Roasted by AI: Lessons in Adaptation | E8 - Hard Refresh - An ISSA Podcast

Sam. Alrighty. Welcome back everyone. This today I'm already laughing because I was about to say what we're gonna do today is Karina and I and we're gonna actually start off our podcast episode with something we haven't done before. And before we dive in, today's topic, AI knows a lot about Karina and myself because we use it day in and day out. So it starts learning behaviors. So going to do some quick control. But buckle up because just like in Hollywood, we're going to do some roasts here on the episode that are done by our lovely AI assistants. But Karina, take it away into quick control and we'll dive in.

Okay. All right. I am actually still like dying over this roast. That chatgpt. I thought we were very close and I am second guessing every decision I've ever made with ChatGPT, but here we go. Kate and I are super excited. We are going to be in Chicago for the business growth strategies is June 11th and 12th. We are doing a business growth series workshop called are you doing. It's the ultimate growth hacking workshop. It's not your average panel or presentation. It's a hands on high impact session focused on one thing, helping companies grow. It's going to really assess what's actually driving growth and what's holding it back. So we're going to also be focused on that framework. A R E. What are you doing? Right, so acquisition, retention and expansion. So please do sign up. Come see us. We are super excited about it. June 11th through the 12th in Chicago.

It's going to be a fun time.

Yeah.

If you're not going to be there, you will miss out. That is a promise. So who doesn't want to spend time with Karine and myself and many others that will be there.

Seriously. ChatGPT apparently because it hates me.

Yeah. So let's, let's dive into this. So real quick, some backstory. We, we do a developer hackathon every once in a while. We were down in St. George, Utah last week. We fly our developers in and we're just hacking away. We're staying at a vacation home and usually when you get a lot of developer minded people altogether, you start like pushing and testing things and getting creative with AI in today's day and age. Well, one of the things that happened one night was our development manager, John, he, he said hey, let's, let's have ChatGPT roast us individually. And so we went through and anyways, it was so funny. So I just, I just made Karina do it because I was like, hey. Just say hey based on what you know about me. This is the prompt that you put into chat tpt if you're a heavy user. It says, based on what you know about me, roast me hard. And usually chat, Chat. GPT is a little soft, so you gotta tell it to go hard anyway. So instead of two truths and a lie, which we would have had with a guest, today, we're gonna share a couple of these funny, pretty direct roasts. So, Karina, do you want to go first? Where do you want me to.

No, I'll go first. Okay. I'm not gonna read the whole thing because it's actually hurt my feelings. No big deal. Just kidding. It was hysterical. Okay, so it said, you're the kind of person who asks for a roast and then edits the feedback 15 times because the phrasing wasn't sharp enough, the font wasn't elegant enough, and God forbid it sounded even remotely like a bullet point. You're not a cpo. You're a compulsive perfection officer. You don't just review a presentation. You rewrite the entire strategy, Read, redesign the ui, rewrite the emails, and schedule the damn dinner all before lunch. Which, I don't know if that's an insult, but I'll take it. So your prompt library is longer than most people's resumes. Meanwhile, you won't even use the word streamline because it gives you the ick, but you will redefine the digital heartbeat of an industry. Like you're dropping mixtapes instead of tech roadmaps. Amazing. And let's not forget, your idea of simple design involves three Figma files, a branding manifesto, and a product vision that could make Apple feel unprepared. Paired. I mean, that's kind of a compliment. I know. That one also feels like a compliment. But the first one, the cpo, Your compulsive perfection officer. That one hit her. That one hurt right there. Okay, I want to hear yours.

All right, so I have a bunch, but I'll choose three of them. So one of them is, you're out here acting like you're revolutionizing commercial cleaning, bro. You building a spreadsheet to tell janitors how to not lose clients? You didn't invent a growth framework. You just rebranded common sense with a dropdown menu. The Pro Pro, bro. You probably tell people you're in business optimization because saying I make graphs for people who clean toilets doesn't slap well on LinkedIn.

Oh, my God.

Oh, here's one. You out here selling hope in a PowerPoint. Martin Luther King had a dream. You have bar charts don't compare.

You have to do the Moses one, Please.

This. This one was good. You're out here preaching revenue levers like you're Moses with a Swiffer descending from Mount KPI, talking about churn and account expans Mansion like, it's deep theory, bro. It's not rocket science. It's customer service. It's. Don't piss off the guy paying you 101.

Oh, my gosh. So good. I feel like yours was way meaner than mine, but hysterical. Hysterical.

My first set, I then had to say, nope, go harder. Be more mean.

Okay. I think I'm gonna do that, but in the privacy of my own home.

I'm not gonna share those. Yeah, no, but, yeah, we literally. It's Very few times where, like, I'll laugh so hard I start crying. And that's. That's what we were doing as developers. And then we'd get back to work and be like, all right, let's actually go build real software.

Yeah, no, but that's such a fun exercise. Like, I never. I just saw the update Saturday or Friday. That was like, something basically, like, let me tell you what I think of you or something. So I did that. But it was, like, all nice.

Yeah.

Nothing mean. This is way more fun. I'm gonna have all my.

Because, you know, there's. There's some truth to it. It pulls into, like, what you're weak at, and you're just like, ouch. But that was funny.

Yeah. So funny. Okay, but maybe. You know what? Maybe the reason why it was kind of nice to me is because I.

Am really, really nice to it.

Oh, my gosh. Like, everything I say, I'm like, thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful day. Seriously. I talk to it every morning and I will say, like, oh, my gosh, that was so helpful. I really appreciate that. Thank. I don't know. I have a relationship with it. Like, I need to give it a name properly.

I'm. You probably yell at me. I literally. It gets something wrong, I'm like, nope, do it again.

Nope. And that's why you got bro. Mine was like, karina, sweetie, that's so funny.

Well, all right. If you're listening and you haven't tried that, that's a good Monday morning laugh. So.

Yeah.

And any day laugh. So. But speaking. Speaking of today and what we're going to talk about is AI and our topic specifically, and what we want to dive into in a semi brief Conversation is maybe help inspire how AI is being utilized, not only amongst customers that I've interacted with, but just what we hear from stories from other people in the industry and just really help perhaps inspire you as a listener to go try a couple things and to kind of back up before we say, like, what is AI? If you were to truly sum up AI, what would you say? Karina?

It's a good question. I think AI in its simplest form is meant to enhance or empower obviously human intelligence is the, the kind of the, the driver behind that. But AI, artificial intelligence almost enhances human intelligence in my perspective. I found myself really unpacking a lot of foundational principles that I have never really been able to articulate well and then having like a sounding board and especially because I write a lot for branding and strategy and just being able to, I just, I love being able to think through different words and articulate a thought, a message and emotion. And so for me it's just, it's improved my vernacular. It's allowed me to see things in a different lens and it's actually allowed me to expand the normal narrative that's going on in our industry. Not words, not just like innovation or AI. Like I, I can think through so many different facets and I don't know that I would be able to without that resource.

Yeah, it's like I attended a workshop several weeks back about LLMs. So that's, that is what like Chat GPT is if you didn't know all of these Grok. They're just, they're language learning models is what it stands for. And what AI naturally does is, is pull the most popular, the most insightful thing that it can find on what your prompt is. And so AI is just literally a reflection of what it has learned. So usually we, we concoct up this like, oh, it's creating out of thin air. It's just like. No, it's, it's based, it, it's based off of the fact that it's had those inputs from somewhere. It's gathered that data.

Right.

But the interesting thing is, is that what we're going to talk about today a little bit is you can't just go ask AI generic questions, otherwise you get generic responses. And so AI in today's form most commonly, you have to be really good at contextual clarification for it to be powerful. Oh, let's, let's dive into what today's topic like what? ChatGPT. Not just ChatGPT. ChatGPT has become like the zoom of like, yeah, meetings. It's like, yeah, hey, do you zoom it? You're like, I'm actually not using zoom. You're like, you know what I meant.

Yeah, right.

But ChatGPT is the obvious dominant leader, but what it means for a janitorial business, their organization, and hopefully today's conversation gets some brain waves moving in a way that like, people are like, wow, it's that easy, or it's that simple. I haven't thought about it that way.

Right.

So, Karina, where would you want to start when we're talking about AI?

Well, so this is what I love about AI and I'm going to push myself to think outside of the chat GPT, Right. Because I think that's always, to your point, common narrative things like lucidchart. Right. Like, so I was on lucidchart the other day and I was working through a diagram for a client of mine and I was getting stuck with the visual part of it. Like, I just wasn't. I wasn't happy with the way that it was being represented. And so obviously they have an AI plugin and I'm talking through it with the AI within that platform and slowly it started to really take form and I'm like, yep, now that makes sense from a operational perspective. One of the things that I really loved about artificial intelligence at Pioneer was that you saw a team member or a department, if you will, really increase their confidence because of AI. And what I mean by that is they started to translate messages or emails and quickly respond to customers when oftentimes that language barrier is really difficult for them. And not only is it difficult, but it takes them a while to respond. And so you just saw this incredible boost in them and being able to effectively communicate the message, delegate the message. Right. Because that's. They're kind of the broker of that. And so that was something that was super inspiring. And then when I showed them how to actually speak to it, then it was just like, it's a game changer. So that, that's something that I think is. It's almost like your own journey in a lot of ways for the frontline team members, but as leaders within the general editorial space, if we can show that to those team members and let them feel comfortable in their native language, whatever it may be, and they can still use it. You don't have to speak English to use any AI tool. It's completely free. No, yeah, edit that part out.

Well, within reason. But like the fascinating thing, like, we, we've just had this Experience. So we just launched like Frontline translations, real time. And we actually, we ran it through and built it through OpenAI because it's one of the best translator models out there now. And the fascinating thing is this. This is the fascinating thing. And this, this shows sometimes the disconnect that exists between leadership and Frontline. For years we've been told, ah, that's not a big feature, right? We were listening to the leaders. They're like, nah, they get it. Like, things happen. And it's amazing when we dove in this, the word you just spoken, confidence, like that piece for someone not to. To worry about. Like, I misunderstood because we. We have stories where people got in trouble and they just. They misunderstood what a word meant right when they were given an assignment. And like, something so simple that we sometimes think about has an amazing impact. And that's existed before AI. But AI makes it way easier to access just because a tool. That's the best part. Just because a tool does or doesn't have it. Like, you could literally go talk to ChatGPT to help you understand. And even if it was given in a way that wasn't understandable, then you can ask for a clarification. Well, what may that mean? I'm not understanding that even when it does translate it. So that's just. Man, that love that Clarity is King. My. My coo, Samuel Clayton. That's like his slogan tagline. He's like, I'm gonna write a book on called that one.

Clarity is King.

Clarity is King. He's often referred to in his old glory high school days of King Clayton. He was prom king and other things, but he's amazing. Anyways.

But clarity is that every time I.

See him now, what up, King Clayton.

Clayton. What about.

Anyways, but yeah, once. The other one I thought of is just like administration. Administration of a company you are dealing with. You're the central communication hub. And beyond language barriers, communication in and of itself in the same language. Often people. People have emotions, people miscommunicate, right? And then we, like, we get in this spiral of feeding into bad communication or lack of clarity, right? And if you like, were to pull in ChatGPT to be like, what questions am I not asking here? Or am I responding in a way that uplifts, motivates, and inspires while correcting, you know, maybe the team that needs to be communicated to. Yes, like ChatGPT can do that. And these are like oversimplifications of what AI could do today. There are way more advanced technologies that maybe we'll get into towards the end. But like we're. We're still missing the simple stuff. We're often unfortunately in the cleaning industry with the laggers of technology adoption. So.

Right.

This might be like the revolutionary mindset topics right now.

Yeah.

But it's. It still matters. I use it daily in that regard. I express a frustration and it.

So what exactly are you using? Let's go through like your roster. What's your roster for AI and then I'll tell you mine.

Obviously Chat CBT is a dominant one, but I also use Grok in other categories just because I don't, I don't lean in necessarily to one AI tool. If another one finds a different pathway or a different research. I just try and keep a different perspective. Models that are trained differently could produce different results. And then when they're like both in alignment and both find certain things, then you can like have a lot more confidence in the response as well.

Okay.

You play AI against each other.

Yeah.

Well, Chat said this. What are you going to go verify the other in just our.

That's why you got roasted by the way. Because it's listening to you and it doesn't like it.

Yes.

So mad at you.

It doesn't. Like I went to Grok to go answer other questions. Like you trigger everything. Right. But that's a big one. But we have, we have design tools and honestly it's not necessarily new tools, it's tools in the market today. Understand that AI is going to need to speed up certain aspects. So you just start seeing AI features come out in actual products that you use day to day. And we just try and capitalize on those.

Right. Same. I think I always toggle between Chat obviously. Claude. Claude. I like to do for a lot of marketing and branding stuff. I also will use Gamma Discord Mid Journey. I use a lot of the AI that because I. I design a lot, a good amount. So on AI, not AI, Illustrator and Photoshop, I'll use some of that to like quick fixes. And then Copilot, I started playing with a little bit just because I've been doing a lot on Power Bi and I'm trying to get a better understanding of it. I also within Excel there's an AI tool that I plugged in because I like to look through and build out macros. So many budget databases and trying to expand on that. So I'll do that and then shoot. There was one other thing that I was going to tell you. Okay. This is a really. Every time I so zapier too Also has a lot of stuff that I do, but like, every time that I'm curious about a new tool or I need some sort of like, AI tip, I always go to Tick Tock. That's my very first place that I'll be like, okay, like what did I do the other day that was like, top five prompts for ChatGPT. And then it's like, boom, boom, boom. I love TikTok for that. I don't go anywhere else. I won't even go. And actually so on LinkedIn I have saved a bunch of groups and companies that are coming out with prompts. But for something quick, digestible to point me in the right direction, I will say TikTok is my number one.

Yeah, that's awesome. It's, it's, it's fascinating.

Yeah.

The level of being a resource for learning that TikTok is becoming.

Yes.

Like competing with the level of usership and, and learning amount for video. Because that's what TikTok is, is video competing against YouTube and, and YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, followed by its own parent company, Google, because Google owns it, being Google Search. And that's what keeps it at the top, is because it's paired with the best search engine in the world. But like, TikTok is when, when I had employees one time to like, oh yeah, I just like search that on TikTok and I was like to watch someone dancing, like, this was years ago.

Yeah.

And it's, it is not that anymore. I mean that, that stuff still exists. But like, as far as the amount of business knowledge and business insights and experts that are appearing there, it's amazing.

So go searching clips. Right. And like, it'll tell you really quickly how to make a, do a macro or do a prompt or do this. And it's like, okay, and if you want more, you go to the page and you start like drilling in. But I love being able to see where like the mindset has changed. Mindset is changing. Like the other day I was, I started using ChatGPT as a search and not actually, it wasn't a search. I was in Target and I was debating between two products and I almost went to Google and I was like, you know what, I'm gonna go to chat. I went in and I was like, I'm debating between two products. Tell me pros and cons. Boom. It spit it out. And then I was like, okay, me that. Give me the top five products in this other category. Boom, spit it out. And then this past weekend, I was in Home Depot lost, of course. And I was trying to figure out how to do a new shelf in my closet. So I opened up CHAT chatgpt and I asked it. I'm literally standing at Home Depot. I have no idea what I'm doing. Can you please point me in the right direction? Spit out less than 20 seconds. I was like. It even told me what aisle to go to.

Nuh.

I swear to you, I was like, where have you been all my life?

Like the thing is that anything and this is so important for marketing your cleaning business. Guys, if ChatGPT can't learn about you in the future, no one's going to learn about you.

Right?

Like there's this whole new wave of marketing. Go, go look it up. It's not SEO search engine optimization, it's generative engine optimization like you have before this. This was crazy. So we did this test like a year ago when it first came out and it was just like, hey, go research top janitorial softwares for me and tell me pros and cons, guys. It literally does the research for you.

Yeah, yeah, right, Right.

And luckily this is kind of funny. O2V appeared and cleantelligent. We're like, ah, that's funny. We took it too. But it still hadn't caught onto the rebranding. But, but like that, that is so key. And if you aren't writing and understanding marketing to learn how generative AI can do the research on your website about your business online reviews, like, you won't show up there. Karina just was in Home Depot and didn't rely on Google. Like AI knew which aisles on because Home Depot has massive, massive amounts of data on the web that tells all that stuff 100%. So like these inputs, this is where AI is again based off of inputs. And if you aren't existent online and I'm talking more than just, oh, we have a quick website for a lead form.

Right.

You will be left behind because AI is not gonna, it's not gonna recommend you. If I'm local, it says, hey, I'm downtown Chicago. What are the top five commercial cleaning companies local to me that I should look into hiring? It's going to go based off of the data it can find from actual user reviews. And like it's, it's going to go search social media. It's going to search Google reviews. It's going to. If like in software review websites like captier and G2, like these things that would take hours and keep people from truly diving in to do research. Right, and they just stick with a Google search. No, they get all the benefits of the research by the same prompt. Now in chatgpt, right? Like, we people need to be optimizing for geo generative engine optimization now.

Ooh, did you just coin that or is that a real thing?

No, that's. That's what people are calling. You're like, it's on the fly, Kaden.

It's on a roll, thanks to Chat GPT. No, I mean, I think that. So one of the things that I still consistently hear is like, but I don't want it to think for me and I don't want to lose myself and I don't want it. And I'm like, you guys, you're not losing yourself, you're just expanding if you're not doing it. I just think that gone are the days of digging your heels in the sand and acting like you don't need it and you don't need to use it, and it's going to go away. Because I will tell you, of the five platforms I have on my screen right now, all five have AI on them. They've all rolled out a new AI feature. Lucidchart, Salesforce, Discord. They all have them. And so if you don't know how to leverage AI at this point, you're doing yourself a disservice. And your company honestly. And I love that you said earlier when we were talking about this, you were like, our employees have to use it. Like, it's not about. Because remember before everybody was like very scared to admit that they were using it. And so now companies like Etuvia does a really good job of like, being innovative is like, you know, you, you should be using it. Please use it. Like, if you're not using it, why aren't you using it? And I will be the first and say, like, I wrote this email with the help of Chat GPT. Like, instead of taking three hours, I use chatgpt. I'm happy to show you what prompt I did, but it's just, it saves an enormous amount of time. And if you think through like, one of the things I always struggle with is like work life balance. And I've found that it gives me an enormous of time back from a personal perspective and a professional perspective. Like the fact that I was at Home Depot, I'm prompting instead of going on Google Chrome or Google and like trying to sort through that quickly gave me information more. So like I had taken a picture from my Pinterest board and I uploaded it and I was like, what, what wall color is this? And then boom, it spit out like 15. I'm like, you know, what did I do before this? Right. Like this is incredible.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's another fascinating point is the opportunity for self help and growth.

Yeah.

So from. I'll use this as an example in sales. So personally I think sales is one of the hardest jobs in the world. It's the constant grind of feeling like you have to own your own segment of the business, handle the rejection constant. Right. In any industry to constantly be turned down when you know that and, and it's. If you want to be an entrepreneur, it's gotta be the backbone of you starting a business. You've got to own sales as well. Right. So this technique, often we fly at the seat of our pants as entrepreneurs when we first start out and we probably don't invest as much as we should in coaching. Well, specifically in the sales methodologies of the world. I'll use Challenger, the Challenger sales framework as an example. If you're a sales leader for a commercial cleaning business and you don't have a sales methodology framework for consistency to train all your Reps, guess what? ChatGPT could go build that in an afternoon. Like you could literally go build that. Say, start with the prompt of. There's way better prompts. But like I'm a commercial cleaning business and we function in this way. Tell me about the typical sales methodologies that we should look at implementing. It'll go do the research and help you relate to them more. But specifically, I want to talk about real quick the individualism of what ChatGPT can do for employees. Imagine you have a sales rep that you provided a built out like GPT for where you gave its knowledge. You, you fed all the PDFs to it for company domain knowledge about your best practices, your rules, your policies, all of that. And then because usually your internal interpretation of sales methodologies suck, you can also then go to the Internet and say, hey, find best world class sales methodology on challenge or sale and fuse our company knowledge and that methodologies together. And then you literally go give it to your sales rep and you say, and everything should be recorded like if you are in, in person. Okay, here's the thing and I'll preface this. Zoom does automatically like you have to give consent for recording and all of that. Right. So it's really easy. You're in a digital landscape, I get it, you're not going to be in that way in the commercial cleaning industry. And so you use this.

What is that.

This. So this is an AI voice recorder when you're in person. Yeah. So it's called Plod. I'm not paid to mention them. Plod AI. It's a literal device. Now technically you could pull out your phone, go through a voice note, but this is just so much easier. It's like a zip tap. Anyways, you got to remember to give consent. We live in a day in an age of consent. Right. If you're in a conversation with some, you're like, hey, do you mind if this is being recorded? It just helps me optimize notes and all that. And it plugs into the best AI models like Claude and GPT. Anyways, but go make sure you have that as a sales rep. Even, even if your company. Here's the thing. Even if your company will not invest in it and they say no, go make the expense couple hundred bucks for the device and then a couple hundred dollars for the annual subscription. But here's what it's going to do for you as a sales rep. You're going to be able to walk into a proposal record a client interaction. Everything that is said is recorded and then the transcript is already in its AI tool and you just go start asking questions. Where could I have improved? What mark did I miss on the pain points they brought up that I never addressed all of those things. Like no one honestly in today's day and age, we're still in the adoption phase. But in five years from now, no one's going to have the excuse for bad follow up missing pain point delivery, customized proposals, bids that are very tailored to that. Like no longer templated garbage that everyone knows was just mass applied. Like the level of personalization that you're about to be able to access because of AI is going to be unreal. So sales reps go get Plaud. I'm sure there's other technology out there.

I literally just went on it. Unbelievable. I have a hard stop at 11, by the way. No big deal.

Yeah.

Why didn't you say that during the AI thing? I was like, this is incredible. I have no idea. I never knew that. So I've seen these little guys like the things that. On the phone. But the, the wrist one I've never seen. I'm like blown away.

Yeah. Wearable. U D. Plaud. Plaud AI.

How come I can't see that? I can't find the band though.

I'll. I'll send you. It's called Plod Note is the actual device. But yeah. So we've, we've talked a lot. Hopefully you as listener have found some insightful things today to, like, just go and try. But the reality is you just need to give yourself time to go try. We do AI Fridays at otv. It's a three hour block, and unless there's an emergency, everyone has to be in AI and exploring. That's three hours per week. Like, that may seem like a lot, but I promise you, if you aren't taking the time to go play with what's available out there and go push yourself forward, you will get left behind.

Um, are you guys hiring? What'd be dope?

You're like, I could just keep doing what I'm doing and get paid for it.

Yeah, amazing.

I'll move.

I'll move to the west Coast. No big deal.

No, we're all remote.

To be is incredible. You guys are doing some really cool stuff. I love the developer hackathon or whatever you called it. That's so cool. The roast is cool. I love that you lean into it. Like, I think that that is such a smart it actually, it also speaks to employee well being to me. Like, you're trying to grow them professionally, you're trying to help them work life, balance all the things. I love it. I love it. I love it.

Okay, well, that's a wrap. On today's episode, hopefully you learned about something that was caught, not necessarily taught, and you go take action. That's it for today. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, guys. Toodles.