Wed, June 12th: “How GenAI is Transforming Companies,” 6:00 PM, CU Boulder

12:00AM Jun 13, 2024

Speakers:

Dan Murray

Susan Adams

Daniel Ritchie

Brett Schklar

Matt Fornito

Travis Frisinger

Keywords:

ai

people

ceo

talk

company

work

questions

generative

subgroup

automate

build

organization

started

brett

couple

months

technology

meeting

engineering

team

a seat and we'll get started here momentarily. You

I see we will get started here.

I'd like to welcome you guys to the Rocky Mountain AI interest group. My name is Dan Murray. I'm the guy that sends you all those emails from meetup and spams you so many times. So welcome. Thank you. Great. Great crowd here we we just hit 1500 members. So

nice cloud you. Yeah,

when I posted this image, someone said, I'm not sure how that balloon is actually floating with all those robots in the time, but hopefully the the organization stays afloat. So congratulations on 1500 a couple reminders of housekeeping. There's three exits, two in the front, one in the back. If you need to leave early, that's fine. We're going to have the microphone for questions, so we'll walk that around. We're recording the meeting as a screen presentation and audio, so we'll have that available afterwards. There's bathrooms down the hall. If you brought in plates and cups. Please carry them out. There's trash cans here. And after the meeting, if anybody wants an escort to their car, just see one of the board members and we'll help you out. Okay, a few goodbyes from our board. Matt Woods is stepping down from the AI in entrepreneurship and startup subgroup, and grace Wilson is a student here on our board, and she's still at CU for one more semester, but is is stepping down from the board, so please join me in thanking them for Their

with the goodbye, we also have a Hello. Uh, uchi abuji is taking over for for Matt. He's going to be running the the AI for entrepreneurship and startups subgroup. So I'm going to turn the mic over to,

thanks, man. So yes, when we say Nora, thank you for thanking Matt, because he was also going to a couple of meetings straight by so during startups, starting something up, entrepreneurship, that sort of thing interests you. Well, first of all, join the slack. Okay, there's a slack for our mag, and that's a good place to connect with all the various interests and knit them together. But also, you know, we'll be trying probably, I'm thinking July 18, probably for the for the next few months, since we've had one, but yeah, generally it's the last Thursday of each month. Uh, like five to the five to six. So, yeah, so yes, so what do you do, exactly? Well, yeah, that's a good question. It's a good question because right, everybody's feeling their way around, whether you know your larger position, whether you're a startup, etcetera, you're feeling your way into it, and we're building it out together. What are product ideas? What is it? How to Market, you know, how can we start? And I'm going to try to introduce a few things that will, you know, maybe bring some sort of structure to that discussion. But it's okay. This is, I'm like, two days of this. Okay, I do want to mention that, apparently, the GPA, the GPT hackathon, was a was a major success in January. That was before my time. So we're going to try to do something like that so we can get our hands in and actually, you know, practice building things together. So sweet. Thank you.

Okay, as we usually do, some thanks to our board, Richard Anna Sean, Jacob giant, pranjal Aggarwal is here. I think he's the only board member here, and he's carrying the weight of everything. So thanks to our board and the subgroup leaders,

we do have a number of special interest subgroups. I'm going to put up the link tree, QR, QR code next, and it's going to, it's going to have links to all of these subgroups. So these are the various special interest subgroups. And some of these groups meet once a month. Could be once a quarter, twice a month. It's up to them. But if you want to drill down into one topic, more so than we can do in the big group, in the big room, you know, get connected with with these guys. There's some really good, interesting subgroups. I wish I could go to every single meeting, because they're so interesting. Are there any subgroup leaders here that want to make an announcement about an upcoming meeting.

Okay? Bill, hey,

yeah. Bill, McIntyre engineering subgroup we're trying to target, actually, you have so many speakers and so much great quality presentation drill that you're up to twice a month now we're trying to turn our next meeting

a week from Thursday, which will be June 27 it'll be a follow up to our large language model Deep Dive. The first we did the inference and

embedding layer. I think, you know Andrew spot, who is the former leader of the school, he presenting, I think, on basically for getting stage layers from out. It's kind of tacky, but there's a lot of good conversation. That's it's really interactive. People talk loud. It's not just say a lecture. So I wish everybody could come. I'll be adding a open meetup link and a layout of calendar

as well. Cool. Thank you, Bill. Any other subgroup leaders want to make announcement?

Okay, okay, I'm getting more I'm shooting next month. Cool. Thank you. Last call on subgroup leaders. Okay, so this is the linktree for our mag, so this has connections to those subgroups, as I mentioned, the slack. So we have a channel for our group with maybe 300 people on it, 350 people, something like that. We have a global calendar for all the RMA meeting subgroups. We sell cool T shirts like this, but we don't make any money on it. We just send you to the vendor, and it's about 15 bucks to your door for an rmag t shirt. Link is right there, and I will be giving this t shirt away at this meeting. So pay attention. Someone's gonna, someone's gonna walk away with this t shirt. Okay, so last chance everyone got get that cool. We usually thank some of our supporters. John Backus, Mark gross Mark's the director of the Atlas center. They provide this amazing space for us. Ken frickless designed the friendly robot logo. Chris Byrne, Brian Griffin, Josh zapin helps with the recording of the beatings and then sweater ventures, hosts many of our our subgroups, okay, let me thank our pizza sponsor, three. LC. Three. LC enables you to create more accurate and smaller ml models. And I am going to turn the mic over to Paul Andreessen, who might want to say a few words.

Thank you all for

sponsoring our leads.

Words, we'll be great, more accurate and smaller animals. So if any of you are training or fine tuning your own models, you should check us out. We are a new startup. We just released our bet that we would load feedback from guys. So try that. It's super simple to integrate into a payment space. Thank you,

awesome. Thank you, Paul.

Sponsorship.

Okay, upcoming meetings, we I haven't booked any dates yet because I can't book this room for the fall until all the teachers and classes and stuff get get their first dibs. We're taking off for July. We'll start back in August. We'll meet monthly August through December, and these are some of the topics that we're planning to do, AI and education, robotics. We'll probably have a CEO roundtable with a number of AI startups in Colorado. We might do another demo night. The demo night was really fun, and we've had some people interested in doing that one. Again, I wanted to highlight a couple of Colorado AI startups that have just announced funding in the last week. If you are seeking a job, pull your phone out and take a picture of this slide, because when a company gets a $5 million or $6 million check, it usually means they're hiring. And I have talked to both of these CEOs. They're interested in presenting at our make. Mike wants to do a demo or a presentation. So is anyone familiar with bright wave? Wow, that's interesting. So they're they're doing a financial analysis using AI for the for the finance industry. So they're doing really in depth financial analysis of companies, of market trends, things like that. They just got a $6 million seed round liminal. Anyone familiar with liminal? They've done some demos at the AI builders. They have sort of a wrapper that goes around your company's it so that, as employees are using calls to llms, they're making sure you're not violating like HIPAA regulations. You know, for regulated industries, you're not sending information out to these llms that's restricted based on the industry that you're in, and they want to come and present as well. I've seen a very cool demo of their company. Okay, so we're going to have an after party tonight. It's unofficial, unpublished. It happens after we head out from here. I can't tell you where it is. All I could say is, it's a nearby classic and a collective dive bar in Boulder. That's that's all I'm going to say. I'm not going to give you any more details than that. And then we're moving right along. If there's any angel investors, please send me an email. We're setting up angel investor channel in Slack. I'm considering making an angel investment right now in an AI startup, and it would be good to get together more people that are that are investing in startups, so please reach out if you want to join that. Okay, I'm going to turn the mic over to Daniel Richie,

who's going to explain this. Thank

you, Dan, I hadn't heard you're going to be investing alright, I promise we'd be up here for 90 seconds. So the clock is coming out and be less than that. Actually, if you have a phone, grab. This is Marko. This is going to be used tonight for the people that are in the room. I'm Daniel Richie. This is my friend Ira McBain. And last month we were at meta San Francisco, and we came up with an idea. That's what this is. This is kind of like something that is going to apply for the RMI community. We thought it would be great for tonight to support Q and A for all the speakers, for people in the audience who might not have a chance to ask a question. So the more questions you ask, the better of a response we'll have for this evening. I probably won't be able to stick around for the whole night. I'm going to try to but I want to pass this off to IRAs. We can tell you how this all works. If you have any questions, you can't find me and keep talking. Yeah, super simple. So the idea, yes, everybody will ask questions, and we'll kind of like, congregate all the most important, most asked questions so we can see what everybody wants. Um, it's totally experiment with the community we love, happy together and learning. You guys want to learn anything about what we did, or anything like that. Let us know. But grab the code and we'll capture him. If we need to. We'll see what happens. Send codes plaster around some other places. Yeah,

so there's, there's signs with the code, if you miss it here, and you sort of need to ask your first question in order to see the the bubble up list of popular questions. So, so you, you, you ask your first question, and then there's, there's another screen that shows the popular questions, awesome. And so, as we normally do, we'll have the three presentations in a row, and then we'll do Q and A with the three speakers in the front. And we'll be pulling some audience questions, and then some questions from from bubble up, which are kind of capturing the vibe of the whole of the whole room. Okay, so I'm going to move on from this, but there are some QR codes posted in the back in different places in the room. Okay, so now is the time where we do announcements. Is there anyone here that's looking for work right now? Any job seekers? Okay? And is there anyone that's hiring right now? There's at least two. I'm going to let Darryl speak about some openings that he has.

Thanks. Dan, hi everybody. I am one of you. I've been coming to these meetings for a while now. I am also, as of 10 days ago, the head of artificial intelligence at Gaia. Yeah, nice. So, you know, but I got my PhD right over here at munsinger Institute cognitive science. I had a company called Knowledge analysis technologies. We created AI applications called semantic statistical semantics. Back in the 90s, we required, like your Center Station. We were the University of Colorado, Texas company here in 2005 and so that's why I'm meeting this team, this Gaia is putting together. And those of you who know Gaia is a conscious media company, they have a streaming video on demand service, and we're going to use the content that they have, over 10,000 videos at all times, crazy topics and all kinds of topics to create some very specialized AI applications. And we have a lot of need for AI within the production group, so we did a lot of video production there. So we're looking right now for that team, but right now I'm looking for a couple of senior level JavaScript full stack engineers know how to do, hopefully know how to do some lag chain and some Lane Smith and awarded beddings. If you know how to do that, that's pretty good. But we really look for people that experience working in house in house teams for global engineering production. We're not a startup. We're a company it's publicly traded, go to gaia.com/career is if you want a career aspect, Strong says full stack. One says full stack. And so we're also looking for just regular engineers who don't want to looking for just regular engineers who don't really have some level upstairs and stuff that we succeed first. So thank you cool.

Thank you, Deborah, to the documentary. Else want to announce a job opening that they're hiring for? Ai job opening? Job openings. Okay, any other announcements? This would be local events, other groups, things like that. Does anyone else want to make an announcement to the to the crowd?

Okay, Brian, just a quick question. If you have a panic button for when you're stuck to get other devs and technical notes that were useful to you and that your people like to be in this room. Would you press that button?

Raise your hand if

you work. Okay, excellent.

Okay, any other announcements Going once, going twice. Okay, we usually start out with some questions for the audience. For how many people is this your first Armagh meeting? First meeting you've been to? Amazing could be good or bad news. And how many people have been here before? Cool. How many like our pizza selection? That's pretty popular. How many people are from Boulder? Boulder area? So most Okay, Denver. Folks from Denver. Okay, route 36 between the two.

Lama,

golden, how about Laramie? Does anyone think that they drove the furthest to be here? Who thinks they drove the furthest to be here? Oh, there you go. They came from the airport. Yeah. Brett just flew in. Okay? Fort Collins, okay, you already got a prize. Okay, anyone further than you guys? Okay, so you guys win. You

okay, how many are currently using AI in their business operations right now? Well, one half. How many believe that AI can significantly improve your company's productivity. Has anyone ever worked directly with a CEO on implementing AI strategies? And if you're a solopreneur, raise your hand. Okay. How many think AI transformation should be led by someone other than the CEO Brett's hand is up on that. That's interesting. Do you agree that automating routine how many agree that automating routine tasks can help you focus on more meaningful work? For sure, did you guys see the post where someone said, you know, I want AI to, like, do the dishes and do the laundry, so I can do Art and Writing, not AI does my art and writing so I do dishes. And has anyone ever implemented AI to automate tasks in their organization? Nice. How many believe that poor implementation of AI can be more harmful than beneficial? Yeah. Has anyone ever experienced firsthand the time saving benefits of AI that's got to be every single person in a room. I use it every day. How many think generative AI can enhance creativity in your industry? Looks like over half. How many are currently exploring the use of generative AI in their own business right now? Yeah, that's why we're here. Does anyone believe the potential of generative AI is still largely untapped? Totally? Just a couple more. Is anyone here in a leadership role in their organization right now? People that are that are in management leadership roles. Has anyone been involved in a major technological transformation in their own company? Quite a few. How many people have participated in an AI training or education program? This meeting counts, okay, um, and how many last question, how many believe that AI will be a critical component of your industry's future? Probably everybody in the room, okay, I'm going to introduce our first speaker. I'll ask pranjal Aggarwal to come up and actually, let me just show you. These are the three talks. So Brett is going to start with what your CEO is being told about, AI. Then we're going to go to Matt. He's going to talk about automate, the boring to spend time on the meaningful, which we just mentioned, and then Travis is going to cover myth and reality of generative AI in the wild. So I'm going to introduce Brett. I'll ask pranjal Aggarwal come up and switch over the talk, and then Brett can set up the mic. You

existing one, yeah,

okay, first speaker, speaker,

what your CEO is being told about AI. He speaks to CEOs across the country, and in fact, drove here directly from the airport, flying in from Arkansas, so he's braver than me. And I said, I'm glad you didn't tell me that you were driving here from the airport, because I had enough things to worry about today. Brett, as I said, helps. It teaches CEOs to harness generative AI to grow, streamline and expand their businesses, to outflank competitors and gain market share with over 20 years as a go to market driver, agency owner, cmo and now fractional CMO, Brett captures the attention of CEOs seeking an AI first transfer, transformation of their business, their business operations and market penetration. Please join me in welcoming. Brett Starr, alright,

let me see if this works. First thing I want to say is thank you, Dan, thanks for having me here. Thanks for putting all of this together. Hi, my name is Brett Sparr. I speak to CEOs about AI, and I have to talk slow.

98% of you know more about AI. Police get that out. You know more about a little more about the practical applications. You know more about the technology and AI has on this world. My job is not trying to teach you anything about AI. My job is to try to share insights as they go out to middle of America. You talk to CEOs of middle of America companies, manufacturing, reduction, oil and gas cans, all the good, fun stuff, and we talk more about AI. Now, when I talk to these people, and I talk through a group called visage. Visage is a group of like 45,000 CEOs, I think they were like 30,000 they bought another CEO group, another 45,000 CEOs. I go around and I talk to groups at the top 18 to 20 minutes time, and I run it when we have a workshop time, and what I talk to them about is, alright, technology works, you know, I just, you know, a lot of them have this preconceived notion about it, and it's because they've been taught everything from James Cameron, from the was it costing brothers majors? They hear about all this topic, how we solve her. And have fallen in love with Scarlett Johansson, who sent a nice little cease and desist to chat GPT because they used her once, or something very similar to but when I talk to the CEOs about AI, I get these, like typical responses. There's like four. First one is, people are cheating on their papers. They're doing this school. This is horrible. It's bad. This is going to be fun. The second type of CEO is not just against it, but against it specifically in their own backyard, like we're not ready for this. We don't know it's here or where we don't believe that we are ready for AI yet. And the fun thing about that CEO is, if I hit the chance to pull those release. Most of them to try AI, they've been trying chatgpt, they tried perplexing, trying, you know, some of it had trial. Gym, model, Google, they've been trying it. But the CEO doesn't know it's like one of those phenomenons of everybody's doing their In fact, one of my jobs, so my daily job is on a fractional, cheap learning so mostly the community based technology. We spoke for other companies as well. And see those that are part of their, part of my group, and you're going to also fractional C practices. And so the CEO who said it shouldn't, you know, I'm not ready for it again. My organization isn't ready for it, but I get the chance to pull them all employees. Turns out most of them have been using trying doing it wrong, right? Or use the free version. Use the corporate information in that free version, or they're not checking their information. And so every everything they like starts out with in the world of an intimate In conclusion, right? The telltale sign that somebody really just didn't read what this thing spit out. Then there's another type of and so this little revelation to those, when they learn that people have been using AI in your organization, then they step up. They pay attention. Now I need to know is not just one of those things that's out there. It's already invested my organization with AI, and I don't know what to do to get myself out of that situation. So I guess I gotta take it seriously. There's a third type of CEO, and they say I didn't want to come to this. I want my IT person to come and send me. But the coach, the CEO coach, said that I should be here because this is not a technology thing. This is a change management thing. And they show up crush, you know, you, you know, like they have to, they're being told they have to do their homework. So there's a multiple kinds of CEOs. Then there's some that are very excited and energized, and they've been trying to look at how to proactively take on AI initiatives, whether it's leveraging AI technology already ends in their patients, and they've just been a little bit afraid to touch the diet too, or they have a real AI application that ties into their customer experience, or it ties into their operations, or it ties into their data analysis, or it ties into mostly marketing, which is the place where I suggest most companies get started with AI. And I suggest that both head of marketing in a company, senior opportunity is a great place to start, because the stuff that goes out there, it can be helpful to people out there, to their customers or prospects, and that's where the efficiency gains can happen in companies that are out there and then America who are scared of, okay? So we've got two types the people that are photo. There's a fear taking over, right? So all the movies have scare us, but also a fear of taking off. If this thing goes faster, moves faster than I can keep my hands around it. As a CEO, I'm in trouble now. The car has gotten in front of the horse, and I no longer have the ability to keep it under control. There's a lot more people that are worried about what they're missing out on, and it looks like this. I know like main competitors, using AI, they're doubling the marketing activities. They're getting a bigger following. Their LinkedIn is blowing up, but Facebook is blowing up. Their Tiktok is blowing up, and it's all because of AI. We're not there. We just missed a big opportunity. So they've got a big fear of missing out. So as I said, it's the best kept secret, right? Depending on the crowd, sometimes I talk about adult websites, right? Or is, you know, cheap whitening scripts or write us, but everybody's doing it and no one's talking about it, I'm going to go back to that fractional cmo thing. Was talking about something over I forgot how I get businesses. I know I look for all of the VPN marketing cmo jobs, and I apply and suggest that they should look at a fractional cmo instead of goals from CRO so I look at 1000s of resumes every month, 1000s of them. I don't see anybody just trying to run ahead of marketing, but trying to get a head of marketing job. This says and embraces that they leverage generative AI to help improve the efficiency and the operation the scalability of their marketing program, they don't. It's still a dirty word out there. It's still a cheat code out there. And it's, it's, I come to groups like this again. Dan, thank you for bringing this community together. I come to groups like this, and me and Bruce, we didn't know the future. We know the petition. We know it can happen, but out there, you don't like it. They're scared of it. What's it going to do? How's it going to break their business?

So then I tell them, Okay, let's take somebody else. How many of you have heard of McKinsey and Company? Just about everybody, by the way, you know who McKenzie's newest biggest client is,

McKenzie. McKenzie is its own biggest client right now because they're trying to figure out how to reorganize because of all the bad a lot of different things. But one of the bad things is that they were very involved in the drug addiction, you know, recommendations, and helped coach a lot of that. But there's still a very trust resource. Do follow them. And I talked about the fact that AI is the number one initiative to every CEO that's out there. Every CEO that's out there that's, I think they said, comes their $5 million plus all the way up to the biggest companies. AI is the biggest initiative. Then it is, you know, using technology to outcompete, and there's a bunch of other things. But here's where I come in, and I get to shine, and it's that I don't teach people how to use AI. I don't teach people AI programming. I barely even talk about large English models when I start to talk about large English models, the CEOs. You ever see somebody in farce by accident and they stand still. But maybe it was somebody else. When I started to talk English models to these people, this is exactly what they don't want to hear. They don't want to get into the leads. They want to get into the details. They just want to know who do they need to run it? What do they do with it, and how does it make them grow? Get better, faster and stronger. Okay, so then we talk about, and again, I'm showing you what I show CEOs in about a three hour work session. So we're, we're, we're definitely being an agile element. I talk about where they can see the biggest gains in ROI for middle market companies. I've gotten 5000 CEOs, CSOs, Chief, sales chief, HR officers, CFOs and coos. I've been doing this for months. We now have 5000 people that have put information in about what they do. So then I talk about a concept called Return on return on AI. Okay, now we're talking Okay, so now I can actually track where my return is. Okay, great. As of right now, again, Middle America, the people you're developing applications for, the people that are ultimately going to get AI and use it, but they probably don't even know that they're going to use it. Marketing gets the most gains. Sales with the email automations gets huge gains. There's a company called apollo.io it's a platform for sales development reps, right? All people who call you, you know, all those LinkedIn messages you get, hey, you know, they use Apollo. It's replacing zoom info. It's like the largest database of people. They are developing new technology, new innovation every day. The companies that are using Apollo are really like, having a lot of success and growth, and that is the number one reason why you're getting so many LinkedIn requests, people who just want to connect and say hi, share ideas, sell you something, HR, things, games, finance, getting gains. Operations getting gains. The CEO and owner is getting major gains. I went out again Middle America, California. It was, what was the city? California? Yeah, beautiful, and there was a CEO there that I spoke to him and his executive team. And I don't usually talk to the CEO and their executive teams. I usually try to keep the conversations level. But they invited me sweets of their team, so I talked to CEO, and we worked through a couple of things, and we I gave this, a hybrid of this presentation to his executive team. A lot of them were very like they were looking at me, like I was the enemy, like I'm here to tell the CEO how to take their jobs away, right? That's the other fear, either, apparently AI is going to take all of your jobs away. And what do we say? AI is not going to take your job away. People who know how to use AI are going to take your job. Thank you. Good job. I'll pay you later. But I actually, the CEO called me. I could use your help. I started using this. This company makes faucets the coolest, the most badass faucets you'll ever see. They're skinny pump faucets, like it is. Faucets are like the centerpiece of kitchens, and it matches the railings refrigerators, gorgeous. It feels so good in your hands. It's got mechanisms. It just feels like Transformers became faucets, and I presented to his group, and it kind of went okay, and a week later, calls me this, I can I have investors, and I'm not communicating with them, well, I'm not talking to them in a way that they're listening. Because I'm very operational. I'm very just the best man. I am very bullied. How can AI help? So I spent 20 minutes on the phone with him, and I showed him a couple of prompts of like, here's what you would normally say. I basically showed him co pilot, which sits next to, you know, which is a part of Microsoft and helps you rewrite within Outlook, rewrite within the Word document, rewrite. And I I'm channeling my speaking to CEOs here anyway. So I talked to the CEO. We rewrote one of his ears real time. I didn't charge the board. I was just kind of on exercise. He sent it out a couple of days later, he responds says that's the first time that actually got responses to the emails that sends my investors positive energy. I was like, so, so, okay, let's, let's the learning. To me. What is the learning? Yes, I need to be more personal. I can go into much more detail. I can be much more colorful. They want me to be more human. AI is helping me be more human. You're not enough. You laugh. What's wrong with you people? It's true. AI can teach people who speak hate man to be more approachable, to be more human, to be more friendly. So that was a fun, fun example. Then I talk about how people are changing behaviors and sometimes AI contribute that, you know, you have these. There's like, three of these, like aI devices that have come out in recent months. I actually ordered the rabbit. Are One. We're friends here. I can take out my sport, you know, in a couple days of like had been miserable failures just in the last couple of months, it's hardware trying to do what Apple just announced two days ago, three days ago, whatever it was they're trying to do what Siri, Hey, Siri, they're trying to do what she does, or he does, however you have programs does with a separate device, which makes absolutely no sense. But people are buying this. I actually ordered a rabbit r1 and I haven't gotten it yet, but everything I see is it's just basically a useless brick now, especially with what Apple's announced. So there's a lot of work to do, but it is changing our behaviors. And as you know, it changes search your SEO strategy sucks now, thanks AI. It changes the apps, right? You're going into chat GBT to look for things or get some help, instead of going into Google or going into a browser, the devices, you know, we talked about that one, and then it is also that secret weapon, right? Nobody talks about it. Everybody does. So these behaviors are changing rapidly. So then, what do we do to organize, operationalize, integrate all of this chaos? Well, we've got a couple of things that I put together under the AI, first leadership thinking principles. How do you as a CEO start to think about AI not as a technology, but as a change management process, as a framework, as a map, as a way to get started into the world of AI. How do you prepare for what's next? So I'll go into my nine day AI, first leadership principles really quickly. Look through it, but I like to prepare CEOs for the next 10 to 15 years. There's a generation. So I have Generation X.

I grew up

in about 18 years old. Is when I started internet right like, dial up all that stuff was first person by fraternity. They were all going to the library during this research Trump gave us one o'clock at night. I logged on. Gilbert wrote some thing that lost me back class of unoccupied 30 minutes. Um, it takes hours. Okay, so I broke next generation loyals. What do they grow? Where do they start getting as soon as they just thoughts, right? They never knew a world without phones, next generation, generation Z, and then the generation after that, generation AI. They're better than any of you at asking, generative AI questions. They are stumping teachers right now because they know how to ask better questions, to generate AI to get better answers out. They know they don't need to have the answers or go from the beginning to the end of the plan to get to information. They just know how to ask the prompts, ask the questions that generation of the people that are using the stuff that you're able to build and develop for them, they're going to be unstoppable. They're already unstoppable. They're using chatgpt to search for things that we are using Google to search for. This is a fun picture. So my amazing, beautiful, intelligent wife, Tamira, was here a couple of months ago. When was that? Alongside of them? Long, long time ago. My God is far, far away. Tamira presented to the group. She is an intellectual property attorney that they focus on trademarks, but also did a really cool copyright thing with one of our own, Jason Allen, who it was basically copyright for AI generated art. So she did amazing with that. She was invited to a to be filmed in a documentary about AI. And then they heard that I wasn't there too. So I basically wrote, you know, wrote protels of of someone amazing, and they invited me to talk as well. It was because I talked to them about generation AI, and what does it mean for the future and for how people do things. So AI first leader. Ai first leadership. Thinking is a framework, it's a map, it's an operating system, and we don't have much time left. But here's the steps I teach CEOs to use in order. By the way, there's a QR code at the end of it, so, yeah, in order to start thinking about and building the framework for AI, set the tone. The CEO must set the tone. What AI means or doesn't need to accompany has to come from the top. Doesn't mean they lead it. It just means they have to set the tone. Build the playground. Make it fun for people to show you their prompts, right? Show me your prompts. Build an interactive playground where people can play and really do a lot of prompts and document it, share it, what worked, what didn't work, so on and so forth. Embrace agility and adaptability, be flexible, rely on those third party tools that are embedding AI in their applications so you don't have to leverage that speed of innovation. Understand ethics. Now, I have a lot of stories I talk about about ethics, but I think a lot of you know more about and have thought through more ethical considerations than I have powering your data. How to really replace bi or bi, you know, business intelligence thinking with AI, with chat, GBT with generative AI of different forms. Build the customer, customer centric AI applications don't take people out, but embrace what AI can do to make it a better experience for the customers that people have trust but verify everything right? So don't let it go out with the in the world of and conclusion, you know, think about it first, and then the ninth thing which kind of scares people is have a disaster plan. Make sure that you know where you're using AI in the event that some technology something goes awry, and you can sort of undo some things. And that is where technology, like an IT person or a managed service provider, can help with some of these mid market companies. So that's it. That's what I teach them. Then I scared a little bit, and I say, you know, I describe what quantum computing is, and I use, like the example of a in your typical computing as a switch that goes on. Quantum Computing of switch can go on, off, left, right. It's basically the long container switches right. And I said, Imagine if that's because right now, the biggest limiter, limiter for AI is the speed of the technology, of the hardware. Nvidia kicks us because of the fastest chip, but it's still not fast enough. They're not making enough of them fast enough. But imagine when the computer is no longer the limiting factor. Ai quantum computing. Have a baby, whole different world. I just love to end with scaring them on that. So that's about it. I went over about two minutes. I do sincerely apologize. I have a on LinkedIn. I have an AI first leadership thinking principles newsletter. I'll let you decide if you like it or not. It's good or not good. But I post about every week or every two weeks, and I share what I'm learning going out there and

talking about writing about. email for the CEO using chat GBT. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal recently about AI, and one of the one of the reader comments said, the first time I got an employee using chat GBT to write an email, I warned them, the second time I fired them, and that's like the fear, right? That's the fear in organizations. I shared that story at Kyle Shannon's weekly AI Office Hours Friday, every morning, 11 which I attend, and one of the other attendees said, do they allow flush toilets software? How about spell checkers? Our next speaker, Matt fernato, will cover automate the boring to spend time on the meaningful. Matt is founder and CEO at the AI advisory group. He's got two decades of experience in AI or data science. Previously, he was CEO, head of AI and data science, and he built AI practices from two firms earning accolades such as Nvidia's credit of the year. He's worked with Fortune 500 companies developing strategic AI roadmap that drive significant business outcomes. He's a seasoned consultant, keynote speaker, known for his ability plan theory, practicality and storytelling to inspire audiences about Yes, future potential, please join me in welcoming Matt forneal.

Okay.

Well, thank you everyone for being here tonight. It's a packed house on Gladys green is to grow lifted a quick show of hands. Who here are the builders that take on the scans on the keyboard, okay, and who are the leaders trying to drive shame to go? You know, being in space for quite a long time, building for models with UDS on depot back in 2003 I've seen data science certainly shifts and save data science anymore. And what I've noticed is that, you know, we had big data early, 2000s machine learning took off. We had automl and other programs or applications that would allow us to be more successful and able to do our jobs. But at some inflection point that we reached, none will take all the talks to one another, and they also work on another. And so we're stuck doing tons and tons of manual workloads that we shouldn't have to do. Who here has a copy and paste from one program to another,

Tableau, click size and its dashboard. How many of you have ever seen anybody have to look at it

so? And you know, I think too, in regards to the enabling piece of AI. We're not there, right? People show data mentality, which is good, which I think, is playground, right? And it's fun to play, but people don't then connect that to what is the potential value of this? Where can we leverage this to be more successful? And when it takes that approach, becomes problematic, that people don't know how to create value from AI. And so the gap between that as well technology not talking to one another means that we're kind of stuck in the mud, hoping that things will be more successful, but nothing's communicating with one another and causes friction. And we know that AI automation, right? These are basics for administrate I think everybody probably knows this, but you can get contact, obviously, organically after increased revenue, cost savings, increased productivity, faster results and certainly link fewer mistakes, right? And all. That's good and well. But almost every organization that I've talked to, the majority that asked for us to come in as perhaps in the past, but on prosecutors, consultants, they wanted one single problem solved, right? They didn't take the appropriate way. We want a culture of innovation. We want to drive change. Can you help us figure out where we should innovate, where we should use AI, right? So they get like people latch on to a single use case for AI or RPA or anything in the space, and you don't see adoption. You don't see engagement, because it's solving one specific problem, which is what tools do, which the problem is those tools. And so we're not enabling the organization to be more effective leveraging technology and AI, we're really debilitating each other. And Dan had a great background on me, so I'm here the the only thing that I'd say is that my take coming from a psychology, sociology background, where I went into like breakfast, was having that people centric approach, right? Because all data, whether people want to agree with it or not, is really based on attitude, behaviors package for the values, right? People buy for a reason, and we don't look at data for the underlying reasons, laid reasons why people are doing what they do. We look at data as a pattern of behavior, and that's fine, except we can't implement behavioral change. And so I come from that approach of, how can we actually change and innovate? How can we overcome a lot of these frustrations in the technological space? And so what I've recently done over the past six months, was bringing on a team of former reporting 100 500 CEOs met at Intel that was to find CSL bearing and Equifax, because these people have been in the trenches. They've suffered. They've had battle scars from trying to build practices from scratch and meeting the kind of friction that all you probably need in your day to day does, and the goal for us is to help that innovation to drive culture change and to more cohesively or structurally look at the system as a whole, to drive change and adoption innovation. And so this is a foundation where our team comes from, and we, anybody here knows, like, AI is a future, right? It's nice. And reback box is not being opened back it's here to stay. And so the people that mean it with friction, it's like, What the hell are you doing, right? And I use it to create a competitive photo and operationalize things or you didn't even have to make that choice and but in regards to what's next, I think organizations have and every individual has the opportunity to figure out where this goes right. Do we continue building one off products, one off data science models using an AI playground, or we use it to enable and improve and enhance our quality of life and what makes us thrive, especially in the workplace. And so I'll give the backstory in a second about why I came to this radicalization. I but if we can look who easily at an organization or at a set of problems, or for you as an individual, right, what takes up your time, what drives you mad, what you off, and if I told you we could find a way to get you 10 to 20 hours back every week. How would that feel? What would you do? Because the organization's going to benefit if you're using AI workflows, right? So that increase revenue, cost savings that will happen as a live product, but that time back means that whether you go and take a walk and improve your personal health, or you can spend more examples seeing all that matters, strategy and collaborating workshop and you know, one on one with Your team, like all of these relationship aspects, we tend to ignore the technological space and we and even like leadership, doesn't look at like, how do we use AI as an augmentation or enablement platform and just see it as as silo AI will solve problems, instead of, how do we use AI To raise all the shifts every employee, any organization, to be more performant, more happy, doing things that they actually want. And so, you know, for me, it was that leading to the reality, the end goal state for we'll say humanity, right? It's a part of the other but it's not a paycheck, right? Is that we spend 40, 6080, hours of our weekly maybe to the work. And how much are you spending to build you need relationships, whether at work or at home or on the go. How much time are you spending focusing on your mental health? How much time you spend on your physical health? Colorado might be the healthiest state, but I know there's a lot of mental and physical health ailments. That means it's not a obesity problem, right? It's a work problem, and so the stem, because I used to work 80 to 120 hours for two

decades,

and not far from here, February, December of 2021, my fiance and I went on a hike with our dog. It was snowy, it was icy, it was dangerous. I mean, I'd be fine, and if I was sorted, that'd be pretty boring. But we got home, and in my boots, I slipped in the back of my head, struck the edge of our granite countertop on the island, and it was lights out

for months.

I couldn't really remember anything for months. It took me 10 times longer to form a sentence. God willing actually stayed with me, because for 10 months I struggled with this and the concussion the migrants that went with it. Those were my personal battles, but I was also head of AI multi billion dollar company worldwide, and I talked with the CTO CEO and asked, like, what do you guys want to do? I probably didn't say it that way, but that's how I come here. And they said, Well, you can work or you can take time off, like, whatever you think, if you want to work like work as much to do again. And if you want to take time off, that's fine, too. I grew up work at all. I started working on a big and never stopped. And so when I was doing it, I told them, nope, there's no way I'm not working. I want to work. I want to make sure this practice is successful. We live in like number three, blowing in sales with Nvidia, top title, etc. And this was my second year at a company, so we were just getting a real spinning so

and so I went and tried to work, and I could put in five hours, maybe the first few weeks or few months that may 10 or maybe 20, and maybe got up to 40. And the thing that took my breath away with the whole experience, it wasn't the concussion, it wasn't the migraines, it wasn't they were willing to be flexible. It was that no one at the company knew that I was working less the 80 hour days were all the damn time.

No one knew,

and all I did was usually a combination of greatest principle, which is like 20% of your effort will generate 80% of results. So only focus on things that actually matter, because everything else is noise. And we get really, really distracted by noise all the time. Whoever wakes up and sees the 100 new emails on your phone gets excited, so that, along with using AI and motivation to help enable me to do a job more successfully, meant that no one had a clue. I could spend time with our customers or with our sales teams building practice to make sure that I still do discovery with 140 500 clients, and no one knew, and it made me say, What the hell am I doing here? Why am I working so hard when it doesn't matter? And it's not that it doesn't matter, it's that I can actually have a greater impact working less, if I'm smart about artwork, as opposed to just trying to put through work more and more and more like I've been trained my whole life. And so my epiphany for that is, if we automate the mundane to enable the meaningful, we can really create impact. You can automate out parts of your job. You can spend time on things that matter, whether it's internal at your company, on like the strategy, the value creation, whiteboard and workshop and talking with your boss, learning, or whether it's with your family, with your friends. I certainly a lot of them, I made as well healthy. So I was taking care of my health, and now I figured, okay, well, we can automate to enable the meaningful and that led to the creation of companies program, which is a four phase A accelerator. We dub an A accelerator. But reality is, it's a culture change model, right? It's about, how do we create innovation in the organization? How do we create a hypothesis driven culture? How do we say, You know what? Maybe we don't do everything perfect. Maybe we could do more, and if we took that approach and then took that into phases of made sure that leadership's aligned and actually communicating Sure. Many of you have seen failures at the leadership level time and time again, and it's usually because of egos or lack of communication. But if there's alignment there, and you create an AI vision and strategy, then the rest can follow, right? So we do top down, but we also do bottom up. That's we have multiple pieces, but they generate AI for business users, right? Like, how do we upskill employees teams being more effectively to your jobs? And it's about the parts that actually can be and should be automated, not about automating out people's jobs. And so we'll show you what we've built shortly. But one of the things I always hated about Consultants is most sort of artists. Has anybody worked with consultants? Anybody best happy with consultants? They can talk the talk, but if they hadn't lifted and they certainly can't walk along. So I said, Whoa, what if we do this internal third number? What if we figure out how to automate all the Monday bases so you can find meaningful things, talking with our customer, talking to the people that actually we can help change the prospects that help drive that. And so we build up this workflow, automation, PRs, TV, right? Is like, what the hell you off? What is your actual name? Nobody actually just said is like being a visceral name, as you have in your jobs, but like, maybe it's 100 emails, or maybe it's that report that breaks every time you send it, or maybe it's Yeah, your team not responding in any timely fashion when you need things done. These are all pains and like emotionally, they drive us crazy. They approach real stress and implicating and so our approach process model goes at, let's actually figure out what those are for you, what are your day to day and week to week things? And if you identify what those are. So instead of like, let's do a cool project. Let's do R and D. Let's do AI here. We'll do genai Over there. Please look at this at the level of like, well, help me be more successful. What do we be happy? And then do an assessment of, is it repetitive? Is it something you do often, if something but if something that happens over and over again, you should certainly automate it. And that just comes down to cost. And value is like, what are the investments that are required to build this, and what are the potential value that comes from that new often value exercise they need a failing if you haven't received before, is the fastest path to get what you want is to be able to showcase what that was like. And so if you can understand, what are the cost savings or revenue potential increase, how's time is saved, and then ultimately, your mental sanity, which you can't really measure, is that valuable to go and accomplish that? And so when I said we decided to walk the walk, we decided to do that with prospecting, right? I will actually show you our workflow in a minute here. But from the prospecting side, there's like, okay, what are my pains? Right? I'm like, I know I can connect with people that I can help. That's easy as simple, right? That's the root cause of all the processing. But I get 100 LinkedIn connections a week. Not that acceptance Harvard is just a little kind of tipping, right? But if someone might be a good fit because they reached out and connected with me, then I should probably review their profile and maybe their company and see if they're eventually good fit. Then I need to add them to the CRM system. Then I need to figure out how to communicate with them and what four of them? And what do I say often? Should I try to reach out? They don't sign. And there's a lot of frustrations with all of that, right? Because all I want to do is just talk to someone who I think might be a good thing. Maybe they're not this time, but those things are all repeatable, all things that happen in day and day out. And cost wise, Michelle was the primary builder of this, and it was some pieces, but it took 12 weeks of work, right? It didn't take us that long. I was like, full time, right? It didn't take us that long to build it out. And big suplexity was connecting local systems, right? We have a few household and prompted. We built in, we built the supporting mechanisms based on our ideal customer pick, and that's the so you can see, but show you this piece in a sec. But we get time back. We get sanity. I don't have to try to remember if I reached out to someone or if they didn't reply, or if I should reach out again. And it increases the potential for revenue, right? Because, again, my end goal, on a personal level, is have more conversations sooner with people I can truly help succeed in AI. And so we always just talk about, like a basic data science or AI problems. Like, do we use genai for marketing? Like, yeah, but have you ever done customer training? So you know what their extra pains and needs are? We don't really address it externally. We don't address them internally. And if we look and try to do that internally, then we can figure out what is the root issue that we're trying to resolve, and so that's what I want to do for the worker. But that's what led to our processing workflow, right? It was accepting LinkedIn invites. We had an application for that, getting into CRM. We have an application for that, identifying who engages with me. We use some LLM scoring

from a we'll say LLM company, an integrator, too, very cool, actually. And then we also decided to do scoring of who's our ideal customer persona. So we wanted to make sure that we're not as blind messaging everybody because to the point of getting willing bid messages. It's maddening. If you go, it's just so generic. It's quasi the denying the open your profile. It feels rooted in common, and that's how you build relationships, right? It's a high trust and credibility. And so from there, it was, okay, well, now we have outbound near boundaries, right? And so like, from our outbound, if we don't have people like, we're not even doing outbound right now, not only about but the goal for outbound is we already know the companies personas and the people personas, behaviorally and role wise, that we want to work with. And so we have a system that can actually auto invite them. And we also do something called disc, which is a communication style. So if you never looked at this, it is basically how people get communicated. And why would you communicate to someone in the regular being communicated with it. So whether they like flowery language or very direct or numbers, whatever that is, it can create meaning, right? And helps them feel like that you're actually addressing them specifically. And so we have that based on their profile, what goes what message do we send out for the inbound we have our Engagement scoring as well as their persona story, and then they get custom sequence based on that. But the most important piece of all of this is that warm leads people that are just referred in those who respond in either one, it automatically goes manual. I don't want to AI out relationships. I want AI in all conversations. I don't want the AI discovering, understanding what someone actually needs, what their pains are. I just want to get to the right people. And this is how I think we should be thinking about AI, as opposed to, let's just replace people. Let's not resolve anything except for a single problem. And what this meant was getting 30 hours of time right, not that is why getting actually 30 hours of time back right each week. And what the heck does that mean? Right? And we're not building this just for prospecting. We're building it for our final holder, creation for new clients. We're building it for operations, for legal, for finance. I want to have an eight to 90% automated company, and so we're at a point where we could have engagement with people, so that way you don't wait through the time they get to do it really well. And the projections are 2.8 more in profitability. You know, distorted and hard to estimate for activity, but based on concussion, 40% more productive, which means that I put less of that into the company. Boxes I do the company, and more time into planning focus will help more time into meaningful relationships. For anyone interested, we don't have this full to build on yet, but maybe other studios. We're building an AI assessment that we're going to be figured out for you guys. So it'll be a questionnaire, and then we'll be able to provide recommendation site graph stuff. In regards to the, what we call it, the vectors that are notes that where you working essentially, so you can know, like, where your company overall is in regards to different aspects of AI and data, and then, yep, very last one, sorry for going over, is, so I talk a lot about me, and it's not about me, right? This is about you. And so how can you actually implement this in your daily life? You have to pay attention to yourself. What you off, right? If you understand what the heck that is, whether that's like, I hate both the air travel, but there's just like, frustrations that over and over. Iterate, right? If you haven't seen what those are, then you can start figuring out, well, how do you see what tools do we need to identify those frustrations, then map that to the pain recognition, cost, value framework implement the ones that are most meaningful. They'll pay, you know, the time, or give you the most handy back. Or if you want to make your boss happy, increase your most you have time to focus on you, your health, your relationships. And thank you.

That was awesome. Thank you, Matt. So I'll ask Travis to set up this month. Just a reminder to submit some questions, because the top questions right now are not the good questions that we want to discuss. So we need you guys to use that fuel submit some questions that are not about weird stuff while the ones at

the top of the list so we want some volunteer questions. Okay, Travis,

Mr Joe's going to speak on myth and reality of general while he's a seasoned Software Engineer with over 20 years of global experience from mainframe operator to CTO as technical director and AI adventurer at eighth light. I like that title innovation, Multi Product and software development, complex problems and promoting technological advancements on LinkedIn. And he has a blog, AI software for please join me in welcoming Travis Christensen,

awesome. Thank you, Danny.

Appreciate the intro, and thank you all for coming to listen to us all tonight. So you know, mission, reality, generative, AI and wild. I'm going to speak from an engineering perspective. You couldn't tell them how impressed. You know, I've been out talking to a lot of people. I've been out at a lot of conferences, seeing conferences, attending conferences, both virtual and person. I've been out, you know, building a bit of product out talking to people, building product as a consultant for do that. And you know, the goal here is to really take what I'm seeing from here, put a set of lenses on it, and have what is, How are people using this? How we make value of it from an engineering perspective. When I say engineering, I'm including design broad, not just raw software, in that perspective, because I don't think you can effectively build anything with a product engineering focus without including the

product and the design view.

So maybe this is a bit of a mythical current state of generative AI. So you know, from what I've been hearing, to somewhat to Brett's point, like everyone's talking about, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, most people are unsure about how to go about doing it from an engineering perspective. Sure. Chat GPT, but you know, how do I make use of this new hammer in my engineering workflow. How do I build products and make use of it? And despite all this, everyone wants economic action. Everyone thinks they're missing out. Think there's something bigger at play here. You know, I think they're right. Maybe we're just a little bit eager to kind of see the next, latest and greatest thing come to fruition here. I So

how am I going to frame this conversation? Well, there's really kind of three, I think, core patterns, lenses I want to focus on, and the fourth, they're kind of meeting where I think the future is going. So the first one is conversational interfaces, pretty straightforward, kind of like what it sounds another kind of lens, way of seeing it show up in product is augmented productivity. And the third one, there is enhanced user experience. So those are kind of the out of the Wild. How is it showing up? How would I kind of classify the ways I'm seeing it show up from really small enhancements to, you know, full fledged startups. And the last one is sentient design. And that's kind of where I think the future of these three lenses are headed. So we start out with the first one, kind of conversational interfaces. You know, I think we're all pretty familiar with this. If you use any, any kind of chat application out there, you'll see it, you know, ideally, they're kind of these AI driven natural language engines. You can talk to them, you can give them pictures. You can give them, you know, additional text, whatever, whatever whatever you're importing, its context aware kind of has the ability to understand, you know, multimodal and the idea is, this is simple interface. I can give it piece of information, you know, as broad or as specific as I want, and it's going to provide some sort of utility to me. The obvious ones here, I think, are, you know, chatgpt, Claude, perplexity. And for me, this is really kind of the the thing I'm excited about, Jim is this idea of conversation interfaces, where, you know, obviously, I've seen a lot, I've interacted with a lot of things. I've never been super impressed. Like, okay, yeah, maybe ask a question or two, and it'll get me some some responses that are kind of on point. You know, for me, what really, I think, piqued my interest with this kind of current wave of AI. Because, you know what 1956 is when the term was coined back at Dartmouth with Turing and McCarthy and a few other folks is this idea of this conversational dialog, this ability to actually engage with it, to feel like I'm talking to something other than just a computer, to feel like there's some essence of understanding there. I think it's the easiest way to kind of really get our hands on generative AI. Now you know, some of the other things I'm going to showcase about these aspects of this, these these lenses, these ways of looking at it, aren't meant to be cut and dry. It's just a way to kind of rationalize the world. Take all this raw input and talk about it. I think that leads me into the more interesting aspect here, this idea of augmented productivity. You know, it's integrated into my environment, whether that's Excel or my IDE. You know, there's a It's not Clippy anymore, like word, but it's there. It's helping me become better, faster, stronger at what I'm doing. It's contextually aware, whether I'm in code, whether I'm in some kind of content, maybe I'm doing some design with the Adobe Suite, whether I'm working with just raw data, it's got multiple integration points, and it's focused usually on automation and collaboration, type tooling. Here. What are some examples? Well, I think the first two most folks would be familiar with GitHub co pilot, love it or hate it. It's there. It's meant to kind of accelerate, you'd augmented productivity, companion tool. I don't know, some people love it. I I've encountered some people, you know, I rag on a lot. Some people come up to me after somebody talks and said, You know, it's, it's really good for these cases. And I'm like, I'm glad you found that Excel, you know, you can go into a cell, get it to do some basic a lot AI stuff. I think Google Sheets as well. Oak owl is one that is internal to a slide. It's a startup. We help build a generative AI product around it's a real estate company. They wanted to improve the listings for the real estate agents, take away a little bit of that manual, automate some of that task. You know, it was quick, six week build, but we managed to get a POC together so that they could go move beyond their seed stage and go actually get an A series funding. It's interesting to see, you know, how it's being leveraged. Some of the lessons we learned from an engineering perspective on how to manage prompts. How do you manage your cost? You know, how do you, how do you kind of find that balance between prompts and costs versus the value that's coming then we got a loot. If you've ever needed to record anything in a browser. Might have used loom. It's quite popular, at least within the organization I work. One of the things that used to really irritate me was that the recording was just had a timestamp there what didn't give some kind of inferred title. It has changed to my great happiness and the fact that they're using little generative AI behind the scenes to take the first five minutes of a transcript and then generate out in a seemingly appropriate title. So it's no longer just summarizing the timestamp that is annoying me. It's taking a little bit of friction out, probably increasing, you know, retention and all the other metrics that product people care about. And then lastly, we've got kalana. I couldn't even remember how to pronounce the name. They're one of these buy now, pay later companies, and they've kind of fascinating case study, because I think they're the ones that kind of touched on both ends of the spectrum of being able to increase productivity. But also, there's some some job loss sitting there, and the fact that, you know, they've managed to downsize their customer support operations through the use of generative AI. They've managed to reduce some of the marketing and sales costs just being able to generate things better quicker. You know, there's still some element of human oversight in all of this, but you know, ultimately the automations win it in these cases. So and the third one, the one I think we're going to see a lot more traction with, I guess, because it's, you know, it's about kind of improving what's there already. So this is the idea of intelligent interfaces that provide contextually aware, kind of almost self aware responses. And I like to think this, you know, the things that are kind of sitting between the various pieces of software helping me kind of maybe put a slack in my CRM together in a way that, you know, from an engineering perspective, we're going to talk about a CRM as an engineer to I've got to be involved in marketing, sales part of my life. But, you know, bring bring that together. Help synthesize information. Just help me be better at what I'm doing. And I think the key part is a seamless integration in the workflow. So for me, if AI or generative AI, or whatever flavor you want to talk about doesn't seamlessly provide utility, and it doesn't approach near human levels of trust. I don't think it's a winner for me. I'm gonna have a harder time adopting that piece of technology or finding a use for it, and if it's a little more seamless, a little more smoother to work with, what are some examples of this? So, I mean, the Google search with the AI overview, blogger, hey, whether it tells you put glue in your pizza or not, you know, the trying, you know, these are experiments. And I think that's the thing to remember here, is that it's going to be a lot of trial and failure. There's going to be a lot of trial and some really interesting successes that pop off another one if you're in the engineering space, maybe you've heard of them called Get unblocked. Now they're a little bit more kind of like the conversational interface, and that you've got a little dialog you ask questions. You can ask it through speech or text. But the idea is, it connects your slack, it connects your GitHub repo, connects all your internal documentation, ingests it all, and, you know, it's meant to kind of learn and respond according to how you're interacting with it. The idea is that rather than, let's say, an engineer joining a company and they set up for a week, onboarding and trying to learn systems, they're able to kind of self service. They're able to get in be a bit more efficient, you know, just have a smoother user experience, rather than, you know, waiting for the 40 hours of meetings I need to schedule with the various managers various areas to understand how things work. They can get going a little faster. Mileage may vary on this, I did a little trial, you know, it seemed to work, okay. I haven't had the opportunity to put it on a larger client code base. But, you know, working on some of my personal projects, the problems looked interesting. Now the next two might be more more interesting. So this one of the webinars NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory was talking about how they're using generative AI and one of the use cases with this idea of a digital twin and retired scientists. Now, why have I put that in the enhanced user experience that feels like a conversational interface? Well, to some degree it probably is, but I'll put on the enhanced user experience because you're getting utility out of former employee, their writings, their experiments, they're pulling all this together to create this engaging experience for current scientists. So maybe you're doing bit of research in an area they were an expert in. You can't talk to them anymore. Maybe they're no longer with us, just not available for whatever reason. You've got this ability now to kind of drill, hence what you're doing, enhance your research, enhance what you're

looking at. Probably the most broad case I could come across was Walmart and their AB experiments with with advertising. So they'll use generative AI to both create a copy the text to create the imagery. They're going to pull in things like, are you price sensitive? Are you time sensitive? Do you own a dog? Do you have a baby? To generate these different campaigns, they then will have a human in the loop. Still need kind of oversight, the ability to dial this stuff into kind of brand specifics in my experiences, touching though it could be, my prompt engineering isn't as good as others, but they'll then use this as kind of a way to run campaigns. You know, they're reducing costs because they don't have as much invested in graphics or copy. And they're able to, you know, see an increase in sales working with generative AI. Now I say, you know, getting brand alignment is difficult because we ran a couple internal hackathons at eighth light. One of them was around generating client profiles. So as a consultant, you know, a new job comes in, we need to figure out what the team looks like. We need to put profiles together. Kind of sell the client on these to the right folks. It's a lot of work, you know, I gotta go get project updates. You know, last project they're on. What was their role? What are their current skills? You know, it's a couple people involved in trying to do this. And so we thought, great, you know, if we feed this into kind of generative Adi, we get all the data, you know, we're going to be able to kind of come up with these standard customer profiles or these client profiles? Well, we got data there, and we didn't build right data by one. We kind of worked through it manually, but we're having a hard time dialing in the tone. We're having a hard time trying to get that age like voice to come through in the final result. Once again, it could be my prompt. Foo isn't as good as others, but, you know, I found that you still needed simple human oversight when it came up the end of that pipeline. Get it to do a lot of heavy lifting, but you know, Walmart's experiences, you still want someone kind of verifying, signing it off, making sure that things are aligned. You don't want to be putting out, you know, $1 airline tickets or whatever the story will actually get out of details. So where is this trending to? Well, you know, sort of trending toward the concept, I like to think of a sentient design. You know, an evolution, evolution towards interfaces that feel intuitive and adapt to user needs. So a lot of user interfaces are I have a design I have some brand guidelines, I make components, I publish websites, people interact with it. I think the idea here is that it becomes a little more adaptive, a little more intelligent, a little more capable to that interaction isn't so much the person has to understand what computer's doing, but now the computer's starting to understand what the person's trying to achieve, and help them facilitate that. I think a great example of this is Netflix recommendations. You know, I'm going to get recommendations on like science and, you know, maybe nature documentaries, where my wife's going to get recommendations on gardening and period dramas, you know, things that align to what we're interested in as far as the centiometer, I don't think we're anywhere near Skynet there. I think we're somewhere between utility and companion trying to navigate that landscape. Interestingly, NASA, once again, has this kind of almost automated process that they're starting to develop around mission critical data we cause analysis when failures happen, like just kind of magic genie in the background, trying to help aggregate this service information, folks. Google Gemini, you know, it's contextually aware. Some of stuff, Apple's QA, like, you know, these three lenses before are really, I think, trying to focus in on shifting.

It was personal computing, the internet, you know, that type of thing. It was always a learning curve to figure out how to use it. Where, I think there's an accessibility factor coming in with more sentient design in that, you know, it's going to be able to adapt. And obviously there's an accessibility question there, and ethics and all the other things that come with discussing AI, but I think we'll start to see more of this as

it continues to evolve.

So what does this all mean? Well, I think there's a few key takeaways here. Master the skill slowly. You know, there's a lot of hype, a lot of hoo ha around how it's going to change everything. Anything takes time. You know, a lot of what we're seeing today started back in 2019, and earlier. I think it's important to remember that don't there might be a few cases that you know, come out of the woodwork. Someone got lucky and it happened quicker. But generally, there's no replacement for time and understanding what you're working with. I always like to say, look to incrementally improve. You know, aim to make something 10% better if you can, from a product perspective, rather than trying to replace yourself or automate it away. An interesting thing, even at NASA, they had to remind scientists of this fed the genitive AI isn't going to replace you. Can't handle your work to it and have it output magic. So there's definitely a psychological element there about how we're starting to understand working with this technology. And then finally, probably the most important thing going to be controversial to some, you know, not everything's a Gen AI problem. You know, there are still some problems that good old algorithms or maybe a bit of machine learning, you know, would be better suited to solve and figuring out that balance of how to mix those things together, I think, is very important as we progress forward with including generative AI or engineering efforts. So I'd just like to say thank you appreciate the opportunity to talk. I hope you found it interesting. You want to connect with me on LinkedIn, get a link to my blog. My previous talk about the role of AI and DevOps is there. There's a healthcare chat bot I built as well for conference. Can't say it's great, but it was an awesome experiment in kind of figuring out some of the core fundamentals of interactive generative AI.

Thank you.

I'll ask the few secrets to put

up for Q and A, and you can still submit questions, and let's see, help us. Laptop over. Okay, I'm gonna give the panel.

So let me ask the first question, managers. And there's sort of a sphere of the mirror is, how do you deal with failure? How do we help people to get through that to your side?

Yeah, I mean, that's for me. The whole premise of why I created this company is because it's change management, right, which is people, they change, like behaviorally, people, stability, uncertainty. And so you're asking people to uproot everything they know, or something that could possibly be right. And so you guys are taken through chief management framework or approach, right, but, but also, like, the reality is that you need to be able to address those fears, which often reality people have a lot higher expectations that they actually did, and start incrementally right if your organization has since implemented before you do the Salt Lake, right? You know, just build your own. You just take things one at a time, maybe so in your direction, model, without depending matter. People just need to see what it actually looks like in practice, what all vertical looks like, and I need to see the output around,

I would say, you know, there's

hesitation, from an engineering perspective, to be involved thinking maybe certain folks feel that's not ethical, it's not equitable. You know, talking through them, maybe showing some technologies out there will just attempt to address some of these issues, encouraging my fellow engineers to, you know, get involved. Help. Go, create something, fix the space. Are you an engineer? Got tools? You know, on the other side, it's also convincing the juniors that it doesn't know everything and it's not going to write all your info. Go, don't just copy your face. So, different angles there. It's couple of different angles

there. I find AI readings, anything ever has reached

your dialog, and just

everybody to add, I'll just say mental Jiu Jitsu. So my audience is CEOs. CEOs have a certain personality. If you talk about the disc profiles, there's a great AI tool called Crystal knows been around for a while. It's sort of having this like AI, you know, resurgence, but it tells you the disc profiles, or the personality profiles of people most CEOs are di and won't go into detail, but basically, they really freaking hate when competitors are doing something better than them, and so if you show them that fear goes into like thirst, like overnight. If I see the CEO, and they're like, Well, I kind of see, I don't really know, you know, what's this really going to get me? Okay, let's list out your three biggest competitors. Let's go take a look at what they're doing. Their marketing is doing. Let's look at their customer service, what the customer interaction looks like. And we can sort of predict what is being used. You know, what? Where generative AI is being used, and isn't that switch flips fast,

cool. Questions from the audience. Please raise your hand if you have a question, and then we're going to take some from bubble up as well. Okay, over here, Sunny picture to see Tino, like three years ago, and he's like,

I'm afraid you're talking to bear basin. Yes, that was AI, advisory groups, process that you worked on, sorry, what

was the first part of that question? What? What's the tech stack? Or what were you using to

actually build out your dose?

Yeah. I mean, in regards to tech stack, like, we're agnostic, but we're also advisory. I work with, like, I had done data science, data engineering in the past, I've ran teams on that. For me, it's that giant disconnect between leadership, pie in the sky, AI dream, competitive moat, and the actual tactical implementation, right? And so I like being agnostic generally my tool set the past 10 years consulting, because it's what's best for the customer, not just what we know, right? And like you know, you don't tell somebody to switch from AWS to GCP because you don't have any folks with that specific skill set, right? You ethically, you just say we don't do that, right? Or find someone that does so. But I mean tool stack wise, we it's none, right? Ours is about building out frameworks with them, helping cultivate innovation and figuring out the use cases that will really drive change success.

What are the tools for your your own internal

process? Yeah, yeah, for our current workflow. So yeah, there's a LinkedIn extension that'll ingest that. And we have HubSpot, we have Apollo IO, we use Zapier as well. We use nas.ai, which is a LLM tech stack with Zapier like integration, so we can feed things back and forth to that, and then populate, like, back into our CRM and whatnot, and then, yeah, our sequencing flows in through Apollo as well. So that's the majority

of it. Do you guys intend to sell that as a product? Or is it just for intro years?

It's it's really damn funny because, yeah, talking with the the other CDOs and I meet like, once or twice every other week. And once he finished building out what that looked like, I go, this is bad. He goes, Why bad? I said, because people are going to want this. And I'm like, I don't want to build it, but I know other people need this, so I will, like, we're going to bring a couple people on. It's like 1090, Nines that can actually can actually do the implementations of it if we do get those requests.

Let me ask the speakers to look at the screen in front of you, which is the bubble up most popular questions, whatever question we want the most popular and answer it.

I guess we all probably should do the first one. That is what it

hits, yeah, 73 and I did like, do you know? Does everybody know how to vote and how to like? Uplevel each of these things. I didn't know either. How submitting the question. So you submit the question, but then how? What? Where did the numbers come from? Kind of curious. Well, thank you.

So the way it works is the AI is pulling everybody's questions together at the same time, if they're similar, they sound important to the context. All those things discreeting A score of, like an importance score of what it thinks. So we're in the Madden territory. What day? I think it's about making questions, hey, Travis, oh gosh, yes.

What are the best resources to get an overview of the breadth of tools and the necessary skills to become a proficient AI user.

That's just you.

That's a hard question.

Three minutes. I

don't know. I can't strongly recommend any specific thing. I mean, look through open AI's documentation on prompt engineering, you know, I think start there. If you want to get more into the engineering side, look at Lang, chain, llama index. From you know, that perspective, you could also roll your own kind of, you know, tooling. If your eyeball sits in Python, there is a bit of node. I would actually just go to chat GPT and literally ask that question, see what it says.

I, you know, it's funny that it gets all the outputs. I think it's, it's the wrong question. I mean, look, you know, we all, I think, you know, if you see, like, it took so many years to get people, like, to 100 million users of the internet, and that, like, it was like seven years, or 10 years or something, and then, like, three and a half years to get 100 million users out of mobile phones. And then, like, 13 seconds, I think it was like four months to get to 100 million users chat. GPT, no, yeah, for Tiktok. It was for two months. Four months for Tiktok. Thank you. Like product led growth, the stuff sells itself like they like, those numbers are insane. As long as they're accurate, those numbers are insane. And so people are already teaching themselves, and people should use AI to ask AI how to be better at ai, ai,

ai, inceptions, yeah,

well, and I'll have one thing is that, you know, I used to mentor on like, springboards data science boot camp for quite a few years. And back then, you know, the question was like, are Python? And it was like, okay, 400 C Plus Plus or C sharp, Java. It doesn't matter, like, what tool uses that you're competent with it. But we're getting very close, since, especially your scenting design, right? We're getting very close to not having to be an actual coder, as long as you can prompt extremely effectively, because the systems will be able to essentially write that on the back end, and yeah, there will be QA testing and all that, which all chatgpt can also make but within probably three to six years, the need for like, all of that coding, especially the juniors, like one to five years, is going to be a miss.

Okay, other audience questions.

Susan, that took too much

deeper any point of view. What is your prediction? And you're very much clearly in the leads and promoting automation. Is there a prediction in your minds of job loss and what that's going to look like? Are we going to have strong period of that, a long period of that, and or, I guess, something speed to that question is, are you talk and see is about that. What are you helping them to think through of what that can happen? And I'm looking at that kind of globally, but also in the context like the conversations. Yeah,

I think you'll do better hands on the where we're at today is for until 2029 there's supposed to be zero actual displacement of jobs, like at least replacement of jobs that might be lost to automation. So in regards to, if you look at the overall economy or unemployment rate, it'll be the same. The bigger issue like, I'm certainly supporting enablement and improving human performance, and maybe we need four day work weeks, or 2030 hours of work a week, right? I think we can get to that point with AI enhancements. But the concern I have is government is not supporting like continuous education, like we don't have free university, right? So government's not supporting continuous education, and so because of that, not only will we ultimately be further left behind, but the displaced I did a lot with autonomous vehicles, the displaced drivers, right? How are they going to be upskilled to do something outside of that blue collar job, right? And that's where the biggest issues I think are going to be are. I think white collar workers will be able to shift their roles or augment their roles with AI, but some of the blue collar replacements is going to be much more problematic because we don't have a system in place. We don't have universal basic income, etc.

So speaking as the as I mentioned, I wear two hats, the fractional cmo hat and then the other hat. It's already replacing half of marketing, like just full stop. It's replacing so much of the marketing function I used to know. I used to own a BDB tech marketing agency. We had about 25 people, and it took a lot to manage the people manage the clients. Businesses would be great if it weren't for clients and employees. Just could have been better. Do you remember this scene in Skyfall where the, you know, the new queue? He's like, I can do more before 6am with a couple of Earl gray that's kind of what AI is doing, right? It can get more, you know, more done, more productive by 8am I have a very, like, very slim, trim team that works with me. It's, it's a virtual assistant, and, you know, she's amazing. And I have AI, and I can get more done with those resources than I've ever been able to get done before. It's just it's insane, and the marketing is just like going through the roof, LinkedIn going through the roof, Facebook going through the roof. And it's better and faster and stronger than I could have ever done on my own, which, you know, is easy, but it's more efficient and effective and scalable than people, lots of people. And sorry, that's like, not comfortable, but not sorry too. It really is happening. And then, as a fractional CMO, I go in and I help advise teams, you know, how to reorganize and how to sort of, how to institute, you know, change, and how to institute scale. And in the last nine months, it has not been to add more people. It is. Let's find ways to leverage chat GPT. Let's find ways to leverage other resources that can be used to help scale to better costs.

Ooh, one thing to add

older generation, I think is going to struggle a lot more. I think the benefit of chatgpt, llms, ai in general, is that the competitive mode from very large companies other than legal contracts, partnerships, is much smaller now, like you can build a exceptional company with two, four or five people, right? You can be competitive with the McKinsey's of The world. And so Because of that, So

uh, because, If, if relationships appear artificial, then a CEO doesn't anybody, but this CEO especially doesn't feel hurt, right? And then you've lost all trust and credibility to actually do some change, because at the end of the day, you're going to be gone and they're still going to be in the driver's seat. So like, you have to change their mindset or approach, or how they view how their company runs, or what problems they actually should solve. So, yeah, I mean, it's it's good all that should be consulting and building relationships after that.

Thanks. Okay, for the next question. Only raise your hand if you wear a medium sized t shirt. I'm not going

to tell you why. Thank you. My

sister Susan pump

it's computing and AI. Is it a good opportunity to explore job in that area, because AI is already taken over. So for a computer science perspective,

I mean, I worked a lot with like Dell and video, all the OEMs that actually try to create fun computers in some of the research labs too. It's to meet funds like blockchain. It's like it gets hyped, but ultimately it's going to have very limited use cases. Binary has worked for a very long time for a very good reason, and so quantum will basically have a few really complex problems that will be able to solve a long amount of problems. But like outside of that, quantum, and it's like that just coming to people want to buy on computers, but they won't play. You can't gain faster. You can't, like, right coded, keep running a little

faster, 512, bits and, like, Wait 00, seconds. Though,

just security,

I think there's a difference in the applications of quantum computing that we see today and the people who are trying to be the next Nvidia and so, but people that are police mark and can leverage a lot of the aspects of quantum computing to help solve the problems that NVIDIA is at The peak of their ability to solve right now, and I think that is coming, and I think that is probably years out, but when it does, it's going to be a complete game changer, because when hardware is no longer limiting factor, and software is the only factor, and software can write itself. I'm not a developer, but that sounds pretty awesome and scary.

I'll speculate slightly on this. You

know, I don't think the two are at a

point in time we could blend them with any kind of

outcome. That said, the current version of artificial intelligence, the neural network that we use what's considered a dead end in artificial intelligence research because of plasma force power. So who knows? Maybe there'll be a breakthrough quantum computing in 20 years, and we will have HPI.

Okay, we've got about three minutes left. We'll fill in the next question.

So this is first for Brett, because it relates to one of your slides, but love to hear the other way in if you wanted to, especially like the slide. Let's talk ro AI, great concept. Would love to see the research on that if you're willing to share. But the other thing that jumped out, yes, marketing at 1.45x shows the highest return on AI, but I noticed that CEOs and owners were in second place at 1.37 ahead of sales, HR, finance and ops. So you show this to CEOs. How do they react? And how are they reacting? I don't know, percentage wise, or where like, Oh, this is, this is good enough for the kids, you know, but I'm not so I guess what I'm asking is, what percentage of CEOs talk to are really AI evangelists, or that you help to make them that

I think very few are AI evangelists. But I do think that they are asking themselves, what can we do? Better, Faster, Stronger CEOs just have the at the end of the day, the ultimate view of a company, more so than anybody else in a company. And so they're looking at it. A lot of them are resistant. You know, they jokes about, like the the grumpy, grumpy, you know, CEOs, but men, women, white, black, doesn't matter. They're looking for competitive advantage, and so they're starting to use it more quickly. Even if they don't want to get it, they are actually using it more effectively. They're rewriting emails to their employees. They're using some type of data analysis. When I show some of these things, because some of those survey responses are a lot of people I've spoken to and I follow up with to see how things are going. So I like to think that I have a lot of you know, on the on the ROA, I you know chaser, but they're seeing the returns in the way that they communicate with their employees. They're seeing the returns in the way that they're looking at data, and they see the returns in the way that they are helping their entire organization evolve to the next level. And so if it's a learning organization, if it's a servant leader, they really do a great job of leveraging it when they're not or overbearing the Bossy it's a whole different question. Great example as well. So the same company, the one that does the faucets, and I talked about water faucets, I started playing around with him, and I said, Okay, let's take your faucets with pictures from the website, and let's just say, What would look what would it look like if Ferrari and this company started collabing and started designing things. And it came up with some really cool stuff. They were like, Okay, what about Porsche? Okay, then what about this and that and and it started showing some of these most amazing and outlandish things to something that's already on the edge of, like being very steampunk style stuff. And his mind just spun. And now he runs every one of his product innovation like every week. He's a big product guy. Every week. He starts out his sessions by asking, you know who did some generative AI work, and come in with ideas about our next series of designs.

Thank you, Brett. Two things before we thank our speakers. You guys have convinced me, I will give a free T shirt to

miss out on that. Secondly, we

do have an after party at a secret, undisclosed location after this event, so please join

me in thanking our speakers. Applause.