The 'Golden Hour' Hack: How to Use AI to Buy Back Your Time | ft. Vic Silverman

In this episode of Women Lead AI, we sit down with Victoria Silverman, an AI advocate who holds a fascinating contradiction: she helps organisations adopt AI, but absolutely refuses to let it near her own creative screenwriting.

Discover how to survive the AI revolution using her "Golden Hour" method and why you should be feeding your performance review to AI to fast-track your career! Victoria shares her incredible journey from driving massive innovation at Thomson Reuters to founding *After AI*, a framework helping individuals and businesses figure out what to do with the time AI frees up.

Links & Resources:
Connect with Victoria Silverman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoria-silverman-afterai/
Reach out to Victoria at: Victoria@MissingManualLimited.com 

#ArtificialIntelligence #WomenInTech #FutureOfWork #AIForBusiness #CareerAdvice #WomenLeadAI #ProductivityHacks #TechPodcast

Join the Community:
Women Lead AI is more than a podcast; it’s a community and learning space for women shaping the future of tech. 
https://www.skool.com/women-lead-ai

Transcript

0:00

My guest today is someone who holds what might be the most interesting contradiction in the AI space right now. She is one of the people most dedicated to helping organisations adopt AI. And she absolutely refuses to let it anywhere near her own creative work. She started in Brixton, got to Cambridge, wrote for The Guardian, The Financial Times and Private Eye. And then she spent years inside some of the biggest names in financial services, Reuters or London Stock Exchange Group, where she watched innovation transform how people work from their insight. She then founded After AI, a framework helping individuals and organisations figure out what to do with all the time and creative space that AI actually frees up. Oh, and she just won a Blockbuster Screenwriting Award in Hollywood. Victoria Silverman, welcome to Women Lead AI. So thank you so much for your time. I'm so excited to have you here. The first thing that I wanted to ask you, you're one of the most vocal advocates for AI adoption, but at the same time, you said publicly that you never let AI near your creative work. And I want to start there and I want to understand how do those two things live in the same person? It's a really good question because I love AI and the things it can do. But if you look at what it can do with screenplays, the output is terrible. You know, you have a player and you just go, oh my God, this is really bad. And a lot of people in the industry know that and they would immediately see if you'd written something with AI, just there's a uniformity and I write with my co-writer Norma J. Hibbert. And we'd been working on a piece, a TV pilot and we'd built, she'd done the outline, we'd built the characters. This has been bubbling up since 2022. And I just thought, I'm just going to write the TV pilot and get it done using my golden hours, which AI helped me do my tax return in a couple of hours rather than three days that it would take me before. So I'm using that kind of time where I'm using AI to help me in my general life. And you know, I wrote the pilot and it's, I do the bare bones and then we work it up together. And I sat next to her and she, she read it and I'm sitting there like an expectant father and she grabs my hand and she goes, Vic, it's good. It's really good. Now, if AI had done it, you know, my poor ego would be thinking, well, you know, she liked it because I'd done it. And unfortunately, creative people are very at the centre of their own ego universes. So I honestly don't think it's viable at the moment. It will be, but it will never have a lived experience that us two have had, you know, which is probably tell you Wiktoria over a glass of wine or a, you know, a box of wine, I think would take, you know, all the things we've been through. AI can't do it. Can't get back creativity. Where do you think is that like, is that balance between the, you know, you, for example, asking it to write an outline versus you're asking it to write a script versus I saw like the other day, a whole trailer of a movie being done using, you know, I think it was mid-journey. And like, it was incredible. So I was really surprised that it was made using AI. But where do you think, you know, is that balance where, oh, it's still like my work and my idea. I have seen those, those trailers and those things and it's so tempting. But it, I was the only time I've used it on our feature film that we won the award for, for the screenplay best drama is a production house we're interested in taking it on as a project. We did an actors read through with them. We changed the script considerably because the actors always have better ideas, which AI, you know, unless it's got kind of built in actors who can feel it. You know, we're not feeling enough tension. We want more peril. We want more thrill. We want it to be a thriller. So we changed it. And the production house said, can you tell us what changed from the actors read through script to the new script? And then I put both PDFs. I made sure that the back end was locked so that this couldn't be shared in the AI couldn't learn from it. I didn't want that to happen. So hopefully protecting the IP. I put both PDFs in and it came up with a one pager which said, you know, on page 22, you changed this scene to this on page 32. And that would have taken me a week. But that's the only time. And that is really, I do, I am so tempted to create a trailer for our film, or using AI. I just, I just think that it feel at the moment it feels like cheating. And is that what's what's stopping you? I don't know. I think it's just not the industry doesn't like it. People would say, that's just AI. Do you know what I mean? Whereas the bringing together of actors in a room who read interpret, who live your words, I think is very valuable. And I don't think it's going to go away anytime soon. It might be a good thing to get you across the line to get an agent. They look, we put our script into AI and this is what it thinks the trailer would look like. Can you imagine Paramount running with this? Yes. But for me, it would feel wrong, although I'm an advocate for AI. I think the real stuff's a good stuff. Won't be taken over quickly. Do you think there could be a case made, for example, let's say I'm a student at a university and I'm part of filmmaking society and I want to make James Bonson movie right with big explosions and all of those things. Obviously, I don't have the budget for it. For example, using it for that. What would you say about that? That's good as an experiment. And obviously, parts of your production, your big explosions, riding off a cliff, unless you're Tom Cruise or you can get Tom Cruise, someone who wants to do their own stunts, it will happen. It's like the green screen. Suddenly, people aren't traveling to Hong Kong from say Paris because the green screen can do it well now. In the beginning, you could tell it was green screen. Now you can't. So, yeah, of course, it will happen. It will happen. But you will lose some of the skill that makes a film incredible. And when you get to know people in the industry, they started by making shorts in their own back gardens and then they've really, really honed their skills. And they've got that sense of what all this this shot mean, what's going to happen here. God, what if we subvert that and do this? Which AI may not have that ingenuity, but it may be that you prompt it well and it does. I'm not ruling it out. I'm just saying at the moment is the time we find ourselves in is good that you're pressing me on this. And I am so tempted, but I dare not. Partly because the people we talk to, we go out to Cannes, we've been out in LA for, they really are not ready yet for their way of working to be sort of lost. And, you know, eventually, the cartographers of big cities had to concede that Google Maps is brilliant. So it will adjust, but the moment it's not ready and it's not, it will be cheaper, but there'll probably be a two tier stream running where you'll have the AI made films that people can buy maybe at a discount. And then you'll have the real films and that will continue. And they will have real actors, real value, people that stand out who really know how to act. And it's, you know, when I was thinking about coming here today, we've had 150 million years when we were pre-verbal. So one sloped eyebrow, you know, one raised shoulder, one glance from an actor, it's unique to them. It's their fingerprint, it's the way that they act. And AI will have a good shot at replicating that and giving it personality, but it won't, it won't be the same. It won't stand out for people. People pay a premium to see a real, a real film. Yeah, I guess, I guess when I think about, for example, you know, athletes and watching Olympics, like the reason why it is so fascinating is because you know that someone has put hours and hours of training into that, right, that they've spent the last four years doing just that one thing. Yeah. And the reason why, you know, we hate, for example, people that do doping in athletics is, is for that reason that it feels like they're, they're taking a shortcut. So maybe, you know, maybe like you say, there is kind of an argument to be made that that effort is part of the, the value that we as an audience have, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do you feel that when you get on your streams or on social media, suddenly there's dancers come up? And at first I thought, wow, these are really good dancers, but then you realise it's AI, no one could dance like that. I mean, how does it feel when you see that? Do you? When you see, for example, someone doing, like gymnastics is like always incredible that human can do that. But if it's not human doing it, then is it so incredible? Exactly. See, that's what we need. We need the joy of the incredible. And a film is a feature film. It's a massive feat. I mean, it's thousands of people and each one has a speciality, you know, and the costumes, the people who build the sets, these are like real experts, like, and they're like Olympic athletes, they have trained and trained and trained, tried, they've done different things, and they all come together and their individuality coming together is, it's magic. And I think that there are areas where we can't lose the magic, but there are areas where it just makes sense to use AI. Yeah. Let's go back to your journey. And you went from a comprehensive to doing an MPhil in Cambridge, and you then became a journalist and then worked in some of the biggest financial institutions that are out there. Where does AI enter that story? Yeah, so we go back to 2016, and I've been doing a comms job in financial and risk business at Thompson Reuters, and there's 49,000 people. And we've got the innovation labs. And at that point, so Reuters news agency were looking at creating algorithms to detect fake news, because they're, you know, it's the cleanest news agency in the world. They, every story has to be real, it can't be invented. And that was back in 2016. And at the same time, blockchain, the distributed ledger, was causing quite a storm, because people were saying, if you work in accounting, if you work in banking, in 10 years, you won't have a job, it's all going to be on the blockchain. This is, we're really in trouble. So I had this brilliant job, I love Director of Innovation Enablement, and we're in every country in the world with a small, tiny, all women kick-ass team. And, you know, I go to the people in the labs, and some of them had like three or four PhDs in maths, and they were just at the cutting edge. And I'd have to say to them, look, can you explain to me can you explain to me how an algorithm works as if I was seven? This is what I've from done, Maya. And they, and then they'd explain it and I'd go, okay, well, let's take this down a notch. Can you explain it to me as if I were your cat? Because, you know, they were just, and they go, all right, let's explain Bayesian statistics to you. And it was my job to kind of translate what was going on, you know, and so that's where it started. And that whole blockchain thing, and then the early application of algorithms in a business setting that was accelerating fast. And I have to say, I work, there were some incredible women working in that field. And big shout out to Joyce Shen, who follow her if you can on LinkedIn, and she's doing phenomenal work, really, really good work. And there were just people come in, they talk up their algorithm on a board, and then you would have to dissect it, understand it, what can it do, where can it go? And everybody, because they were lovely, brilliant, intelligent people who had very little ego, they were talking about the ethics and what does this mean for the world. So my ears were pricking up and going, okay, you know, we all think that we're going to hell in a handcart because you're going to have this agentic learning and it's going to do its own thing. But the people behind it are really responsible. I don't think there's a mad kind of wizard going, ha, ha, ha, you know, James Bond villain controlling it all. It's, I'm relatively sure that although people do want money, they're also humane and they're thinking about the world, although they know that there will be consequences of applying AI rapidly. And in that role, I know you managed to get return on investment in innovation, 333%. Can you tell me about that and what, like, how did this happen and what did you learn from that experience? Yes, so obviously I'm part of a team, what fantastic global leader is that in North Carolina, we spread across the world, across Europe, across India. It's like a kaleidoscope of innovation. And we had a fantastic chief of staff, the late Carla Jones, who she bought me into a room and said, I think you're quite creative. How can we use this in the business? So she was open to doing that, you know, and in all businesses, you have pockets of genius and you have pockets of people who want to move ahead and want to do things. But they're also really annoying for the people who plan three to 20 years in advance, you know, your financial planners, you know, so you've got all these people who are rolling their lean, their agile, they're, they're all about small experiments and pivoting. And I love those people. But it's also quite hard, you're an operations person, you've got a supply chain, like you've got it all lined up, it's all rolling quite smoothly. Why the hell do you want the people in the jeans and the t-shirts to start disrupting everything? But, you know, businesses I'd worked in and go, well, do the customers feel, what do they feel? And they say, well, we're not moving fast enough, or we're not cutting edge. So then we took an approach. So obviously there were, there was a catalyst fund, which you could, it was like a Dragon's Den or a sharks tank, you could go in, you could pitch an idea. So that was within Reuters. So they, so they, they had, so the company put together a fund and the employees were able to pitch their ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you could have up to $100,000 or more. And you could backfill your own role and you could go off and develop your, your innovation. Oh, wow. So, but you know, there was quite a bit of money put into it. So we take 90 people who were at the cutting edge of AI at that point, we take, we all went to Bangalore, we all went to Zürich and Zürich, and we would work on a challenge of series of challenges that the business needed or the customers through the labs had said, you know, we want to get smart contracting or we want to do things in a different way. It was really, that was very technical AI and, you know, blockchain related. It wasn't the sort of organisational HR functional stuff at all. And then we did operational challenges for innovation. And then we did do some of the lovely soft stuff. So we got, we had, we ran this campaign called Dare2 Disrupt. And at that point, people in the office was pre COVID. And what we did was every time there was a flip chart, we got people to write something that would spark innovation for another team coming into the room. Then people did it online because it's global business. They did haikus, they did, people built storyboards in corridors to try and get other people thinking. And they, what they did was I got them to take a selfie and then hashtag it with #dare2disrupt. So everyone could find the inspiration that the whole business was creating. That was fun. Do you know what I mean? That obviously didn't incite the action. But then we created a whole system where you could identify what kind of innovator you were in the business, you know, where you're a technivator, where you, you understood and love technology. And we put you into sort of one group. Some 49,000 people did it. It was an e-learning that brought you in and helped you identify how you innovate. Were you an'intrapreneur'? Were you someone who wanted to physically give up your time, you know, in that discretionary effort because you couldn't help yourself from making new stuff? And so what it was saying really was, you know, if you're a disruptor, there's a place for you. You exist here. So, you know, or were you just someone who liked to bring in knowledge and if you went off to an event, you came back and you had a coffee or virtual coffee with your team and you just explained that I've been out to this conference. There's always stuff happening with wearables, VR, you know, and the labs were looking at that as well. So you could have a subject matter expert come and talk at your coffee or your lunch and learn or whatever it was. Like to me, this kind of, it sounds like a culture within the company where innovation is like one of the North stars, you know? I think when you, within a week of being in a new company, you kind of either have that feeling of, oh, this is the kind of company where they believe either they disrupt themselves or, you know, someone else will disrupt them. Or it's the kind of company where actually, you know, this is the way we do things. And if we're forced to move because competitor has, you know, has improved, then we'll do that. But we're not like that open to it. How, you know, how do you think you can, you can like create that kind of culture within the company? And is it, is it the case of like, because it sounds to me like Thomas Reuters, they, you know, they basically put the money where their mouth is, right, where they had that fund. And they realised that, right, if we want innovation, we need to have like budget for it. Yeah, you have to invest. But to be fair, they weren't at the cutting edge at that point, but customers, they could see that their competitors were. So, you know, if you, look, if you go into a Google or a Facebook or a meta, or, you know, it's baked in, right, and they're employing you because you've got that creativity. And then you, you do go to places where things are good. And it's like, why, why rock the apple boat? This is working. There is a problem because everyone who's asked this question will say, we have to have psychological safety. You have, and in a way, that's what all this funding of innovation did. You had psychological safety. You didn't have it in every team, right? And sometimes there were team leaders who were like, I've got three people out on maternity leave. And now you're telling me someone wants to backfill their role so they can go off and, you know, create something that might not even work. Under staffed, I've got five people off sick as well. No, you know, and then, then it was a negotiation. And we would negotiate for the people who really wanted to do that. But for me, psychological safety, right, cannot work if people are tired. So, especially in the financial bit of the business, you had a lot of presenteeism. You had a lot of really hardworking people who were being at seven, and then they would finish at seven, and then there would be networking drinks, and they'd be supporting, you know, business resource group, et cetera. And, and then I think it's harder because when you get people who are really, really tired, they cannot innovate. Their brain is on high alert, and it's ready for fight or flight. And it's not doing a lot of other stuff. So it's not an easy path. Do you know what I mean? It wasn't like a wonderland where everyone went, oh, yeah, lovely. Yeah, let's, let's do that. Let's, let's look at an algorithm that can do X because at that point, what we're doing works, they want to do is a work that's going to get them the bonus. Then, you know, you look at how do you reconfigure renumeration? How do you get what people are doing as'intrapreneurs' recognised within their performance review and sort of paid for? So that is the challenge. Like it's not easy. If I was a leader, I would be like, okay, how I am bought into innovation, but how do I get return on investment? And I think it's, is it the case that, you know, you just know that if you make however many experiments, you eventually will get that innovation and those potentially productivity gains? Or, or is it, you know, something else? I think it is structural. And I think, you know, the whole lean six sigma innovation methods, which are probably being surpassed by new things I don't know about. But I think that just looking at things in a lean way, doing small experiments, small steps, move fast is still valid, really valid. And you know, in your own life, don't you sort of we're sold so many vitamins and minerals, you take it for three weeks, if you don't look like Olivia Dean or Hannah Fry, you just, you just go now, I'm not, I'm not spending on this anymore. So we're doing it in our own lives and doing it at work is harder because you have got your finance people who might not be agile. Or they might, you know, that that's a joy, isn't it to have people working with you collaborators who are really agile, you know, and one of the things I'm doing with After AI is helping founders market themselves and really reach customers, because that's quite, it's relatively new. So we're all scrambling and sort of seeing what works, how do we do it? And I'm working with an AI founder and she's just, she's just a machine, you know, and she, she literally thinks that you should feel uncomfortable doing something. You should, it should stretch you and it should be painful. And you do it, and if you muck up, it doesn't matter. And I love it because she, she's created a really great platform for schools and communities and for people to get a scale of economy when they buy things for schools and education. And, you know, big up Yvonne, it's, it's a spirit, it's an esprit to go with it and find the right people who feel the same. And then have for one who's a bit slow, he goes, well, hang on a minute. Why are you pivoting? That actually worked, you know, because sometimes you get too busy with iterating and changing and, oh, hang on, that's not going to give you as big a much of a return, but your return on investment is going to be good. Or, or that has potential for growth that, you know, your, your perfect thing might not. Yeah, I think in companies where I worked, you know, like sometimes that culture of innovation is, is, you know, you can kind of feel it more or feel it less. But it is at the end of the day, I think a lot of companies have that. Oh, you know, at the same time, the end of quarter is coming. Yeah. And we have to hit this target. And obviously, you know, and sales is one of the primary kind of factors that people look at. So if it goes down, then it impacts, you know, their kind of stock market value. And I think, yeah, that's like, that's a very big challenge where with innovation, you have to have that look at, you know, what, how do we want to position ourselves in five years time? But actually, we're only looking in the next like two months until the end of the quarter. But I would love to hear more about your work with after, after AI. What, what is it that you do? And as I understand that you look a lot at what happens after AI is introduced in the company, I think a lot of, a lot of people go for that, you know, transformation sort of phase and they help companies with that. But yeah, would you tell me more? So sort of three levels. So when I say after AI, that's because I think AI is here. Do you know what I mean? So even if you're not deploying it in a company, if you've got 50 people who can save one hour a day because AI helps with their emails or helps with their plan or whatever it is, their planning or their analysis, making sure it doesn't hallucinate, but it's getting better. But whether it can help you speed up in your own job, the instinct is to do more busy work. But if you had 50 people in a company, and each one of them set aside a golden hour, right? And you haven't even got AI, you know, you're kind of telling the shareholders that's coming or you're, you've got systems in place that are highly automated, right? Even if you haven't got anything, all of those employees that you've got amongst a team of 50 or a company of 50, if they can save one hour a day, you've got 12,000 hours a year, even with everyone taking off for four weeks, holiday or whatever they're doing, you've got, you know, all those hours. Now you could do something together with that really innovative, you know, or you could, you could put it to your wellbeing because when you have good wellbeing, you have more psychological safety because then you don't have people who are running around like headless chickens on high alert because you've got to get this done and I can't think about anything else, which is how it is. I mean, most businesses are quite, you know, it's a swan with the legs flapping underneath. And as you say, you've got to hit those targets, you've got to get that money in. So just say, well, look, we've all got an hour a day. How can we use that hour? So I've created a little calculator which calculates what people do and then creates what not to do list, right? It's very simple stuff. But then working out, what will you do with that time and where, where, how are you going to become more creative, more productive, more strategic is looking at that. So with the big companies, you know, that is, it's workshopping, it's working out what the reality is for them and where they want to take their, their time as they adapt to AI. So, you know, if you look at survival of the fittest, which Darwin took, he took that phrase, he took that phrase, it was phrased by Herbert Spencer in the 19th century. And what Darwin was seeing that was that the best you, the best you are adaptive, the way that you adapt will help you survive. It's not the most intelligent. And it's not the strongest. It's the ones who can work out what to do. And, you know, he's looking at peppered moths, and they can make their wings go look like their surroundings and their environment. And they're surviving and other little clever moths are not. You know, so, you know, if you put Mike Tyson in a room with a peppered moth, you've got no chance. He can be big and strong and punching away. Your peppered moth has found a little space behind the bookcase where no one's going to find it. So it is all about that survival. And then I am working with small companies and creators, so graphic designers and animators, illustrators, who are literally having their lunch stolen by AI, eaten every day by AI. They're going back years, you know, some of them have, their profits have gone back five years. And they had big customers and they were well respected. And they now they are often freelance. And then it's about diversification and obviously doing that work really cut price for them to say what would a new revenue stream look like? And, you know, for people who are art sort of inclined, where AI is producing images and is doing stuff for basically nothing, taking their work, as then you help them to look at, you know, where a big growth area. So there's a mental health crisis in the UK. How do you can can you adjust what you're doing around towards art therapy at scale that you can handle? Or, you know, how can what you do find its place now? Because we are after AI, the AI is there. You know, if you're saying it can create a trailer for a feature film, probably in about 10 seconds. And then all those camera people, all those, you know, scene builders, set builders, costume, costume designers, they're really having to look anew at what they do and how they can adapt. So after AI is just about the adaption, but also bringing in some of the techniques that I've learned around being more creative, being more strategic, because I think, you know, those are always useful, even if your business isn't predicated on tech, it needs to be as creative as it can be. So if I am a graphic designer, and I got laid off from my job, and the reason is that the company had employed five of us, but now, and I was responsible for, let's say, editing pictures of the products, but now with combination of clothes code and nano banana, I can, you know, edit 100 of pictures in about five minutes. What would you say to that person? How can they utilize their skills to, you know, to make money and have that likelihood when we look at the next five years? Wow, it is a really difficult time for those people, you know, it is tapping into what they can do, and where they are, and how they can adapt. So it's not going to be easy, there are no easy answers, but it is just thinking about what are the three biggest crises in the UK, right? So, obviously mental health, housing, and now employment is going to be a bigger problem, and that person is literally feeling that, and I know so many people who are in that experience, you know, in that situation, it's really about thinking it through, and I am experimenting with looking at fine artists and how they worked through disruption, Picasso especially, through the 20th century, kept changing, kept adapting what he was doing, and often innovating as well to do it, but it is not easy, and it might be, if you're self-employed, you might need to ramp up how you go to market, and you might need to invest in different ways, but I think all of us should be preparing, so, and adapting, not just thinking that it's not going to happen to me, because every role will be possibly replaced. And how do I prepare? So I would say, I think the Americans are more forthcoming and easier with this, obviously generalising about a very large population, but the Americans I've spoken to, they have always had, because they don't have healthcare, right, so they've always been a very large percentage, between 55 and 75% of the American middle-class, dealing stocks and shares, so they have a fallback, I mean, I've known people make six-figure salaries, not salaries, you know, revenue from stocks and shares in America, people I've worked with on teams, so I think that if you're a woman, especially, get yourself a financial coach or a good financial advisor, and start any spare money you get, even if it's more start to do that, I think that if you have got savings, property will be a good thing, obviously we can't get financial advice, we're not financial advisors, but if you can get a cheap property at auction and rent it out, governments will still be paying housing benefit, they will still be helping people to live in places. I mean, this sounds crazy, because, you know, it sounds like I'm saying, oh, get some dry biscuits and a cupboard where you can, you know, be ready for the zombies to start parading in the streets, but there will be a really big shift, and it's in the next three to 10 years. Yeah, I mean, when I hear, you know, about Amazon laying off like, you know, 505,000 people, it doesn't feel that far away, does it? No, it doesn't. I mean, all those companies are always laid off, you know, I used to call it the annual coal, and I've worked in companies where they decided just before Christmas, you know, let's tell them. I have worked, companies have always been automating and always changing, you know, and people, unfortunately, you know, in the Ukraine, suddenly they had this terrible war, and your job is gone, your house might be gone, and you have to adapt, right? So there's not really a lot we can do. And same with creativity, sometimes you've had religious zealotry, or you've had wars, you've had things that happen in life, you know, we could all, we could all have an illness, we could all, so I think get yourself a golden hour, right? Get AI to give you a golden hour. It's almost like saying, okay, if you're going to mess up my life, matey AI, I'm going to use you to prepare and I'm going to adapt, you know. And what does that golden hour mean to you? And what, yeah. So I got very friendly with time, I had a cancer diagnosis in 2020, and no, it was all right, it was a stage one, it was luckily, despite all the newspaper headlines, NHS was brilliant, and I got seen really quickly, and they sorted it out. So that was lucky, but I had been to a coach about, I was here about 10 years ago, and she said to me, look, I said, I want to, I feel like I'm not performing at my best, I'm not really, I've lost my MoJo, and there's things I want to do. So I wanted to start a blog, a support kind of community for the parents of teenagers. And I wanted to do some more writing, I wanted to be doing my journalism. And she said, the only way anyone can do anything, if you're busy, which all women are, do you know what I mean, always, is you can make a golden hour. So at nine o'clock when the kids are in bed, partners washing up, you can use that golden hour and you have to insist that it's your golden hour, you're going to be a prima ballerina, you are going to train. So take an hour, and if I did that, and so with the film, I had a lot on, and Norma and I, when we met, both of us had parents with dementia, Norma had a sibling with dementia as well. So we were looking after our children, niece's nephews, and we had our own sort of physical battles and disease and stuff going on. And we were absolutely frustrated, but we knew we wanted to write something. And we were like, well, how are we going to do it? And I thought back, I thought, well, I did manage to have my golden hour. I got the community for the parents of teenagers up and running. I did a column on the South London Press, regional newspaper, had a every week, there was a time when it got too much when my son was ill, I was ill, my parents were ill, and I was like, okay, enough, you know, forget your golden hour. But I went, well, we've got this golden hour. So we did literally do that. And you just set yourself a time boundary. If you don't look at time and say, if I fritter you away, it's like money, you will never have any time. You will always have busy work. You will always have, you know, the things you want to do, the giving and the loving and the family life that you need and that is part of life. But just carving out time, even before AI was really important. But now I'm like, hey, AI can actually do that. Some of it for us can do the grunt work. But that's the difficult thing, isn't it? Because so at work, I had this Excel spreadsheet, and I was like, oh, you know, I want it to be more interactive, I would love to redo it. But I was never that good at Excel. I knew what like the output that I wanted, but I didn't know how to actually do it. So I use the co-pilot and it has that age and mode where it can actually put in the formulas. So, you know, something that would probably take me three or four hours. Like it did it in five minutes, right? But what I did next is I looked at my to-do list and I just went to, you know, point number two, three, four. So I feel like a lot of people are like me were, okay, you know, I managed to reduce that time that I had for that activity. But then I've got, you know, five other tasks to do. So did you put your task list into AI and say, tell me how I can create an hour a day for this for me for work, but will help me see more valuable in my workplace? That's a good point. Yeah. Or you can put your performance review and you can say, I was in this PDF of my performance review, you know, obviously subject to data protection, but put it in and say, but how can I be more strategic? How can I, how can I have my boss's job in three months? Don't put that in. But do you know what I mean? Like you can use it for you and get it. You could say, if you're a solopreneur, you can say to your AI, I want you to be my CEO or I want you to be my executive chairperson and coach me and make sure I'm doing the right things. I think, yeah, using it for personal development is something that like people don't think about when actually, you know, two or three years ago, hiring someone who has that level of knowledge would have cost me, you know, $500 per hour. But now I have it in my pocket and, you know, what people use it for is, is creating a custom meme instead of thinking about how do I actually get that, you know, next position. Absolutely. I mean, this is it. And we've got to use it to adapt. Yeah, you know, I don't know, it's like sort of asking your enemy - AI is our Frenemy, it's our friend now, and we've got to prepare. So get that golden hour. You were featured on Channel 4 in, I think, a programme that was called Will AI Take My Job? Which I think is a question that a lot of people, it keeps them up at night. What is your answer to that? Yes, it's going to take lots of jobs, definitely. But you have to think that if you look at digitisation, which took jobs, you know, typing pools and lots of jobs, that organisations move glacially slowly sometimes. Did you see the Citrini Alap Shah research? So actually, it didn't quite make the headlines as much as it should have done because it was just when the conflict in the Middle East was kicking off. But there was an international piece of research, research was on Substack. There's a blog by an AI creator and venture capitalist at Alap Shah, Citrini Research. And he was saying that you're going to have, if 10%, 10.2% of white collar jobs go, white collar workers make up 75% of discretionary spend in most advanced economies. And therefore, you're going to have ghost GDP. You're going to have faster, better output by companies. But because no one's employed by them, you're literally going to have no one to spend any money on what's coming out. And so you're going to have this silly situation. And it's like quite an obvious thing to happen. And the jobs will go. But he was saying, or the research was saying 2028. I think it will, that's when we're going to hit crisis point. I think it will be much slower. But I still think that we should be ready to adapt. We are the peppered moth of survival. And the Channel 4 programme looked at all the different areas where AI could take over and it pitted humans against the AI. In some cases, I think where the humans won out, even then, the law is one area which is ripe for change. Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because from what I understand, when a lot of these labs were evaluating the performance of the models that they were coming out with, they had, I think it's something called Turing tests. But they found themselves in a position where they need to come up with a new and new test because the models are too good at it. And what they've been recently doing is understanding how long can we have AI work on a big project and compare that to, for example, human working on the same project. But they got to the point where it was about 16, 18 hours. And obviously, they didn't have the data for humans because no human can work continuously for that long. So it feels like you're on that train and all of the labs, their believers, if we don't come out with a new model and get to AGI, which is a whole separate conversation, as soon as possible, then China will come out with it. So we have to be the first ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's definitely a race. And I guess as a human in all of this, you think, oh, there's a new model coming out there, there's a new tool here. What do I do to be relevant? Yeah, absolutely. And what would you say to that question? Yeah, but it's going to be different, isn't it? So you have to look at your own situation and say, how can I be the most relevant? And it's what what skills will my company need? And I and start adapting now. And, you know, even project management, that that is going to be mechanized, or I think understanding ethics and risk will be very valuable for people. You know, start doing some certification using your golden hour to to, but it's what your company does. And where you can be, you can't say it will become a great people manager, because you're going to be managing machines. I think being able to say, you know, you don't have to know algorithms and AI inside out and back to front, you know, it's like we're getting a car, we don't really, yeah, my brother knows how it works. But, you know, or a lift, you get in a lift, you don't fully understand how that lift is working. But you use it every day. And you're not going to go back to stairs all the time. Just look, be awake to it. But don't worry, because we, you know, when I grew up being ancient, that, you know, it was like, we're going to have a nuclear bomb was going to fall on our heads. And literally, everyone joked and planned what would they do in the last two minutes or three minutes before the sirens began, you know, and as a kid, you're like, oh, no, it will happen. But it will probably happen quite slowly, because the AI founders, they can create the new model. But, you know, it's like blockchain that existed. It's the thing. But who's bringing it on board? And how quickly? And, you know, you do get the old CEO who's putting out a lovely message saying, oh, I could replace you with 17,600, I could replace 17,600 people with AI. And it's like, you've got to be ready to go, we'll bring it, you know, and how you do that. Try and get your investments up, you know, just let your golden hour put some money aside every month, some time aside to treat this as a real problem. And, you know, if I, I got two, two young sons, they're young adults. So I started a family relatively, relatively young age. And one of them has really struggled to find work, he's done his degree, got good to one and tried everything to get work and ended up working at a casino. And my other son's four years older, he stepped straight into a job. And, you know, he's paying 500 quid a month back in the student loans. So the struggle's already there. So it's very hard to say that if you're under a certain age, how, how are you going to do this? But make time, yes, you can do, although it's hard, I might be have to do something on Sunday afternoon, rather than watch the football or, you know, whatever, you know, have the time that you'd like, and really work out what you're going to do. But the trouble is, if you retrain, you, you might retrain in an area that was also going to be taken over. So we're at a sort of thinking crisis of thinking it through and being fearful. But, you know, just if you, if you find yourself spiraling and say, Oh God, I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage, just think about people in Ukraine or Middle East. There's, there's no house for them. There's no job. Their factory has been bombed. There's no electricity. And so things like that do happen. But eventually, we find a way and we go through it. It's very hard. And, you know, when we think and look towards the future, what do you think, what is going to differentiate the companies and individuals that are going to come out of it stronger versus those that, you know, are going to, let's say, let's call it be left behind? I think there are two things, right? There's the peppered moth, right? Survival of a fittest isn't, is a wrong term, but it's easy to get your head around the people who adapt. So start adapting now. Use your time wisely. Don't, don't waste brain, mental brain energy. There's a really good book by Karen Whitelaw-Smith, which was called the butterfly experience. And that says that no negative thoughts can help you, which isn't, which is very different from toxic positivity. What it says is, is if you've got a problem, if you start to think negatively about that, it can't help you. So say you were in Paris and you knew the Germans were marching through your country in the Second World War. If you sat back and said, right, I'm really worried I'm really worried, I'm really worried, I'm really worried, you're just using brain energy. Whereas if you say, right, I'm going to find the resistance group, or I'm going to work out how I get to a bolt hole in, I've got a cousin in, in Nantes, I'm going to go and stay with them or whatever it is. And someone goes, well, all the streets are clogged. How are you going to walk there? Do you know what I mean? It's like, but you, you start to use your brain energy for something constructive. And even if having your golden hour where you get AI to do something, or you have, you, you learn about stocks and shares, and you do start to make investment, you take it really seriously. And you maybe go to a money bags relative who say, you say, look, can you, can you seed fund me, some money to do that? Because I really need to do it. It will help you to start thinking better because you can't be passive. You know, I think it's always, you know, when, like, my personal belief is that whenever a new technology comes in, you can either think and spiral into anxiety that this is going to replace me, my skills, and I'm going to get laid off. Or you can think, oh, wow, this is like the biggest opportunity that I've seen in my life. That's great. Do you, are you able to do that? Have you got that? I think, I think it's like you said that if you go that first route, then nothing constructive comes out of it, because it only puts you into more depressive mode. If you think like, this is opportunity, what can I do with it? Then you think, oh, like, it's a, it's a reframe. you reframe this in your mind. And, and then you think about like, oh, I can do that, I can do that, I can do something else. And then, you know, that, that helps you with those, like, next steps. And when we think about that, you know, something that I've seen research on is that women are adopting it at a lower rate than men. And you've led a lot of diversity and inclusion communications in the roles that you've been in. What would you say is the reason for that? So I suppose women are represented less in tech roles, aren't they? And whoever is building the tech, making the tech has a say in how the tech is. So that is, and who's funding the tech as well. Interestingly, I was working with a founder from Kenya and she's noticed that an AI founder that there's a very certain type of woman who's getting the VC funding, and the angel investors, and they know women aren't getting that funding. Ridiculously small number of women founders are getting fully funded. Also, you know, if you're relying on AI co-pilot, you're a woman. I don't know how true this is. It seems that the women I know are more risk averse, right, which is a great value in the financial sector, especially, you know, really thinking before you do something is a good idea. I definitely, you know, my attitude is always like, oh, if there is a problem, I'm thinking, oh, let's sleep on it, right? And my partner is like, no, I just want to make a decision. Yeah, let's fix it. Let's fix it soon and do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. So I think we are more careful. I mean, in the beginning, when you first played around with the chat GBT, you thought, who is this clown? You know, it's just making stuff up. I've asked it stuff and it comes up with something. I've been like, no, that's not right. I know, I know. So you, I think we've lost a bit of faith. And, you know, an academic who works in this area is very hot on hallucination, and what it means. I also think that there's some evidence that those problems are being ironed out. And I do think it's good for women to get back and like, if you've, if you've dismissed what AI is doing to really have another look. I think I come across many people that, you know, they, I don't know, they, they, they tried one tool and it was even like seven months ago. And they're like, oh, it's, it's rubbish. Like it told me that something that is not truthful. And, you know, since then there have been three updates of that tool. And now it's like, it's completely different. So I think having that mindset, oh, I tried it once and, you know, it's not working for me. Like it's, it's very detrimental for people. Yeah. Yeah. When we look towards the future, you know, like I can think about a version of the future in which creativity becomes less valuable because it's outsourced to AI. And at the same time, it can be, you know, the most valuable thing when we think about, well, if the problem, if it's not a challenge to actually like create a product, but the challenge is having good taste, then actually, you know, having that creativity and having that good taste is really valuable. Which, which way do you think we're, we're going to go? And, you know, what do we need to do to make sure we are on the right side of it? Yeah, it's a good question. And actually, someone I know who works in customer service AI created a website for a business and showed it to me and I thought, oh, that's fantastic. She'd done it all with AI really quickly. But it was good. It was top, top notch. But then I saw another business, someone doing something different, I had exactly the same look and feel. You, you, you are going to get a lot of repetition. It's like crowdsourcing, right? You're going to crowdsourcing is great. And why shouldn't you crowdsource from all the world's experts? You can come up with good stuff like it's clever. And it's, it can be brilliant. I think the trouble is it can't be original, which is where, you know, all that stuff about AI trailers and AI films is you lose that originality. And you, you won't be able to get the, the uniqueness of projects, you know, each graphic designer comes in with their own thinking, their own ideas, everything's filtered through their experience. And you can get brilliant original work. I think that's much harder with AI. And, you know, I know a photographer who Tim, who is, he was, he was around on shot shoots with Princess Diana, right? So he'd been in a long time in the game. And then digital photography came in and everyone went, oh, we can do digital photography. That's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've all got our own iPhones and good digital cameras. We're going to do it. And he had spent 50,000 pounds upgrading his equipment, etc. He no longer needed a dark room. So he got some space back in his house. But he and, and, you know, I think it was quite hard, but he stayed in the game. And then people realised that his work was actually much better than someone with a digital camera, try to take a picture. And so now he's really in demand, because people have worked out that kind of photography he does is it's, it's him in a way, you know? So I think we always do, don't we always sort of you have your thesis, your antithesis, and your synthesis. And for people who want, you've got a cheetah in your pocket, I remember going to a school as part, doing head of comms role for a charity. And we went out to lots of schools. And there was one school where they got people who had a four in their GCSE. So people got really bad marks. And then they worked with absolute passion to bring all these young people up to a really high level at their A levels, so that they could get high A levels. And I said, Tim, what do you think about AI? And I thought he was going to go, oh, well, the kids are cheating and it's ruining my life. And I feel really bad. And he said instead that AI was the best thing that ever happened to his children from disadvantaged backgrounds, because they had a tutor in their pocket. So now it's not just mommy and daddy are going to spend 70 quid and I'm going to have a tutor. Because the kids has also who hasn't got mommy and daddy has also got that tutor. And he said it was a great equalizer. So I think what will happen is that we will, we're also in the cycle of hype, you know, and fear. And everything we do is based on fear, everything we consume from the number of face creams I use and hair conditioners and all the rest of it is based on the fear of looking, you know, my age, which is ridiculous. And every newspaper you buy, every, you know, every time you scroll The Guardian online is all every, every news story is built around fear. It's that amygdala in your head. And a lot of time in comms, people say to you, I know, let's do a newsletter with good news. And then you have to go, well, it's not going to work. I go, you don't know that people like good news in an age of bad news, people like good news. And unfortunately, we're just not wired for that, you know, it just doesn't work. Yeah, of course. Well, let's do a fast round. I'll ask you three questions. And just a short answer to them. So what's one AI tool or workflow that really changed the way how you work? NotebookLM. Okay, what was that? So it's a little app. And you can take a lot of information. So for example, I was working with a CEO who was phenomenally busy and really have had space for a lot of new regulation and laws that was coming in. So I took all of that regulation and all of the white papers, everything that was proposed, I put it into NotebookLM and it created a podcast. Oh, it's like a NotebookLM. Yeah, and you can listen to it in the car. And so she started the CEO, she started to use it all the time, you know, I like to put the board notes in and then there'd be a podcast and just before she went to the next board meeting, rather than reading the minutes, she, it took me a second to do, you know, and, you know, I showed it to my partner or my sons, they were like, Oh, it's creepy having somebody's voice and it shouldn't be. It sounds really real though. It sounds really, really real. It's not robotic. It's brilliant. And I use it for myself. So if I've got to remember something, and I'm short on time, I put it in there and it teaches me, I'm listening to it and it's lovely and it's two or three people chatting about something. What's the best piece of advice for someone who is scared that AI will take their job? Get adapting now, right? You're the peppered moth. It's not the fittest and it's certainly not the most intelligent. So people start adapting. So use your golden hour, try and get some investment advice and like really get going stocks and shares. If you can, if you can get a cheap, flat auction and you get rent coming in, do it because it's key that you have some backing to help you through the shocks. And even if you can't do any of that, just take an hour a day, but don't get rid of that time by more busy work. Say, okay, I'm going to put my to-do list into AI. Let it tell me and put my performance review into AI. Obviously, looking after privacy, you don't want, you certainly don't want your company to know completely to see what you're doing. If it's not allowed or it's going to give it away. Yeah, obviously follow your own policy. Yeah, adapt yourself now slowly. And the two things. So one is that adaption. The other thing is family and friends. And sometimes we get estranged or we fall out. Try and mend those relationships because it's families that survive and go together or deep friendships. Try not to find out if you're falling out with people, why you're falling out with people and mend and heal because you've got to be in this together. We've got to help each other. Yeah, I think you can always find ways to lift each other up. Exactly. Lift other people up. That is key to adapting. Finish this sentence. The most valuable human skill is? The most valuable human skill is adaption. It's getting used to it. Yeah. Change is the only constant. Yes, and change is a pain in the butt, but you get good things. So when you have a baby, you're like, what? I can't even, I can't go to the toilet without lugging a child with me. But you will get the most out of life. Yeah, where we all rock into our old ages, hopefully, it's all those things that matter. And somehow you always managed to survive it. I mean, I survived quite a lot of poverty as a young person, but be prepared. Do your research, get your golden hour, try and get some investments going so you're not exposed, or you can have some rents coming in. This is all very kind of commercial or materialistic. And I'm not like that. I just think that we need to survive. Yeah, I mean, if you're struggling for money, you don't have enough money to cover your rent or food, then that's the only thing that you can think about. So you have to make sure that you have those necessities. Yeah, and even with the cost of living, it's already hard for people. Even people on quite good wages. So it might get worse, but it will test us and then it'll get better. No, thank you so much for your time. And if someone is interested in getting in touch with you, either to work with you for your company, or they're interested in the movie that's got the awards where they can find you and where they can find the film as well. Yeah, so Victoria Silverman or Victoria Harbord, my maiden name on LinkedIn, is a good starting point at DM me or email me. And there is another company called After AI, but I've trademarked the After AI brand. So it's a trademark of a company called the Missing Manual Limited. So if you feel you need a manual for life with the advent of accelerated AI and agentic AI, get in touch, victoria@missingmanuallimited.com. And obviously, the usual Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. Yeah, well, thank you so much. Thank you. Every conversation on this podcast exists because of one simple belief that when women understand AI, engage with it and lead with it, something shifts, not just for them, but for the organisations they're part of and the people around them. If you want to keep exploring that with us, Women Lead AI is more than a podcast, is a community, a learning space, and honestly, one of the best conversations happening in this space right now. Come join it, details in the show notes, and see you next week.