Accelerating Careers with AI: Lessons in Leverage, Humility, and Practical Application

01If you want to say that I don't want to do it, that's great. You're kind of agreeing to say mediocre is okay. I feel like that opening line for every one of them is, is changes. So you know how to get a job and you know how now at this point, outside of just being W2 and being able to get a W2 job and you and I worked together at one point and I basically begged you to work with me W2 and you said no. So you know how to get a W2 job and you also know how to go out there and showcase your skills and ability and get a consulting engagement. So you're really good at that. That is a core skill set of yours. I know that you, so there's two things out of this. One is you use that skill set, talking about leverage, you just were, it's like, how do I use the model? You use that to help a buddy do what was already a core skill of yours. So you used it to accelerate that.

02And then if you could be a little Detailed as much as you feel comfortable be detailed about the process that you used because that's the practical type of Here is how I use this for a real use case and the outcome Yeah. Good or No, think that's like, so right, the background on that is, right, ⁓ you know, you have people in your life that you've had for a long time, people that you care about, you know, I've got a friend who is in ⁓ technical field. ⁓ He's great. I've known him for 30 plus years. ⁓ Me helping him is not a question of like, do I help him or not help him? I mean, like not helping him is not an option, right? I mean, like for the people that you love, right? Like that's, it's not a will you or won't you, you know, it's, you know, why wouldn't you? ⁓ And so he is one of the most earnest people I know, which is just amazing. Like just, you know, it just cares about people, is thoughtful and ⁓ conscientious, you know, works hard, takes ownership, all the things, which if you're also really earnest opens you up to being somewhat exploited as an employee.

03And I think that maybe is something that's changed some in the last 50 years in, you know, kind of what was expected in corporate America and now what is actually like prized and how much we, you know, as managers that we are called on to maximize shareholder value. so our decisions are not always, ⁓ you know, we're not always able to ⁓ try to make more average decisions. We have to kind of work that angle to, you know, so a guy like this, if they're really good and conscientious and keeps their head down and takes on whatever gets assigned to them, you're going to kind of keep that person in that role for as long as you can, right? And then just keep handing stuff to them until they break. He's stuck in that type of role and he's stuck with that mentality of that that's what a good employee is. Right? So, part of this work of coaching someone is helping them move past that. ⁓ But we have to accelerate that. And so kind of the point of the preamble to the story is how do I help my friend? How do I coach him verbally?

04And, but then how do I give him some way to interact at a higher level ⁓ with others without ⁓ maybe necessarily him having the background or the skill set, you know, baked in with 25 years of doing it, ⁓ of experience. So for him, you know, one of the frustrations I think most people talk about is, you know, they apply to jobs on indeed.com and on LinkedIn, and it's a giant black hole. of resume submission. you know, it's, it's, you know, point ⁓ one response rate on on on resume submissions. And people talk about that online about just, you know, 1000s of submissions, never getting a call back and ⁓ it's It's gotten a lot worse too. just to interject for few seconds, it goes back to the it's all who you know and networking. That is something that a large language model, so just banking things that humans do that... I mean, as long as we still have jobs, I know Elon says that we should stop saving for retirement and all that other stuff. But as long as we still have jobs and that... It's it. Yeah, two- we still have to create value to earn money.

05Man, is the way to, that's the way to do it. You have to go out and like look people in the eye and know people before you get a job because the algorithms are shutting everybody down. Like you just said. Yeah, I think, you know, it's just the world has opened up and there's just, there's more competition, especially in certain roles as well in the, you know, in the economy. so for my friend, you know, I was thinking through, what are the highest value items that we could do? Cause we can't have him just run out there and build relationship in a week. We can't have him, you know, he didn't take the time to engage in a fulsome way with LinkedIn over the years, building a network and maintaining relationships and doing things. So that's not his path. ⁓ And so ⁓ what I thought of was, you know, could we build him a personalized job search agent? And not only could we do something like that, could we ⁓ build something that would ⁓ give him ⁓ an accelerated way to engage in his job search with ⁓ companies.

06so, a big piece of this is finding those hidden jobs that are out there that are corporately posted, not necessarily on LinkedIn or Indeed. Finding ⁓ diamond in the rough jobs that are maybe in kind the lower mid-market that are ⁓ jobs that aren't necessarily being like just like, like just dogpiled and fought over. And then also for my friend, ⁓ finding ⁓ work that's not just technically appropriate for his skill set, but you know, as we get older, we'd need to lean into well, where do we have vertical competency, right? He had vertical competency in the manufacturing and millwork ⁓ furniture space. ⁓ So I sat down one evening with that in mind. ⁓ So one of the tools that we talk about are these autonomous coding agents. ⁓ You're ⁓ deep into the ⁓ cursor and for cell ⁓ world. I'm pretty deep in on Manus ⁓ AI. ⁓ so Manus ⁓ been using it for ⁓ close to six months ⁓ before they got purchased by Meta. they have a autonomous It has the LLM has its own computer in the cloud, right? It's like an independent worker. It can spin up and build itself a box.

07We're just like, would hire a developer and I would assign him or her a laptop. So I went there and started describing the situation. I want to build a website that ⁓ is going to be like a job board, but I want to populate it with jobs for my friends. So here's my friend's resume. that we've worked on already. Here's what I know about his background. Here's the vertical industries. ⁓ Now, I need you to go do research, right? My friend lives in North Carolina. What's that? Give me just a second. Let me stop you there. Yeah, how long and how much thought did you put into the prompt for manas? I mean, the prompt took maybe 10 minutes. mean, I probably put 15 minutes into thought over if we string together, right? I had conversations with my friend over the course of two or three days. was coaching him through how ⁓ to say no to people. But it became apparent, right? He needs a new gig. ⁓ so, you know, right? I got all this information. kind of stored away.

08⁓ Now, we talked a little bit earlier about these ⁓ tools where we're recording ⁓ meetings and conversations and transcripts. so when I put this prompt together to do this, what I was also able to do was to pull in transcripts from these conversations so that the AI would know what does he think he is good at? What have I been coaching him to, you know, that he can lean on? and be better at. And the prompt though was let's build him a site that's gonna be his own personal job board. Let's do research into these specific niche areas, manufacturing, mill work. Let's use his zip code as a stake in the ground. Let's do 50 mile radius, 100 mile radius. We're looking for jobs where I want you to research these industries. Part of this too is, Being able to put together a good prompt is just the fact that like you and I have worked in industry long enough that we know some of these like nuances of like, if I want to find similar industries, what do I do? I go to Dunn's, right? And I, right?

09So I'm able to coach the LLM in a certain direction of like, do this type of research, gather information, go find the top, you know, 50 employers in the area that are in this, that satisfied these criteria. go look for jobs that match his resume. But then I was able to tell it, when you do match the resume against the job, go ahead and match the two things together. And in this specialized job board, go ahead and put a little box there that tells him, this is why this job is appropriate for you. This is where your skills and this job's job description align. And then second, know, kind of instead of him having to figure out how to engage with these ⁓ hiring managers, I put a button there that said when he's ready, let him hit the button and ⁓ generate a ⁓ introductory email that shows his interest, aligns his resume, ⁓ anything else that we know about him that overlaps with this particular job so that there's a very custom email that he could send out. And then he could just cut and paste that into Gmail. and he could apply for jobs.

10And so now we're taking the uncertainty, the heavy lifting, the finding the jobs ⁓ off of his plate. And we're just having Manus ⁓ do this every night for him, build this pay, build this website for him, go out and do research for him every night. Manus will build it, test it, stand up a URL that's publicly available that I was able to share with him. ⁓ host the website, host the database behind it. So as he applied for jobs and he marked them as applied, we did some status thing on that website so that he and I could have a conversation about how many jobs did he apply for and which ones did he like and which ones did he not like. Like that from beginning to end, idea, writing it down, telling Manus to go do the research to being done was an hour. All right. And so that is a real example. And just so everybody in the audience knows, I saw it. It actually happened. It worked. I got to click a little bit. So did that feel so first of all, how many hours did you compress?

11Like if you spun up, if you developed a front end back end, you know, full auditable logging system for this. Like how long would that have taken? Weeks. mean, well, and let's pull that back. Well, if we had built it with traditional tools, that's weeks of hands on the keyboard, writing code, checking in code, doing all kinds of stuff. ⁓ Weeks of time, weeks of design work and finding, you know, color palette, all the things. No. mean, ⁓ it wouldn't have, well, no, that's not true. It would have been worth it. But Would it have been worth it? It wouldn't have been possible, right? Could I have been able to ⁓ just set aside my family, my job, and go build a website for my friend for three weeks and ignore all my other things? I guess, yeah, so maybe it's not a question of would it be worth it? It's a relative question. Yeah. So was there did the did it have enough value that you could spend three, four weeks of time doing that for your friend? You know, basically putting all things else to the side. I think the answer is no, right?

12No, like, yeah, you couldn't justify it. But now, I say the caveat is, okay, so I did this with the newest tools available to us and did it in an hour. ⁓ For the last year, with low code, no code, other things that have been available for the last two to three years, you know, maybe that would have been a several day project, right, for somebody to go build. Much shorter than, right? cause it may not have been as custom and it would have just used a lot of like pre pre-existing widgets. and, ⁓ what, what I was able to do though, which like goes beyond that low code, no code space to some degree is the fact that it is in a lot of ways, a no compromises solution. that I was able to put together for my friend, right? I didn't have to sit down and go, ⁓ but this product doesn't let me do a box that looks like this. And this one, it's going to charge me extra for the database. So I'm going to solve the problem a different, like I didn't have to make a bunch of technical or ⁓ end user compromises. I just kind of thought up an idea and said, go do it. went and did it.

13No. So all of that, you know, Hey, here are the constraints that I have to work within. This is the, the processing power I need. And these are the trade-offs I need to make that is software engineer that I mean, like that's like beyond architecture. mean, that's like a software engineer and you basically spun up an engineer and everything else. infrastructure, security, all the things. It did everything. ⁓ That is, that is wild to me, because you didn't have to go through and think about all the hard processes about, well, I need a route for this. And I need to, you know, log this and, you know, you know, the rest API is the only way to go here. mean, like, you didn't have to think anything about that. Now, this is where I think as we talk about, right, this whole idea of functional executives and executives who've been doing this work. For me, a lot of the language that I used in putting that prompt together was second nature because of my background.

14I was able to give it, I think, a very structured approach, very much like I would do if I was sitting with a senior engineer in the room and we have shared vocabulary. ⁓ Not to say that you can't do this if you don't. What I'm saying is- you can, absolutely. We can I do it. And then I call you and I go, why didn't I get as pretty a stuff as you got? And you go, ⁓ well, it's because you don't have 25 years of systems engineering and architecture. I think where we're at though is the fact that like this, ⁓ you know, kind of ability to engage and to build the walls have come down, right? It's not the barrier to entry is a lot lower. You can still get good solutions ⁓ and you have, you've built some really cool stuff and I've seen what you've built. And so... What I'm saying for folks that do what I do is, you we can lean into our strength and we can build margin for ourselves. And in my margin, you know, here I'm able to help the person that I love, you know, and I care about him and his family and his children.

15And I know what I'm doing is something that, ⁓ you know, not only can I do, I want to do, and now I'm able to do it with excellence for a friend. Yeah, and I I agree with that. I've been using it in the world of finance the same way. And I won't go into all of that right now. But I think we pretty clearly defined like, hey, if you have 20 to 25 years of experience in a discipline, you can ask some really smart questions. And then now you can really we've spent, you know, better part of an hour talking about how we can improve we can, you know, Our marginal hour is worth so much more at this point because we have all this prerequisite knowledge. Let me just, I just want to ask, like if you were 22 years old and you were just out of college and you're seeing all of these things and you want, and for some reason you still want to go into this traditional career path, which I don't think is going to go away. I think there's still going to need to be people for a while. to do this, but again, that's my speculation. How do they use AI?

16How would you recommend, let's use your discipline, so it's very clear, but try to be as concrete as you possibly can. You're 22, you've got all these tools, but you don't have 25 years of experience. How do you accelerate that or how do you use the tool to help you get up to a fear level? Well, I mean, think, yeah, the path, the pathway is still shorter. We talked about the fact that access to tools doesn't, you know, just net an instant win, right? As a society, we should be a lot smarter considering that we carry the sum total of human knowledge around in our pockets all day long. ⁓ Right. and ⁓ I think we would also agree that like, we see some really dumb stuff ⁓ across, you know, all facets of society. And so I I probably said some of that dumb stuff just while we were talking today. Well, that, but also we didn't level up everybody just because they have access, right? And so here we have these young people. So I think that the key thing for that 22 year old that says, what do I do next? Is that they still have to have a plan, right?

17Things that we learned early on, things that we do in our disciplines even is have a goal, have goals, have... planning for that goal? What are the steps that are going to get me to that goal? When I was in my 20s and got into technology, I set the CIO as the goal. I said, that's the top of the food chain of what I'm good at. Like, I want that. So how do I get there? And I talked to other CIOs. I learned what I kind of respected out of the people that were ⁓ ahead of me. And a big piece of it was getting a tour of duty around ⁓ technology. so I made sure that I made that part of my plan, learn databases, learn front end development, learn how to manage those people, learn how to manage projects, learn how to manage budgets, learn how to do warehousing, learn how to do infrastructure, how does telecom work? And so that when the opportunity presented itself for me to have that role, I was ready for that role, as ready as I could be at the time. so for that young person, this is their accelerant for learning.

18If they're humble enough to say, need to learn because the difference will be the fact that, I think I was telling you the other day, I know the CIO over here at ⁓ Vanderbilt University Medical System and ⁓ He's great and they do really exciting things in their ⁓ tech stack. And yet he is hampered by the fact that it's Vanderbilt and there's a lot of exposure. He can't just hire people to go in and muck about and figure things out. I spent my career doing healthcare, it's highly regulated, right? There's so many rules about what we are allowed, not allowed to do. So I think these younger folks, If they came in, if they would have the, if we can coach in just a level of humility of like set a plan, learn those pieces. You know, I would coach somebody if I was spending time with them about what took me 10 years will take you four, if you commit to it. But you can't have it in four months. You can have something in four months. You just can't have this. Yeah, but you have to commit to it. And I think you touched on another very human thing, which is one big part.

19You guys can look it up. Anybody can look it up. But one big part of the critical thinking process is being willing to be wrong and being humble enough about what you're, you know, what you believe, right? Because what you believe today may change in 10 years and you have to be open enough. to pivot. So I think that's very, very human. So you only learn through the critical thinking process. So I think what we're really saying is you've got to hang on to that critical thinking process. But if you maintain that ability and you leverage these tools, you can be Veer possibly in a quicker amount of time. Now, the landscape might look different. Maybe everybody's a solopreneur at that point and they're all doing their own things, but you still have the ability to ask all the same questions and understand the nuances that you understand. that's kind of my take on it is you still have to be humble, which is very, very key in the critical thinking process. Yeah. That humility, think the temper to the humility is having some appetite for risk.

20that, like if we're dancing on a line, that's the line that you need to like learn how to like really like dance on is be open to pivot and change and, ⁓ you know, ⁓ take the red pill to come out of the matrix. be willing to take the risk. And so, and that maybe is more for the little bit, older folks is the fact that there is a need for us to adapt and change. But even for them, I still talk to folks who, you they're getting traditional, you know, kind of career advice from career counselors and, you know, they're coming through college. I've got a friend here in town who's doing a career pivot and going to a coding school and doing one of these boot camps and ⁓ And I'm kind of pushing him also on like, ⁓ I'm open, can come hang out and talk to me. ⁓ I've heard what some of them are coaching y'all on as far as how to engage in the workforce and what to expect. And I disagree. mean, are these teachers though? I think of it is teachers, some of it are people who kind of came out of a little bit of industry.

21I think the, you know, I have strong opinions on some of these like, you know, kind of for-profit schools and these academies that are teaching folks. I think there's value there, but at the same time, ⁓ sometimes the coursework or the approach that they're giving some of these folks is antiquated and doesn't necessarily prepare folks for, you know, if their goal is to get into a, I'm not talking for these folks to get ahead in life. just, you you want to go work for a great big company. You know, you want to go work for Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 even, you know, just like one of these big organizations, there's a certain level of polish and ⁓ that's necessary and understanding that, you know, how business works, right? And how, what is really gonna ⁓ get the attention of your management? Is it delivering great product or understanding how that great product drives revenue or savings and how it fits into the bigger picture and being able to talk that narrative is the missing piece for folks who really want to get ahead. ⁓ a hundred percent.

22And I think again, if they're willing to, you know, like you said, if you take the red pill and you go down the AI world, I think you, one, you're just keeping up with where things are headed. And two, you're making, you're, doing yourself a real service in your career because you're going to speed past some other folks. while we're still in this kind of, I don't know, it's probably not the right word, but like AI purgatory, where, you know, a lot of people are just like kind of trapped, right? I go to, I go to, I do a lot of, you know, networking events and round tables and panels and things like that. That's just kind of part of what I do. I've always done that and I enjoy it because I like meeting new people and hearing new ideas. There are a ton of people. in our positions that still want to talk about AI as a resume reader or AI as an email. I write all my emails with AI. It's like, hear you. But if you dive in a bit to what some of these other people in these other disciplines are doing with this, there's absolutely crossover. You can learn a ton.

23You got to be humble, but you can learn a ton and you've got to just be willing to put in the man hours to So yeah, so like if there were two kind of takeaways here, right? So what? So what? One of them would probably be the fact that ⁓ you need to commit to going down this path of asking good questions, asking questions that are curious. ⁓ Instead of starting from a negative point of view. had a conversation just a couple of weeks ago with a friend and I mentioned some of the projects we were working on in the very first thing out of his mouth as instead of like, hey, that's a cool idea. Or maybe I could do that at my job was ⁓ but those those AI things are never right. They all hallucinate. And I'm like, that that that is a bold starting worldview that you're starting from. It's totally bold! That is an interesting starting point. But so the takeaway there is be curious because I mean that that clearly was I am not curious. I'm I have an opinion. I've kind of locked it up. I've moved on to the next thing. Awesome. Good for you. You know, right?

24Like, but that's That to me is exactly what we talked about a moment ago. That is not thinking critically. That is not being open to another idea being right or possibly right. Yeah. So, the takeaway there is be open and curious and engaging and saying, I'm going to, and I'm going to figure out, and I'm going to try to cut through, which is what we're going to try to help people do, is we're to try to cut through the hype type stuff, the things that are just pure automation to, is there some real things that we can start doing? But I think the other piece here is recognizing that is not simple. ⁓ There's more to it, but it 100 % has some value or has value for the work that we do as we serve boards and shareholders and owners of businesses that we are at a place where this is not a ⁓ rounding error amount of benefit that you're gonna get from engaging in this, that this will disrupt what we're doing. if you wanna say that I don't wanna do it, that's great. You're kind of agreeing to say mediocre is okay.