Say that the number one thing you could do for from my perspective is to just try. If you're really struggling to try, one of the things that is a huge tell for AI is these goofy and they are goofy. Every LinkedIn post now has like 40 emojis and it's one sentence. It doesn't sound like you. We all know it's AI, and truthfully, I skip them. Now other people might not, but I skip them. One of the things that I think everybody could do right now to get their, you know, their feet wet is start building out a skill. So figure out what a skill is, and then start building a skill that writes like you. And then relentlessly update it.

I feel like that opening line for every one of them is this change. I have never had an account or something hacked because of my poor password choices and my poor, you know, programming choices at home. ⁓ but I get a letter from Citibank or Chase or Bank of America. And ⁓ so so, you know, let's just take this with a grain of salt that if you follow all the rules. And you work for great big corporate Fortune 50, that's not a guarantee of success and safety. And in fact, you know, that 10 million row ⁓ you know that that got leaked out of Bank of America or one of the other banks, you know, just name them, right? They've all had it happen, is probably a worse problem than you may have tomorrow with. The five store franchise.

We've been talking a lot about like the technical problems and risk in you know having rogue technology out in the enterprise, but is it really a technology problem or is it a really boring human problem where people just need to talk cross functionally and partner more?

There's little bit of that, right? I mean a and d Share what they're doing with each other. Right.

That that's that's where I'm that's where I'm coming down on it. I'm hearing all of these different things about technical this and that and the other. But the fact of the matter is when we talked about training up front, I mean, like we trained on Outlook, we trained on Excel, like we had to seed this stuff in, and I have not seen in a lot of mid size and smaller companies a ton of training around these AI tools. Maybe that's because they're moving so much quicker. Then you know the pace and the things that you can do with them. And they're also more intuitive than Outlook. You didn't know to you have to know to click a button here and go here and then update this and set your settings this way, install a signature, you know, all that stuff was brand new. Nobody knew how to do it. Some people still don't know how to do it. Today now this is this is as easy as a Google prompt. And you can go Very simple. It's a chat box. Yeah. And you type in it and it's basic. Now they keep adding things onto it. But so to me it's like it's a human issue. Like we've gotta start talking with each other.

Well and part of that talking with each other, I think, if folks are using the tools, they need to start sharing their wins with each other.

You mean knowledge hoarding.

They're not and I and maybe they're not, maybe they are. Maybe they're hoarding it. Maybe they're just inadvertently not realizing how difficult the leap is from I don't understand what I what is possible. And, you know, and and we and we keep saying, like, you know, we it's on YouTube, it's on TikTok. The hype side of it makes this sometimes feel like a toy. And and ⁓ and so But when you show people what is possible and then they go away for a little bit. And and if you know, if you have the the the enough relationship and social capital with each other to to and the respect of each other to to you know to push each other a little bit to work on this. I was leading a workshop yesterday in Atlanta ⁓ for a half day doing kind of a product design ⁓ activity with ⁓ with a gentleman who's got a ⁓ retail ⁓ ⁓ set of stores. And one of the things we took a little bit of an aside for ⁓ you know 30 minutes to kind of take a break and I had my computer up and and ⁓ one of the ⁓ pain points he had pointed out was that the existing platforms that ⁓ their industry had and the tools that he uses ⁓ updating product descriptions for his e-com site, right? So you think here's a product What is the description that the customer sees about that product? ⁓ there was no vertical integration with ⁓ the the suppliers, so there was no way to just pull in the product image and the the pro the ⁓ the wholesaler or the manufacturer's product description. ⁓ so they have to type them themselves. And the tool that they had did does not have a bulk import feature. So there was no way to up, you know, just do them all at once and upload them and ⁓ and ⁓ y you know, and right, I mean like I s I I've only told you that much, right? And y you and I both know how to solve this problem.

Well yeah, I mean my my brain already lit up.

Already solved the problem. You and I both know how to solve this problem. And so ⁓ so sitting down with him and asking him to bring up his tool and and saying, let's just take five minutes, right? Let's take this out of here. ⁓ let's show you that you could take your your your product catalog, dump that over here to Chat GPT, Claude, whoever you're using, right? And say, you know, my name is Blah, this is my industry. This is the the kind of you know vibe that I want for my you know products to you know, this is how I write product descriptions. Here's six of my existing product descriptions, here's five new products, ⁓ write descriptions for them. I want them to be under 180 words, it's ⁓ it's it's for you know marketing, it's it's for a website, go, right? Right. Thirty seconds later, he's got five. And I'm like, great, you know, your your your your assignment this weekend is to get an export of your products. dump them all in once you're happy with what your prompt that it's def you know building what you want and it'll do it in a spreadsheet and it'll give you all three thousand of your products and he adds you know 20 to 50 a week. and I'm like fantastic. Then you're going to use one of these tools that lets you do computer use on your browser and you're going to give it three and you're going to ask it to learn how to use your website to go click on edit, open the product paste in the description and th this this guy who you know he this operator, right? Owner operator for you know a couple of stores, he's he's spending two to four hours a week doing this task.

That's amazing. I mean like that's that's so much time wasted. Does he have an API route to his website?

He does not. Okay. But but what what I told him and ⁓ you know and and let's talk a little nerdy here for a second is is ⁓ when you use these tools ⁓ to try to automate things like ⁓ Claude or ⁓ Manus or whatever, the ones that can agentically go to a website, often they figure out that there is an API. It's hidden, it's under the page because the page is interacting with an API and ⁓ And so when you ask it to do some level of automation, it can often figure that out. And so it's not going to do a whole bunch of page clicks. It's just going to figure out what the the domain says ⁓ about the buttons that get pushed and it's just going to inject it and and it'll do the transaction as if you had clicked the buttons. ⁓ it was actually one of the more impressive things that I saw. Like like an AI did that for me. Manus did that for me on a project. ⁓ and it felt like an emergent kind of thing. Like I asked it to go click through, it came back and said, Hey Veer, I figured out that I don't need to work that hard. I can just do it like that. Is that okay? I'm like, it that that is absolutely okay for what ya I'm asking you to do.

Yeah, I ⁓ I've had that same aha moment and it's funny as you were talking, like literally at the beginning of you talking about that. My command prompt popped up for the task that I have scheduled to run every hour that uses that same API on a web page scraper to go get the most real time data. So it was just ⁓ it was man, that's the geekiest thing that we're gonna get excited about all day long.

It ⁓ it is. It's a f it's a fun geeky thing. We wouldn't have run across it if we hadn't been curious, right? We keep saying that word to ⁓ I think, you know, often about like we the curiosity drove us to look for solutions. The solutions surprised us by, you know, in fact, ⁓ you know, I had a ⁓ guy I worked with, he he I don't know, it's a little flowery, but he would say he would say that that's an elegant solution. Yeah.

It is because it's a yeah, it's simple. It doesn't need to be any harder than that. That is that's not flowery. That's that's not flowery. That's pretty typical IT code, you know, developing developer

Speak. It's an elegant solution to a problem that has seven different solutions and some of them are are are inelegant.

You learn over time, I would say the last thing I'll say about this is you learn over time too, coming from my perspective, finance guy who has stayed curious and been on the front side of this since it came out, right? So two years of experience is why I can have this conversation and even hang with you. Because I I'm that deep. But it's taught me what elegant is and isn't. And I, you know, I mean, like I find myself now able to push back just by sticking with it. But it takes a long time to get there. And people don't like people see two years of experience and they go, well, I'm never going to get there. So what else can I do in life? Because I can't catch up. I don't think that's true. There's some things that you could walk away from here today and start doing. And I think you have a couple, I have a couple And I think we should just let let's tee up like maybe three or four when you stop listening to this, just immediately go and start start working on these things and that's gonna help you along your AI learning journey.

I mean, I think ⁓ so like like this example ⁓ for for this gentleman, it was, you know, you need to find something that is that you do every day, every week, every day, every month that, you know, chews up, you know, and a bunch of your time and it's a bunch of button clicking. And you know, get you have you have to be a little honest with yourself about, you know, that might be a satisfying piece of your month. Because of the certainty and the deterministic value of what you're doing. Like, ⁓ you know, I don't have a lot of control in my life, but this I can control and I can do the the the these five steps. I get it. But you could be doing something better with that hour, two hours, four hours of your time. And you know, if you'll invest four hours, two hours into solving your problem, right? This this again, the the you know, the old lessons are the best lessons. This is you learning how to fish.

Yeah. You and I mean I would say the the number one thing you could do for from my perspective is to just try. If you're really struggling to try. One of the things that l is a huge tell for AI is these goofy and they are goofy. Every LinkedIn post now has like forty emojis and it's one sentence, you know, a paragraph space, whatever that's called. I'm not a writer, but there's a space, another sentence, everything is in it doesn't sound like you. We all know it's AI, and truthfully, I skip ⁓ Now, other people might not, but I skip One of the things that I think everybody could do right now to get their, you know, their feet wet is start building out a skill. So figure out what a skill is, and then start building a skill that writes like you. And then relentlessly update it. You're going to get much higher quality content. And it we all know you're doing the thinking behind the AI for the most part. Right, you're not just letting AI think for you. You wouldn't be where you are in life as an executive or director or VP at a at a company. So

Don't

Sab I mean in today's world, maybe it'll be more acceptable later, but right now people don't take you as seriously if you write in AI and it sounds like AI.

I think we're where we're heading towards is, you know, I had a friend ask the other day because I sent him an email and he was like, I can't tell. I ⁓ you know, like it was, you know, how what what is what was written by AI? How what what what part was written by you? Because I and I was like, Well, good. The system is learning. And second, I wrote that. I just asked AI to polish it so that I didn't waste 10 minutes doing paragraph lines, capitalization, commas, shortening it for you. I gave it an output and it polished it for me. And what we don't want, and I think what you're saying is, is you don't want that polish to feel mathematical.

No, and it does feel mathematical when every sentence ends in a three comma list. You know, that doesn't sound like you. When you're using emojis, when everything's bold I mean, like this is all stuff everybody knows at this point, I I I ⁓ pretty much. But there's a way to get around it. And that way, and what I would suggest as you leave this today, one of the first ways to really start getting more comfortable and understanding That AI can help you is to make it sound like you. Like that's a tangible go learn how to build a skill in Claude or Codex or where whatever it is. And then use that skill across all the AI that you use because they're portable. They're just they're files that you can take anywhere.

So the starting point is walk away from the podcast and try. Try to put something together. And and when we say try, I mean you can ask the AI to help you. Like, hey, I'd like to write a personal my my personal voice skill. Interview me. Ask me some questions. If you're if you if you do write a lot of stuff, you can take your output from your ⁓ your emails ⁓ that you've written that you like. Or if you've got a couple of documents you've prepared, give it to it, let it analyze your writing style.

Yeah, absolutely.

This is five minutes worth of work is what we're trying to, you know, kind of get at is don't let the I now we you know, Jim and Veer gave you a project dissuade you from just taking some baby steps here because the the plus here, and I think you know, folks you need to start embracing is If you're shooting for a hundred percent and and and you know, perfection is is is crippling you from you know, from from moving, making your writing fifty percent better is a big win.

Yeah. Right. Especially I mean like think about people with English as a second language.

People that write, I mean, and so just des just that jump, ⁓ right? Don't don't discount, don't fall into this, you know, you know, eighty twenty stuff. Twenty would be great in this case because it it's getting you one step function higher. And you'll learn through the process of doing these steps of just building a small skill that you can further enhance as you go along.

Yeah. We're not asking you to become an engineer, but you do need to start s or you do need to stop treating AI like it's someone else's job. Because it's not. It's ⁓ it's a it's an operating system. It's a way of working.

That's one, you know, that's a good that's great example of something you can take away. Go do it right now. You know, you could, you know, I you you can take an example of a task that you do many times in a week and try to figure out a way to have AI ⁓ help you in writing marketing copy. I'm not trying to take the job away from marketers. That's not the point. I'm what we're saying here is you know, I sat in a room with an owner operator. That's his job. He is not going to go hire a marketer. He he is either going to sit with his hands on keyboard and ⁓ you know crank through eighty items every week, or he's gonna get some help from a tool and he can teach that tool to write like him.

Or l or write like the brand.

Or right like the brand. Yeah, exactly.

You know, put it in the brand's voice. The I'm not the brand. The brand doesn't talk like that. We have a a brand voice. Here are the last twenty years of copy that we've handwritten. And you can see the evolution. Stay more true to the last eighteen months and look for nuggets of authenticity that go back all the way to nineteen eighty when we just started. And that that's your brand voice. And here's fifty examples. Yeah. And the examples really help. But I I mean I'm not trying to get too detailed on how to write brand voice, but that is exactly that you're exactly right. That's what you have to do. And that's an easy, easy, easy like introductory step.

It's one that takes you one step beyond asking it questions and treating it like a ⁓ an evolution of Google and search, right? Where now you're asking it to build you something that is reusable over time that is going to enhance your utilization of the tool. And it's a straightforward way to do it.

Yeah, it is. It's ⁓ and it and so hopefully we've been able to kind of bring a few new ideas and then leave you with something tangible to walk away with. ⁓ our goal is always to try to demystify some of this and then to drive more of this AI by default mindset into into your workplace.

Yeah. And we'll talk more in the future about the fact that the skills, the abilities, your time spent, this it is it it compounds. Right? I mean, just like any kind of like natural law of you know exercise and execution, ⁓ you know, the more you do, the more you're gonna see, the better you're gonna get. ⁓ not just in your small life, But this is the stuff that does get brought in and we talk about doing as a team, IT and finance, working together, hand in hand, ⁓ to to, you know, see a c a company ⁓ execute on its purpose and vision and mission ⁓ instead of being in in a in a place where we're fighting against each other for, you know, dominance and control.

Yeah, and make mistakes. Go try something. Bottom line, go try something, make some mistakes. Hopefully not too many mistakes with people, but make some mistakes. Get some wins, some quick, quick wins, you know, always thinking quick wins. ⁓ if you screw up you learn something. Just I mean don't screw up the big things, but take little measured risks and that's how you're gonna get better.

I think we have we we we've ⁓ spent enough time ⁓ converting oxygen for this ⁓ discussion today. But hopefully we got some takeaways. Follow along with us, follow along with us on LinkedIn and on YouTube and ⁓ wherever else you subscribe for podcasts and ⁓ look for things that we're writing. You can always contact us and ask us questions. ⁓ You know, Jim and I are always happy to come out and chat with folks too, if we're you know, we're spending time helping companies understand the application of this at a ⁓ executive level. And so we're always happy to have those conversations as well.

Yeah, and please please please comment. If you heard something that you agreed or disagreed with, we'd love to we'd love to hear from you right here in the socials because that helps us get better and then we also just enjoy the conversation obviously.

So well, it's been a good day for Jim.

Alright man, stay curious.

Say curious people.