Embracing AI: Psychological Transformation in the Workplace (PT 2)

00:00:06 - Speaker A
Welcome to the Transforming Lives panel podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Sharmin Prince, and I'm here with Mitzy, and we have a special guest. But before we continue, just join me in a quick grounding exercise. If you can, just close your eyes and take a deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth. Another deep breath in. And as you breathe in, just feel that breath and hold it. And as you exhale, let go of all the tension, the stress, the things that are incomplete, the things that you have to do for the evening. Just let it go and take another deep breath in and hold that breath and feel the power of that breath. And then exhale and let go of all the tensions you might be feeling. And when you finish, just join us back into the room.

00:01:31 - Speaker A
Thank you. And over to you, Mitzy. Thank you, Sharmin. Great to start off with a little peace and tranquility. Well, I'm very excited because today we have Steve Cunningham as our guest. I've known Steve for about three or four years. I met him when he had a company called Read it for Me, and he has morphed into a new business. He has the distinction of being a lawyer for exactly one week, reading a business book a day for over a decade as part of his Read it for Me business.

00:02:06 - Speaker A
And he pivoted into AI and creating the world's largest AI transformation consulting network about a year ago. Before founding Simple Academy, Steve was the CEO at Read it for Me, transforming complex business and personal development insights into accessible multimedia formats. His earlier career also saw him at the helm of Kohler Unlimited, a digital marketing agency that led innovations and client engagement across diverse industries. Steve holds degrees in math and economics from Colby College and a specialization in tax law from Western University. He currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his three beautiful girls, wife, Marissa, and his daughters, Sophie and Emma, and two rambunctious dogs, Molly and Ben. Okay, well, I love dogs, cats, and all animals, so we're good. So, Steve, you know, a transformation is of in our title, Transforming Lives, and you have done a lot of big transformations.

00:03:12 - Speaker A
Can you kind of just walk us through sort of your one hour as a lawyer to read it for me to where you are now? Oh, gosh, we're going to start with that one. Yeah. So I went to law school and about halfway through law school, realized that I didn't want to be a lawyer, but finished, finished up my degree and made a deal with my father that if I finished up, got called to the bar that he would let me join the family business. Which at the time was a very small like Monpa sign company. I realized that after I joined the company, I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. So I started a marketing agency. And that was around the time when social media was a, was a big thing. And so I went around doing a lot of public speaking about social media. And one of the things that you do in law school is it's basically three years of reading a whole bunch of stuff at night, making a bunch of notes summarizing what you learned so that the next day when you went into class, you were not embarrassed in front of all your new law school friends when the teacher called on you using, if you've watched any movies that have law school in it, called the Socratic Methods.

00:04:27 - Speaker A
So they basically just, you know, go after you for, you know, five minutes and it's usually a very painful experience. So anyways, you do you get really good at summarizing information. So this is a skill that, you know, wasn't really intended. You know, you don't go into law school thinking about getting good at summarizing information, but it just happens. And so I did. When I joined the family business with no business experience, I decided that I needed to do the same thing.

00:04:54 - Speaker A
And I read as many business books as I could. So as I'm going around doing the, these talks on social media and I'm pitching services to, you know, VPs of marketing and business owners and so on, I would invariably see a stack of books on their shelf and trying to do a little sales 101.

00:05:12 - Speaker A
I would try to create a little bit of rapport. And so I was, I and invariably I had read all of the books that were there because I just read all of them. And so I'd ask them, you know, what did you think about this idea from that book or that idea from this book? And most of the time they would stare back at me with a sheepish look on their face and admit that they actually hadn't read the book. And so I, because I had made these notes and I was like, well, here, why don't I give you these notes? And so, you know, the next time your boss, who is usually the one who gave them a book, you know, asks you about that book, you can tell them something intelligent. So over time people started asking us, you know, could you, could I pay you to do those summaries? And I turned in, that's so basically that turned into a business by accident, turned into a, you know, a decade long run.

00:06:00 - Speaker A
And Then back In November of 2022, ChatGPT comes out. And just like everybody else, I was sort of indifferent about it at first. And then I asked it for can you give me a book summary of like. And what I realized very quickly was that it generated, even back when it first launched, a decent summary of a book that would have taken me about 10 hours to read the book, summarize it well, and so on. So I figured out very quickly how to prompt the AI to very quickly do what otherwise took me a long time to do.

00:06:39 - Speaker A
And so is in that moment a few things. And it probably took me a couple of weeks to piece it all together because eventually when you start interacting with these AI tools, one of the things that I've learned how to do is think about what I would call second and third order consequences. So the first order consequences, and now I can use AI to produce these summaries and that's saving me a whole bunch of time. The second order consequence, well, I can use this tool to summarize books, so can everybody else.

00:07:10 - Speaker A
And the third order consequence is once everybody realizes that they can do it, this book summary business that I have will no longer be in business. And so you just think about the kind of, the knock on effects. And so we decided very quickly to pivot what we were doing because we realized that wait a long enough time and this business would go away, that we needed to transform our business into something else.

00:07:35 - Speaker A
So that got us into teaching folks how to learn what we've learned about AI. And over the last, mostly from January of this year to now, we've created essentially what we call an AI transformation company where we help organizations learn and adopt AI so that they can do every one of their role deliverables faster and easier with AI. So everything that I've done in my career has been by accident. And so transformations kind of, you know, show up and you decide whether or not you're going to take advantage of them.

00:08:14 - Speaker A
And if there's one thing that I think I've done well, is be able to see things that are coming and you know, be one or two steps ahead of those things. So that's, that is the short version, as I can make it, of kind of the whole journey and you're happy to dive in anywhere where you think would be interesting to chat. Awesome. Thank you. Sherman, do you have a new thing that you wanted to ask Steve? Steve, you said transformation. I'm, I'm. First thing, I must commend you for reading one business book per day. I'VE met a lot of readers, but have never met anyone who read one business book a day, maybe a week. So I commend you for that. But you said transformation was by accident. However, you were able to identify the changes. Right. And there were some innate ability that. That said to you, go after this. What. What is that innate ability? And where did it come from? I don't know that I'm going to have a very good answer for this question, but I'll try.

00:09:41 - Speaker A
And first of all, I don't thank you for commending me for reading that many books. I don't suggest that for anybody else. But I think I've an innate curiosity about the world and about things. I am very much somebody who needs to create. So I've, you know, sense of dreams of becoming, you know, a rock musician. And we went kind of down that path, and I was a songwriter. So I've always had this innate desire to create. And I don't know how or why that was the case. So again, that's where I think. I don't know that I'm gonna have a good answer for this question. It's just something that I naturally like to do.

00:10:26 - Speaker A
It's not something that I've ever worked at. And so it leads me to look for ideas. But also I also have a desire to turn it into something. So this is not enough for me just to learn something. I have to go make something with that knowledge that I just created. And so for me, the book summaries was, well, I'm making something tangible and I can express my creativity through the writing and the summarizing, making connections between ideas.

00:10:56 - Speaker A
But when AI came along, and I think maybe this is where that skill, if you want to call it that, has helped me, is trying to find connections and ways of using this new tool that we all have that other people might not see. And so for me, it's a creative exercise to figure out how can I help you and your role, figure out all the different ways where this new tool can be useful and help you make these new connections and ultimately help you then go and create. So I think that if I had to boil it all down to one thing, I think it's maybe two things. Curiosity and the need to create. Thank you. But a lot of persons may have curiosity and the need to create, but I think it's a gift.

00:11:51 - Speaker A
That's why I ask that innate ability because you, you have the curiosity you create and then you turn it into a business. That's not an. An easy feat. So I think it's genius. I don't know if it's genius. And it's not. Like I said, it's not something that I proactively work at. It's not like, like I sit down and say I need to work on these things.

00:12:18 - Speaker A
It just happens naturally because that's what I enjoy. So it's not. And impart wisdom on how to do it better is like, wake up and that's what I want to do. So I go and do it. So it just happens to also, you know, provide a living for me and for my, for my family. So that. That has come along for the ride, I think. Thank you, Steve. Brilliant. I think it's brilliant.

00:12:44 - Speaker A
You know, I think you brought up a really good and interesting point, which is the ability to pivot, to look two, three, four steps ahead and see what's coming. You know, you see and you hear so much about people complaining, you know, oh, our jobs in manufacturing or working in the coal mines, you know, don't exist anymore. And it's like, yeah, right. Things are changing and you have to adapt and make changes. Jobs that existed 50 years ago are not going to a job exist moving forward.

00:13:21 - Speaker A
And jobs that we've not even thought of are what are going to be being done moving forward. And I think that, you know, in my working with you, because I started with you with, read it for me, that ability of yours to sort of look and say, okay, you know what, I can see, see that down the road that the book summary business is going to, you know, technology is going to make it obsolete, but how can I use the fact that technology is going to make it obsolete to pivot and use that as a way to build a new opportunity? And, you know, I think that that's such an amazing skill for our listeners. You know, when you're looking at your business doing that, kind of looking 2, 3, 4 steps forward as to how things are going to be transforming.

00:14:15 - Speaker A
Can you talk a little bit about how you take companies through the process of bringing in AI into their company and helping them, you know, because employees are scared of losing their jobs. It's like, oh, my God, you know, if I, if the AI learns how to do this, we're all going to be out of work.

00:14:37 - Speaker A
But it's coming and it's going to be. So how can people embrace the fact that it is happening and utilize it so that they're the ones that survive? One of the biggest things that we've learned over the last several months is that I'll Start with step one. The AI can help you do your job faster and easier. And it's true of every single role, as long as it's a knowledge worker role or the part of your role where you use your brain to create what we call deliverables.

00:15:13 - Speaker A
So any knowledge work is broken down into, you need to create documents and, you know, strategies and plans and, you know, even, even down to, like, emails. Like, we're using our brain to create these deliverables that come at a cost to an organization. And this new tool, what we have shown, because we simply, when we go into a company and we work with them, we simply ask them to tell us, it used to take you X amount of hours to do this task. Now that you know, how do you do it with AI, it takes you why? And there's this difference. And that is turned into what we would call it a productivity gain. For the company and everybody that we work with, the average productivity gain that they see after one hour of training is on average $4,000.

00:16:01 - Speaker A
So the gain is not like small. The gain is enormous. And it's been true in many verticals. And also, it doesn't really matter which role we're talking about. So step one in this kind of discussion would be the tools are here. They're way more productive than you might think. And there's a direct correlation between people using AI and becoming more productive. That's not like, what's the way I put it at a presentation last week.

00:16:33 - Speaker A
That's not like my opinion. I have the facts on that one. It's just true. So then the question is, okay, well, what do we do about that? So most people end up going through what we would call the five stages of psychological transformation around AI. And the first one is indifference or active resistance. So they're resisting the idea that AI is useful. We get over that by simply just showing them one of the role deliverables being done by AI that are in their role. And we've got some tools that would say, okay, whatever your role is, let us know and we'll deconstruct it into 64 role deliverables. Pick one of them. And we would show them how AI is, could be used to do that part of your job. That is usually when people transition into fear, which is, oh, I now that I see the AI doing a part of my job that nobody has shown me before, now they get into that fear mode of what am I going to do? And it's what I did when I typed in produce me a book summary Is like the first thing that happens is a wave of fear comes over you.

00:17:41 - Speaker A
What am I going to do? This thing that I've been working on for the last 10 years is now going to be irrelevant. I need. I need to figure out what to do. And so that's stage two. And then if they're working for an organization that is, you know, proactively trying to take this on and not eliminate people, but develop them, that's kind of the mindset. Like if your organization brings us in to work with you, they are proactively trying to develop you, not get rid of you. So that's kind of the way that we approach it. And so then third phase is what we would call embarrassment. So you go and use AI for a particular role deliverable. And it's kind of like a double embarrassment. You're first, you're embarrassed that the AI can do this part of your job, you know, either better than you or at least as good as you, but faster and easier.

00:18:37 - Speaker A
And then you're also embarrassed that you hand this. You. You use AI for a role deliverable. And you turn it, let's say it's a report that you're producing for, for somebody in your organization, and you turn it in, and then you're embarrassed to admit that you used AI to make it. And so it doesn't matter who you are, you'll. You'll feel this. And so then we move into, once you have a good reaction from that to confidence.

00:19:01 - Speaker A
So you start to gain confidence that the more you use the tools, the more confident you feel, because now you're just getting more done. You're not. Nobody is going to fire you because you're using AI. And then ultimately, then we move into the last stage, which is transformation, that you can, now that you're comfortable and you're confident, you can actually start producing amazing results for yourself and for the company.

00:19:26 - Speaker A
So what we have realized throughout this process is that this is a psychology problem to solve, not a technology problem to solve. That organizations, if they focus on the psychology aspect of it, of again developing their people instead of trying to figure out how to get rid of them. So the way we always describe this to a leader and also to the people inside the organizations is companies don't get rid of people who find ways to do their job twice as fast or to create twice as much output.

00:20:00 - Speaker A
Like, those are the people you want to keep. You give them more work, not less. And so ultimately, those organizations which all want to grow, there's the very few organizations that Just want to slash costs. Almost every single company on the planet has aspirations to be bigger, not smaller. And so that means more people.

00:20:21 - Speaker A
And so ultimately this becomes a growth enhancer, force multiplier, whatever term you want to use. Not. Not a tool that's going to get rid of jobs. And yes, there will be some jobs that go away, but what organizations will do for the people who show the capacity to adapt to this change and take this on is they will just find them new roles within the organization ultimately. So, you know, you got 10 people and five of them take this on as a way to enhance their work. Those are the five that are going to get more work and more and promote it inside the company. Ultimately, this is going to be a binary choice. If you take this on, you'll stay, and if you don't, you're probably going to get let go. So it's a. It's almost like the only way to lose in this scenario is to stay at that first stage, which is resistance. If you continue to resist this process, it's likely that you will be ultimately let go, which is not what anybody wants.

00:21:22 - Speaker A
Exactly. Exactly. One of the things that I noticed when I've been working with some people with AI is that sort of. That the fear of the how prompt engineering and how to do it right and how to make sure you're getting the best result possible and also make sure that what you're getting is factual, because that's one of the other challenges is that sometimes, you know, garbage in, garbage out.

00:21:52 - Speaker A
So as these AI things are learning, if they're being fed bad information, then it's somehow getting into the system and being interpreted and coming out as well. Could you talk a little bit about those types of issues too, from your experience? I think there's two things in there. One was prompt engineering, and the other one is like garbage in, garbage out. So I think the first one is actually.

00:22:20 - Speaker A
So there's this idea that you need to become an excellent prompt engineer, and which was the mindset that we adopted initially as well, teaching people how to prompt these tools well. And ultimately what we figured out was that the AI is actually a way better prompt engineer than you're ever going to be. So you can actually go to the AI and say, this is what I want to do. Give me all the prompts I need in order to make a large language model or an AI tool produce this output, and it will give you the prompts that ultimately you need to use. So you copy and paste them, which ultimately creates this, like, cognitive Dissonance like your job is reduced to a copy and paste exercise.

00:23:06 - Speaker A
However, you could spend a whole bunch of time trying to get good at prompt engineering or you can focus on doing your job faster and easier. And if your focus is on doing your job faster and easier, you're going to get the AI to do the prompts for you because that's the way to do it. So I think for the most part most people would be better served not focusing on prompt engineering, but focusing on the thing that they know which is their role.

00:23:32 - Speaker A
And how do I do that faster and easier. So that's the first thing. So I think it's a misnomer or it's misguided ultimately that you need to become very good at prompt engineer for what that's worth on the second, and garbage in and garbage out. Ultimately that's where your, if you're in a role, that's where your value is. Like you know what garbage out looks like. So when we take this bottom up approach, we're going to train all of your people to use these tools productively in their role.

00:24:03 - Speaker A
And who knows what is good or not is the person that's already doing the job. So if you're a customer service rep and you're writing emails like you'll know from the input and output whether or not it's garbage because most of the time you're not using these AIs as fact checker. Like you're not doing like facts finding research. It's not like a Google search. For the most part in some cases that is true. But again I think that's, it gets a lot of attention. But I think it's a misguided attention. They will make some mistakes, but guess what? Human beings make a lot of mistakes too. So ultimately it's this fear because it's a machine making a mistake versus a human being. But ultimately the idea would be that's not a real problem as long as the human being remains in the loop and looks at the, and says yep, that from what I know, that's what I would have turned in had I done it myself.

00:25:05 - Speaker A
And also I got it done in you know, five minutes as opposed to five hours. So that's how I would answer those two questions. Steve, you mentioned something earlier that your client have to overcome the psychological barriers. How do you help them to do that? It's usually just the one big thing is like I'm not going to get fired.

00:25:40 - Speaker A
That's, that's ultimately what they're worried about because they have Bills to pay, they have a family, they have all of these things that if their job was taking away things would be very hard. And so ultimately, what folks are looking for is psychological safety. And the biggest thing along that is, we are not going to fire you if you learn how to do your job with AI. We're going to give you more responsibility, we're going to promote you within the organization. And so ultimately, that needs to come from the leader of the team and the leader of the organization.

00:26:14 - Speaker A
So when we're working with organizations, we ask them to take the AI productivity pledge. So we do this at our own company. Some of our clients are doing this as well, which is we give you this, what we call an AI role plan, which is you need to go investigate how AI can be useful across at least 64 tasks that you're doing in your role.

00:26:33 - Speaker A
So it's comprehensive and it takes a long time. And by the end of it, people have found a significant amount of productivity gains, usually on the order of somewhere between two and five times the productivity that they would have been producing before. Or put another way, like if the job did change today forward, they can do their job, you know, in two to five times less amount of time. So the AI productivity pledge is, if you go and do this, not only will we not fire you, we will give you a raise above and beyond what you otherwise would have gotten, just as a standard pay raise. And if it's appropriate, we will give you a promotion. And so I think that is the psychological safety that people are looking for.

00:27:18 - Speaker A
Like, ultimately, at the end of the day, all we want are the same things that we've always wanted. And we want whatever our hopes and dreams are. It just happens to be that a lot of our hopes and dreams are tied in with our careers and how much, you know, ultimately how much income we bring in. And so people don't want to see that taken away. And if you can flip the script on it and say, hey, not only is, are we not going to eliminate you or your role, we're going to turn this into something that propels you towards your hopes and dreams, whatever those happen to be, that's where people feel safe.

00:27:54 - Speaker A
And then thus throw themselves into this work in with as much effort as they can, because they know that it's ultimately going to be a good thing for them and not a bad thing. And also, I think from the most people, that's all they can see in front of them is what's right in front of me, which is, how do I not get fired because of AI, because that's all you hear about in the news.

00:28:20 - Speaker A
But there's a meta like, this is just going to accelerate over time. This is not going to slow down. So the AI tools are as bad as they're ever going to be today. They're going to continue to get infinitely better. So possible way that you plus A like there's no possible way that you without AI does a better job than you with AI. So like if you compare it that way, it's like there's no, there's no option here where you without AI win. And so the only option is how, how can you do this with as much effort as you possibly can? Even if your job is going to be eliminated, you resisting all of this will make not one lick of difference.

00:29:05 - Speaker A
So there's no real option. Even if you think about it from those second and third order perspectives, the only real option that anybody has is to jump in, learn these skills so that you can become even more valuable in the marketplace moving forward, even if that's not at your same company or in the same role that you're in today. Thank you. Thank you. Just, just it's my curiosity, are CEOs and business owners open to accepting AI into their, their companies? I think it's, you know, certainly there are some people who are and there are some people who still have their resistance. So it's like not a role based thing. It's some CEOs don't understand it and they still have a lot of resistance to it. So especially at a higher level, once you show them the potential productivity gains, because there are very few organizations who have figured out how to actually get provable productivity gains with AI. So this is not like a well known fact at the moment that this is what, this is exactly what will happen if you adopt AI. And here are the productivity gains and we can we even give a guarantee when we're working with folks that we guarantee the results.

00:30:37 - Speaker A
So once you do that and once you show them that we're putting our money where our mouth is, so to speak, we're much more open to it. But there's still concerns, there's a lot of privacy concerns still that need to be worked out. And so there's certainly the adoption curve where I think we're still from a company perspective, even though a lot of individuals have been using AI since November 2022, and that just accelerates every day, we're still from a company perspective very early on in the adoption cycle. So we're still in A very early adopter phase from a company perspective. And but at the same time those things are just going to get worked out because the gains are so much better than not using the tool that every, all of those things will just get worked out along the way. Thank you. When you're working with organizations and with people, are you finding that sort of smaller to mid sized companies or mid sized to larger companies are embracing it more or is it really not sort of company size but rather just sort of who's the individual at the helm of that particular organization? I think certainly the larger the company, the more is at stake and they're much more likely to have resistors inside of the company who will be able to block the organization from doing something today.

00:32:19 - Speaker A
So usually it's the legal department or it's the IT department. So most technology goes through the IT department. Even though this is kind of like a general purpose technology. And it doesn't really make a lot of sense for the IT department to be making these decisions, but that's kind of where it goes. And so usually when things are unclear or there's these risks that they don't truly understand how to wrestle to the ground, like the first thing a larger company will do is just pump the brakes on and say like nobody can use this until we figure it out.

00:32:53 - Speaker A
And then it takes some time to figure out. So certainly smaller companies will adopt this faster because they'll have less red tape to work through in order to get people into IT and productive. So I think there is definitely. So I think that's one perspective. The other way to look at it is larger organizations are much more likely to have a top down approach to this.

00:33:16 - Speaker A
So we're going to control this, you know, as many ways as we possibly can and be very prescriptive about things that you can't do and can do, whereas smaller organizations, and I think this is true of anything that these different sizes of companies like the policies that they'll enact it will. A smaller company is going to have less policy and procedure than a very large company, which means they can do the bottom up approach quicker because they're going to have less restrictions on it.

00:33:44 - Speaker A
But ultimately it is where we're seeing the most success would be in the SMB market where it's large enough so that they can see these massive gains, but small enough so that they're not stuck in a bunch of bureaucracy and red tape which is they're all, nobody has bad intentions around creating. There's a reason why red tape exists because in larger companies, the stakes are a lot higher. Something goes horribly wrong. The impacts are much greater at a larger company. So anyways, I think it's a nuanced discussion around those things, but that's, I guess, my general thoughts on it. If you were somebody, one of our listeners watching, who really is just sort of like, ooh, okay, this AI stuff, I've kind of heard about it. What should I do? What would you recommend as the steps that they take to start to be getting involved in AI and making themselves valuable to their organizations? Yeah, so there's three mindsets that we always, whenever we're doing training, we're always reminding people of. And I think this would. These would be the three things that I would leave with, folks, if I could only leave a few things.

00:35:09 - Speaker A
One is to work on your work. So as you're using AI, don't do things in general, but work on your work. Try. Try to figure out ways to do your work faster and easier with AI. So don't learn prompt engineering. Don't go, you know, trying to write a poem or these cool things you're seeing other people do or do videos like, figure out, how do I do this task that I'm trying to do in my job Faster and easier with AI and the easiest way to do that is to open up the AI and say, how do I use AI to do insert task here? Faster and easier and start to explore.

00:35:55 - Speaker A
So that's number one. Number two is, you know, always think AI first. So this one is, whenever you're doing something, think about, how could I help me do whatever it is that I'm doing, and do that everywhere in your life. You know, let's just say maybe you have kids who don't listen to you as much as you'd like them to listen to you? Which is something that I experience almost daily.

00:36:19 - Speaker A
They're wonderful kids, but sometimes they're not doing the things I would like them to do. So that's an opportunity to start to explore. How can I tap into AI to help me do those things? And most of the time we're like, well, I don't know how AI could help me. And so our instruction there would be. Well, that's when you go to AI and say, this is what I'm working on right now.

00:36:40 - Speaker A
Here's an obstacle that's in my way. How can you help? So always AI first. And if you don't know what. Where to start with AI first, you ask the AI, where do I start? So that's number two. And Number three is we've created something called a daily AI growth journal, which is start to document just like you would try to document any other new habit you're trying to create.

00:37:03 - Speaker A
Start tracking your progress and do it daily. And the daily, daily habits become the. They ultimately will create the best possible results. Like in any people are trying to lose weight or if they're trying to stop smoking or they're trying to write, you know, become a better writer. It was widely known that doing daily tracking for a whole bunch of reasons gets the best possible results. So track your progress every day on you doing those things and ultimately try to keep that streak alive as much as humanly possible. And I think this is going to be, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a long marathon of sprints. And I think if you become, you know, the only way to get good at AI is to use AI. It's like riding a bike. You cannot, you cannot, you know, consume your way to getting good at this.

00:37:56 - Speaker A
You need to do it and you need to do it daily in order to make the most progress possible. So those would be the three things I would strongly urge folks to do if they're looking for ways to get started. Wow. Wow. Thank you for that. How can someone participate or gather more information on the Simple Academy? Yeah, so we have a website, SimpleAcademy, AI.

00:38:30 - Speaker A
We end up working with, like I said, community of consultants. I think we probably have a. And there are things that you can get through our consultants that you can't get anywhere else. So I think we got a link that you can share with your listeners that would enable them to get into some of the, some of the learning that we produced and also some of the features that you wouldn't otherwise have access to through just coming to our website in general. So I think if you want to get that link out to your folks, we can do that. And we would love to, love to have you in our community.

00:39:05 - Speaker A
Thank you. We will make sure that that is in the show. Notes that we've got a link. Before we let you go, if you were to use your crystal ball and look forward and say, what do things look like in businesses two, three, five years from now with everything that is coming in the forefront with AI Well, I think one of the things that there's a bunch of people that are building these AI and one of them is OpenAI, which is the company that created ChatGPT.

00:39:41 - Speaker A
And they've done a good job of trying to communicate with folks about what should you expect in the Future they've got these five stages of AI and stage one is chatbots, which is what most people are familiar, which was things like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot. And the stage two is the stage that we're kind of straddling right now is these tools that will do human like reasoning. And so the tools are already at a level where they're doing PhD level analysis. They're now, you know, world class developers in terms of coding. So these tools are now able to reason at the level of elite human reasoners, which is a new, which is now taking it from like, hey, this tool can do customer service replies to it can now do a lot of the thinking work that most people in leadership positions would say, well there's no way the AI is going to replace me. Well, unfortunately your brain for many things is no longer required because this tool can do it better.

00:40:48 - Speaker A
So that's kind of like stage two. And we're going to start to see this play out in management roles, certainly in middle management roles at companies. And then stage three is when we create these agents so the AIs will start to actually execute tasks on behalf of us, go off and do work which they cert, which they currently can't do. You need to manage all of the work that's being produced by nai, but in the future it'll start to do work on its own.

00:41:15 - Speaker A
You just give it a goal and it'll go start to do it. And then there's stage four, which is it'll be an innovation machine that you can use to invent new things. Like the best, easiest way to think about it is it'll start creating new drug formulas that can cure disease. Like that's an example. And the fifth one is it'll actually, you'll think an organization into existence and then like poof, like you've typed a command or used a phone with your voice and you've now spawned an organization. So nobody knows what that means and what that looks like when we get to the fifth stage of that. And we're only at straddling the first and second stage.

00:41:56 - Speaker A
So I don't have any real predictions about how fast this happens, but ultimately those are, that'll be the stages that we work through. And most people believe that it's going to be, you know, if you think about ChatGPT really came out, it's been a couple years, basically two years per stage would be kind of like the aggressive target. So but it might take longer. But ultimately these tools are already starting to Take over work. And one of the stories we like to say, there's a. There's a book called the Black Swan, and it talks about these rare events that happen that have huge impacts, like stock market crashes that you can't really see coming. And one of the ideas in that book is don't be a turkey. So they talk about the existence of a turkey where, you know, every single day it's getting fed, it's being cared for, it's having this, you know, for the most part, all of its needs being taken care of.

00:42:55 - Speaker A
And then all of a sudden, Thanksgiving comes along and it finds out that, well, things are not what they seemed. And so the idea is don't be a turkey. Do not believe that this trend is not going to continue, and get proficient with all of these things now, so that whenever these changes happen, you're ready. And that would be my best advice for anybody, is this cycle will continue where we've only scratched the surface of what's possible. And to ignore it would be a very bad thing. Thank you for the recommendation. I'll go read the Black Swan. It's a tough read, to be honest, but fascinating. You could get ChatGPT to give you a 15 minute summary on it.

00:43:49 - Speaker A
Yeah, you can get a really good book summary on it. You could also. This was when we realized that we were going to be in tough with these AI. You can get a summary of it, but you can also tell it to tailor it to your exact circumstances to whatever problem you're working on. So, yeah, you can certainly get a good summary of the box one by asking any of these AI tools for sure.

00:44:15 - Speaker A
Okay. Actually, thank you so much. Sorry, I was just. I think you just hit on something there, which was that you can get it to customize it to you. Right. So. And that is what is so unique about what the AI tools can do. It's like, okay, take this book and give me a summary based on my occupation or my lifestyle or whatever, and summarize it and adapt it and how it can help me in my world.

00:44:45 - Speaker A
And I think that that's something that's totally new. Right. Because it was. What we used to get was just the information, but now you can get the information adapted and personalized to yourself. Yeah, and I think that's. Once we realized that, that was when we knew that, like, it's not only faster and easier, but in this case it's like infinitely better for each individual to do this on their own to get the customized version of this.

00:45:11 - Speaker A
So the second and third Order consequences on that would be if, like, if anybody can create content, but they can also get a personalized exactly for them and their exact situation. The creation of any static content is of almost no value anymore because everybody can do create a better version of whatever they're looking for themselves. And you can create full courses this way. You can write an entire book this way. So it's like everybody is going to mass produce information for themselves.

00:45:46 - Speaker A
And me producing something for you would be of no value to you because, you know, you can just go and do it a custom, get a customized version of it for yourself. And I think that's one of the big things, like one of the dangers is not thinking. Any second and third order consequences is everybody sees these shiny objects like, well, I'm going to go create a course with AI and sell it with AI. Like, if everybody starts doing that, it's of no value. And also one of the promises of AI is that every piece of information is customized for you and for your exact circumstances.

00:46:19 - Speaker A
So I would think through that as you're wrestling with AI so that you don't waste a lot of time working on things that will ultimately not be any long term competitive advantage. And we all get stuck in those mindsets because we were showing people how to create courses when that first came out. But ultimately you start to think about it in those terms, well, if I can do this, that means everybody can do it.

00:46:46 - Speaker A
And if everybody can do it, everybody will do it. And if everybody does do it, what does that mean? And you can start to nudge your way forward to try to find things that would be valuable even if everybody was doing it, if that's, if that makes any sense. So I think that's an important skill to develop of thinking in second and third order consequences, which very simply would be, here's something that I can do, but if I can do it, that means everybody can do it. And if everybody can do it, they will do it. What does that mean would be the way to think through these things. Thank you so much, Steven. This is really enlightening. I'm sure that people are probably going to listen to this episode a few times because they're going to pick up so many things like, okay, what did he say about that? I got to go circle back and find out about it.

00:47:35 - Speaker A
Thank you everyone for joining us on the Transforming Lives podcast panel. We Charman and I and Steve, thank you for joining us today today and wish you all a fabulous week and we will see you again. Thanks for having me so much for joining us today on Transforming Lives Channel podcast. We hope if you enjoyed what you heard today, we encourage you to let us know and to share with those that matter in your lives. If you would like to connect with anyone from the panel or our guest speaker, you can find all of the ways to connect in our show Notes. We have so much gratitude for you and we are so thankful to be a part of your day. Until next time, take great care.