I'm building that. That's what I'm building on my computer.
SPEAKER_01So um, you know you'll run it on this laptop, you'll be able to do your custom LLM.
SPEAKER_00On this laptop. Um, and and because the dirty secret about most apps, like in the app store and all that, everything is just the same thing underneath, right? Because they're all just websites or you know, like Slack is just a web browser and Teams is just a web browser, and it's just like you know, like there's all these things that they did to make the user story possible that I have access to too, right? Like I, you know, I can go to Trilio and I can get a phone line and a video stream. And um, the only thing is like I'm not a uh enterprise-level systems engineer. So I write my story, I have it generate the code of of the hello world, and then I take the code and I run it through research phase and I do go through the same thing as I did in corporate world, where okay, I'm gonna have a legal review, I'm gonna have a security review, I'm gonna have a technology stack review, I'm gonna have an ethics review, I'm gonna and I just run it through all these filters and and when it gets to the point where it makes sense to me, you know, then I will release it, you know.
SPEAKER_01So I hope you're enjoying the episode. Did you know that while you're listening to this, competitors are already boosting EBITDA with generative AI? If you're still stuck in pilot mode, margin and market share are leaking every quarter. CheapAIOfficer.com guides executive teams through the three moves they need to be doing. Identifying the top AI plays that will lift revenue or slash costs within 90 days, de-risk adoption with team training, airtight governance, and change management best practice, and then building and deploying production grade AI-powered tools. No extra headcount, full ROI tracking. The results? Operators at Scale Generative AI cut process costs 22% last year. Let's talk. Claim your free, private, 15-minute executive briefing by going to chiefAIOfficer.com and walk away with a board-ready roadmap. Slots fill fast, so lock yours in. Now, enjoy the rest of the episode. So will this this will be something that you plan on introducing commercially to others?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I yeah. I I think like I think the future is open sharing, right? Because the internet, the internet was built on open data, it was built on open source libraries, and so and the value is not being the pioneer that planted a flag on the beach, right? The the value is being a systems thinker that can understand what a person is trying to do. So like I started on customer service at tech support when I was 16 years old. Yeah, uh, Bill Gates gave the the Chicago Public Library a couple million dollars and they hired a bunch of teens to teach people how to use the internet. And I learned then that people didn't want to use the internet, they wanted to look up baseball scores, right? They wanted to like find out what's going on in their hometown. And like, so the desire to do a thing is not like, and I think tech people have completely forgotten this, is that people use tech not because they like tech, is because they want to solve a problem quicker, right? And if we come to a point where the reason you went to Google for the first time can make an app for you, you know, like um, and I found myself asking questions that were like, you know, search foo, but with my end state in mind. So now I I don't have to do search foo for prompting. I could just write, like, I really need to find a plumber to fix my car. Here's what's going on, right? And then I tell the story and I tell them where I am, and I tell them, you know, I so like all the things you you would spend an hour looking around on Google, you could just plan out your list of requirements and have it scour, right? And that's so much that's so much better than clicking through a bunch of pop-ups and finding things, and and I think that is like the it's probably the end of apps, right? You know, it's probably like because no longer, and now when I say the end of apps, I mean like right, like Slack versus Teams, and you know, an Xbox versus PlayStation, and like the it's immaterial, right? Uh what if I could take the video quality from Teams and stick it into the GUI from Slack and then attach it to my Salesforce in a way that had all the features I needed and none of the things I wanted, right? And I think that is probably more aligned with the future. So we're not going to build Salesforce type management platforms. Yeah, we're gonna build a single tool that can talk to services and vendors and my data, which I own and never give out unless it's a suitable business reason. And and we're gonna have to figure out some way to monetize that so people have a living and be able to keep doing it and stuff.
SPEAKER_01So yeah. So you're suggesting that what the future of apps looks like is oh, I hate doing this. Hey, wait a minute. Hey, Claude, I can you build something that does XYZ and then uh blah blah blah, and it might ask for an API key or something like that. But once you do that, it's like, sure, here you go. And now I've got an app that I just built for me, maybe somebody else in the office, but maybe nobody else uses it.
SPEAKER_00Well, like, like, have you looked? Do you know what all the buttons in Excel do? No. Right? Like, there's all these things that Excel can do that's like someone someone spent six months building that button. Yeah, right. Like someone, you know, someone spent a good part of their life building that button, and there's probably millions of people who use that button every day, but I could I don't I couldn't tell you. Yeah, yeah. And like, so like so then like what it wouldn't it be great if I could talk to Excel co-pilot and like I could just tell remove all your buttons and only add them when we need them. Wow. Yeah, you know, and I think like that's where like the critical error that Microsoft and all those people are making is they don't understand how now the cut one, the customization and lowering the the 100,000 option problem all that makes the LM smarter, right? Because now the LM is making five decisions at a turn or two decisions at a turn versus like picking from a toolbox and doing all this stuff, and and they're never and I think like you have to completely rebuild all these products from the beginning to do what you want. So like I work with uh like I mentioned I we use Notion because I I have a great PMO who does Notion and she is a ninja at Notion, and I have engineers who work in GitHub, right? Yeah, and and then you know, small manager, I'm like, well, now I gotta buy everyone a seat in in Notion and GitHub. And now I don't because I have a transformation layer on my desktop and people just work where they work. And so, you know, when my PMO creates a project, it puts a project in my in my planning file, and then it creates the GitHub repo and assigns the tickets to the person, and and then people just work how they work, right? However they want to work. And and that was kind of the realization me. Um, I started making schemas like for people. So, like uh so my employees have like a little profile of like when you log into machine and put on the repo, it'll set up the repo how you like it, right? Because now it doesn't matter that they like to do certain things and whatever, because when I commit it, I run another script to formalize it or in the output style. And this is kind of like how people should work, right? I can hire someone who speaks a language I don't even speak. Yeah, I could I can hire people who you know, like I have a lot of uh friends and family that are like in economic dire straits and they're the smartest people I ever met. And the feature is gonna be rewarding people who are better being street smart than book smart because in the system, having that kind of like intuitiveness and reactivity, it I the f like the first three days were bad of my experiment. The next three days was like playing SimCity, right? And and then you know, the fourth or fifth day, I was doing my business again. Like I was actually like where I I wasn't aware of the thing, and I was able to like, you know, it's like, oh, I've been, you know, once I like hooked in the ability to like keep an eye on the prize system and the ability to not make 3,000 scripts, I was like, okay. And like there's no way, you know, I've been working with Office Tools for years, and I've been working for I'm an Apple person, and nothing in the last like six years of of tech is maybe as excited about it as I am now, because you know, I have a four-month plan where I can realistically fire all my SaaS subscriptions, yeah, just get API access to the services, and uh I can pay go what I use and and not what I use because um the the service quality is still there, but you know, like there's all kinds of features in these products that I have no use for, right?
SPEAKER_01You know, like like if there's so many people regardless, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, I've worked I've worked for companies that have both Teams and Slack, and they have like you know, Zoom and this, and it's like why are we, you know, why are we adding Zoom meetings to team calendar invites? And yeah, and it's just like because and it's because the person who's in charge of buying the video thing like that better, and it's just like you know, and it's too expensive to build a just for us system, and so like everyone's come up with solutions to do that, right? Like Salesforce has the everything platform, and yeah, you know, if if this or that, you know, has like little connectors and all that, it's just like it's so trivial now to create connectors to do things. Like um, I built the notion to my desktop to Slack synchronization tool in four hours. Yeah. So now, like when my PMO changes the name of the project because of rebranding, it flickers through the system, right? And then every time I write code, uh there is like a mission statement of the project in there. So like I don't make 3,000 scripts, right? And it knows what tools it has and all that, and it's just like, okay, cool. This is like a viable business, and I'm no longer getting throttled by clawed code every two hours because I'm able to like slowly prompt less and less and have it just run a script and wait for things to happen, right? So um, and I so I think like there's a really strong possibility that a person could download an app and pay Claude $100 a month for like five or six months and then switch back to API access or whatever, and uh, you know, just use it as any it's like installing solar panels in your house, you know, like it's just like a thing that smart people do and instantly get ROI and and it's flexible to the point where their values make them do it, right? So like, you know, you don't want to work on Microsoft because you think they stink, you don't have to work with Microsoft, right? Uh you can you can you you can now like build the the buffer layer between you and your ethics of like thinking Google's gone evil or you know open it, you know, open you know, Sam Altman and doesn't know what he's talking about or whatever. Cool. Uh you pay Sam Altman for six months, you never have to talk to him again. Yeah, you know, like and and eventually people are gonna give playbooks to start off with zero API uh LMs. You know, like the you don't need to write code for everything, right? Like there's like, you know, I just want to journal, you know, or I just want to do this or that with my life. And like, okay, well we'll just structure as much as that stuff you need, and you know, you go buy a computer and it'll come with most of everything you need, and we'll like just wrap on top of it, right? We'll just use Apple Mail and Apple Calendar and give you the interface on that you want because email is a solved problem, right? Like it's like except the only thing that isn't solved is the ability for someone to ruin my day with bad email. And uh, and I think like once we figure out that kind of like really personal, intimate uh engagement with technology problem, uh you won't have to buy a computer ever again either, right? Because it just works, right? You don't have to upgrade because unless there's a good reason for you to upgrade because your tooling works, you know. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, Peter, let's shift gears a little bit about your experience oilville. Um uh when when your founder is your role, when did you start the business?
SPEAKER_00I I we're still uh wet behind the ears. We we started last November. It's funny because I I left Microsoft, and the day I left Microsoft, uh Satina Delly gave himself a $40 million raise. And uh I was just like, okay, that's how it's gonna be. You know, like I it was just kind of like, okay, I I I need to help people, right? Because it's like good for you. I don't I don't think I don't think tech is gonna help people through to the end of this journey like they should. And you know, I've seen a lot of a lot of opportunity where people were like being misled or making, you know, bets that um they shouldn't have to make, you know, and uh and people who know their business, right? You know, they're you know, there's all kinds of people like you know, plumbers and doctors and lawyers, and there are people who are like they want to have a savvy business, they don't want to make unicorn money, and they they just have to do life and stuff. And I think there's really lost connection with those kinds of people uh for the people who make these pools.
SPEAKER_01So you know that's interesting because there's certainly concerns at all strata of the business about how is AI going to impact my workforce? Like, if I got this agent that can do this, do I really need five people in that department? Do I need one person? Do I need anybody in that department, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So that's a a different perspective, and I like it. Let me ask how your experience, you mentioned your team. Is your team much leaner than it it would be without AI? Obvious question.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yeah. Um, you know, like I I have uh uh my senior developer and I have uh a PMO and I have me and I have a designer who helps design the images on your website. Um, but all these people are contractual. Like I've not I would love to give them like money to like mess around and play with me all day. Yeah. And we're not we're not there yet, right? Yeah. And um, and I think the thing is though, um I can take their eight hours a week or 12 hours a week that they give me, and I can make it stretch. I can like, you know, get engagements going. And now we're able to take on like multiple contracts in them. So it changes the game, right? You're not looking for like the big fish, you know. You're you're you're more like, you know, a realtor, you know, or you're more like a barber, you know, like where you know you build up your clientele and and maybe you serve them multiple times and you create content you can reuse and and like do in different ways. And it's just like it just feels more natural of a business for me than anything I've done in tech, right? Because uh, you know, I I've been through what four tech meltdowns and three recessions, and you know, and it's just like you know, my entire adult life, the wolf has been at the door, and now I can just like oh okay, I have a meeting today in an hour, so I'm just gonna talk and play and uh do things and like hang out with my daughter, and you know, like all these things become like a di whole different lifestyle. And you know, we're we're we're reading about you know the six six nines of the world, people and you know, and you gotta be a 10x engineer. And yeah, and if you can't get if you can't get this work done in 40 hours a week, you're what are you doing, right? Because I think, yeah, it's like exposing a lot of these lies about like crunch and um planning and all that, because now like every day I'm I'm doing research, you know, all the work I do is research now, so I don't have to like plan the research study around my work. I can like capture insights about my work and change things every single day. And uh, you know, and if people don't like it at my company, they can stay on the old version of the work, right? Because my tool now my now my tooling will just like auto-convert on the fly. So like, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna work with people who love Outlook, right? Or I'm gonna work with people who love this or that, or and that is fine now, right? Because I'm hiring them not for like the style of clothes they wear, the way they cut their hair, you know, I like the I like the meet between the the ears, right? And and I think that changes a lot of like the way you do things. Like, you know, you know, I I talked to my uh uh contractor and he's like, okay, well, I only have two hours left this week. I'm like, you did the work I need you to do this week, so either you can play with this stuff or you can go home, like yeah, you know, like I'm not, you know, I don't want to pay people by the hour, right? I don't want to like I want to pay people enough time to like do all the work I need done in the month. And if you do it at three in the morning or you do it in Singapore or whatever, like who cares, right? Because it's like I like the work that comes out of you and and all that. And I think that is like an amazing shift in paradigm where you know, like you're not, you know, everyone has work life and personal life and all that, and now it really can be like taking you to two, right? You know, and and I think a lot of people are super uncomfortable with that, especially like a sea level up, right? Because they don't understand it doesn't equate their computer. And they they've had you know AI agents for years, it's called the sm smartest 25 people on the planet working under you. Yeah, you know, you know, and like if you gave there's probably millions of Americans that if you gave them the intelligence and data that like uh Simdor from Google has every morning or Mark Zuckerberg's have every morning, they'll be 10 times more successful than those people, right? Because the intuitiveness to put you know two pennies together is not rare. Yeah. And having access to machinery is so and you know, I think this is a really like I've you know I was very skeptical of AI for many years, and you know, I've kind of like aha moment has flicked in my brain since I started consultancy where it's just like, okay, you know, all technology, you know, and you can say this, you know, about ethics and stuff, you know, like guns don't kill people, people kill people, but it's kind of true, it's a force multiplier of the human experience, right? And you know, if you build your your life, you know, I s you know, while you wasted time watching movies, I studied the blade, right? And and you know, if you live righteously and do things right, you can give yourself access to the tools and you can have your cake you need it too, and not have to like put on a tie and go to downtown Seattle every day. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So tell me about the types of clients, like what's the the customer profile that you're servicing?
SPEAKER_00Um, I've been working a lot with um, you know, the ever every vertical really, you know, like healthcare, small businesses. Um, a lot of companies, uh especially since um COVID, have switched to like remote models, and that changes that has changed their whole approach to like teamwork and team building, and it's made tools like Teams and Slack super important. But also they they don't, you know, they don't know what half the buttons do, and they don't know how to do the things they want to do. And like right now, I'm working with IT company, uh, IT team inside a large healthcare company, and their executives come every day, it's like, hey, I need this data and this report in this format, and they pay $30 a month for copilot, and they can do that, but they don't know how to start because Microsoft doesn't uh you know, they they won't bring they'll bring the horse to the water, but they don't necessarily tell them all the tricks and the tips and all that. And so, like, you know, I'm just going through their program and like telling them like, oh yeah, you don't need to pay for these four different products, you're just doing this product and and do the thing you want to do with a prompt, right? And it's just kind of like oh, like Ottomans Razor. Like, yeah, I I I sometimes I talk people out of using AI at all, right? Because I'm not sell you know, I'm not selling Azure anymore, you know, I'm not selling Google Cloud, and it's just like, yeah, man, use the AI to learn what the script is, and then once the script is in place, fire the AI. Yeah. And uh and because the thing the AI can't do is the thing that everyone's having problems with, and that's why it hasn't done what it did, because if you spend $10 billion on a model, you need to run you need to own people's entire life to make that ROI pay off, right? Yeah. And and the thing is like without the data of the users, those models are useless. Yeah. So so like I I think consumers have that opa upper hand in these things, right? Because all they need to do is wait these people out and figure out that like, oh yeah, technology's getting cheaper, and you know, you know, everyone got so hyped up on Bitcoin and all that stuff. Now the computers can run models that can run your business. Yeah, you know, yeah, you know, like instead of you know, all these kids who grew up like souping up their computers for for Xbox type games and others, they they know how to make an AI computer now, and uh eventually someone's gonna make it where it just comes with the OS. And when you boot up the OS, it's just a chat window. And nice. When you talk to it, you're like, hello, you know, like um, you know, you get to just say, What do you like to do? And it's like, well, I need to send emails. And so I built emails, you know, like from there. Like, you know, and I think like and then once you have this profile which you own, you take your key, you go to a a new hotel, and it has a computer, and you put the key in and it's everything like it was at home, and it'll convert, like, oh I I gotta find the thermostat, you know, I gotta find where they do the laundry, it's like, oh yeah, it's you know, everything you like to do. And I think you know, being able to like, you know, just like like I have an iPhone, right? And I, you know, I should just be able to go anywhere and just put it down and start working, right? Like, and you know, I shouldn't have to have six devices and cloud services and all that. And I think we're kind of like at this point, but you're gonna have to like step one step away from the people building these tools because their investors want them to bring everyone along for the ride, you know. And they keep telling they keep telling us like, oh yeah, we're gonna have to fire people or there's gonna be less people. It's like, no, there's gonna be less CEOs, there's gonna be less middle management, right? Because uh we won't need to like you know uh work with everything machines anymore because you know we just use what we need and we don't use what we don't need.
SPEAKER_01So um for the listeners that are interested, because we we don't normally the people that we're bringing on the show typically are non technical. I gotta say 80% of the people are non technical, right? And some of the things that you've described to Me, I totally understand, but because I'm not I don't have a tech background, I would have never thought to uh like to leverage the capabilities in the manner in which you've done that. And there should be some people that are listening that are are particularly interested in this. Oh yeah, we don't need all the buttons. Can you help us, you know, get the version we need or whatever? So for those who wanted to find out more about what you're doing at Toilville, what's the best way for them to get in touch?
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, you can reach us on the web. Uh we have uh we just registered a new domain called uh People Make It Better because uh we think we we think they do like all the tooling that we recommend. Um at the last mile, there's a person who clicks yes or no, right? And so uh we are on summer of a break, but we start doing office hours again in the fall, and that's just like I you know, like kids stream on Twitch, I stream on LinkedIn, answer questions about things, and uh my calendar is on the website. So if you want a book or you have a question, feel free to send it in. Um also like when you're playing with Chat GPT, um, instead of asking your question, ask it uh what you're trying to do and what tools it would use to do it. And uh that was like that was a half the thing that got me through it because it's like I I I started explaining to the chat like what I did, and they're like, well, you know, you can do this with well I mean you only need this way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You only need A and D of that chain if you did this. I was like, oh okay. So like you know, I I think people kind of like they get in these holes like, oh man, I have a Slack and I have a OneNote and I need to get them to talk together to make to review the Figma. And you just like start searching for, you know, how would I do the thing I want to do without brand loyalty? And you'll find yourself making these same kind of you know connections into a lane and get down from three thousand get down from three thousand apps to twelve apps, you know. I'm actually gonna try that.
SPEAKER_01Well, Peter, thank you so much. Good luck. Um, I I'm a fellow founder, and I can tell you that until it starts working, it sucks. Not the whole time, but you you earn your seat at the table, let's say. You know? Thank you. So um you've got a lot of exciting times ahead of you, and and with what you're doing, I have no doubt that and with with the velocity at which you can iterate because of your past, you know, the 25 years you spent um and the new tools, uh, I think we're gonna be seeing some pretty cool stuff coming from you. So awesome. And your your LinkedIn profile, I'm I'm actually gonna start catching some of those live. Um yeah, yeah. It's gonna be in the the show notes. Uh we're gonna include that. So anybody listening, I can tell you I've I've interviewed a lot of people, you know, talk to people every day about this stuff. The stuff that I heard today with the way that that Peter's thinking about this, he's doing something we call think in AI. There's no question where it's like every every decision is being made. Well, how can the models help me? How can the models make this better faster? But his unique skill set, like his background certainly qualifies him to uh bring solutions that your typical quote unquote AI consultant. I I just don't know that they would be able to think in the way that he's doing with the experience he's got to be able to apply those solutions. So um let's pay attention to Peter and as he grows Toilville. So awesome, buddy. Thank you so much for your time, Peter. Take care, everybody. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to using AI at work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. Well, thanks to our producer, Evan Desalnier, for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle UsingAI at Work and visit www.usingai at work.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.