The Future of AI Embracing Optimism With Mahdi Shariff

In this episode, Mahdi Shariff, founder of Humble AI, discusses the transformative potential of AI in fostering creativity, inclusivity, and innovation. He emphasizes the importance of shifting from fear to optimism regarding AI, advocating for a mindset that embraces technology as a tool for empowerment. Madhvi shares insights on how AI can enhance learning experiences, support neurodiversity, and revolutionize brand strategies. He encourages listeners to experiment with AI, highlighting the need for a more inclusive approach to technology development that reflects diverse perspectives and experiences.

Disclaimer:

The views and opinions expressed by the guest on this podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Humble AI.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

In a place of uncertainty, I think people are going to gravitate more and more to the brands that basically resonate. And then they happen to have the technology that allows them to support that voice that they're basically putting out there.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hello, and welcome to Codex Futures, a triptych podcast decoding how we'll live, learn, and play in the future. Each episode, we dive into a different industry to uncover the trends, cultural shifts, and powerful forces reshaping it. And what those changes mean for the people driving innovation forward. In today's episode, we're thrilled to be joined by Maddi Sharif, the founder of Humble AI, a platform making AI accessible to all. Together, we'll explore what a more hopeful, creative, and inclusive future of AI could look like and how AI optimism can reshape learning, entrepreneurship, and the new way technologies are built. Welcome, Maddi. Wonderful to have you.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Yeah, really a pleasure to be here with you.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

To kick off with, I know you've had quite an interesting career journey. I'd love if you could give us what led you to founding Humble AI.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

So I've taken a slightly nonlinear path. So started life in chemistry and realized that labs didn't quite resonate with my love for people. And then end up being pulled into the world of fraud investigation to investment banking, to then spending kind of four years out in China working in an early stage startup, which was a very, very different world and probably one most formative, I think, career-wise. Then a mix of private equity to about four years ago, kind of kicking off rather than joining a startup, building our own in the world of Humble.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Fantastic. And could you give us an overview of what Humble does?

SPEAKER_01 1:40

So when we start to Humble, it was really around building a platform that enables anyone, even if you don't have any technical background, to be able to build and create and manage and share your own AI assistance and tools with the world. As you've gone down that journey, we've also really been focused around seeing how you can especially do that with a view of inclusivity, especially areas even like neurodiversity, which is a very interesting space.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Yeah, amazing. Amazing. And could you bring that to life with, I don't know, an example, whether it's one of the products or the use cases of how that works in practice?

SPEAKER_01 2:14

So an example of how someone might create with Humble will be often in companies, you'll have a lot of challenges around how do you scale operations with this kind of new AI lens. And most people are kind of used to using AI with this view that like chat GPT is equal to AI. How do we build an internal tool that helps our employees onboard in a really easy way? So they would go to Humble, train up their Humble assistant on all the knowledge as if it's like fellow teammate. Then they could basically then help define out the rules and behaviors that they want these AI systems to basically operate and run. And then you can actually then just embed it really easily as like a little bot in your Slack or in your team's channel so they can ask questions in an easy manner. And so that's like a really basic example of how someone might use Humble in a company where the company as well could help manage and track and understand how it is being used, how do they improve the system, give it feedback to basically improve itself, and then share it across teams in like a more centralized, organized way. So you have like a humble home where everything's organized, you can see what whatever what's happening. So that's a really basic way.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

I love that shift from not just being consumer of AI, but being a creator as well. So really nice.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Yeah, because I think especially with like what you can actually build, I think one thing is the stuff like that, which is more about like taking a process that you have working today and just optimizing it. But I think the more fun stuff happens when you actually get a more creative mindset in place. Because this is where you can kind of make AI and technology your own. And so we've done like really fun experiments where we've built things like business simulations for uh for students to interview with one of the universities to try and see how do they extract out the information from the client they think they're working with before they write up their strategy. Or policy, for example, where you're helping center check policy against the different customer personas that you might actually be interacting with. I said these are really cool ways you can look at AI in a way that's more creative and rather than actually just using it from a how do I do this task faster from a productivity lens, which I think is how most companies think about this.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

That's really interesting. And uh what what's your advice, I guess, to kind of using AI to help fuel creativity as opposed to just efficiencies? Like, how do you get is it a mindset shift? How do we start to use AI more creatively?

SPEAKER_01 4:28

So I think you're spot on. I think it's a mindset shift versus anything about kind of tech or tools. So I kind of had this concept that I like always like to play with, which is uh deja vu and vojadé. Deja vu is this kind of feeling that you've uh that you've seen something before you're actually seeing for the first time. And voujade is this idea that you can have the propensity to learn something new in something you've seen many times before.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

Oh, I love that. I've never heard of that before. I'm gonna use that, and that's so good.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

Making the shift, I think, for people is suddenly allows them to go, wait, rather than thinking about how do I use AI to replace what I do today, how do we have more of a an approach of thinking, well, what's now possible? The what if kind of questions. And so have you ever seen The Matrix? When they have uh like Neo's like, great, I want to be, I want to learn Chinese, I want to be a pilot, I want to learn Kung Fu. And then he suddenly has all these new skills that he didn't have before. In many ways, I think when you have creative individuals and you empower them with an understanding and some of the base skills, and then they suddenly go, wait, so I could prototype this up this thing up really quickly for myself. Wait, I can actually have something live running with a client and see how they actually use it. Then you can suddenly actually re-I think unlock a lot more creativity. But I think to get to creativity, you have to basically reduce the fear and remove the fear. And I think that's one of the biggest barriers that companies face is getting rid of that fear. And that fear, I think, comes from the unknown. It comes from the lack of information rather than information giving them reason to be fearful. And this is, I think, one of the big unlocks that's required by companies.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

Really interesting. Because you mentioned, I think, in our last conversation, you talked quite a bit about AI optimism, I guess, in in relation to that fear. Could you share a little bit more about I guess your perspective on that? I think that's quite interesting in the context of I'm seeing a mix actually. There is there's fear, but there's also excitement around what AI can do. Like, what's your perspective about some of the fears and then I guess how to how to address them? And I'd love to hear more about that.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

I think if I take a step back and even just look at like my own the stuff I see every day in social media or LinkedIn or wherever it might be, news, everything just feels very extreme. It's like, oh my god, AI is incredible, it can do absolutely everything. In reality, most people's personal experiences using it, it doesn't quite actually meet what that feels like sometimes. Not because it's not possible, but maybe because of how they're using it. And then the other side, which I think is the other really dominant narrative, is doom and gloom. It's like AI is incredible, it's coming for all of your jobs. We all need to reskill, but we're gonna give you no guidance on how that what that actually looks like. And you person who isn't a developer, which is 99% of the population, you're so far behind. And I think that's a really, really negative narrative. For me, for example, I think there's just so much focus around the idea of every market size that you see from a from the big report to say all of these jobs are dead, it's all going to be replaced. And it's very much about replacing people. And for me, I think it's about flipping that script entirely, which says, like, our humble belief is we should spend more time about saying, How can we use AI to embrace people, not replace people? I think this then starts to allow us to shift from this idea of kind of fear to a place of freedom where people suddenly feel in control, capable, and fearless around these technologies, which then unlocks their ability to shape technology to their desires. And that's where I think you're gonna have a lot more creativity, a lot more entrepreneurialism that's gonna come through in society. That's definitely the version of the world that I want to live in. Yeah, so I'm a huge fan of driving forward this idea of AI optimism because there is actually this really, really, and I've gone through this journey myself where like, as basically I've got a better handle of how you can really play with these tools in cool ways, it massively allows you to explore ideas faster, have feedback loops, and just do more than like ever could. And that is just phenomenal. And I've just loved that process, and I would love for more people to be able to have that same experience once AI is more accessible to them.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

Yeah, I love that. Kind of for the the fear, fear to freedom is again another nice, really nice shift. What do you think is required to unlock that? Is it knowledge? Is it just practice? Is it when you've seen that journey, I guess, in you know, the partners that you work with, what's the thing, what's the unlock that gets people from fear to freedom?

SPEAKER_01 8:56

I think the biggest unlock for me is where you see someone who is highly, highly skeptical, like the most skeptical, and also the person that looks the least like people would expect someone to who would be using AI. And when they hit aha moment where they build something and it works and they see it, that's the magic piece because like knowledge is one thing. One of the universities we work with as a professor who leads all of the kind of PhD, she's the director across all the kind of PhD work they do at the university. She's in her early 60s, and so she is she is just amazing as a human. And we were basically training her on how you can build an AI assistant to support all of the PhDs to handle all the common questions and structures that they often come to her with. And they obviously repeat that every single year when the next group comes in. Suddenly, for example, she was like, Okay, cool. Well, I know how to write instructions and I've been doing this for so long. Let me sit down and do this. And then she goes and builds out this little AI assist and then shares it with some of her, some of some of the PhDs, and they start using it and it works. And it's just like the moment when you see this kind of level of like pride where she's there just beaming, and I'm like, congratulations! Like, you've just made like your own AI assistant. And she's like, actually, I've made two. And it's that moment when you just have this kind of pride where suddenly they go, Wait, this thing that I thought was not for me, I've now done and it works, and I know how it works. I haven't had like someone else have to go do this for me. Like, I feel empowered. That I think is this kind of magic moment of clicks. I think this is why it's not about people just seeing a demo of what this what's possible with AI. It's about them practically going, how do I use it? Using it, making it work, going through the struggle of making it work, and then having this kind of success moment, and they can hold on to that. And that gives them the confidence to say, wow, okay, now I'm up for my next challenge. And then they start kind of going up the skill ladder of what they can do and what's possible with how they can build with AI.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

Such a nice story. And it's really takes you back to like, I guess, the kind of the roots. Like there's something about when you're you have a hand in building it and kind of seeing it fail and then trying again, you really feel kind of connected, and it is empowering. I mean, it you know, when you were talking, it just takes me back to like I've got a five nearly five-year-old, but just like watching her trying to kind of put things together, it goes back to the kind of the very core of you know how humans learn and grow. She's trying something out.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Well, children were a great example of this. I actually always use children as an example because when you look at a baby growing up, no one's like, oh my god, I can't believe this baby is struggling to walk. It's not hard, it's just new. And it takes time to build the muscle. And I think as adults and professionals, we sometimes don't give ourselves the same level of like mercy and support that we would if we would with children. And I think when it comes to these kind of new things, we actually need to take a step back and go, actually, like, no one's taught me this before. This is new. Just like all the other things I've learned in life, I can learn this too. And it's just creating a safe enough environment that allows that to happen.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

And I think I don't know whether they always say, isn't it, it's a bit harder when you're kind of more stuck in your ways. To there's a little bit of unlearning to learn that needs to happen when you're maybe more used to the certain way of do things versus the next generation who are just growing up with this as kind of the way that things happen.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Yeah. And actually, I'll be curious actually on your side, even for your own experiences, what are the things that you found you've had to unlearn to be able to then engage with the world of AI for yourself?

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Oh, that's a good question. I think because I don't know whether I'm gonna articulate it right, but I think because it like AI fundamentally thinks in a different way. I think learning how to prompt and kind of be really focused about what you want it to get is something that I'm not sure what I quite had to un but like I think it's a more direct way of brainstorming rather than being a bit more expansive. Like I think the way that I would brainstorm with an AI is different than it was if it was a human. I think I have to learn to be a little bit more know where the white spaces are and kind of scope them out and kind of give the clear prompts and then go expansive again and then go reductive again to like, okay, that that bit was right, that bit was wrong, try again, go expansive, and then which is slightly different to how I would bounce around with a human, I would say. It's funny you say that.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

I found the more and more I've learned how to play with AI as well, it's actually changed the way that I actually work with people. I found that the AI then has helps start to expose where, for example, I'm not actually being clear enough in what I'm actually articulating in a way that humans are just much more nice about it.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Absolutely. There's such good critics.

SPEAKER_01 13:30

I do, Marty, and I'm like, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

It's taught me to be a lot more direct in terms of kind of communicating and bouncing around. I do I mean, I definitely think there's a role for both. But it's a good, you know, when you're a lot of the time we're working independently now, it's a good thought partner in the absence of when you're sitting next to someone.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Thought partner is a great way. I love that framing as well. And that's why like I think similar to you said, I think there's there's roles for these different types of things. And that's why I have like very kind of custom setup to be able to like play with it in these different ways for different types of tasks.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious actually, because I know you work quite a bit in the education sector and I guess with with younger people, like are you seeing any differences in how they're adopting it versus different generations, like I guess differences across generations?

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Yeah, really great question. So I think on the educational side and with the youth, I think it's more of they have less unlearning to do if you just focus on learning. So their ability to kind of like then get started and play with things and just see what happens without overthinking it. They kind of just tap whatever they want, hit go and and and see what happens on one side of it. So I think that's kind of one interesting difference versus normally, for example, someone else is in a more kind of adult environment. Often people are thinking, oh well, can it do this? Should I give it this? Am I allowed to do it give it this? Do I whose permission do I need first? And it's like a very different I think in the company environment, people think about there's a lot more barriers to innovation and experimentation in how they approach it. So that's kind of one side of it. I think on the other side of it is that they don't necessarily have the domain expertise to apply it to a specific set of problems yet. Because when you're working in a professional environment, you've probably already had many years of work, see many problems that exist, and then basically saying, okay, well, what is that? Uh like I can now take these problems and try and break it down with AI and they have the context and content to basically discuss with AI. Whereas kind of just starting out, for example, they have to almost like think of idea, think of a problem because they haven't experienced many of these problems when it comes to like new ideas and areas. And I think this is an opportunity where some of the existing companies and brands have places where they can leverage their existing domain expertise to kind of like identify new ways for them to take more control of their own business in this kind of era of AI as well.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Yeah, really interesting. Going back to kind of, I guess we mentioned brands, like I guess kind of company, like I imagine every every company is adopting AI and kind of thinking about what's the way to do it in the in a way that feels right for their brand. Are there kind of buckets of, I guess we mentioned kind of efficiency, creativity? What would you say the role of AI is within this? This is a big question, and I can imagine differs across industries, but generally, what would you say the role is for AI within brands?

SPEAKER_01 16:16

I'll take this from kind of maybe two different ways. So there's like the traditional piece, which is operationally, you can be using this, which is all the normal stuff that most people talk about. I think the stuff that's talked about a lot less is actually, and in some ways, these cycles always happen every kind of generation of technology, where it's like, hey, now you have websites, now you have a pathway to actually like own your engagement with the user. Then it went into like digital and e-commerce. And then it's like, great, you can have your own shop faces where you can own the customer relationship in a certain way. And then you've gone into applications, which again, you're trying to then build in that relationship with it. I think the opportunity for brands is really trying to help. There's been so much talk about hyperpersonization, what that kind of looks like for many years. And we've seen that in advertising, in marketing, in different spaces. But I think the interesting piece around AI when it comes to brands is the power of your brand voice and your taste is going to become the most important parts of this. I think brand value is actually going to increase massively as a competitive advantage for companies. Because in the era of AI where AI is also making development more accessible and technology more accessible, some of those things are going to commoditize. And that's why right now we have a we are overloaded with information and tools and companies constantly pitching and trying to trying to basically like grab your attention. In a place of uncertainty, I think people are going to gravitate more and more to the brands that basically resonate. And then they happen to have the technology that allows them to support that voice that they're basically putting out there. That I think is actually where like taste is gonna increase in value as we go forward. So companies that are more distinctive have invested in their brand is gonna really benefit. And then in terms of how they can do that, it means that using AI, they can make sure that brand is actually embedded in all of their experiences. And so, for example, right now, when you think about your own experiences on digital, like you will see this massive disconnect between certain brands that basically like talk a great game and amazing with their marketing and approaches. And you get into their products, you see this breakdown of how they actually talk to the user is very, very different. Kind of push back to this like old school system where you have to ask, answer a thousand questions, even though you're trying to be a human-centered company. For the brands that basically really want to start experimenting with this, there's the cost of experimentation has gone down massively, which then means that they can then start to experiment and play and invest invest more in the strategy of the brand and the approach they take, and then it run these experiments in quick ways and get feedback loops and then learn what they actually need to build. Because I don't think it's a, oh, AI should be applied in this standard form for a brand. I think it's more like AI is going to basically give you the foundations and the infrastructure to work out what's actually really going to unlock your brand with AI.

SPEAKER_00 19:09

Yeah, no, I love that. Such a great answer. I really like the kind of it's distinction, but also consistency. It's like you need to have something distinctive about your brand, but then consistently deliver that across every single touch point and every interaction with it. And what do you think people, again, experimentation? What do you think brands should be experimenting with?

SPEAKER_01 19:27

From a brand perspective, I think starting to experiment with how they take their brand tone of voice and style, and first of all, seeing how does that actually map across the interactions our users have with them. Every company's got their own chatbots or whatever else it might be, but it's about saying, like, does it actually represent your style and way that you like to work in terms of your brand and style and how you how you want your users to go through? So I think it would depend on the type of brand. So if you were a high-end brand, I'd be thinking about how does this act as a concierge when your concierges aren't in the room? Because it's not about replacing the concierge, because for high-end brands, they're going to want some of those human touch points because of the perception value of what that means. And that shouldn't, you shouldn't think that AI is going to go replace all of these areas. But there could be spaces, for example, where you go, how do you make sure they have that access when they don't otherwise have that access?

SPEAKER_00 20:16

Yeah. Because I mean, it actually enables your brand to show up in a lot more touch points, isn't it? And there's more opportunities to interact with your customers through AI, but in the right way, because it could be detrimental if it's not done in the right one.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

And I think this is where we need to be intentional about our choice of AI. And I think intentionality is another thing that's been lost in the fear and the gold rush of people going, This is my silver bullet. They've forgotten to stop and breathe and go, what do we actually want to do? And where does it actually help and improve the experience in a way that we couldn't before? And this is where I think certain brands, for example, that are serving in more mid-market areas where they have a much larger kind of customer base. And so would a concierge structure would never make sense. Actually, may they maybe they can look at what the digital concierge equivalent looks like to give a taster of what that could be for a larger group. I think depending on those types of brands, you might take a very different approach. And again, if it's mass market, it may not be about giving concierge, it may be about reducing support, like operational costs of support. Depending on the brands, you have very different approaches for what that might look like. And that's kind of on one side. Another area of experimentation, I think, for brands, which is often underutilized, is actually using it as insight. So, how do you basically build applications to help drive insight into your areas? For example, it's like if you are the brand that has owned all the biggest drinks, alcoholic drinks in the market, just as an example. Normally, for example, even though you've got digital properties and you have e commerce and you have you're selling via all these places, your data and information about what people buy and how they discover your properties. Bucks is actually trapped in systems somewhere in IT team or the digital team or central team that's really far removed from you, and you kind of lose the kind of context. The beautiful thing about this is that actually you could have a team that might be running a campaign and you're running a campaign for January and you've got all your non-alcoholic equivalents from your other sub brands. Basically help people navigate how to choose the best drinks for pairing with recipes for non-alcoholic recommendations or whatever it might be. And now suddenly you're realizing, oh, wait, here are these others, these other kind of moments, and here is the context that moment's happening in that helps them about a given product. That's way more contextual information that you would ever get from like, oh, they bought this drink.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

That's a great use case. I mean, I could feel that every every brand and company has that challenge of, you know, data being stuck in silos across the organization. And I guess AI can be the or the thing that kind of synthesizes it and spots the opportunities that you know you naturally won't see when you're in your individual departments and team.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

And same again for reports. Like I think about how many B2B companies, for example, spend a lot of time pulling together market reports, but market reports actually aren't as accessible, aren't actually that accessible. Because it's like 50-page long PDFs with a huge appendix, tons of information. Instead, for brands that have this, take all of their research and reports they have, wrap it in a little humble system, stick it on their own site so that people are coming to their site, not ChatGPT, so they can control the narrative. And then they get the insights on what are people actually looking for in these reports. And now you're like, wait, now we know the value of the reports that are coming through. Like, are people using it? Are they using it? What's the key questions that my the the group of CIOs that I'm serving is asking me about? Or if it's in culture, it's like, okay, cool, like this is. These are the questions, for example, that this specific person or group is actually trying to find out the answer to that we fail to ever communicate on our website as a starting point. Or this is a piece that actually goes, This is a really common question that everyone asks about. We'd be doing a piece of content on this, and then it becomes a really great trigger to then run a campaign or a piece of content based on the information that comes through. Because you're like, everyone struggles with this one thing. Let's do a campaign around it. Now, rather than AI being the kind of endpoint of generating stuff, it's actually the starting point of a process that you're gonna something you're actually gonna go do. And these are the things that I think are often just completely underutilized across how most people are playing with these tools.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

Can we talk a little bit about um, I guess, inclusivity? Because I know that's something you feel quite strongly about. I guess you know, the context of making sure AI is is adopted equally and inclusively to all. How do you go about I guess A, what are your kind of thoughts around that? And then B, how do you go about creating the conditions for that to happen?

SPEAKER_01 24:45

So taking a big step back, I feel like we as a society think we're like super tech native and AI native in many ways modern in this like modern society and digital society that we live. But in truth, it's a very, very small number of people that actually know how to build and create with AI or technology. And that's what you're talking about, like less than point of a percent of the world as a developer. I think there's this massive missed opportunity where I was saying, like, if we can basically make these tools accessible and build for belonging and inclusivity, then you have a whole new generation of builders at the table building new tools that support their needs in ways that no one who wasn't who didn't feel that pain before could serve that need. Especially around and when when you kind of think from that perspective, it's about saying, like, right now in the world of AI, people feel overwhelmed. We have notification fatigue, like, I know I ignore my WhatsApp. Building with things like neuro in neuroinclusivity by design makes things materially better for everyone. And so, like, that's my personal belief is like, yeah, you design for belonging, you actually approve the lies for everyone. And so as you basically build for these very specific needs, actually, these people have like superpowers that give you a microscope on the world that helps you discover a layer that you didn't realize was a problem that allows you to build solutions that support everyone. And that's the reason why I think like rethinking AI around neuroinclusivity and belonging and just more generally inclusive AI, that is incredibly, incredibly empowering. And from a personal perspective, I've kind of gone through this journey myself, dealing with my own quirks and how my brain works. And we have a very neurodivergent team that we work with. But it's been a really, really powerful way of working out. Oh, actually, wait, you're right. I actually wasn't being very explicit here, which isn't great by someone who might be more on the autistic spectrum. Or actually, look, you know what? We've got so many different Slack channels going. This is really hard for someone to actually navigate if they've got ADHD enough to context switch every single time. People are horrified when they see my browser tabs. I have like 20 different windows, 10 different agents running on different places at all given.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

No wonder the connection was slow when we started.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

That's why I have to go glow down everything because but that's also how my brain works. But that equally allows me to identify patterns across different spaces. And that's kind of like where I look at inclusivity, like all these things are superpowers in different ways. And as we build support systems for the other parts, that's how we also unlock the talent in our teams. And I think, especially if you think about in the brand world and the creative industry, the number of individuals that you'll have, for example, that have ways of thinking creatively that are very, very different from everyone else. That's what makes them distinct. How do you enable your talent, your internal talent to basically to like release that? That is the magic. I was speaking to a friend of mine the other day who studied at RCA, and she was saying how like 80% of her class was dyslexic. And for me, you think about like these like hyper-creative beings. Of course, their brains work differently. That's kind of why they take this, like sometimes take these different life paths and land in these different spaces. Because other pathways just are less accessible. But equally, for example, if we can build better systems, we can really unlock that kind of potential in people who are otherwise, things are never really quite, really quite fit them. It's never really built for them and the way their bare minds work. And that's kind of one of the big things that I want to try and solve for.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

Yeah, amazing. Such a such a powerful mission. Could you bring that to life with the example? I'm curious, like absolutely agree, like building more powerful systems that feel more inclusive and are designed for you know the way the the amazing ways that different people think. Like, what's an example of that in practice? Like, how might a system look different for a neurodivergent audience versus kind of quote, normal?

SPEAKER_01 28:26

As an example, so with ADHD, I think one of the things that people don't understand or often misunderstand about ADHD is one of the areas of time-blindness. So often when you find people who have ADHD, sometimes they might either be late if you're ever meeting them, even as a friend, like catching up or kind of turning up on time to a meeting. It could be, for example, their estimations around time, around what they're going to achieve by a certain date doesn't quite match up. And so it can cause like late, late deadlines or kind of missed expectations from a work perspective. Also, for example, the way that memory works is also different. So they sometimes forget what they've done or what they were supposed to be doing and then end up doing another task because they also have lots of these other things running at the same time. The problem with a lot of the technologies and tools today is that they don't really support you to understand like what are you doing, what have you done, and what's that look like? So one of the key things that we're doing at Humboldt is like things like journals. How do you basically have systems that work across your tools rather than forcing you to use something new? It basically helps you understand an entire timeline of like, oh, cool, these are all the things that I've been working on, these things I've done and achieved, and I feel progress. And these are the things that I can do, and I have one space to organize it in the way that I like it organized. Because when you're working across Linear here and Slack here, AI Assistant here on Claude and then ChatGPT and then Gemini, I know I did that work, I had that conversation. Where was it? And I can't I can't remember. Having easy ways of basically being able to just like search and see exactly when it happened, where it happened from one place, uh, just suddenly shifts. That's like one thing. Another area of memory, like I basically have to extract out lots of information from my brain from all the thoughts that are kind of constantly generating. And I need to basically place it somewhere where it gets organized for me. And I can just go ask Humble and be like, yo, I had that discussion on that idea around progressive alarms. Where's that information? I can just quickly go find information very easily from all my brain dumps. It's like death by a thousand paper cuts when you every login you have to do, every two-factor authentication, every verification code gets written down on a piece of paper somewhere, you lose the piece of paper. And it's about ripping out all of this friction so that, for example, you can just have your information captured, you know it's staved, you know it's stored, your brain can relax, you reduce the anxiety, you can easily find it again, and it's organized and tagged in a way that like makes sense in the way that you want to tag instructor these things. That's the stuff for me that suddenly means that like I feel like, ugh, I know where everything goes, I don't have to rethink every time. And it makes just like a world of difference just be able to like just get the stuff out of my brain and have it there, ready for when I need it next.

SPEAKER_00 31:08

Thank you for sharing those examples. It just shows how AI can be such a powerful tool at, you know, I guess it's that linked to that personalization point as well. Like it can be tailored exactly to how each person's brain individually works and make something easier and kind of more empowering and kind of very aligned to kind of being in tune with what you need to kind of get through the day better. I wanted to ask you, I guess, you know, this is the future of live, learn and play with your AI optimism, which thank you, I think you've definitely brought that energy into the conversation. Where do you think some of those areas, it's a big question, but where do you think, or where do you hope AI will positively change some of those areas in the future?

SPEAKER_01 31:44

If we think about what's possible when we would have support for like us, like our own personal assistant supporting us for just that's fully aligned with what you need that's for you, what that can unlock from a personal perspective, it's pretty incredible. And so having and setting up my systems in a way that I can go, great, I now know what my tasks are that I've got to go do. I need you to remember this thing. Can you remind me of this that when? I've got this thing coming up. Can you just like help research that holiday stuff before I even start? How can I put it in a form that's easy for me to share with someone else in an easy way? And just making these things frictionless from an individual perspective and just reducing the cognitive load of life for the stuff that you hate the most. So for me, that's like the tax forms, it's the like all the bureaucratic like admin stuff and outsourcing that stuff as a cost to zero. It's just what does that world look like if we could all afford to have the kind of support infrastructure that maybe only the president has? And so from a live perspective, that's super empowering because it means that then you can actually spend more of a lot more of your time to be like, great, I get to become more human with my time because I basically like used, I now have this kind of personal assistant I can work with in a way that fully unlocks me. That will allow us to open our minds up to a lot more of what we actually want to spend our time doing. The other piece on on living is helping make sure that you've got this kind of almost like accountability buddy where it goes, I've told you that this is my goal, this is what I'm trying to work towards. But often I get locked in the day-to-day and I kind of this site lose sight of this. How do I make sure that I'm being internally consistent with myself and just surfacing that back to me, but like, hey, you really want to go down this entrepreneurship route, but you just keep trying to go up the ladder here. And just being able to surface those kind of questions to have your own coach in that way is something that is historically been completely inaccessible, which I think is going to become more and more accessible as we kind of go through this area. And I'm super excited about that. That is already had so much unlock for even having non-biased feedback loops for myself for parts of our own self-reflection has been incredible. On the learned side of things, we are at a point in time when more and more information is more and more accessible than ever before. But the way in which it's accessible is not actually that accessible to us because we are overwhelmed. Like you have so much information, it's even scarier to start. And this is where like AI is like the most guilty area of this, where people sign up to every single newsletter about AI updates, but then never read any of them because they kind of feel so overwhelmed around it and then don't know what's right from wrong. And instead, for example, actually, if we use AI in a much better way, we can start to build systems that basically work with us at our pace and progressively share the information that we need at that moment in time to help kind of go up the learning curve, or expose where there's assumed knowledge that we haven't actually learned before that we need to go back and fix. In my teaching, for example, when we're teaching the university, we did some things like building learning assistance for some of the programs to support, especially again, more inclusive learning approaches for some of the students as well, who are either international, where English is say their second language, or people who are on the spectrum. And when people can set up their own learning environment and the learning support assistant, essentially, where it's helping communicate in a way that they can understand and they can basically, when they're feeling nervous about asking a question to the class because they feel social pressure of everyone watching them, they can basically get some support when they need it. And that means, for example, now suddenly they're learning in a way that works with them and that unblocks people, which you can't control when as a human, you're kind of just trying to talk to 30 students in the class, and there's a couple of these needs otherwise undeserved. And there's that's from a kind of a learn perspective. And when we ran this, just as context, there was a lot of skepticism in the educational world around what some of this looked like. But there was this incredible professor who I love called Egadas. I'll give a shout out to Eggadas from ISM University, who's the director of entrepreneurship. And he built this learning assistant, he did a comparison from the previous year, and there was a 40% higher grade than in previous years, just by putting this in place to help support the students for their exam preparation for this course. And it's not that AI has done all of that, students engaging with the process of doing so, and you've got some selection bias for sure of some better students, about 263 of the 400 students used it of that cohort, 40% high grade, and it suddenly made everyone go, Wait, it's like, how do you then roll this out across all these areas to support them? And that's, I guess, from the student learning side. The flip side is there's the other side of it, which people often don't talk about because right now it's just the big AI companies that kind of see the information. But when you build these stuff for yourselves, you can get these feedback loops for yourself. So now the professor now knows. For example, if you've built this little learning assistant, they can go to Humboldt and go, wait, wait, wait, how do I understand what's actually happening here? What questions are people actually asked? Which are the parts of the course that no one understood versus which parts of the course that only one person had a question on? Maybe I need to rethink my content. Maybe I need to rethink how I'm presenting the information, maybe I need to rethink the format entirely. Because now you have this opportunity to turn these interactions into something that's data and use that data to start informing with evidence, are the approach that we're taking working. That is, I think, again, just a massive, massive, massive opportunity around the kind of learning space. But that takes time and it takes and and right now, I think for for education institutions, a lot of them are having to rethink their entire strategy around what does this look like? Because they're like, all of my assessments, what does assessments look like? We've got to rethink this stuff. And this is why, yeah, running experiments like a business simulation where students have to interview the CEO for their business case, it completely changed as an AI CEO, completely shifted the way they interact. But then they have an assessment model that they can use, which it doesn't matter if they have AI. The students can use AI, but actually AI, they still have to do the thinking for themselves. And so you can do you can start play being way more playful. And I think this is where to coming to your third part around why play becomes so important. Because I think to actually unlock these opportunities, you have to have this very much like playful mindset, and that means you've got to, but you've got to set up the environment that we need for play to happen. Because I think people think that you can just go and play. No, you can't just go play, you need the sense of safety. Sometimes the constraints help. There's rules of a game, those rules help improve the quality of the game, they give people an understanding of like where they can be, because it when they know the guardrails and they know that know where they can operate, they can be way more free in the places that they can operate. Going back to the kids, it was like a small thing, but I've got a little niece and nephew. And when I saw them, and this was a long while back when the first image models started coming out, I just started playing with them when we were kind of like sitting down, chatting, and we were like, Oh, cool, what do you want to go do on this day out? And then we basically started kind of walking through it, and I started basically building these little images and visualizing of them basically like on the beach, and then, oh, I want a pony, and it's like, oh, what were you wearing? I'm wearing the pink jumper, and they're suddenly in the pink jumper on the pony. And it was amazing to sort of see what their reaction of it was. And it was a beautiful experience, which is way more playful. And you think about like the opportunity to have this kind of like open canvas where people can just just much more creatively take their ideas out of the head and create things that other people can interact with and other people can play with. It's so powerful because it enhances your ways that you play. I think when we play with others, having stuff that you can build and create and share, and then you have that feedback loop of the people that you share with, and then they fork a version of it and start playing with it in a different way. This is where play comes from because there's a I don't know if you've ever read the book, Steal Like an Artist. It's a tiny book that Lisa talks about like taking these different ideas from all these different places and stealing like an artist, where it's not about don't steal and copy the thing, it's about build your own version of what that looks like, put your own taste on it, put your own spin on it. And that means that these systems they've become part of us, they've become something that we're like, oh, this really cool thing I built on the weekend, like check this out. And it solves the thing that you want to solve in your way, and you feel that ownership. And I think this is what I want to see in the world of technology is like people having that sense of ownership and empowerment that they go, wow, this is built for me, and I've built it, and it's mine. It's not big tech co, it's it's mine, this is my thing. And that's kind of what I would love to see because I think when we do, and then you suddenly realize like the most beautiful things that we've had have come from these places of democratization. So you think about every single book that you might read that you love, it only happened because literacy was accessible. Even when you think about things like even like Fifty Shades of Grey, it started from fiction, that's now a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and is a is a brand in its own right that commands brand exposure like most brands could only dream of. And those things come from this democratization. And so what you now democratize in this era of AI is so much more open than ever before. And that is incredible as an opportunity. And that I think is what why I'm such an optimist and why I'm so excited and why I want to make sure that people see that future. Because I think as soon as they see it and they understand that it's possible, and they understand that there is a pathway for them basically taking it, we're gonna have an absolute explosion of creativity like we've never seen before. And that's where like there's there's another really old expression which says, I let a thousand flowers bloom. It's not like we can say there's too many flowers in the world. Why do we hold on to this idea of fear of replacement of all work when actually technology can just be another form of expression? And now we can actually build a society that's even more expressive, even more creative, even more playful than we've ever seen. And that is what I'm super excited about.

SPEAKER_00 41:44

Yeah, I love that. I love that. It's I mean, yeah, you're absolutely right. Everyone can be a creator, isn't it? It's like bringing all these tools to the democratizing it and enabling. I think the the important thing is ownership and kind of authorship, making sure that you're embracing and creating with it enough so much that it feels like an expression of you. I mean, going back to right what we said at the beginning, isn't it? A creator rather than just a consumer of it. Really powerful. I feel like you're the antidote to Black Mirror. You should have you should launch a counter series around optimism.

SPEAKER_01 42:13

It's actually a beautiful idea, actually.

SPEAKER_00 42:16

Amazing. Thank you so much, Marthi. I'd love to end on one final question with so much to so much to reflect on. You've made me think lots, and I think really, really, yeah, really uplifting conversations. So what's one idea that you'd love people to take away from, our listeners to take away from this conversation?

SPEAKER_01 42:31

I think one key idea that I would love people to take away is the idea that AI or technology isn't for them. I want to take that idea and remove it. I want them to remove that kind of idea from their mind. In this era, more than any time before, there is now this opportunity that technology can be for you. And so I would really, really love them to think about that and embody it. And by embodying it, that means actually starting to test and play for themselves. Not just reading the briefing, not just even like watching the demos or testing tools, but actually like playing, like really and playing and engaging with them themselves. And that's what I think I see as like the best trait in some of the folks that we've worked with around like how do you become this kind of humble hero? This like this idea of like you're basically the hero of your own story, building stuff for yourself and people around you. And don't try and maybe even focus on like the big business objective first of all. Just start to solve something small that you feel it'll be interesting to play with and experiment with and celebrate those small successes. Because I think if you do, you will start to take yourself on this pathway where you're like, great, I've done this little thing, now I can do the next thing, now I can do the next thing, and it's me and I'm in control, and I've learned a whole bunch of stuff. And so I think that'll be one thing. And especially for those who are neurodiverse, especially there's a bunch of like great like neurodiverse leaders and founders often sometimes sit in this bucket. There are some really cool ways for how to use AI in a very different manner that supports that, like how that really works for you as your brain type. And so I would love to leave people with.

SPEAKER_00 44:01

Amazing. Thank you so much. I feel like you've inspired me. I want to go build something now.

SPEAKER_01 44:05

Challenge to anyone who is listening to this. If you go off after this, after listening to this, and you go build something, post up, message me a link to it, and I will give you feedback. I will help support you with it and coach you through some ideas if that's useful. If you if you go do it. So that is the and I know that's a very risky thing to say as a founder, but please do. I would love to go see what you build. I really want to see a next generation of builders from that looks very different from the small groups of what the developer bucks system looks like today. If you take on that challenge, let me know. I would love to support you on that journey.

SPEAKER_00 44:38

Amazing. What a great challenge and what a great offer. Thank you for that. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

SPEAKER_01 44:43

Perfect. Speak soon.

SPEAKER_00 44:45

Thanks for listening to Codex Futures. If today's episode sparked new ideas, we'd love to hear from you. Email me at louise.newson at triptych.com or click on the link below. Follow Triptych on LinkedIn and subscribe to our Codex newsletter as we explore more perspectives shaping tomorrow.