The whole world kind of went nuts because Gemini 3 is here. Google is on the map now with their AI models, at least with Gemini. Google owns so many things. Google has access to the world's data, and as a result of it, they are a massive player.
SPEAKER_02Gemini is Google's version of ChatGPT. It's their large language model. It is a contender at the top of the charts when it comes to tools to use.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and one of the big advantages to Google Gemini is data control and privacy. And this is a big deal for a lot of businesses. And Gemini is literally baked into every one of their products. It's baked into sheets, docs, slides, pretty much everything. But the more I began messing around with Gemini, the more my mind was blown.
SPEAKER_02Michael Stelsner is the founder of Social Media Examiner and a driving force in AI-powered marketing. As host of the AI Explored podcast, he guides business leaders through the fast-changing AI landscape, showing how tools like Gemini can transform entire companies from the inside out.
SPEAKER_01Welcome 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_02Right now, every business leader is asking the same question. What are we going to do about AI? If this is you, ChiefAIOfficer.com has the answer. We'll give you a simple path forward where we provide executive and team training so your people know exactly how to safely use generative AI in their day-to-day. We also manage the deployment and implementation to make sure tools actually get adopted and deliver results. And we'll also guide company-wide transformation so AI becomes part of your operating system, not just another shiny object. The companies that act now will increase productivity, cut costs, and grow faster than their competitors. Those that wait will get left behind. So if you want to make AI work in your business, visit ChiefaiOfficer.com and see how we're helping companies of all sizes finally get results from AI. Everybody, welcome to another episode of Using AI at Work. I'm Chris Dagle, I'm the host, and our guest today is Michael Stelsner, founder of Social Media Examiner and many other things. He's got a fantastic AI podcast. He had me as a guest on uh several months ago. And we were doing our pre-interview yesterday, kind of like, you know, just game planning where we were gonna go with this, and he blew me away with something. And so here's what I'm gonna tell you. If you're listening to this on audio, you're gonna get plenty out of it. However, there's probably gonna be some things that you want to actually see. We don't normally do screen shares, but with the what Michael's gonna show us today, I was like, yes, let's definitely do it. So um don't worry, you can listen to it, you can learn plenty, but there may be a few things where you want to go and catch this on the YouTube channel and and actually watch um what Michael's gonna be showing us today. So as I mentioned, Michael's got a fantastic podcast uh about AI, fantastic guests. Uh he reached out recently um to honor me with being a guest on our show, which I'm very excited about. And we had, man, we had a great conversation yesterday talking about some of the stuff he's doing, and I'm really excited about it. So we're gonna talk about a few things today, but um, Michael, out of the two things that we talked about yesterday, where do you want to start?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think we should start with Google because that's the hot thing we still do it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, for sure. So Michael was sharing with me how I think if you're listening to this, maybe you're aware that Gemini 3 has recently come out. As of this recording, it was this week, it was just a couple of days ago. And, you know, all the chatter on the the Twitter sphere or X Sphere about, you know, for all the AI enthusiasts, is that this one is like Google is on the map now with their uh AI models, at least with Gemini. And, you know, sure, we test out a lot of models, we see a lot of cool stuff. We kind of, you know, we've got some habits. I use ChatGPT for this. Hadn't really been using Gemini. And after what Michael showed me yesterday, he's like, hey dude, you got to see this. It's it's a tab that's open in my browser right now, and I'm actually gonna be doing some of the things that Michael is gonna share with everybody today. So, Michael, kind of run us through um what's happened in your company over the past week.
SPEAKER_00Well, actually, just a little backstory if you're okay with this. Uh, we put out an annual report called the AI Marketing Industry Report. And uh we did the last one in October of 2025. And obviously, no surprise, the number one AI tool used by marketers is Chat GPT. But what was surprising was 51% are using Gemini. And I was shocked to see so many people using Gemini and that it was in the second place position. I would have thought Claude, you know, because that's what a lot of people are using. And I've been talking to people like you on my AI Explored podcast, and offline, they're all telling me, man, there's something big happening with Google. So if we think about why, first of all, Google was the company that invented the T in GPT, the Transformer. Okay. They were the one that wrote the original white paper. In addition, they have a lot more money than a lot of these other companies that are venture-backed, and they have a lot of uh data center technology, but the most important thing is data. Because Google owns so many things, one of the biggest, obviously, is YouTube. Uh, what they're working on is what they call world models. So, what they're doing is they're training their AI to understand physics and geometry. And this is really important. Um, in the last couple of weeks, they've come out with a pretty sophisticated video model called VO3.1, uh, which is definitely kind of top of class. And they also came out with something called Nano Banana, which is really, really good at generating images. The thing that really got me as the CEO of a of a business was the big advantage that Google has for our business and lots of small businesses and mid-sized businesses is the the Google ecosystem, the workspace system. You know, there's a lot of businesses that are either using Microsoft or they're using Google. My business happens to be using Google, and we use Google Sheets and we use Google Docs and we use Google Drive and we have Gmail and all the things, even though we have a corporation. And I started in my head saying, okay, I think it might be wise since we're already paying more, because Google decided about a year ago to raise their rates and give AI included for everyone who has a workspace account, and lots of people probably listening do. I made this strategic decision uh about a month ago that we're going to move to um to Gemini as a corporation. Uh, we were previously using one of these tools that allows you to pick your model and it's all done through APIs. You know, there's a lot of companies out there that do this kind of stuff. But the more I began messing around with Gemini, the more my mind was blown. Um, and literally it was Tuesday of this week, uh, I think it was like the 18th. And uh we had planned that I was going to be training all of my employees with one of my other staffers on how to use Google Gemini. And literally an hour before this meeting, I got an email um from uh a big influencer in the AI space that Google Gemini 3 had just launched. And I'm like, oh crap. I just it was 2.5, you know, that we've been using. Yeah, and it was um Ethan Mollock, you may know who Ethan Mollock is. He's kind of a big deal. I'm on his email list, and he tends to always be the first to preview these things and releases it literally moments after it comes out. So I'm like, oh crap, oh wow, ooh, look at this. And sure enough, the whole world kind of went nuts because Gemini 3 is here. So this is all kind of backstory to help everybody understand the unfair advantage that Google has is access to data and also integration. I think integration is going to the massive unlock. And right now you have two camps. You've got the Microsoft camp, which is everybody who's used what do they call it, Copilot. They're not happy with it. Yeah. And then on the other side, you've got Gemini, and it's like, wow, this is really cool. So we're at this junction point right now where we are um as a company deciding that we're going all in on Gemini. So I'll pause there, let you react to that, and then we can go deeper. Where do you want to go with that?
SPEAKER_02Here's my my take. People that are using Copilot, it's gotten better. But I'll be honest with you, man, two years ago, somebody from Microsoft reached out to us and said, um, hey, we need help because our internal adoption at Microsoft of our own product, Copilot, is way behind where we thought we'd be. And we, you know, they just wanted to kind of game plan how we could help them with that. But I will say that it's gotten better. Um, however, like you, we run our whole business on the Google Suite. And I encounter a lot of we, you know, we target lower middle market and above-size businesses. Yeah, there's plenty of Microsoft in there, but a lot of them are on Google or they've got both because Gemini wasn't quite there, they weren't quite uh comfortable with the safety and security settings with outside of the Microsoft environment and that sort of thing. But I I agree with you. With 3.0 being released, and for those that don't know Gemini, Gemini is Google's version of Chat GPT, it's their large language model. Um it's been available, uh, has been okay, but not really that great. But now, as I mentioned earlier, it is a contender at the the top of the charts when it comes to tools to use. So that's my reaction.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and um one of the big advantages to Google Gemini is data control and privacy. And this is a big deal for a lot of businesses. If you are already using Google for your docs and your sheets and all your intellectual property, you've already made a commitment that you trust Google. Does that make sense? So, and Gemini is literally baked into every one of their products. Uh, it's baked into sheets, it's baked into docs, it's baked into slides, I think is what they call it. I don't really use their slide maker thing. Yeah, it's baked into pretty much everything. For example, in a Google Sheet, you can literally have it do really fancy stuff if you want to to sheets, which is really cool. But what I'm really excited about is gems. So uh everybody in your audience knows what a custom GPT is, right? Yeah, a custom GPT is effectively like a specialized version of a GPT. Um the benefit to gems is gems can be made and shared internally only. So, what that means is you can give all of your employees access to your gems and not have them ever be out in the public. It's the same sharing uh features as a Google Doc or a Google Sheet. So, for example, you can make a gem and just share it with people in your department, or you can make a gem and share it with everyone inside of your company, it's completely locked down and secure. So when you start to think about that, and then you couple in the fact that when you add a Google Doc or a Google Sheet to a gem, it's live updated. Okay. So if you change the sheet, it's gonna dynamically update into the gem as you're using it. And this is very, very powerful. So when you start to think about how you can lock down these gems and create as many as you want, that's when things get absolutely fascinating. So what I did was I brought my company together and we did a training and we did some very basic training where we showed them how if you hit the at sign, and if you decide you want to share your screen while I'm talking, Chris, you can. It's kind of up to you.
SPEAKER_02I would love for you, if you don't mind driving, that'd be great. Because you showed me this yesterday.
SPEAKER_00Okay, let me just show off real quick Nano Banana because this is really cool. And for everyone listening, I'm going to narrate exactly uh what I'm doing here. Okay. I have a conference called AI Business World, which is part of social media marketing world. So all I did was I uploaded a PNG file of this logo, and I said, place the logo on a coffee cup in a cafe. And what's really cool is it actually placed it as if it was silk screened on the actual coffee mug, and it looks legit. Like it looks real, real. Okay. Is that your logo? That's the logo right there at the top. That's the logo, yeah. I dragged it in there, and you can see how it made it look like it was printed on a coffee mug. So then I said, put it on a steel mug, okay, and it put it on a steel mug. Now, this is where it gets really interesting. I said, have a worker wearing a short. I typed it wrong, it should have been shirt, with the same logo on it, deliver the coffee. Now, in this case, it knew it was a shirt, but it's got a perspective problem. The guy, for those that are watching, that are not watching, the guy the coffee cup looks huge, and the guy looks like he's carrying like a massive platter with a coffee cup on it. Yeah. But then I went further and I said, etch the logo into the windows in the back of the cafe. And you can actually see that it did a really good job. It actually glass etched it right into it. Okay. So this is just some of the cool stuff that you could do very, very quickly with your logo if you wanted to create like a mock-up of um, like it let's say you're creating some merch or whatever for your customers or whatever. You could put this together in a really cool way, and it's pretty phenomenal. Okay, so that's just that's just one thing. The really cool thing that Chris freaked out about yesterday is when you're in Google Gemini, which is gemini.google.com, um, you if you have an account um with workspace, you will automatically have a pro thing. You hit the at sign and up pops a whole bunch of apps: Google Calendar, uh, Gmail, docs, drive, workspace, and you can call on these documents and you can literally just do some really cool stuff. So, for example, I was in a chat earlier today with um with my um uh my coach, one of my coaches, and I said, at Google Calendar, find any meetings with my coach that fall on or around the holiday season. And it actually said, here's all the ones that are right around major holidays. And um, it actually brought up the calendar, and then I said, find me times during my normal working hours on Monday or Friday to study Google Gemini. And it came up with available times, and then I locked in the time and it actually added it to my calendar.
SPEAKER_02So that's on your Google Calendar now.
SPEAKER_00On my Google Calendar now, exactly. What's even cooler is that you can actually talk to this if you don't want to type. There's a little use microphone feature on the bottom. For those of us that are podcasters, we tend to be very verbal. So we can just talk to this thing and it will literally narrate it right into the thing. So this is just a couple of examples of of what you can actually do. I'm going to not share my screen anymore now and just kind of talk more conceptually.
SPEAKER_02You know, I uh before you go on, I I want to this is very relevant to what I've been doing, right? So I had a client, as I mentioned to you yesterday, they wanted to learn about uh GPT connectors. So I hadn't really used GPT connectors prior to the demand the need for the training them, and I realized how powerful that was. I can go into ChatGPT, I can I can link up my Gmail and I can ask ChatGPT, hey, uh, you know, take a look at my inbox over the past 30 days and pick out any you know high priority emails that I probably should have responded to but didn't. And that requires a deep research, right? Like it's it's in for those of you that have ChatGPT, you only get so many deep researches per month. Very helpful. Pulled up some stuff, but what you're doing now, I don't need the connectors. It's baked into Gemini. All of my Google Act, my drive, like you mentioned. And one of the things I want everybody to understand, when Michael was talking about those gems, if those gems, which is like a custom GPT, if it's referencing a uh a file or something as part of the knowledge base, and somebody from the team goes and updates that that document and drive, that gem is automatically updated with that. I don't have to re-upload the document. And that real-time integration and updating for this stuff is huge.
SPEAKER_00Huge. And also, um, I also discovered that Asana is fully integrated into Gemini too. So for a lot of businesses, they use Asana for project management, which we happen to use. So now I can at tag Asana and you can begin to understand where Google's going with this. They're gonna allow you to quote unquote integrate your critical tools into Gemini with just an at tag. I had to give it permissions the first time, but now I have access to all my Asana projects. And if you've ever used project management tools, you can kind of get lost inside those things. Um, so so what I decided to do with the training of my staff was first I taught them how to do very basic prompting. And then what I effectively did was I showed them the Google Calendar thing. And one of the first things I encouraged them to do was to tell Gemini to find a time on my calendar during normal working hours. If you don't say this, it's gonna put on like midnight, okay? It's not quite there yet. But it will actually put it on your calendar, which is really cool. You can also, if you have inbox problems, you can actually say, hey, go into my inbox, find any critical deadlines that I might have missed for anything, and it will read all of your emails for you, okay? And it will actually, in a different panel, bring up those emails right inside of the Gemini app. Um, but then where it got really interesting was I encouraged all of my employees to create their own gems. And what I did was I created a gem called a gem creator just for my staff, okay? And to be honest with you, I started with Gemini, then I went into Claude and enhanced it and brought it back into Gemini. And this is important any custom GPT or Claude project, you can port those very same instruction sets directly into Gemini. So that's the good news, right? So if you've already created this information, you can just port it right over into Gemini. And the advantage now is that you don't have to pay any extra for these team licenses or anything like that, which is kind of huge. You can control who has and who does not have access. So what I did was I told all of my team, hey, we're gonna have a contest. Um, we're gonna uh for you have until November 25th to um make as many gems as you want and to update this spreadsheet inside of a shared document and put a link to your gem and describe what it does. And for each entry, uh you're gonna go into a drawing, we're gonna give you a $100 Amazon gift card to the winner. And then the person the most gems is gonna get publicly recognized in our weekly email updates. So this is just incentivizing them to actually do the thing. Because you know, Chris, this is part of the challenge. Giving people access to the tool is not enough. And I have been teaching my staff for over a year to use AI, but I started to notice they're not actually using it. What's also cool about Gemini is when you log into your, I mean with Google, when you log into your admin dashboard, it tells you what if people are using Gemini. So literally it goes across uh the every app sheets, docs, Gmail, and it shows you whether they're high, low, or medium use for each of these things, right? So I can actually see at a high level, and it includes Gemini, whether anybody is actually utilizing the tools.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And that's how I know, you know, kind of at a at a macro level whether or not the adoption is taking place. This is all natively built in.
SPEAKER_02Listeners, if you have Chat GPT now and you're on a business account, which is $25 a month for your people, you don't have access to be able to see that kind of information. You have to have the enterprise version of Chat GPT, which is extremely expensive for most, you know, listeners to this, just to be able to see not necessarily what they're you like what they're doing, but see how much usage they're getting. That feature is now baked into Gemini through the admin dashboard with your Google Workspace. That's fantastic. I didn't know that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, 100%. And it's across all the apps. And um, and by the way, for those of you that use the Chrome browser, you may have noticed in the upper right-hand corner of the Chrome browser is a little thing called Gemini. So this is what Google is getting really, really good at is they are, if we think about the the amount of people that use Google-based apps, the fact that Gemini is getting worked into the entire ecosystem is really cool. And going back to um um some of the unexpected features that are built into Gemini, um, the nano banana thing, nanobanana pro is really, really cool. Um, it can do it understands um architecture. So it can do architectural designs, drawings, 3D kind of stuff. And also the uh Vio is also studying um worlds because remember, they're training on all the YouTube data. So they understand the learning physics by watching videos, and people may not understand YouTube. The number of videos that are uploaded every day is just a ridiculous amount of data. So this is the key. Like Google has access to the world's data, and as a result of it, they are a massive player. And just today, I read that Sam Altman recently tweeted or internal to his staff said, Hey, we're gonna be in a little bit of a pain for a while while our next version comes out. Because what's happening with Google is they are surpassing them, and I'm going to predict that integration is going to be the most important thing for marketers. Because here's the deal if you use um like Chat GPT or you use Claude, you have to kind of give it access to all of your data in order for it to work. And a lot of people like me have a lot of problems with that because I don't trust that that IP, that secure that stuff is going to be secure. And it's stopping a lot of businesses. And I do think this is one of the biggest things in the future is going to be how easy does it actually integrate with everything that I already use.
SPEAKER_02And you trust Google already. I mean, you're sending your emails through it, you're storing your documents in it. So this is not much of a leap on the security side of things.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and by the way, um, I haven't tried this yet, but it's also important to understand that um Google's deep research is considered best in class. Okay. So Google is capable of in incredible research. So you could create gems, if you will, that automatically do certain kinds of tasks, like competitive research or other kinds of tasks that are that are super, super valuable. You can create, I believe, and and I may be speaking out of turn, but I believe that you can actually um create tasks that are um uh creating images and stuff so I have one of my graphic designers is working on creating a gem to allow us to allow him to mock up kind of rough thumbnails for YouTube videos just by putting in like the title of a show.
SPEAKER_02Yeah yeah so this is I don't know if you can do that with chat GPT custom GPTs can you maybe you can can you have them generate images like that you know I you you can but I don't know the quality like people have sent me some of the stuff they've created with nano banana recently and like our chief AI officer sent me a picture of something he said I sent this to a a professional at he he's a sword fighter he's just a fencer yeah I designed this just through prompt sent it over to uh one of my buddies who manufactures swords and the guy was like where'd you get that like assume that it was real it was so realistic and this is somebody who builds these things like understands the finest details of these things saw this image and assumed that it was real based on the quality of that nanobanana I don't know that his same experiments using Chat GPT image creation would have fooled even like a world class expert at something like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah so if if we project into the future and we think about what's happening here at a macro level we've got um open AI about to go public sometime in the future they're gonna have a lot of in cat in flow of cash and they've got a lot of partnerships and there's a lot of people hoping it's going to be successful. But one of the things that they really don't have is data and this is going to be their struggle moving forward. Yeah they're gonna have to do partnerships because they don't own media they don't have access to media and um you could have some of the best technology in the world but if you don't have access to the training data that's going to be a problem and Google is not going to run out of data. Yeah it's just not I mean you think about every person that has an Android you think about YouTube you think about maps all the stuff I mean it's crazy. And when we start layering in um real world kind of stuff that's where this stuff that's where I think you're going to see incredible innovation. And honestly I I have a strong sense that like Google's the underdog right now which is kind of crazy to say they are the underdog but I but I do believe that a lot of people are going to use the tool especially if the tool is built in right out of the gate.
SPEAKER_02It's a perfect demonstration of that tortoise and the hair kind of thing. GPT 3.5 came out everybody was all about chat GPT then Claude came out you know a little bit of usage there Gemini was it was just no good but now after this last release GPT's on the ropes Claude's got their niche but they're you know that this is this is a huge leap. So for those of you listening and you've tried Gemini and this is very typical with all the Gen AI stuff oh I tried it you know a couple months ago it was no good try it today it's different it's better. It's and as Michael just said their deep research is best in class which is something that you know if you're doing the basic day-to-day like hey chat GPT I need this or whatever not a big deal but if you're doing sophisticated analysis for your business for your business strategy for you know outsourcing certain parts of departments to the models the large language models deep research comes in very handy do you know about any type of limitations on deep research with um Gemini if you're a project I think that there are limits to um video this part I know because that takes a lot of processing power you only get so many credits.
SPEAKER_00There might be a limit on images but I have not reached it uh deep research I think with the pro account which is what you get if you have a workspace account I believe that it's pretty robust. I don't think I've ever gotten to a point where I have not been able to do it. And it's pretty sophisticated. I mean to be honest with you I think it is the best at what it does. So if you think about this from a a strategic perspective you if you don't have the right training docs you could start with a deep research task inside of Google. And then you can port it into a Google Doc, right? And then you connect it to a gem and then all of a sudden you've got this this this data source if you will upon which you can do um more sophisticated work over and over again.
SPEAKER_02You know and it's interesting we haven't really talked about about it a bunch on the podcast but internally we us and all the chief AI officers we all use notebook LM a lot which is another Google tool. It's recently had some updates prior to the release of 3.0 or uh Gemini 3.
SPEAKER_00Yeah they just added slides which which is supposedly crushing uh Gem what's it called Gem?
SPEAKER_02Gamma with Gamma yeah gamma exactly yeah um they also added deep research functionality within notebook LM so I'm starting to see how this like you may not need a bunch of other tools now like you can do it all you know the the vibe coding bug I've been bitten by it I've been using Google's AI Studio and we've built some amazing apps that we use on our website and our community. So like all of this stuff being integrated it the limitation is going to be you as the human being able to make the connection and go, oh I could do this oh and then we could do like plug all this stuff in but if you can overcome that as the the user of AI, generative AI in the Gemini environment Google environment man like everything's baked in.
SPEAKER_00It's amazing. There's one other feature that's gonna surprise people but if you install the Gemini app on your phone and you connect it to your workspace account it brings conversational audio and vision. So for example you can just talk to it while you're driving just like you can with ChatGPT advanced voice mode and you can turn on the camera and you can point the camera at your screen and I'm sure eventually they're gonna have a desktop app for this but right now it's exclusively on the mobile app and and it's pretty good. I mean it's actually and and they're running a lot of Gemini's running a lot of commercials right now about this functionality. It's pretty impressive. So I I'm still Claude is still my favorite you know because I'm a writer but I but but my staff is starting to get very excited about this because they've got now a powerful tool that's only getting more powerful by the day and it's allowing them to create super precise um applications for lack of better words that allow them to do all sorts of cool stuff. For example I've got one that does research for guests I mean my assistant does one for research for guests one that does um discovery for guests you know so we're we're designing all these gems because the Google ecosystem is really good at doing this. Yeah and they're going out there and helping us do a lot of the work that we do in preparation for for example the multiple shows that I host.
SPEAKER_02You know before we I know we want to talk about the way that you're using Claude um but before we do that you mentioned a couple things that I want to dig into you talked about this idea of the team training. So how how many people were in that training?
SPEAKER_0019.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So listeners uh you don't have to necessarily bring in the expert you know like the outside expert to come and teach your team how often do you are you guys doing these types of trainings?
SPEAKER_00Uh well we have something called the AI Business Society where we do them monthly uh which is our membership. So sometimes our staff comes in on that because that's where I bring in experts third party experts that are way smarter than I am. But this is only the second time we've done something like this. We did one last year around this time and we did one this year but we are committed to doing more. One thing that's really important for people to understand is Google also has something in their labs called Opal. Okay. Yes the best way to describe it is like N8N or make or zapier where you can set up um automated workflows where you connect all the Google things together. So for example if an email shows up in my inbox trigger this do that create this document all that kind of stuff um there's a lot of people that are going gaga over that because they want to create automated workflows but the cool thing about Opal is it's drag and drop super intuitive and it has an uh interface where you can just interact with it and we'll automatically create the whole thing for you. So you can tell it, hey, I want to create a workflow that does this. Blop it'll just create all the things connect them all for you and then you can customize them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah I want to make sure that I load up a browser tab with with Opal so that I can test that after we're done today.
SPEAKER_00Yeah it's uh it's opal.google that's how you get there.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So for those of you again you know if if you're an AI enthusiast and you listen to the show, you've probably messed around with at least Zapier it seems to be the the most approachable automations builder. And what we know is with working with clients a lot of time they're like we need we need AI to help us with that. And the reality is it's not AI that they need that for some of these things it's just an automation that they need. But now I got to go learn Zapier or I got to go learn make or I I got to go learn God bless you if you have to learn N8 in it's not easy. But now with Opal being yeah and with this drag and drop functionality accessing all of my Google stuff that's already there I don't have to worry about did I you know do I have the right authorizations? Did I you know set up the right API keys or any of that stuff it's all this is it doesn't bode well for all of these kind of individual tools even though I know Zapier just raised at like a two billion dollar valuation still um Google's on the scene now. So I I like this idea about the training and I like the the idea that that you did that yourself. What was the catalyst for that now? Like why why didn't you do it six months ago?
SPEAKER_00Why aren't you waiting for six months? Okay well first of all an important thing about training I discovered I had Michael Hyatt on my show recently and um if you don't know Michael he's kind of a leader's leader kind of guy and he's written a whole bunch of books and stuff and he was talking about how he had trained his staff and that inspired me. But what he specifically said is you got to do exercises in the middle of your training. So what I decided to do was we actually created a little worksheet to go with my deck and we had three different exercises in there. And the first exercise was just the at Google Calendar exercise place an hour on my schedule to play with Gemini and that kind of blew everybody's mind right then the next exercise was just how to do basic prompting and we created a virtual equivalent of each of our employees we had them create one on the fly and I gave them a prompt and I said place your Enneagram in here because we use Enneagram and I said here's a you go here if you don't know your Enneagram. And they now all have virtual doppelgangers of themselves which is like a thought thought partner right and I taught them how to do that just in a very simple prompt and to attach our company wide vision and mission document. Because the vision and we have a shared drive where we have these resources that they can attach to any chat or any um gem so that they have the ability to kind of leverage that existing resource and we have a shared drive where we're placing more of these kinds of resources and that was very valuable. Then we kind of showed them how to create a gem and one of my uh employees um uh loves the book Eat the Frog or Eat That Frog I don't know exactly what it's called but she did a deep research project first of all to find out what the core principles were of the book. Okay. And then she saved that into a Google Doc and then she created a um a gem um basically using the gem builder that we had built and it walked them through a series of questions one at a time to build it and now she's got this Google gem that she's sharing with the whole company that they can use to basically um uh leverage the concepts of that book and anybody who has a certain book that they kind of ascribe to for the company could do this. She didn't have to go and steal the book she just did internet research and created a Google doc on the core principles and themes and philosophies of the book but she understood it deeply and she was able to look at it and make sure it had a right and then she created a gem that effectively guided our employees through that the core principles of the book. Now that's something really useful that I think a lot of CEOs and businesses could probably find really valuable.
SPEAKER_02Yeah for those of you that aren't familiar with the concept of eat the frog it's based on a quote from Mark Twain and he said you know if you got a rough day ahead of you basically do the hardest thing first and the rest of the day will be easy. So if you've got your people now using that as a filter for everything that's on their calendar their to-do list you know as a business owner that if they're following the output from that gym they're getting the highest leverage hardest things done first. If the rest of the day nothing else happens but they got that one big rock done they ate the frog it's a it's a win for sure. I love it.
SPEAKER_00I'm actually going to build one yeah so like you know those are the kind of applications that um we created I created another one called a um master marketer so um what I did was I looked at the marketing skills that we had in house and then I built a and I and you can use any chat GPT Claude whatever it doesn't matter but I built one I built a um for lack of better words a um system instruction that included um a broader field of marketing than what we have in house things like that we don't normally maybe have expertise in like maybe affiliate marketing or PR you know and it covered like 10 different categories and now my marketing team has access to this marketing genius. Yes right and it's and and that gem also has some of our company vision and mission documents attached to it. So now when they're stuck they can employ the marketing genius to basically get marketing ideas. And and you know there's endless kind of things that you can do all the things that you can do obviously within any kind of custom GPT environment can be ported over into this environment. So those are the things that really you know I'm excited about and and I've got like uh the sheet now and I've got like about there's probably 20 different gems that everybody has created so far. And I'm waiting to see all the gems that they're creating but it's really fascinating to see them create the gems, share the gems it's in a public repository now anybody can use those gems and it's just kind of you know the key thing is to get people to do some sort of a task in order to get adoption because the last time I did training it was just me and this other person for 90 minutes talking talking talking but then the adoption fell off a cliff. Yeah. So you probably expound these kind of details as well right yep.
SPEAKER_02You know there's another interesting thing that just hit me. So when you're building custom GPTs one of the issues with companies in particular is we've we've got people using AI. Well are they using your team's account? Uh no well if they build a GPT for their role and they leave if it's in their personal account that GPT that was so helpful to that department or whatever that leaves with them. In the gyms environment certainly if they've got their own Gmail account they can do it. But if you're in the Google Suite environment odds are they're always logged in to their business Gmail account right so any gym that they build, they have to be so any gym that they build, I don't have to worry about that leaving with somebody because oh they were using their own account for this thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah and if if you do end up firing someone who created a gem, the cool thing about Google is you can assign all of the documents and this is technically like a doc as far as the privacy to another person. So that access just gets boop right over to the other person. And I like that a lot because I like what you're saying a lot because you're effectively developing IP and applications for lack of better words that are really useful to employees. And if you've got a really creative employee that's created all these gems, you don't have to worry about it as long as they're using the workspace account which is what they'd have to be using in order to be able to have access to all these features.
SPEAKER_02Another thing when building custom GPTs that you know you have to make sure that if you're sharing it that it's it's shared only with the company or only with certain people because there is a setting that allows you to make it just wide open. And if that's the case it shows up in the GPT store anybody can look for it and get whatever training material you've got they might accidentally get access to it right. But as you mentioned at the beginning with these gyms that's not the case it's not going into some big gyms marketplace.
SPEAKER_00There is no marketplace it's no different than any other document right like it's there's nothing stopping the owner of the gym from sharing it with an outside contractor or consultant. It's got the same privacy controls. You can extract it you know whatever uh not do it not you know you can probably even enforce this at the admin level I haven't really dug that far into it because it's so new. Yeah but my guess is there's probably going to be some way to enforce this because a lot of people have employees and they might have in critical contractors that they want to provide access to some of these gems to and I would imagine those don't have company email addresses but I'm pretty confident you could allow them to get access to these things. I could even see creating gems for onboarding new employees. Think about that Chris imagine if you've trained it on your protocol and and you walk through a series of things that you have them do that are highly customized depending on their role I mean you can just start to see all the applications here. It's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_02There's no more 90 day ramp up time for these people they're able to go on day one never having done the thing before but okay now what do I do? And the gym says do this. Yeah love it. You know um it's it's this interesting paradigm because Google has had the opportunity to hear everybody else's complaints about oh well Claude doesn't do this meta sucks at this I wish GPT did this and because they've kind of waited to release this mega drop that they just did they've been able to build in a lot of the a lot of the things that I know are friction points for our internal use or client usage and Gemini's addressing those through this this system wide integration and I well and the other thing that I think cannot underscore enough is that Gemini was built multi-modal from the ground up which means it has eyes and ears and this is really important.
SPEAKER_00As you know you can drop an audio file into AI Studio which is like their techie side of things um or you can link to an audio or video file uh like in your drive or uh on YouTube and it's not just going to read the transcript it will watch it it will listen to it. This is really really really important because so many of these tools that we use today are based on the transcript and if I'm saying something and showing something on the screen it's impossible for those tools to understand what's happening. Good point. It's not impossible for Google because it's designed from the ground up to have eyes and ears and that's really really important as we enter into this new multimedia world where our mouth is the keyboard and where our screen what happened what's happening on the screen is just as important as like as what we're typing. So I think this is going to be a big unlock for a lot of businesses that are that are um maybe underestimating the importance of audio and video.
SPEAKER_02Mm-hmm interesting okay I want to make sure we we have time to cover Claude because you're a power user of Claude and I think it as you mentioned because you're a writer because of your marketing background the the output the quality of the output when it comes to the writing style the writing capabilities are uh incredibly important to you. So I'm curious as somebody who would love to be able to write better in all of my communications how an expert at uh that is using Claude in particular.
SPEAKER_00Yeah so um the big deal about Claude just so everybody understands um Claude is founded by a team that used to work for OpenAI okay so our our um Amade um Dario Amade yeah yeah Dario Amade he used to work for um the guys over at OpenAI went off and he wanted to start a more ethical technically ethical solution even though they just settled a lawsuit where they had copied my book and lots of other authors' books and stuff but they tried to build it on an ethical base um major investors are Jeff Bezos, Amazon and Google. Okay so they've got they've got major players outside of the Microsoft open AI world that are investing in this technology. It's also used by very large enterprises. For example I have a friend who's very high up in Texas instruments this is the only platform they're allowed to use in-house is is Claude Anthropic. Mostly because they're technical and Claude many people may not realize this but Claude is considered the world leader in coding yeah and um it's very very good with dealing with mass amounts of data. So if you think about TI as an engineering company it kind of makes a lot of sense that they would use a tool like this. But but another thing that most people don't realize is Claude is most is considered widely to be the best um writing platform in the world. I hear that all the time the reason why is because they've been trained up on the world's books. And if you think about who one of their investors is Jeff Bezos he happens to own the Washington Post right so you start to think about this and you think about Amazon and their whole ecosystem they've got a they've got their own like nice little baked in training system and it's quite sophisticated. So that's just kind of important context but the other part of the context is the Claude interface is just easier to use it feels friendlier it feels familiar and it's kind of disposition I don't know it's personality like you know how ChatGPT has kind of a personality has one as well. Claude has more of a consultative advisor personality and it just is unprompted going to make recommendations. Sometimes it's going to pick the best of the bunch as as it has multiple outputs. It's very good. It's one of the earliest ones that was really good at data analysis. It knows Python code so it will literally take information and it will run code right there on the screen and figure it out for you where the other ones are just guessing they're actually mathematically solving the problem which is pretty good. So so I I I I use Cloud Projects and we have a couple of accounts internally you know individual accounts because the team accounts can get a little more pricey you have to have a minimum of five and I think they're 25 bucks a month and I'm not a super big business. But um Cloud also does have full integration with the Google ecosystem. The problem is you have to grant access to the entire drive okay this is where I don't want to do that right yeah and it also is live access to so similar to Google it will provide live access. So what I do when I use this is I tend to um oh and the other thing you should know about Claude is out of the gate it will use your training data on a paid account unless you're Turn it off. This is really important. You have to click off the privacy button. They decided to turn it on. And it makes sense because remember what we talked about earlier. Having access to data is one of the most important things for a lot of these models. So you have to remember to turn it off. They've got a whole bunch of connectors. They fully integrate with uh desktop. So Claude does have a built-in desktop. Yes. Where it can take over the desktop and do automated things within your file system and all that stuff. Um, it also integrates with um active campaign and just all these third-party tools, right? And once you have these connectors, you're basically allowing live access into these into these integration tools. I don't do any of that. I I effectively just use it predominantly to write. Now, the key to Claude is Claude Projects, which is like the secret sauce. What makes it different than custom GPTs is it has a memory. Okay, so this is really important. A lot of times when you use a custom GPT, it's as if it met you for the first time every time you tag it, right? Now it's true that with ChatGPT you can create a project and somehow work around that, but Claude was the first one that came out with projects. And with projects, you can do just like a custom GPT. You upload your data, you give it your system instructions, but then you can have unlimited threads inside that project. And as it starts to realize, like, oh, there's certain ways that you always ask for clarity, it learns and it has a memory feature in it. And and basically it's not an editable memory feature, like in the traditional sense. It's a okay, what about this memory do you want to change? You prompt it and then it'll kind of update the memory. But the coolest thing about projects is it has this thing called artifacts. And I think they call this Canvas in OpenAI. Does that sound about right? Artifacts is really, really cool. It looks like a Microsoft Word document or a Google Doc, and it pops up on the right side of the screen, beautifully formatted. And then you can highlight whatever you want, and then you can just in free text tell it what you want to change without editing it, and it will just automatically update it and change it. But what I really love about Claude and the way that I use it all the time is I am uh I have a background as a copywriter. So what I'll do is I will write promotional emails. For example, uh AI business world or social media marketing world. And my team will give me, even though I'm the CEO, they'll give me a little prompt, a little starter prompt that has a couple things. And I'll go into my cloud project for social media marketing world and I will say, write me multiple variations of emails based on this theme. And then it will go ahead and pop out eight different variations. I'll I'll read them and kind of have a sense as to which one I think is best, and then I will ask it which is best. And what it will do is it will go into its training data and it will analyze which is best based on what it knows about who the core audience is. And it will say, like, uh number seven is the best, and but number two is a close runner up, and here's why. Okay. So at that point, what I can do is I can say, all right, I actually really like number seven, but I like this part from number eight. Go ahead and create a new set of variations. And then what it will eventually do is um I'll work with it as I'm as I'm creating these new variations. And unprompted, sometimes it'll say, Yep, this one is like an 8.5 out of 10. And I'll say, Oh, well, what do I do to make it a 10? And all of a sudden it will just start coming up. Well, here's how I would change it to make it a 10. So it's super consultative and it's learning. And and this is really, really valuable for me because I happen to be a mastercraft person at my copywriting craft, and it's just making me a so much better writer. So now I'm able to produce uh a lot more copy. Now, this is where it gets really, really cool. When you create a project inside of um Claude, um have you ever been in a position where you've created like a custom GPT and you wish you had one that did a slightly different task? Yeah, this happens all the time. So what I did is I said, okay, I'm going to create a special podcast series for social media marketing world. And um I went into my email writer and I said, You are now an expert at helping create podcast episodes uh for the social media marketing podcast. Do you understand? Yes, I understand. Now I have two special roles that I'm doing, okay? Then I copy and pasted in the list of all the speakers for my conference, and I said, identify groups of people that will be ideal guests on a round table topic with these two of my guests, okay? And then it came up with all of them. It and and it said, here's who you should have, that dot that dot. And then I said, okay, rank the top four. And then it decided, okay, based on everything I know, these are the top four you should do. Then I said, Well, are there any other topics that I should be considering? And it said, yes, as a matter of fact, there are. And it came up with AI and workplace disruption. And I'm like, ooh, that's really good. Who do you think we should get for that? And it said, well, I think you should get Christopher Penn and Rachel Woods for that. And you can see how basically I used my project just for writing emails. I gave it a new responsibility just for that one thread. It knew how to take the old data that and the new role and effectively became a new specialist for me within that existing project. It's kind of next level stuff.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And this goes back to that comment I made earlier. It's not about the capabilities of the tool, it's about the capabilities of the human knowing, like, ooh, I wonder if it could do that. Yes, it can, kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because like uh it's a pain in the butt to create a brand new project from scratch and add in all the data just for these one-off kind of tasks. Yeah. But when you've got this really well-refined model that I've been using for over a year, and I've got hundreds and hundreds of interactions I've had with it, and it's super refined. Why not use it for all these special point tasks? And sure enough, you can with cloud projects, which is the beauty of it.
SPEAKER_02As we're getting to the end of this, I I I got this question for you. You've done how many episodes of your AI podcast have you done?
SPEAKER_00I think I've done about uh AI Explored. I think we're probably about 70 in right now, 7-0.
SPEAKER_02Um What have been the biggest lessons learned? I mean, this is an amazing opportunity because you get to just ask AI experts question questions that you want to know the answer to, right? Yeah. What have been some of the takeaways from some of those um interviews that you think maybe the the audience should really like, oh, you need to know this?
SPEAKER_00Well, the first thing is it's changing faster than all of us realize. Like what the people tell me before we get on the call and after the call. Wow. Is kind of the secret sauce stuff, right? Yeah. And um because, you know, you've been on my show. We usually meet a week before, we come up with a show flow, and then we we we you know, we we stay on topic. Um, but but what they're all telling me is it's so hard to keep up with this stuff. I wish I had time. I happen to be a CEO who's a personality, you know what I mean? I and I host two shows. I wish I had time to dig into all the things, but what I often end up doing is sending uh advanced recordings to my staff. Hey, you got to figure this out. Interesting. I think the hot thing right now that a lot of people are interested in is workflows. I really do think this is the massive thing that everybody wants because I'm a believer, as you are, I believe, and most of our guests, that we shouldn't use AI to replace humans, we should use it to enhance humans. And in an ideal world, if we can keep our staff and double our effectiveness and productivity, that's gonna be that's gonna have a massive upside for the company. And um, I believe AI enhanced is kind of the phrase that I use instead of AI first, because AI first is typically means you know, you're automating and replacing humans with AI, and I just don't think it's there yet. But I'm I'm a big believer in AI enhanced. And this is kind of the message I keep driving to my staff, which is hey, we're not training you on how to do this so that we can replace you. We're training you on how to do this so you can help with the mission of the business. And you're gonna become more valuable to the business. Yeah. And that's gonna be job security for you, right? So the more you understand how to leverage these tools to allow you to do the things you want to do and maybe automate the things you hate doing so you can open up mind share for creative tasks or deep thinking tasks that require human brains, that's you become more valuable to the company. And I believe that's kind of a through line that I'm seeing right now. And I believe that also will be happening in an AI business world when we meet in April. I think a lot of people are gonna be there because they're scared and it's hard to keep up. But I think they're gonna walk away with a lot of, wow, we can become really valuable if we embrace these things now. Because, you know, we're just three years, Chris. It's only been it's only been three years since the Chat GPT moment. Like we're as we're recording this, we're about nine days away from yeah, you know, the three-year mark. Yeah, we're still early days, brother. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And you know, just considering when 3.5 came out and uh three years ago, it's like, man, this is amazing. It was nothing compared to what we've talked about today. It's so crazy. Hey, I want to make sure we talk about the event too. So tell me about when and where.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So social media marketing world has been around forever, and um, AI Business World is a sub-conference within that conference. It's gonna be at the Anaheim Convention Center, last few days of April, and the AI Business World Conference is gonna have two simultaneous uh stages with nonstop AI training, and then social and we'll have about a thousand three thousand people at the whole conference, and probably about a thousand will be in the AI portion of it. And for those that are interested, I do have uh it's on sale right now, but you can get an extra hundred bucks off if you go to social media examiner.com slash AI A T Work, AI at work, uh, which I believe is the name of the show. Um, but but yeah, I'm really excited about it because what we did last year, Chris, is we had a Was last year the first year? Last year we dedicated a track at the social media marketing world. It was our most popular track. We had a room with 700 people in it and it was packed out the whole time. Wow. And I'm like, okay, let's go ahead and let's spin up a new event because not everybody's interested in social media. Yeah, a lot of people are interested in AI, and that's why it's called AI Business World, because it it's really gonna be practical, tactical. It's really for the person in your company who wants to learn how to use this stuff. And we're gonna be talking about all the things that we talked about today. Like that, like how in the world do you actually come out like understanding how to use all the tools? We have massive space called a networking plaza with them tables where people can sit and interact with each other. Our event is highly social, doesn't shouldn't surprise you. But yeah, I'm really excited about it. And we're committed for the next few years to having AI Business World be a uh subconference of social media marketing world. And if people want the whole thing, they can pay a little bit more and get the whole thing.
SPEAKER_02So we'll make sure that that link is in the show notes for sure. I I plan on going as an attendee to the event. Um so who are maybe some of the the speakers that you're the most excited about that you've already lined up?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, uh I'm pulling it up right now as we speak. So it's um we have a lot of people that if you listen to my show, um, we've got Christopher Penn, who is one of the leading voices. Uh we've got Dan Sanchez, who um he's got a podcast called AI Marketers or something like that. Um we have um a guy named, well, we've got a lot of people that probably aren't going to know, but some people might know Jonathan Mast. He has a massive AI community online. Um Michael Hyde, who I mentioned earlier, is going to be there. Um we've got, let's see, who else do we have? We have um Rachel Woods, who's a big person in the world. We've got uh Dr. Nikki Saunders out of Australia, who is really a leader in helping businesses develop AI operating systems. Um we've got 18 of the 20 slots filled right now. A lot of these people, um, not everyone is going to know, but we're covering everything from AI video to AI images to custom GPTs, AI operations, AI content, AI automation, um, you know, and agents too, which is kind of a big deal and workflows because agents is kind of the hot button right now.
SPEAKER_02Are you going to be recording any podcast episodes from there?
SPEAKER_00No, because when I'm at the conference, I'm the opening keynote. Okay. So I don't have a lot of bandwidth for that kind of stuff because what ends up happening is everybody comes up to me because they know me in that world, you know. So um, but no, that I don't record while I'm there. I just kind of make myself present to that community. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Very cool. Man, like for being your second, I guess your first year of actually doing it as its own thing and you're expecting that many people, there's other conferences in the AI space that are well known that have been trying for years to break that thousand-member uh target. So this is gonna be fantastic.
SPEAKER_00Anything we can do to support it, I'm yeah, I mean, uh, first of all, check it out, let your friends know about it. For those that are listening, if you are a CEO of a company, you know, send some of your people. Yeah. Um, it's not super expensive. Um, social media marketing world is a conference that's been around for a long time. We started in 2013. All you got to do is do a little Google search. We're definitely um a legacy, you know, business when it comes to the marketing world. But I do want to stress this. The most important thing right now is for people to learn how to use these things. Yes. And this is not a conference where we have people pitching from the stage. These are actual people that are the best of the best that I've recruited. If you listen to my show, you're gonna know all the names. Um, and they don't come to pitch, they come to train and they come to hang out and they come to interact. And I feel like that's kind of the missing thing right now is like that's that's why I'm bringing this to the table to help mostly smaller businesses um or anyone who's working inside of a mid-sized business to really understand how to put this stuff to work. So social mediaexaminer.com slash AIAT work at work uh will get you extra 100 bucks off. Um and I think it's only gonna be for the next couple of weeks.
SPEAKER_02Okay, we're gonna push this one out because of the timely nature of Jim and I and the stuff that you shared with me. I want everybody to start practicing with this stuff during the holidays for sure. Michael, thank you. Man, this was I we don't do a lot of episodes where I get to geek out on the tactical. We tend to, you know, well, tell me about how it's gonna impact, you know, business. Like, which is all good stuff that you need to think about as you're but we don't get into the weeds like we did today, and I love it. This is amazing.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Chris, for having me. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_02So again, everybody, I would encourage you to check out Michael's podcast. I was a guest on it. Um, but the the the names that he's got on there are people that if you like the type of conversation that we had today, that that podcast is full of those every single week. And AI Explored is what it's called. Yeah, thank you. AI explored, yeah. And we'll also put a link to that in the show notes for this as well, because I want I want you guys to I mean Michael's talking to some amazing people on his show. So um and and everybody, thank you so much for listening in on this episode. I would encourage you, don't just go, oh, that was interesting. Please go open up if you've if you're on Google, go open up the Gemini app and start playing with it and doing the things. Look at the use the connectors, have it go through the email inbox and say, you know, what are some important things that I've missed? Or, you know, come up with just play, like you did. This concept of training your people on this and getting them to actually build a tool, a gem in this case. Um, great idea. Your people will start to use those. They'll start to go, oh, this wasn't hard. Oh my gosh, this is saving me this time. I didn't even like doing that thing anyway. And now I've got this tool. So some great nuggets in here, Michael. Thank you so much for being on the guest or on the show today, man. This is a pleasure. Thank you, Chris. All right, guys, we'll see you on the next uh episode. And in the meantime, go use AI. Thanks for tuning in to using AI at work.
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