And if we don't teach students how to utilize AI, it's the same as not teaching students how to do math or how to read. You've kind of been ringing the bell about, hey, let's do something about AI. How has it been received by your peers? Everybody could think of all the horrible reasons why not to adopt AI. And I was trying to figure out how do I get past that? I went to my C-suite, right, and said, I want to push AI. Will you give me permission to do that? And we flipped it on. Not for students, but for all staff. With no training, no policies, no execution. We just turned it on and I told everybody, I use AI and it's okay. Let's figure out how to do this together.
SPEAKER_02What questions should they be asking of the administration of their educational environments that their kids are plugged into to make sure that they're not missing out and have comfort, that they can sleep at night, that their administrators of their educational environment are doing this the right way?
SPEAKER_00If they're gonna turn on AI, one, what level of access will my child have? And two, do you have filtering protections in grades at levels that catch if my daughter were to start talking or discussing self-harm within that chat?
SPEAKER_01Jason Hill is a leading voice in AI adoption for K through 12 education and deputy superintendent at Redlands Unified School District. He helps school leaders move beyond fear, build responsible AI systems, and prepare students for the future of work.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to Using AI at work. I'm your host, Chris Table. 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. Right 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 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. All right, everybody, welcome to Using AI at Work. My name is Chris Daigle. I'm the host, and today our guest is Jason Hill. And Jason's the deputy superintendent for Redlands Unified School District in Southern California. And his main purpose there is to oversee the business services side of the district. Now, I don't know if any of you have much context on the annual operating budget of a school district. It ain't cheap. Right now, Redlands has got over a $330 million annual budget, which is going to give Jason an incredibly large-scale operational lens on AI adoption, not just the business side of it, but what I'm particularly excited about today is asking and digging into some of the questions on the educational side. This is something that we've haven't had the opportunity to really cover in a hundred plus episodes that we've done of this podcast. And I I wanted to be careful. Sure, I could get people's opinions and those sorts of things, but Jason is an executive in actually doing the thing in the trenches in the educational environment. So this is a unique opportunity for us to hear what's actually happening. Um, you know, because I hear all the time people are saying, What about my kids? What should my kids be studying? and those sorts of things. So um we've got somebody who can actually tell us how it's impacting uh not just the operational side of the school, but also what his experience has been, even anecdotally, with seeing how uh the teachers and the students are reacting to uh really some major changes that Jason has hallmarked or kind of led in the Redlands uh unified school district. Now, how we met, he was already on the AI journey, um, but uh uh shoot last year sometime he enrolled to uh go through our chief AI officer certification program. And the feedback that he was giving to the rest of the community indicated to me that this is somebody he gets it. He's really like not only does he understand its application, but he's fully committed to upskilling his own capabilities when it came to this stuff. So we're in um you're in for a real treat with our guest today, Jason Hill. So Jason, before we get started, anything you want to share with everybody about uh what you're up to and uh your positions on AI?
SPEAKER_00Oh, thank you for having me. Um like you mentioned, I I I'm the deputy superintendent of a K-12 school district, about 20,000 kids. Um we have 26 schools that we we have here, and uh AI is upon us. So, you know, I would say a couple years ago when AI started to kind of get talked about, uh, I was trying to figure out how is that going to impact a school district? How does that impact kids? Um, and that's where I came across the chief AI officer certification. And uh I haven't looked back since. So we'll go and kind of get into some of the details throughout the call.
SPEAKER_02You're crushing that. So just for everybody listening, I definitely want to cover like what does this mean for you know your children and those sorts of things from somebody who's working with your kids. Um, but I also one of the things that I'm interested in in particular is some of the lessons that you're learning on the educational side, uh, and like the administration of education, that like what what are those lessons that can also be applied to um really any business? Uh so we'll maybe start there. I know that one in our conversation before we uh recorded this, we did a pre-interview as I always do. One of the things that stuck up was that or that stuck uh stuck out was the the the policy conversation wasn't necessarily as fast as maybe the execution or the application of the tools. And I think that that's probably something that uh a lot of the listener companies might also be experiencing. There's been ongoing dialogue about what are we going to do about AI, but it hasn't quite uh gotten the traction yet. So can you kind of share what your experience has been since you've kind of been ringing the bell about, hey, let's do something about AI? What is that like how has it been received by your peers? What have been the challenges from both the administration side, the teacher side, but maybe also the parents and things like that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. All right. Well, if if we go back a couple of years when AI was starting to kind of get out there, right? So it was being talked about, it started to show up in the news. Um, students started to kind of pull it up on their phone. Parents were kind of skirting the idea of what is this thing that's coming. And that's about the same time that I stopped in. So I checked in and Chat GPT was kind of there. They came out with scheduled tasks, and and what I had running every morning was you know, ChatGPT scouring the news across the country about what are districts, what are counties, and what are states doing about AI. Um, and what I was getting, it was almost like cut and paste from no matter what district you were in, what state you were in, what county you were in. It was a cut and paste script, is we're all stuck on policy. Everybody was afraid that students were going to cheat. Yeah. Everybody was afraid that students would just not get the rigorous mindset that they need, right? They would, they would be dumbed down through AI. And so there was, they were stuck on this policy concept. Um, and I was kind of at the same time going through some leadership type focuses, and I was focusing on a book by Chris Voss, and and he does a negotiation book. And he talks about this concept of uh getting people to say no versus getting to people say yes and the comfort levels that our brain goes through with those two answers. And at the same time I was doing that, I was starting to realize that everybody could think of all the horrible reasons why not to adopt AI, right? And you and we don't need to go you list them, right? Yeah, you see them on the news every day, and everybody was trying to prepare or write policies on how to present how to prevent these bad things from happening, and nobody was getting past that. And I was trying to figure out how do I get past that. And so that's when I hopped into chief AI officer, chief chiefaiofficer.com. And what I was noticing in the business world is you were teaching us go to the C suite, right? Go to the top, go to the president, go to the CFO, and get them to understand the importance of AI. And so I stopped for a moment and I thought, well, what how does that equate to education? And that's where it did. So I went to my C-suite, right? My executive cabinet, and said, I want to push AI, I want to turn the switch on. Uh, will you give me permission to do that? And I'm a business guy, right? Yeah, I have an educational past. I was uh, you know, I've been on the educational side of the house for 30 years. It's only in the last five that I've been on business. So I said, I know how to do this, let's just flip the switch. So what we did is we immediately jumped into this concept of which AI, right? Um, in California, uh, and I am specifically in California, there's a lot of laws on student privacy, student protection, family rights, things like that. FERPA, COPA. So the the big names in the house are Google and Microsoft. But Google and Microsoft at the time was taking this really let's wait and see approach, right? Uh you had these private companies like Anthropic and OpenAI that's pushing fast, and you had Google and Gemini just kind of or Google and Microsoft kind of holding back. But we went with Google because we're education, we have you know the Google in uh educational suite, yeah. And and we flipped it on, not for students, but we flipped it on for all staff with no training, right? No policies, no execution. We just turned it on. I t I stood at the top and I told everybody I use AI and it's okay. Yeah. Um, let's figure out how to do this together. And that's what started it. Um, I I created a forum, a community. Uh, it's using Circle, like you are. Yep. Called the Redlands Launchpad. And uh we opened it up to managers and teachers and custodians and office staff. And we said, uh, like we're all in it together. We're we all enter artificial intelligence together. Uh, you know, the custodian or the office manager, the teacher, or I are all in the same learning circle. Um, and if you've been involved in artificial intelligence for a while, you you fall in and out of that learning circle because there's new products and new things that pop up. And I may think I'm an expert in AI, then you start talking about MCP, and I'm like, what are you talking about? Yeah, yeah. Right? So now I'm a beginner again. Yeah. And it's almost giving permission for everybody to accept that we're all beginners and we're all in this together. And that's where we spent year one. Um, we were starting to pilot with kids. Um, and I'll be honest with you, parents um were not on board, right? Parents were also afraid of the cheating and their kid not being as uh you know pushed towards that rigorous level. So we pulled back on the students and we continued to push hard on teachers and staff. Uh parents started to comment, well, your teach your teachers are using AI, and we don't like that because they're using AI to grade and they're using AI to lesson plan, um, and they shouldn't. And my conversation with them is well, why? Yeah. Right. Um, do we expect uh an accountant to use a calculator? Like that's okay. Yeah. Um, do we expect our leaders to use tools that make them better or make them more efficient? And that was the conversation, right? With parents saying, look, it our teachers sh should be using AI because they can customize content, they can, they can customize quizzes, they can cater to specific students' needs quicker and faster than they ever could before. I had to acknowledge that teachers shouldn't be using AI to grade and not use their feedback, right? It's okay to kind of assist, but we also want the human in the teacher, right? Yes, uh, not the robot in the teacher. So we stepped back and then we started creating policy. And so I would say the last three or four months, it's been policy, uh, creating that cheating policy, creating the proper use policy. So now when a teacher says uh here's the assignment, you can use AI level three, right? Because we have levels of AI use, one through five. Um, and they can actually call out that AI is acceptable using a level two, which is using it to generate ideas, okay. You know, whereas a level five is completely immersed in AI, AI is giving that product back. Yes. And then we had to give teachers tools to um grade and judge students' work based on AI. Um, and we also had to give parents tools to um question if a teacher is uh accusing their child of cheating.
SPEAKER_02Interesting. Okay.
SPEAKER_00So these policies that we had to create were policies for students, for parents, and for teachers. Where we are at in the process is I'll be rolling those policies out to our board of education in July, um so that they can see, right? Because our board was kind of you know a a little on the teeter about this, right? Okay. We're gonna roll that out in July, and um, if all goes well, because we took student feedback, parent feedback, staff feedback. If all goes well, we will continue the push with our staff. We'll roll out the policies that we now can refer to, yeah, and we're gonna pilot with um our students. And that's kind of the evolution we had to stop and pull back. Um but it I I honestly believe if I hadn't flipped the switch, yeah, we'd still be talking. Yeah, we actually put an article into the local newspaper that said that Redlands Unified School District is partnering with Google to turn on Gemini for everybody. Like we put it right out there. We said, this is what we're gonna do. Yes. Um I didn't expect the kickback I I got. Yeah, um, but I I I wasn't surprised. Yeah. It just required me to pause and say, okay, I have to meet the needs of the community as well. How do I do that?
SPEAKER_02I got a couple questions. This is f this is fascinating. Um one of them is a thought. As parents get they start getting exposed, something that I've I've I've heard in my past, and I I believe it wholly, a confused mind always says no. If I don't understand something, there's no risk with me saying, nah, I'm not gonna do it, right? And I know that initially, and and listeners like this, all this stuff, the same thing applies to your business. If your uh stakeholders or your um clients or your internal team is confused about it, expect some resistance, expect some no's. Yeah, do you think that as the parents, because you're talking about like this, this you've been doing this for over a year now, or about a year, or how long? A little over a year?
SPEAKER_00About a year. Okay, we're we're moving into July one will be our second year with our Gemini contract.
SPEAKER_02Okay. As parents who a year ago were like, wait a minute, this is, you know, they're at work. At work, they're probably getting exposed to a Chat GPT license or they're using Gemini. Do you expect that because of what's happening at the at the parent's job, that they're not gonna be as skeptical? Or do you think they're still gonna say, I don't see how what I'm doing at work, and my understanding of that translates to the impact it'll have on my children?
SPEAKER_00The latter, right? I I still think parents are afraid that their kids won't learn how to read or write or do math. Okay. Um the spin I've taken lately is um we teach mathematics because we know that adults need to know how to perform math to function in life, right? You have to know how to balance a checkbook, so you're gonna have to do math. We teach reading because reading is required to if you're an adult. Yeah. AI is the same way. Yes. Um, AI is being used in businesses and it's growing in the use of businesses. And if we don't teach students how to utilize AI, it's the same as not teaching students how to do math or teach students how to read. We have to prepare them for the life that's ahead of them. Um, and if I don't, then what I'm doing is I'm providing a disservice to our students who are entering into fields with AI and don't know how to use it because we didn't allow it. Um, and and and that's kind of the evolution of all of this thought. You know, I think I think in the beginning I was excited about AI. So I was I was 100% in and I was expecting everybody to dance with me about it. Yeah, yeah. When I hit when I got hit with the resistance, it made me stop and think, okay, the resistance is real. Let's think about that and let's talk about that. Um, and and hopefully we can meet in the middle. And and those conversations have happened a lot this year, and it's caused me to pause and says, okay, I'm an educator, and in my profession, and then what I went to college for was to learn how to educate humans, right? And children. And what do I need to educate them to make them marketable? Right. And and I think we had a conversation the other day in the forum about um the evolution of AI, yeah, and how a year ago it was prompting and now it's workflow management, right? Um with with cowork and codex and and and clause, it's it's thinking um about how to utilize these tools to increase efficiency uh and in a business increase that bottom line. And our job as CAIOs is no longer to go in there and say, okay, I can teach you how to prompt. It's to go in and teach you how to think different.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00To think in this automation role and to think, okay, you sit in front of your desk and you have tasks all day. If I told you I can automate some of those, what would you do? And I find myself on a daily basis sitting here trying to figure out okay, what what now can I automate? Yes, yeah. That yeah, that inquisitiveness, that curious mindset is what we have to teach our kids. AI is just the tool right that they're gonna use. Yeah, I don't need to teach AI. What I need to teach is how do you utilize this product to think different, to automate, to be valuable to the uh to the person, you know. Yeah, someone told me the other day that if if you're worried about losing your job, it means you're not valuable enough to the guy making the decision, right? Yeah, and if if you were to go into a company, the safest person in the company is the one that allows the boss to sleep that night because there's gonna be things that keep the the CEO awake. Yeah, and if if I can keep that CEO sleeping at night by automating or in or doing that, that's what I need to teach our kids. And AI is a tool to do that, but really as a mindset.
SPEAKER_02So this is an interesting shift for me. Like I I've been looking at AI as the thing, and the educational side, it's a thing. It's there's reading, there's writing, there's AI, there's physical education or physical fitness. Like there's yeah, it's it's not the thing. Yes. And now in businesses, I've been going in and looking at it, looking at it as like it's now gonna be uh the thing that everything gets built around. But I'm thinking that the listener, if you're in your business, if you're getting pushback, introduce it the way that Jason did, where it's just another thing that they learn. It's not the thing, it's not taking over everything. But if you if in the educational sense, if I'm not teaching kids. How to read and write, there's a disservice. If I'm not teaching kids how to use AI or think about using AI as an accelerant, as a tool, I'm doing a disservice. On the business side, the same kind of thing as a change management approach, maybe it's not, hey, we're we're transforming the business with AI. Maybe it's like, hey, we're going to introduce something that's going to support your role, right? So it becomes less intimidating of, oh my gosh, there's this huge sea change that's about to occur, even though it is. Maybe the narrative that you bring in as a business person to the rest of your team isn't that, but it's like, oh, we've got this thing that we're going to start to bring into you're still doing your job, we still need you, but now you're going to have a tool that helps you do it better. Now, um, one of the things that came up for me as you were talking about this, because you've dealt with the parents, you've dealt with the students, you've dealt with the educators, you've dealt with the administration, um, you've dealt with the media. Um, what questions, like listeners here, some or most of them will have children at some age that are going to be exposed to AI. Maybe it's already starting to happen, whether it's elementary all the way up to advanced education, what questions should they be asking of the administration of their educational environments that their kids are plugged into to make sure that they're not missing out, that and and have comfort that they can sleep at night, that their administrators of their educational environment are doing this the right way?
SPEAKER_00You know, it it I'm gonna look at it as me as a parent, right? I have I have daughters, right, that that utilize versions of AI, and my conversations with them and my conversations with their teachers has been about what level of AI use do they have?
SPEAKER_02I like that concept, yeah. This level thing.
SPEAKER_00We've decided in our upcoming policies that the K5, which is our elementary levels, will not have direct access to AI. But we will educate them on what AI is, how it's not human, that it makes mistakes, how it thinks, why it's so complimentary and appeasing to you as the user, right? Those conversations um are what we're teaching our elementary kids. When you move into the middle school, what we've decided is that teachers can utilize AI in the classroom and teachers can give AI tools to the students. For example, like a Google Notebook. The teacher will design the notebook and the student can interact with the notebook. A teacher will design that GPT and the student can interact with the GPT, but the student themselves will not have direct access to the chatting agent, right? And it's not till the high school where we're gonna give access to the chat agents, right? So now they're using that as a coworker or a partner in their educational journey. Um, and so my question to my teacher or my question to my administrator, what level of act access are you giving my child? I like it. Yeah. Um, because I have concerns over their own maturity levels, right? Um, my own daughter probably got too close to it as a friend, it is a partner, right? Um, let me ask, you know, and she named it, right? And and I have no problem with naming something, but the thing is, is when you name it, you humanize it. Yep, right, and you just do it's natural. So when I would find her asking advice, and I'm thinking, okay, well, the problem is, is it's always affirming device, right? And I had to have conversations with her about okay, you realize that how these language models work and and had to have those conversations with her, you know. And at one point she stopped using it, but I'm also a guy that's proficient in this, and so I can have those conversations, but I'm going to expect me as an educator and my teachers to have these conversations with their kids. Interesting. Yeah. So we're building lessons that will allow them to have these conversations, and it's going to be hard. We have, you know, 1300 teachers, and will they all do this with fidelity? Because they're all at their own comfort levels. So we have to give them little little nuggets of information that they can repeat. Um, but we're we're open to have these conversations and we're open to say, you know, AI is is is not all great, right? There is some negatives to it. And um, but we also have to be mindful of what safety features do we have in place. So, for example, um, we had to switch our filtering products because our old filtering product did not scan through chats, right? It it scanned through like their Google Docs or their Google emails, right? And it would alert us if there's self-harm or things like that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, Google would, in their educational version of their Gemini, that they will they will recognize self-harm type talk and then stop them and give them phone numbers to call. But they weren't alerting us of any of that. So we had to switch our filtering platforms that will allow us to search through those chats and give us alerts when certain chats and tell us who to go reach out to. Yeah. Um, so that is a protection that we had to take on, and that's the same protection that your listeners should be also asking their school district, right? So if if if if they're gonna turn on AI, one, what what level of access will my child have? And two, do you have filtering protections in place that catch if my daughter were to start talking or discussing self-harm within that chat? Yeah, yeah. Um, and there are products out there that will do that, right? Um, because they have to, you know, in we we don't need to go into the techno thing, but they pull apart the packets that are going back and forth and can filter those contents. Some do, some don't. Um, you know, Google by default doesn't have those in their own systems yet. They're working in that direction, um, but they're not there yet. So we had to purchase that separately.
SPEAKER_02So, and and again, listeners, uh as yes, we're talking about this experience in the educational environment, but I'm seeing a lot of parallels about how they're dealing with this and how you, as a team lead or as an owner of a company or a decision maker, can also be using this because just change the name of student to employee or teammate, right? Um, as a parent, how would you suggest that the listener get involved if this is now something that their school districts are uh exploring? Because the listeners of this, obviously, they have a a little bit more understanding of about AI and than the average, right? Somebody who's listening to Joe Rogan. Nothing against Joe, but you know, like that's a different topic. So the people that are listening to this, they have a little more savvy, I would suspect, than some parents who are just like, oh, hell no, like we don't want our kids being dumbed down. So, how would you suggest that I as a parent or other listeners as a parent get involved? What can we do to make sure that our understanding of it is introduced into helping the administration make uh a decision based on real world or based on not necessarily like fear-based, but like the the upsides of AI.
SPEAKER_00You know, this is a an age-old question about what's the parent role in educ in education. Sure. And, you know, as an educator, I'm always employing parents to become more involved. Um, what parents do often is they reach out to the Board of Education or they show up to a board meeting. Um, that is their right, and that is a public version of tackling this issue, but you're not speaking to the people directly who are employing it. You're not speaking to the people who are uh are implementing the systems and working with their kids. Those people are the teachers, right? Um, the teacher themselves. And so, my I would be having conversations with my teachers. Okay, I would start with maybe site administration just to find out how AI is used and what protections are in place with it. The principal site administrators should know. She all should be on the district website if they're a good district, right? Because they're listing their AI use and their AI policies, and this is common. But involving um the teacher and and showing up to those parent conferences and reaching out to the teachers is always encouraged because there's there's a piece to this, right? Teachers have to think differently with the age of AI. Yeah. You know, back when we were young, we didn't have to type typewriters, right? So uh we hand wrote our um our reports. I remember back in the day when we had to have handwritten outlines by certain dates before you'd have an outline and then a draft and then the second draft and then the final report. I have seen that didn't go away, but it's far less common today than it used to be. With the advent of computers, they just want the report. Yeah. Well, that's what AI can just give you um is the report. And so the teachers have to think differently. You know, I was at my father's father's day, you know, last weekend. I was up with my father and and you know, my brothers and sisters, and my niece was up there and she's a freshman in college, and AI came up as a topic. And she goes, I I don't like AI. I go, why? She goes, My my classmates just cheat, right? They don't know how to write a paper. They just don't know how to write a paper. And they just use AI and the teacher just grades it and they get good grades, and it frustrates me because I know they don't know how to write, and I'm watching them use AI. And my response was, okay, I love AI, so what's my response going to be? And I thought, well, you're a freshman in college. Shouldn't the student know how to write a paper? So if they don't know how to write a paper, well, that's the problem. Yeah. Because AI has only been around a couple years. If they're now a freshman in college and can't write a paper, then the school system failed them long before AI came out. AI. Yeah. And I said, How did your teacher take that? And she goes, Well, it was just it's a paper they turned in. Well, whatever happened to oral presentations, whatever happened with drafts, whatever happened with show us how you got there, whatever happened to the conversations that happened long before you actually turned in the final draft. So and I asked her, I said, Do you think the teacher's doing a good job at grading that AI paper? And she goes, Well, no. And I said, Well, there's your problem. This is a teacher-student problem, it's not an AI problem. Uh AI was the tool she used, but back in the day it was an encyclopedia, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, then it was Google, then it was Wikipedia. Yeah. Um, it doesn't matter what it is, teachers have to accept work in different modalities, right? Maybe produce a video, maybe produce a PowerPoint, maybe get up in front and talk in groups, maybe put your students into small groups and have conversations about their reports and then mismatch those. Those are all tools teachers should be doing. And if I'm a parent, I'm gonna have those conversations. I'm gonna say, Hey, thank you for this report coming back. Can you can I ask you why you gave the A? Um, is this the only way that you would turn this in? Uh if I know they're using AI, yeah, uh, I'm gonna ask those questions. And yeah, you don't have to know what I know. You can go in as a parent and just ask the question. Do you guys use AI? Yes, no. Well, how do you use AI? I'd like to know a little bit more about that. Um well, if if students are just turning in a paper, how are you how do you know if they're cheating or not? Like be inquisitive, right? Ask questions. Um, sometimes you're just wanting to know, you're not challenging them. Yeah, yeah. You just want to know. And right, and it's the same thing for businesses, right? Yeah, if if if a if an employee turns in this report, yeah, well, where did you get the report from? Yeah, we had a report turned in the other day and they said I used AI on it. So I kind of read through that report, and honestly, I threw it in AI and said, Can you check for against the data? And it found inconsistencies. And so I had replied back, Well, hey, there's some inconsistencies in here. Um, and they go, Oh, well, after I threw it into AI, I swapped some slides out. Wow, when they swap the slides out, the slides that they swapped out didn't match, right? And so it's a business. I wanted to make sure the data was presented right. I use the same thing. Yes, you know. Yep. A perfect so I mean here's a perfect example of how I use AI in business. So my I'm the deputy superintendent, so I have directors that do the reports. So in the old days, in my report, so it's called a SACS report, it's 200 pages long and it's all numbers, right? There's just no way that I can go through there. So I have trained myself to look at certain lines on certain pages for certain trends, but I can throw that whole thing in there now and say, analyze this for me. Um, and pay attention to these lines and these trends, and it does that. There's a narrative and a PowerPoint that's also generated where I used to go through and I used to proof those narratives and PowerPoints. I'd spend hours just checking grammar. I'd spend hours just totaling the charts so that they would total 100. Well, now I can throw the PowerPoint, the narrative, and the Sax documents in a folder. I can say, co-work. I want you to go through and analyze all of them. I want you to verify that the data in the PowerPoint matches the data in the the Sax documents. I want the I want you to then look separately that the narrative matches the Sax documents. And then I want you to compare the PowerPoint to the narrative. And and and I'm telling it to do these comparisons. And this is the first time I was using cowork to do that, right? Because uh chat used to max out my context window, but I don't have that problem anymore. So then it was done, it told me what it found difference in, and it says, Would you like me to make those changes for you?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I said, Well, sure, but I want you to save them as a separate document called corrected, and then I want you to highlight those changes so I can give them back to my director so that they can see the errors they made so they don't make them again. Yes. And that whole process took me 10 minutes, where it used to take me hours, and I never got past the grammar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I never got to the point where I was comparing the numbers across the three documents because it would just take me days to do.
SPEAKER_02Um you know, you you keep referencing this levels of use, and uh I like that a lot, especially for the kids. I think that that starting with the elementary to where they get educated on it, or like the the uh K through five. Yeah, then the next level up is you using tools that were built with AI and so that they're interacting with natural language, like understanding, like, oh, I chat with it, but they're not necessarily able to go chase rabbits with it. And then at the high school level, introducing now you have a little more discretion in how you're gonna use it to to create something, right? Not just not just enter information. And I think at the at the business owner level, that might be something to uh consider. There was there was uh an AI consultant out there that had um, I think the concept came from uh Matt Church in New Zealand with his thought leaders um kind of school, but they they created these belt systems, just like with with martial arts. And the benefit from a business side would be that if you had people who had kind of gone through level one training, level two training, level three, and you knew that if I was a level three trained employee and I was talking to a level one trained employee, I would have context on, oh, this is what they understand. This is this is how they're thinking about AI. And I would be able to communicate in a way that they could that they could understand based on what I understood to be their level of knowledge, right? So as a business owner, maybe think about what that would look like, identifying, even if it's self-identification initially, where somebody is on the learning journey. Um now, uh, one of the things that this this idea first hit me um when we were presenting and speaking at the EOS National Conference in, I guess that was April of 2025. These people would come up to our booth and they would say, Um, you know, well, how much can I learn in a day? Because we've always done like a one-day immersion kind of thing. And I would explain to them, like, I can have you close to being an expert level user. You're not gonna be an expert at AI, right? There's a lot to learn there, but you can think in a way that you're using AI way past what somebody who is brand new at this stuff would be doing. And they asked me how that was. And like on the spot, I had to think about traditional education. For you to get where you are now, um, you invested a lot of time in your career and like you had mentors that you've mentioned in the past. There was a lot of that that was going on. And it took like there was a sequence of activities that had to occur that built on the previous activities you did. Okay, I've achieved this level. Now I'm I'm ready to ascend to the next level of understanding. And then I thought about, you know, Adam, one of our chief AI officers, working with that uh a Saudi company that is a uh they build islands for the Saudi government. He Adam's never built an island before. But if he could ask somebody, okay, well, what do you want to know? And they could ask him a question, he didn't need to have all of that foundational understanding. He was able to access all of that information. So this paradigm of learning went from I need to invest years, advanced degrees, you know, all that type of thing, to be able to be the person that on demand, when my subject matter is needed, I'm able to recall it. The old paradigm. New paradigm is hey, what's your hey, expert? What's your question about your your expertise? Hold on, let me see. Hey, Chat GPT, hey Claude, what would I do here? And I'm almost like I'm able to access expert level information, but the missing piece is if I don't understand the industry or the application of that, I don't know the question to answer. So it's changed a lot from being somebody who is got the information waiting for somebody to force me to recall it, into you know, I don't know the question to answer, to ask, even though I've got access to, you know, expert level information. So this idea of um, I think for now for sure, especially with kids, the ascension path that you've got with your levels of access and understanding is fantastic. I'm wondering what the you know, 10 years from now, fast forward, and and the kids that are in second grade now have had 10 years of of it before they graduate, like they've been exposed to AI, they've been using it at home. The games that they play are now AI enabled. Their parents are using AI to manage the household or to plan the vacation or whatever. And it becomes this completely different thing to where what you were to you were talking about earlier, where we you and I had to go through this thing of writing things out and learning that process now to where it's we've got the shortcut. So uh what do you think this paradigm of learning is going to look like? I mean, next year, next school year, much less 10 years from now.
SPEAKER_00Uh I think it'll be behind us. And what I mean by that is, you know, we've all heard the comparisons to AI to um the you know, the the automobile, right? Yeah, tire, the yeah, the printing press, right? Yeah, uh the calculator. Um and all of those things disrupted the system. Yeah. Um the internet disrupted the system, right? In 91, 92. This is disrupting the system. We are thinking about AI actively today. Um once it becomes normal, uh, I think it's gonna be just another tool. I mean, I can remember when the internet came out. Interesting kids were just gonna cheat, right? And then when Wikipedia came out, there was all kinds of policies and rules on how to use Wikipedia. And you can't use it or you could use it. You know, in in in in um in behind the scenes, you have adopted textbooks, right? So all districts go through these textbook adoptions, and and your children have come home with big fat textbooks. That's money, right? That's a financial engine that I think drives that. Yes. Then you had this thing called teachers pay teachers that came out, and it was teachers creating content that they use in their classroom, hosting it on online, and other teachers paying for that content. It's like a teacher version of Etsy. Okay. It freaked everybody out in education. Well, you can't do teachers pay teachers. Oh, it's it's not real content, it's not the textbook, it's not this. But you know what teachers were doing were filling their gaps that these textbooks weren't giving them. And I'm not here to make a via proponent to say teachers for teachers is this great thing. I understand that you can host things that are probably not the best for kids. Sure. But the concept of that teachers had to adapt to and figured out how to fill a hole. Um, I think AI is similar to that. Right now it's big, it's a thing. We talked earlier, it's a thing still. Yes, yes, and while it's a thing, it's going to be a thing, and we're gonna have policies and rules, and it's gonna take everybody's jobs, and it's sucking up all the water and all these things um until it's not a thing anymore. Um, and you know, Siri and Alexa when it came out was a thing, yeah. And then it just no one cared about it anymore, and it was AI, right? Yeah, yeah. Uh, you know, maps, right? Oh, we're we're we're using maps, and so many people didn't like using you know their maps on their phones because they wanted to pull out their Thomas guide. Um, you don't even think about maps anymore, it's just what you do. Uh, you know, I watch Landman a lot, right? Yeah, and I I laugh because he says all the time, just drop me a pin, drop me a pin, drop me a pin. Yeah, it's such a part of the the show that that's all they do. Yeah, dropping a pen five years ago was like foreign. Yeah. And it's it and it's natural. And I think AI is gonna be the same way. I think eventually it's going to become just a part of what we do. Um, it's always something that teachers, students, and parents are gonna have to worry about, right? Because it is a method of cheating, but so is going on Google, so is going on Wikipedia, so is us back in the day going and just pulling the encyclopedia out rather than going and pulling out the other books. Yes. It's this, it's just another thing. Um, and that's the way I think about it. Yeah. So how do we manage today to get through the thing? And that's what we're here for, right? Yeah, those are the conversations, that's what we're doing. Uh it and it's it's it's marketable, right? There's businesses surrounding themselves about this, but you know what? 10 years now, I don't know that the there's gonna be a market for pushing AI into companies because it's gonna be there already, because we're gonna educate kids, and yes, we're gonna now get these kids coming out of our school if we're teaching AI, don't need us, they're gonna be us in the company, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right, just by default, like every everybody will be an us, a me and you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so but we're in this period of time where it's a thing.
SPEAKER_02Because you mentioned Wikipedia, and I was like, that's so benign, like right, but at some point it was considered like cheating to be able to and just like people are looking at that now with with AI, whether it's a work product that you're creating or an educational product that you're creating as a as a user, um interesting.
SPEAKER_00You said something earlier about the levels, and I'm gonna throw it into the businesses this way.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Um, I think another way for a business to accept AI use is to create levels of acceptable use. Meaning we call it one, two, three, four, but call it whatever. To say, okay, it is acceptable for you guys to use AI to proof your work. That's one way of doing it. It's acceptable for you guys to generate ideas with AI, and it's acceptable for you guys to use AI to give us a finished product, like the presentation that you're gonna present. Um, and and as a business leader, I'm gonna tell my employees what's acceptable up front, right? Because I'm gonna give them permission, say, okay, yes, you can use AI. I'm not gonna chase you down, I'm not gonna look over your shoulder. But my expectation is the product that you're gonna give me is an AI product, it's your product, but you it's okay if you used AI to get it. It's being up front with your employees to say, okay, AI is out there, and I'm hiring new guys that know about it. Yeah, and it's okay that they use it, but but I want the product however you want it, right? You you might be okay with an AI-driven solution. And it's hard because with spreadsheets now, I don't even know that the spreadsheet's not AI driven. I mean, I can just have co-work build me the spreadsheet.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So how we're addressing that, I think that's great. How and I didn't realize that we were kind of doing this, but how we address that in AI use policies when we work with companies is we kind of call it like a green light, yellow light, red light environment. Where, hey, green light, if you're doing these activities listed, it's totally fine to use AI. Yellow light, you can use AI, but get approval first. Red light, hey, this company, we don't use AI to do these certain things. And I think that this idea is another concept, and you're familiar with it from being in a chief AI officer community, but when we're working with clients, we explain to them this concept of 1080-10. And that's something that I learned from my buddy Mark Moss, if anybody knows who Mark is. The first 10% of working with the models is you being clear on what you want and you being able to just to clearly describe that to Chat GPT or Gemini or whatever you're using. Not just, hey, write me an email to a subcontractor, but hey, here's a situation. Subcontractor is behind, we've already paid them, blah, blah. The more context you give it in that first 10%, the better the result. The 80 is what the models do. You hit enter after you've put in your prompt. But what we always tell people, and a lot of people don't think about this, the last 10% is you as the human going back through the output. You've got context on the solution, uh, on what is good quality answer to this. You've got an understanding from your industry or your business experience of what a good answer would look like. So it's up to you as the user to still go back in on that final 10% and say, is this how I would have worded that? Like you said, with the with the analysis of the the narrative and the the slides and everything, you understand what good looks like. If you didn't go back through what AI gave you, you would be opening it up to hallucination or maybe AI didn't quite understand it. So as a human listen, as the listener and the human that's using the tools, you're responsible for the first 10% and that last 10%, exactly what Jason said he was doing right now. Yeah, AI did 80%. It takes him minutes, what used to take days, but it's once he hits enter and gets that output, he's not done. He's still going to use the experience that he's got of doing it the old way, the manual way, to be able to look at AI's output and say, is this quality? Is this what I would have done? Is this how I would have said it? So as a user, you know, uh see how you can apply that to your own usage as well.
SPEAKER_00Um go ahead. I would just never once in the entire time that I've been involved in AI and pushing the district did I ever think about reducing staff. Right? Interesting. It's always been about optimizing our time and growing the capacity amongst my team. Um a little tip that I did, I I it was an online, I I couldn't tell you the guy's name, it was on YouTube, but you know the custom instructions sections of all these models, and we put in there don't use EM dashes, I'm professional. We put in what we want the output to kind of look like. He had a little tip to put in there to rate its output, and if it doesn't between zero and ten, and if it doesn't rate above an eight, run it again. Interesting, and run it again until it hits above an eight, and then give me a better structured prompt. Interesting. And so at the bottom of every one, so that's in my custom instructions uh underneath don't use the aim dashes. So at the bottom of every answer that I get, there's a score. It's it's it's the language model score, but then it gives me another prompt that's better than what your original prompt was. What my original prompt was. Yes. And often I'll just take that prompt and I'll throw it in a news chat to see if I get a better response. And so I'm allowing the model to train me every single time that I ask it a question. It trains me how to write a better question next time. Great tip for sure.
SPEAKER_02Hey, so Jason, we're at the top of the hour, but I I I want to make sure that everybody who's listening to this, I hope I hope that you have a better understanding of what's going on behind the administrator's door at your children's school, whether that's a university or that's a kindergarten, right? Um, I hope that you walked away with an understanding that you're responsible for communicating with the people in the classroom with your children about how they're using AI. And hopefully, if you're you know you're listening to this stuff and you're using it, you may be able to uh present some suggestions to your the teachers that are working with your kids on how, hey, here's how I use it. Maybe that can apply to you, um, to the educators. So be active, don't just assume because I'll I'll I would be surprised if most school districts had a Jason working with them, or that was part of their like invested in not just AI, but invested in AI across the school district. I would be very surprised. Are you finding that at all? No, no, most of them are the tech guys. Um it's not the same. Not the same. That's not who you want, right? So this is this is a very unique. So if your kids are in Redlands, congratulations, you got somebody like Jason um at the helm of this stuff, which is what you need. If not, uh please pay attention to the the narrative that's coming out of the school district, uh, the administration of that school district where your kids are, and pay attention and listen. Are do they get it? Or do they have the CTO who you know who's a great database administrator or whatever, trying to figure out the AI policy? It's not the same. Um, and then this this levels of of uh identification and access for usage. Figure out how you do something, you translate something like that into your own business. I think all of those are huge takeaways. And then I I guess any any last comments, Jason, for the listener on both the business considerations as well as the educational considerations.
SPEAKER_00Out of all of this, what I think I wish people had was a natural curiosity. Right? Yeah, it's it's to ask the questions, it's to be open with with hearing what you want to hear. AI is out there and we can fight it. Um, but if people were curious about how it's used and how it works, um people would be more open to it, right? Yes. Um kids are gonna use it. And and if we're not teaching it and not giving them access to it, they're gonna have it on their phone. Yep. So shadow usage. Yeah, so why don't we talk about this and let's let's let's have this conversation together on how we can better educate their child. Um, you know, and parents are ultimately the the control of their child. If they don't want their kid to have access to it, well, we can shut it off. Sure. You know, and in and but I hope they don't do that because it's putting a disadvantage. Um because when their child enters the same job force that all the other kids are, that's just one tool that they're not gonna have in that competitive market. So be curious and be open. Awesome, Jason.
SPEAKER_02I I've enjoyed this conversation. We, as I mentioned, we haven't had uh, I don't think we've had any educators or people involved in in education that have sat with me and shared the perspective, but you're not just thinking about it, you're leading it across a large school district. So this is a very unique opportunity for the listeners to get that perspective of what's and not just from somebody who's like, oh, I was curious, but you were already like you're a professional, you're an AI professional who happens to be in the school or the other way around, you're an uh educational professional who happens to be an AI expert. So it's been um very enlightening for me. So I really want to say thank you for taking the time out of having me, the busy summer um of doing this, man. So and Jason, if anybody wants to kind of follow your perspectives, I know that you're producing content, you're sharing, you're speaking regularly. How what's the best way for them to kind of see your opinions on things?
SPEAKER_00Um, LinkedIn is a good one. Um, you know, I'm I'm available on LinkedIn under Jason Hill. Um and we'll add that to the show notes as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So you can find me. It's uh, you know, I'm I'm just looking at what it was, but uh I can give it to you later. But yeah, it's uh I'm out there on LinkedIn. Um I don't do a lot of other social media. I have a YouTube site I'm just created to kind of start doing some of this stuff. But uh, you know, if you're in the California market, um I, you know, I'm a part of AXA and a part of Casbo. And, you know, I talk at various conferences and can always reach out via email, man. I I I love to share and we're all in this together.
SPEAKER_02Then we'll include uh Jason's email as well in the show notes. So um, and for the listeners, like thank you for for taking this little journey with us today. Um, it was uh a bit of a deviation from you know the traditional just business talk about AI, but I think it's a very important topic and it's one that's under addressed um just in general with AI-related content. So uh feel free to pass this along to anybody else who's uh concerned about like what does this mean for my kids and that sort of thing. But um thank you so much for listening. Uh we're gonna have another fantastic episode next week. Um and uh if again, if you got value out of this, please uh feel free to forward that along to somebody who you think would benefit from it. And Jason, again, thank you so much for taking the time out of the busy summer uh to help us with that. So thanks everybody. We'll see you on the next episode. See you. 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 free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chefafficer.com. 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.