AI or Extinction? Chris Daigle’s Blueprint for Staying Ahead

Welcome to beyond you'd why podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys, and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now, let's meet today's guest.

This week we're going to be talking.

About the why of right way.

So if this is your why, then you believe there's a proper and correct way to do things and that things should be done right. You see no point in skimping on the details or cutting corners and believe that to achieve success, you must follow procedures that have been proven. You also prefer to use systems that have been developed, tested and shown to work over time, and you have no problem making adjustments and corrections numerous times in order to produce the right outcomes. You know that if you create structures and processes that work, the right results will follow. And so today I have a great guest for you. His name is Chris Daigle. He is the CEO and co founder of Chief AIOfficer.com and in 2024 and beyond, it's really AI enablement or extinction. Chris makes sure that you end up on the winning side by helping your business gain the AI advantage. His frameworks for teaching you how to start using AI at work make sure you create more time, create more revenue and create more enjoyment from your business role. An early pioneer in SaaS, Chris launched his first software company in 2002 and since then has gone on to found several successful businesses where he was able to develop the entrepreneurial and leadership skills that have led us to where we are now. The cutting edge of AI empowerment for mid market companies from the C Suite to the Solopreneur. Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks Gary. Glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Well, this is crazy that we're talking online now and we had an office, what, five doors from each other for a while and never really even talked about it.

Yeah, I think we were Both so busy. We just said passing hellos. We kind of, oh, you know, so and so it was that. But yeah, it's really just in the past few months that we've started to have more traction with our communication and rapport.

Yeah, exactly. Well, let's do this, Chris. Let's take our audience back into your life. Let's let them get to know you. Where were you born and what were you like growing up? What were you like in high school?

I was born in Meridian, Mississippi, just a few years after they found those poll workers. If you remember the movie Mississippi Burning.

That was about the area where I was born, actually. And all that had occurred just a few years after my birth or before my birth. But most of my growing up in the south, though I'm not exclusively Mississippi in high school.

You know, this, this thing about entrepreneurship, I didn't even know what that word meant. I was just born that way. And I, I remember my first understanding of that was in the fifth grade when I was arbitraging candy. Honestly, is something as simple as that? Buying it at the tgny for X and then selling it from my locker for X plus. And I realized, like, I like this. Like, this is good, this is easy, right? I'm just, I'm seeing a gap in the marketplace and, and taking the initiative really to fill that gap. So in high school, I'm not going to say I excelled in my studies. I was blessed to not have to really work hard, to have good grades, score well on the SAT and the ACT and that sort of thing. So I was, I was a. An uninspired.

Student, I guess you would say, who didn't really equate the time that I was spending in school with any type of guarantee of success. So I wasn't.

I wasn't expecting a whole lot from my high school career. I knew that I had innately the ability to, I don't know, kill what you eat, I guess, as they say in the sales environment, and.

That it was a big world and that I needed to go out there and discover it on my own.

So if we were to have seen you in high school, what would we have seen?

Depending on the year, I was. I sported a mohawk for a number of years when I was in high school.

I was a skateboarder. And this was back in the 80s, so it was think of maybe like a. A deep south version of Spicoli from High fast times at Richmond High, I guess.

But, you know, somebody who was recognized certainly for. I don't want to go there, but certainly for being much smarter than the average bear and the school and a natural ability. I don't know if it's from growing up in the south or whatever, but a natural ability to build rapport. And I leveraged that with the relationships with all of the cliques in the school, as well as with the, the faculty and the administration and everything. Everybody knew who I was, and even though they knew I was a rascal, they held me in high favor.

So what kinds of things were you into? Were you into sports? Were you into computers?

Were you into, you know, not really computers. I played soccer, but, you know, it was one of those situations where I was like, hey, Dagel, somebody's hurt. Can you go in? It wasn't because of my athletic prowess.

I was, you know, I, I, I think I, I don't know, this is legal or whatever, but I think I got my first job at 14 in Mississippi and recognized that I enjoyed the, the ability to produce financial resources for myself and for others and.

Got a thrill out of that, actually. Way more so than doing whatever kids do on, you know, Friday nights and high school these days.

Okay, so you graduate from high school in Mississippi, off to college or no college.

I got a scholarship to a kind of an exclusive liberal arts college in Birmingham, Alabama. And full ride academic went for a year. And it was.

I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Rushmore. It's a Wes Anderson film. And at the beginning of Rushmore, it's a, it's a presentation that Bill Murray is doing. He's a big donor to the, to the school. And the advice that he, he gives the assembled audience, which is, you know, the daddy's money crowd, he says, I'm talking to those of you who don't come from daddy's money. He says, get the rich kids in your sight and take them down. And that's how he finished his, his presentation. And that's kind of what it felt like at the school where I was at. It was a lot of affluence, which I hadn't grown up around or with. And it just academically, again, it was a question of, like, why am I, what is, what is, how is this going to help me? I mean, I understood the, the, the chronology of, you go to high school, you do good, you go to college, you do good, maybe you get an advanced degree and, like, you know, life is kind of laid out before you. But I had, I had no interest in the traditional pursuit of, of that path. It just seemed like it was going to. I mean, young bull, old bull, if you know that. That little quip. I was a young bull who was ready for action. Now, I didn't want to delay my gratification. So one year in, I took the asfab, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, and scored the highest percentile that you can score. And at the time, my friend's dad from high school had been a recruiter. He's like, man, you can do anything you want. I was like, I don't want to go back to college. I was like, well, what does that mean? He said, you know, you can do this, you can do that, you can fly helicopters. I was like, that sounds fun. So I enrolled right there at the kitchen table or enlisted right there at the kitchen table with my buddy's dad, who was a recruiter, ready to go to Fort Rucker, Alabama, and learn how to fly combat helicopters, and took the physical. And they were like, oh, well, you're colorblind. Red, green, colorblind. I had no idea you can't fly helicopters. And my response was, okay, well then never mind. And they're like, no, there's no nevermind. So I ended up getting something not so glamorous. I ended up getting involved in military finance, which is a very obscure. That MOS doesn't even exist anymore. And.

You know, got. Got attached to a field artillery unit. So I did some fun stuff. But looking back, I wish I would have taken that opportunity to test myself.

A little more seriously. I mean, I can say that that there were certainly experiences that I was placed in that I had never been put in before. I had always been able to rely on smooth talking and, you know, intellect to get me out of situations, and.

If anything, that will.

Exacerbate or magnify situations in boot camp. So.

It was. But it was the first time in my life where I was having an experience with a drill sergeant in my face, like, doing his best to intimidate, scare, break me down. And there was a detachment, there was like an observation that was a me that was observing what was happening. And I don't mean I floated outside of my body, just my awareness was, oh, wow, this is interesting. Like. Like what is going on in your body right now? Which.

Has been a recurring theme in my life. And it certainly allowed for me to deal with a lot of life situations by being able to observe the situation rather than participate in it, I guess, as odd as that may sound.

So how long were you in the military? What did we.

You.

Yeah, how long were you in the military?

Two years, and then they were downsizing after that, and I took the opportunity to go chase the wind. I got out of the military and ended up in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands in my early 20s and stayed there for about five years in the restaurant business, just, you know, doing the thing, going to the beaches, dating waitresses, drinking rum, and just really, like, appreciating where I found myself in life. All the. All those suckers in a cubicle, right? And here I was and truly in paradise. And it was.

A great experience, for sure.

Okay, so you were there for five years, and then where did you go after that?

I met a girl down there who was from the Bay Area, and this was probably the late 90s. And she said, you know what? I'm heading back. I was like, well, you know, I'll go with you. I'll go learn some of this computer stuff. And I said, you know what? Here's my plan. Let's go back there. I'll spend a year learning something to do with computers. I mean, that's the. The tech area. And then I'll get rich and we'll do something, right? And what happened was we moved there. And for 11 months, I waited tables in Berkeley, taken, like, I don't know, some Microsoft certification courses. And then there was this opportunity that popped up to learn SAP, which is an enterprise resource planning software that at the time was in. It was in as much demand then as AI deployments and businesses is now. So I. So I'll go learn that. I went and did a crash course for 30 days, and I went from waiting tables to getting hired by what, at the time was Anderson Consulting and. And shipped off to London within, I don't know, 30 days of getting hired by Anderson and working on a huge, you know, probably a 200, 300, $400 million project, something huge for Halliburton UK.

I was part of the team that cut Dick Cheney's last paycheck from. They were from Halliburton so he could go and run for, I guess, vice president at the time. And that. That was kind of my first, like, big boy job and a lot of lessons learned there.

I. It was its own boot camp in a way. If anybody has experience working with, you know, some of those big consultancies, they get that young, smart talent, and they just grind the hell out of them. I moved to London. I was there. I lived in Wimbledon, you know, maybe quarter mile from the tennis center. Never saw it. Every morning I was up before it was light and I was in a car, driving to Leatherhead, I guess was the town, working in a basement of a building that had been built in the 1300s and beating up the keyboard all day long for 12, 14 hours. And just everybody that came by my desk, scared to death they were going to say, you don't know what you're doing. Huge imposter syndrome, right. And it was just again, a test in resilience and.

Wouldn'T want to do it again. But certainly crafted the person I am today in some degree by reminding me further, like, just show up and just, you know, keep, keep up, show up and keep up. And you know that you will. They're not going to eat you. So, you know, the worst that can happen is you get found out as an imposter. Because I certainly didn't possess the level of skills that Anderson was advertising that I had. And.

It just an exposure to business that was, was not casual by any stretch. It was like jumping into a raging river. And it was, I guess looking back now that I'm not having those experiences, I can say it was awesome. But at the time it was. It's pretty tough.

Yeah, but it gave you a lot of experience. Didn't it compress time for you?

You know, I realized very quickly what the tolerance was for payment when it came to specialized skills like what I had. I think that, I mean, I went from waiting tables and this was like 1998 to a six figure job. And for me, that was pretty damn good. Until I realized how much they were billing me out at. I was like, wait a minute, like I'm getting a fraction of that. And then what happened, which I fully expect to happen in the, in the AI space as well, is that there was such demand that headhunters started showing up. And they're like, you know, this, we'll get you a job tomorrow. Making double what you're making now sounded pretty good. So within six months, or no, I guess it was about nine months of working with Accenture Anderson. I was at a boutique firm. And then six months later, the same thing happened. Another firm said, hey, well, double what you're making now if you come work for us. So, you know, it was an interesting experience, Gary, because.

Sure, I took it right. I think at the time I might have been like 27 years old. I was making, I don't know, three or four hundred thousand bucks a year, something like that. No dependence. You know, I was traveling all the time, so I didn't have girlfriends or anything like that. My mom was doing missionary Work down in Honduras. So she didn't need anything.

And I remember realizing, oh, my gosh, I've got everything that I thought I wanted, and I hate it. I was making a lot of money. I was, you know, flying first class on a client's dime. I was respected by the clients, and I was lonely. And I was realized that the money didn't make me happy. And I remember I was on a project in Duval County, Florida, for the Jacksonville county school board. They were doing an SAP implementation. Turns out that school board's budget at the time was over a billion dollars a year, which blew my mind. And I saw a TV commercial. I was in a penthouse suite at some hotel, you know, midnight, working. And on the tv, pops up.

Sold geezer Carlton Sheets. If anybody knows who Carlton Sheets is, he used to do infomercials, talking about buying real estate. No money down. And at the time, I was living in New Orleans. That's where my home was. But I was never there. And I was like, man, I'd love to spend more time in New Orleans. I got friends there. It's a great city for a guy with, you know, a single guy with a lot of money. Let me do that. Picked up the phone, ordered the thing, it arrived, powered it. And one of the suggestions was to join the local real estate investors association. Now, keep in mind, I didn't know anything about it. I'd never bought a house before. I'd never. Nothing like that. I didn't know anything about debt instruments or anything. And so the local real estate investment association in Jacksonville, Florida, happened to be the home real estate association for a guy named Ron Legrand. And at the time, he may still be, but Ron was kind of one of these. And I didn't know anything about business opportunity or Internet marketing or digital marketing or direct response. I didn't. I knew nothing about that stuff. So I was like, this guy sounds like he's got some great courses. I walked into his sales floor, which nobody. Like, everybody's a little nervous. Like, is this guy upset? Because these are kind of boiler room environments, right? I walked into the boiler room, and I was like, hey, I'm ready to sign up for some stuff. I think in that they were like, okay, come sit over here. Because if anything, they try to hide where they're doing all the boiler room stuff from. And I didn't know any better. I showed up, sat down, and walked out maybe 30 minutes later with $20,000 worth of educational products purchased. And was excited and spent the next 90 days, really. And this is a pattern that's shown up in my life. Immersion Boot camp was immersion. SAP Boot camp was immersion. This was immersion. I went to every event that I could that they had lined up for 90 days and figured it out and said, let's get to work. And I think within, I don't know, the first 18 months or so, I had bought and sold about 50 single family homes in New Orleans and was really instrumental, if anybody knows New Orleans, I was instrumental in feeding the investors who re gentrified the an area called the Irish Channel down off Chapatoulas. If anybody's ever heard of Tipitinas. It's like that area when I was buying these houses, they were, it was scary and they were ugly and now it's a bit bougie. And I was a big part of that. But in the process of that, and Gary cut me off at any point if you got questions. But at the process, in the process of that, I didn't know that I was looking for leverage, but I said, man, we're doing a lot of short sales. We're negotiating with banks to get the properties for less than the mortgage amount because they're just not worth what they were mortgaged for. We were very successful with that. But it required.

A series of paperwork that had to be submitted in a very particular way. And I said, let's build some software. Actually, I had a partner at the time, I said, let's build some software to do this. And this was 2001 and it was elance. It wasn't even upwork. It was back when it was still elance. We found a team in India. They built basically a wizard where people could go onto a web page, there's some information and some forms or some fields, and it would populate exactly where it needed to go on these government documents. And they could print it out. And for us, we used it internally because our attorney was charging US$75 every time we needed to do one. We built this thing and now we could crank out 20 in a day for no cost at all. And somebody's like, oh man, can I get that? And somebody else said, oh man, can I get access to it? And my final Ron Legrand course. And the, the course I bought was one with a guy named Dan Kennedy. And it was an introduction to information marketing. It was perfect timing. And I was like, oh, wait a minute, what these guys are talking about, we can do that with our software. And immersion commenced once again. And that immersion was in the what used to be called Internet marketing. Field now they. I've cleaned it up a bit, and that's called digital marketing. But what was interesting, same thing. As many events as I could go to, as many courses as I could buy to learn how to do this. And we started selling it, and it was a monthly membership, and I had no idea, you know, how to do anything with that. But it ended up being relatively successful. I certainly wouldn't reject the, the revenue that I was making from that if I had it today. But it, it got me going to these Internet marketing events. And they, you might go and there might be 75 people or 100 people. And they ended up being people who were early in the space. And now those individuals who have stuck around are big names. Most of the names that you'd recognize as kind of like Internet gurus, right? So I knew all these guys socially. Hey, let me buy you a drink. What are you up to? What's your name? Oh, my name's so and so. You know, like, no. Had no idea who they were, wasn't looking for anything from them. They weren't anybody big. They weren't like big deals anyway. But I maintained those relationships and, and that has probably been one of the best investments that I've made because the network that I was able to build early in that space got me all kinds of opportunities all the way up to the, to the pinnacle of direct response, which I think a lot of people would agree was the company Agora. So I ran business development at Agora off and on, at different divisions there, off and on for about a decade, Some very big wins, and it came from relationships that I had made, you know, 10 years prior. So that kind of leads me to, I don't know, off and on for a decade still. Same kind of thing. Have kids, travel, move around, be the digital nomad with the kids, stuff like that. So.

Yeah, and then I was just doing some, you know, during, when, when Covid was rolling up, I was.

CEO of a finance, acting CEO for about a year of a financial publishing company. I guess they were doing about 80 million bucks a year and had aspirations to. To exit for a billion dollars at a multiple of their revenue and blah, blah, blah. And I had experience at Agora. I had gotten a lot of experience architecting growth for companies that. And removing friction in advance, like identifying where there would be impediments, solving those impediments before they arrive. So that when we did, in fact, hit that predicted wall, it wasn't like, oh, what do we do now? It's like, oh, let's go back to the plan that we set a year ago and how did we solve. Oh, we can, let's go for, you know, option B. And that was very desirable in a fast moving environment like financial publishing and.

Yeah, that leads us to Covid and a whole different story.

Yeah. So you've. So you were in the Internet marketing space for quite a few years.

Yeah, probably.

Some more active than other, but I got started in 2002 and was very active until probably, I don't know, 20, 2020.

So those of you that are in that space now or have been in the last little bit. I know Chris, you know, pretty much all the people at the highest level in that space, they were the ones that you started with and kind of grew up with.

Yeah, right.

We're all kind of in the similar age range.

Yep. For sure.

And what got you into the whole AI world, When did that happen? Was that during COVID or before?

No. So I guess kind, I mean like when did covet end? I don't know, but 2022, November 2022, the end of that month is when chat GBT 3.5 was kind of like rolled out to the world. And my first exposure to it was like AI. I'm not a technical guy. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of opportunity there, but it's not going to be my opportunity. Too bad. And it wasn't until maybe February or so and I was doing business with a guy and he was using the models to.

Doing corny stuff like, you know, I solved the secret of the universe, like whatever. And I was like, wait a minute, this guy's not that smart and he's using AI. So I really started to investigate and I like a lot of people, especially their first usage, I, I treated it like Google, right? Like I went and asked it a query and I was like, you know, Google's better. Because I didn't, I didn't understand what, what we now at my company, we, we've kind of coined a phrase that you might hear in the marketplace called thinking in AI. I didn't understand how to do that. So it was early 2023, which was last year, beginning of last year, that I thought that I was going to do my consulting but just be AI powered. Right. Like an AI enabled growth architect business consultant. So I got the domain name chiefaiofficer.com it was a premium domain. I'm sure it would be a lot more now than what I paid for it, but it was a premium domain. And I said okay, this will, you know, and I use the same argument now when I talk to coaches and consultants. If you learn this stuff, you've now distinguished yourself in the marketplace as somebody who's got a very high demand skill, right? And that's the way I looked at it. And again that, that word, leverage. I was like man, but kind of be wasting my like the, wasting this AI opportunity because I was really starting to understand the impact that could have on business. Why don't I train others, other coaches, consultants, whatever, how to do this and do exactly what I did in the, you know, in my early real estate days. Create an environment where I can have a digital asset that I.

Can fulfill for a price. And that, that was, I became a nine month effort of building out a, a Chief AI Officer certification program and establishing the International association of Chief AI Officers in the meantime. And you know, I just built what I thought was a good product. I didn't know anything about building. Like I hadn't, man, I had gotten, I'm not gonna say lazy, but money had been easy for me to make as a business development expert because like you know, before we, you know, before I moved to New Mexico where we met you, I was running business development at the largest private equity fund in Beverly Hills. So it was like it was easy to make money, right. So I hadn't really been that involved in tactical stuff for a long time. And this brought me back into course building and diving in and pushing the buttons and tasting and feeling and all the stuff again, immersion. And we planned on launching of August of last year. It didn't happen. September, October, November, December. It wasn't until the end of January I guess at the end of December, sometime in December, the course was finally ready. I had assembled a fantastic faculty graduates from mit, Sloan who are now doing big projects, MBA like people who are combination MBA and project management professional. So they were bringing that like this, this amazing framework of business centric automations to the table. Stuff that people just weren't.

It wasn't, it wasn't that information wasn't, didn't have big distribution. So I realized like we've created something pretty special.

But like most first time founders, we focused on product rather than distribution. And I'm gonna say first time founder that I got lucky. I've gotten lucky a lot in my life I guess. But the, the real estate software was.

Right time, right place and brother I think this is right time, right place again. Except I know things that I didn't know back then. So I this is going to be a very big deal. Um, so we started the certification program and have really. But you know what I did, I saw, hey, this is just like the Internet. I started reaching out to thought leaders on LinkedIn and really primarily LinkedIn. I'm not interested in TikTok and Instagram. I just don't have time for all of them. But I reached out, hey, you're in the space, we're in the space. And that domain name that I have, Chief AIOfficer.com has some implied credibility and stuff like that. Right. So, you know, I started building that. That network with people who, you know, I connect with them. And we'd be going back and forth on, on how can I help? And it was always like, like, hey, man, how can I help you? I've got a little bit of infrastructure here. We've been doing this thing. You're a solo. I've built businesses. So it came from really like a supportive. Because I play a long game now. I'm not interested in trying to make a transaction on somebody. I know that those relationships paid off in Internet marketing. They will certainly pay off as far as credibility or recognition or, hey, Chris, this thing's happening or being at an event. Somebody I know is now a speaker and he's like, oh, hey, Chris. Like, oh, who's this guy Chris? I know how that game's played. And you know, like a month later, these guys were. And gals were turning into LinkedIn top voice on prompt engineering, LinkedIn top voice on AI strategy. And so I did the same thing. And now what we're doing is.

We'Re still continuing with what we. What we. The course that we built and taught.

And man, I'd love to share some lessons that were accidental but. But kind of things that I couldn't have planned better that just organically occurred. Sure love to hear them. So people are like, well, how do you keep up with, you know, AI changes all the time. How does your course. The course teaches high level understanding of the categories of tools. AI for voice, AI for image, AI for video avatar. Like, we cover those things without getting into the nitty gritty of how to do it. Exactly. Because my intention was I was going to be teaching strategists, not tacticians. So people that could come in that were already business coaches. Again, that was our initial avatar. Business coach understands business holistically. They can come in. And if they know, oh, there's a category of tools that does this and this and this and this, they can come in and say, like, like we can get you a guy to push the buttons, but there is AI that can support this and I can, that can support this so that they could come in really and operate at a macro rather than a micro environment in the business. However, come to find out, this stuff's kind of fun. Once you learn how to use generative AI tools, you realize, man, it's not that hard. Routinely I hear from people, you know, seasoned business pros that are going through the program and they're like, man, I spent 12 hours yesterday and, and it went by like that. And that tells me that people are finding flow state right in this, I experience it myself. So we had to address that and to, to address the tactical side. We launched, we had a community, but it wasn't, it wasn't as focused as it is now. And every day of the week, Monday through Friday, we have at least one, if not more calls on topics that are addressing very time sensitive things like tools that are coming out or prompt engineering or what's the latest in being an AI mark. Like if you're, if you're an AI consultant, how do you charge? Right? Like you're not charging by the hour. I hope not, because, you know, you're, you're giving them 10 hours worth of work every hour you work or whatever. So we're addressing all these things that are popping up in people's minds, but it's not me anymore. It's now people that have gone through my program that they kind of had a penchant for this or they really liked this and they've stuck around as what we call fellows within our community and are teaching the classes for us. And they're like, they're in their happy place. They're diving into the, the subject matter, you know, and they're doing their own interviews with experts and stuff like that. So it's really become this environment of we're not teaching people how to make a bot and charge five grand and all the, you know, the, the gimmicky stuff, as a matter of fact. And I got friends that do that and I consider them friends. However, my position on AI.

Is that this is, I mean, I see it, we're living it in our own business, how profound of an impact this is to the business world. And I see people like selling pics behind the curtain and it's profane to me. It's like you've got this amazing, truly paradigm, like generational paradigm shift occurring and you're trying to sell somebody a gimmick or a, you know, get rich angle on this. It's like I just. So if, if that's what somebody's looking for, there's plenty of that out there and go for it. But that's not what you'll find with us, it's much more. So we shifted from coaches and consultants. It's just they're more than welcome. We have plenty of scaling up and, and EOS folks and stuff like that in our program, metronomics and all that. However.

What we found is that it's the non technical business professional that has really gravitated to this because they're not looking to get rich quick. Their career path has been I get a certification, next time there's a performance review, I get a raise. I do that over and over and then, you know, ascend up the corporate ladder. And a lot of them that have, you know, had a few reps at doing that thing, they realize, wow, I learned this stuff. I am, I'm indispensable to the business. The business can't afford to ignore this skill set that I've developed. And that has been huge. We've been able to attract just amazing people who, who have like realistic expectations when it comes to, they're not trying to get Rick get rich quick and make a, you know, 10 million bucks off the AI stuff, but what they are doing is they are bringing in like childlike enthusiasm and excitement because they, they've been doing things the hard way. We all have until now. And now there's if you know how to, you know, talk to the robot.

And think in AI like we call it, you, you truly, you're a universal problem solver for businesses. It's really incredible. So more or less today.

Yeah, yeah. So you know what actually is, you know, Chief AOfficer.com, like what do you actually do? If I'm listening to this right now and I'm thinking, man, that all sounds great, but like what is.

Is? I mean, I guess like the elevator pitch would be it's training and certification, primarily training and certification for non technical business professionals who recognize that this is an ascension path for them. But here's an interesting angle that has occurred. We now have all those thought leaders that I told you about that I met on LinkedIn. Well, guess what? People are coming to them and saying, hey, can you help me with stuff? And they're saying yes and yes and yes until they have to say no because they don't have bandwidth. So we are creating the one thing that they need. We're creating all of these Savvy business people were getting them way tuned up on AI, generate generative AI and business. And now those individuals are looking for opportunities within their own companies, but also externally. So we have started to partner with these thought leaders and say, listen, you've got a framework that you do for clients and you're saying no to quarter million dollar contracts that would take you not that long to do, but you just, you just do not have time. Why don't we codify, map out what it is that you do, take it out of your head and put it into a framework somebody else can, you know, adopt and we'll start, give it more, make that as a path of study outside of our core curriculum to where you can go and learn this girl's model or this guy's model. And you, the thought leader who's got all this business deal flow now can comfortably say I got help, I can start saying yes more. So it becomes this really win win. Our chief AI officers are now coming into the program. We've always taught them how to create an AI business strategy. With my background in EOS and scaling up, I knew how important strategy was and reasons why and all that. So and that was one thing that they all came through our course. They'd say, oh I've done the MIT course or I did a course through Stanford or you know, whatever. And I'd be like, man, that sounds awesome. You know, what was it like? And they said, well they taught me a bunch of machine learning and technical stuff that I don't need it. And they, I learned a lot but they didn't teach me what to do. And again accidental, I just built a course that was how I would do it. And it turns out that that was exactly what these people needed, like not just the non technical because the definition of chief AI officer that, that we subscribe to, I first heard from Peter Diamandis. We already knew it, but we hadn't heard it, you know, stated this way. He said it's not the individual who's going to come into your business and fine tune an LLM. They're not a data scientist. It's the individual who understands business and can go out into the landscape and can like see, look, look for use cases or you know, application or tools and bring that back into the business and say hey guys, we're going to do things differently in hr. Hey, I've got a great idea on how we can, you know, compress our sales cycle like using these tools and that in my mind, look, if you're General Motors, maybe. Of course you need somebody to come in and extract insight from large pools of data and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? But if you're at that level, you've got Deloitte, you've got, you've got Cap Gemini, you got whoever you want because you've got big budgets to bring those people in and let them figure it out. Some Bs, mid market, they don't get the attention of those resources, right? So what they end up doing is they got to figure this out on their own. And here's their option. Go watch a YouTube video from a 22 year old kid trying to grow a mustache that's telling you how to do, you know, like corny stuff. Maybe you catch a 30 second clip on Instagram and you're like, but there's no. Or you do the mit, not the mit, but like business people. You don't even need to understand how to, how, how an LLM works. I can go flip the light switch. I don't know why the light turns on. I don't need to. I see generative AI the same way. Now the data science side, we don't teach it. We've got plenty of resources we can refer you to who are extremely capable. But if you need those people, no exaggeration, I can go to Upwork and I can find a PhD in data science, I can find a PhD in machine learning. It's been an established career path for, you know, 20 years or whatever. But for what we teach and what businesses need, there is no curriculum there. Like even I was talking to the team at ut. They're, they're doing a marketing specific thing and they're focusing exclusively on like the data analytics side, which is awesome. In marketing you need to be able to, you know, make informed decisions based on data. But like that's just one tiny sliver if they understood how to. Okay, I'm thinking in AI, I know my job really well. I'm getting exposed to tools I'm able to make. Oh, this goes here, that goes here. They're not like, the universities aren't teaching that stuff. They're still kind of teaching that even though they're using generative tools, they're still kind of teaching the data side of things. So we're really, we're, we're like a unique gap that we're filling in the marketplace. And.

Honestly like the, the feed our Net promoter score is like a 9.89. People, they, they love what we're doing and how we're doing it. And Gary, the biggest aha. For me it was like, oh yeah, we'll create a community so that I can service those people in a one to many environment. No, they're servicing each like themselves and each other by sharing information. And they're like, they're hey guys, I just learned this thing, right? I don't have to go out and be the expert anymore. I go there and the hive mind brings it back to the hive. I'm learning just as much from people who have gone through our program or in the program as I do through any of the research that I like. And it's, it's been awesome. So it was an unanticipated enhancement.

You know, for the listeners that are not as familiar with AI. What, what is generative AI? Why, why is the word generative in front of it?

So generative means that it's the AI that can generate, AKA create new output. If you know Suno, you can create songs. If you know Runway, you can create AI generated video. If you know Leonardo or mid journey, you can create AI images. If you know how to use chat GPT, you can create ideation strategy content. Like so it's, it's AI that generates novel output. Novel meaning like unique or new output.

So when, and that's probably the, if you're walking around the office and people are talking about AI, they're not talking about machine learning, they're talking about, they might not call it generative AI, they're talking about the, the applied side of AI, right? Not, not the, the, the technology side. And again, I want people to understand if you feel intimidated by AI because you think it's a technical play, there's, there's that path. If you're wired that way, go for it. However, if you're like me and you're a non technical, you're like a business.

Impresario, I guess you are able to understand it is a tool, it's a mechanism that I can do business better. It's not like something. And there's, you know, there's all kinds of tropes that are out there about AI such as AI is going to take people's jobs. And I think the more, and this is one that I do want to address for those of you who are out there that are like, oh that's cool, we'll get some AI people, but I don't need to learn it. I want you to consider something, some research that I, I reference regularly and, and a lot of my buddies who are doing research that we look at this study with Boston Consulting Group in Harvard, it's conducted in September of 2023 and it involved about 800 of the staff at Boston Consulting Group. And they said, hey, what's the impact that generative AI is going to have on a knowledge worker? They took 400 of them, around 400. And they said, hey, go do your thing, right? And the other half they said, go do your thing. But oops, hold on a second. We're going to let you use chat GPT. Here's about 10 minutes of just familiarizing yourself with it and that's it. At the end of 12 weeks, across 18 points of measurement, the people who, the consultants who had access to ChatGPT, that's the only tool they did with no deep instruction, outperformed those who didn't on every measurement by a lot exciting results. But one of the things that they realized was that at the beginning they did kind of baseline measurements on everybody so that they could measure the improvements. What they found was that those who had scored the lowest at the beginning of this study saw almost a 50% increase in performance. So all of a sudden this one tool is taking my B and C players and moving them into the strata of a player performance. Incredible, right? For those, those thinking, well, you know, we don't, I don't need to worry about AI that much.

Let's say you're in HR and you know this study and two people come in for a job, same school, about the same time, you know, oh, have about the same experience, similar companies, blah blah, blah, everything being equal, except the one person has a certification. It doesn't have to be ours, but some sort of credential related to their use of AI in their role.

Now, does that mean they're going to get the job? There's no guarantee. However, that person certainly on paper is. It makes a lot more sense. Why? Because the performance from that study showed that AI powered knowledge workers produce 12% more, 25% faster at a 40% higher quality than they were doing without it. So if, if all the only benefit I'm getting from that person is that they can get me 12% more, 25% faster than 40% higher quality. I have a responsibility to the viability of my business to hire the best person. That person is the best candidate provided that they're a culture fit and all the, you know, all those things. But on paper, no question, there is no, like, there's no comparison. This person is a better fit. And if you were listening to this and like you hadn't Considered that go watch the YouTube videos, like join a local group, like do something to start getting yourself AI literate. Because there's going to be somebody else that comes in, is going to be somebody that you know in your business, in the company. Maybe it's somebody sitting next to you and they're going to spend the weekends doing this, or they're going to take a couple hours, you know, every night for a couple of weeks and they're going to come in and they're going to start using it. And all of a sudden leadership is going to say, what happened over here? They're producing more, it's better quality. Like they're showing up better prepared. One of the, one of the use cases that we routinely show and some of the training that we do is how do you use AI to prepare for a meeting? Right? We all have meetings, all that sort of thing. We show them three tools, give them a scenario. You've got 15 minutes to prepare for this meeting that you did not know was coming. In 15 minutes, you show up with all of the information, with insight and analysis that is expert level. And it's presented on a slide deck that's professional. And you're able to bang it out like that in 15 minutes. While the other people, they just didn't have time to do it all. They, they could do one or the other, they could do a little bit of research. They could maybe mastermind with somebody, get on the phone with somebody and get that ideation. Maybe they spent most of that time making the deck look good. The, the slide deck look good. You were able to do all three in 15 minutes. So like it's, it is not you. Buckminster Fuller has a quote, he was a futurist, you know, back in the 60s and 70s, and he said, you don't win by competing in the existing paradigm. You create a new paradigm that makes the old one obsolete. That's the idea behind creating new categories, right? This is a paradigm I'm AI enabled and I'm comfortable with the tools and I'm comfortable training other people how to use those tools. And in a business setting, right? So let's say I'm the guy that walks in and I got my certification. And now, you know, at lunch, a couple of people like, hey Chris, can you show us how to do that stuff? And I start training other people. Remember what I said in that study? The people that scored the lowest once they got access to Chad GPT saw a 50% increase. So all of a sudden I'm not just a Guy who knows the thing. I'm the guy who knows the thing and is helping other people. And guess what? The chatter is at the water cooler. Guess what? The chatter is going all the way up the line to the leadership. Oh, we've got an AI expert in the company. Oh, I didn't know that. Who is this? We've got questions at the leadership level. We've got questions about AI and we don't know who to turn to. We don't want to spend ten grand for a day for some, you know, Kenzie dude to walk in and give us the basics. Bring that guy, bring that girl into the office. I want to talk to him. Right? It's. We're seeing it happen. We're seeing it happen consistently and predictably with people who are taking the time. Again, doesn't have to be our program, but investing in themselves on learning how to use some basic, basic tools.

We're looking to see. Yeah, I can tell you are passionate about this stuff. I love it. It's fun talking to somebody who knows what they're talking about and is passionate about it. And so where do you see AI a year from now?

And that's about as far as we can go out, right? I mean, because.

Yeah.

Or can we go out five years? Or is it a year more?

So there's a few. There's a few concepts. Currently, we're operating in a phase of generative AI called artificial narrow intelligence. So what that means is that it has application in a very narrow environment. I need content creation, I need an image done. I need, you know, data analyzed, whatever. The next step from that is artificial general intelligence. Now, the definition of general intelligence is that the capability of the models is at parity, on par with how a human thinks. Right. It can reason, it can correct its own mistakes, it can do things like that. Now beyond that becomes what's called artificial super intelligence. Now, ASI is the level that it exceeds human thought on every dimension. And like every. Every discipline, every opportunity, whether it's creative, whether it's scientific, whether it's, you know, biological, it doesn't matter. It's. It's better than humans. So right now we're at a. And I. And we were early users of the tools, and this happens a lot. People say, oh, I tried that tool and it was okay. I was like, when's the last time you tried it? Six months ago. It's not the same tool. Everything in this space is accelerating, and it gets better, literally because of the way that these, these algorithms are built. It Improves every use, every time it gets used. There's some learning that occurs. So like constantly these things are improving.

In 2023 I thought we were late. I thought man, everybody's got to see the value that I see. Like and we're, it's March already. This thing came out in, you know, basically the end of November. We're late. Didn't happen. 2024. At the beginning of 2024 I was sitting in my office in Albuquerque like just working my. Because I was like man, like this is the year it's gonna pop off, it's gonna blow up. Like we gotta hurry, hurry, hurry. We worked so hard because we thought we were behind.

And although it, it didn't steamroll into businesses yet the way I was predicting, we are seeing an acceleration in this just really the past month or two of interest, not quite adoption, but now, now the discovery phase for a lot of people is like what they're feeling the way I did in 2023. Gosh, are we late? Right? So I fully expect 2025 based on the conversations we've been having, based on the consistency of anecdotal result out there from Microsoft doing research and the guy that you golf with saying oh yeah, somebody in our marketing team's using it there, blah blah blah, right? All of that combined is the zeitgeist is going to be adoption in 2025 for the way that we're talking about it in chief AI officer, the, the non technical business professional, being AI literate, being AI enabled artificial general intelligence.

It could already exist. And this is, this is what's trippy. Whenever a new model is released from ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, it's been built for a year, maybe more and they've been spending that time making sure that it's safe. They call that red teaming it like trying to get it to you know, build bombs or whatever, right? So even though the technology, the power of that technology may already exist, it's not being released because they got it all are you know, saying that they, they want to prevent Terminator, right? Like they, they want to make sure everything's safe. So we could already have that capability. But it's not being talked about because it's still being red teamed by the creators. But I would expect before the end of the decade, not just me, but most people familiar with the pace of the advancement of this technology are suggesting that by the end of the decade there will be the artificial general intelligence at a minimum. ASI people are talking about maybe 2050. I just don't see it. Because think about this. If it improves with every use, right. It just got like, it's a better AI than it was when I started that sentence. Literally, how much better? Whatever. But. But it's better. It didn't get worse, let's put it that way. So if you think about that, the moment that it hits parity with human capabilities, that very next second, it's better than humans slightly. But every second it's getting slightly even better than that and slightly better than that and slightly better than that. So.

With that being, you know, a perspective, I don't know that artificial superintelligence is going to be 2050. It could actually be the very next second after artificial general intelligence has been, you know, confirmed and recognized.

That makes sense. So you and I could go on for. Go on and on. But I know we're running out of time here. How about last question for you?

Sure.

And this is outside of maybe even AI, but maybe it's not. But what's the best piece of advice you've ever been given? Or maybe the best piece of advice you've ever given?

Oh, man, I've got a number of them. One of them, a confused mind, always says no. When I understood that, I saw patterns in my own behavior. But I also understood how important it was for me to be responsible for both sides of the communication. If I want you to do something and I don't explain it in a way that makes sense to you, it's easier to say not. Not to like, literally go, I don't understand it. I'm going to say no. But for you to just be like, let me think about it, or whatever. Right. So that's certainly one of them. Another one, Arithmetic is not an opinion. I love something. Right. But I learned this early in marketing. Show me the data. Oh, man, this is a beautiful landing page. Oh, this creative is going to kill it. Well, are you split testing it? Why would I? It's so beautiful. Let's split test it and see if, in fact the arithmetic is not going to fall in love with how pretty it is. The math, the data is going to show me which one's the winner.

And those don't have anything to do with AI And I don't know that AI is a mechanism. But we're still, as my buddy Jeff woods with his AI Driven Leader book, he calls it the thought partner. Um, so we're still the thought leader when it comes to our interactions with these tools. So if you keep that in mind and, you know, I guess.

Play a long game. Instant gratification is going to be very disappointing. Even when you get it, it's like fleeting. It's like saccharine. It's, it's, it's sweet for a moment and then it's like it's gone. So please, play a longer game.

Meditate, like, get out of your head a little bit. If you can do that. I think that you will.

Have limits beyond what the average competitor is up to because you're not reacting as much as you are observing.

Well, one last thing for you. Yeah, Chris. If there are people that are listening, coaches that are listening, entrepreneurs that are listening, business owners that are listening, and they're saying, man, I want to get somebody on my team trained or I want to do the training myself, I want to be that AI guy. What's the best way for them to connect with you for your, with your organization? Yeah, what would work best?

I'm active on LinkedIn. We, we actually have a podcast called Using AI at Work. You can listen to that on LinkedIn. Look for me, Chris Daigle. And we do a monthly, once a month, we do a three day challenge that people tell us like, we just wrapped it up last week and people tell us like they've paid a thousand dollars and gotten less information. So it's three days. On day one, we covered kind of like that use case of here's how you'd use AI in a common business scenario. On day two, we run you through exactly how to identify like, okay, well, where in my business can I use this? This is awesome. We show you how to find those and manage a pilot project and you can go to chiefai officer.com challenge and free at the end of it, we're going to pitch you the opportunity to enroll in chief AI officer. So spoiler. But it's not, I mean, we, we've done like, we're known as being extremely generous when it comes to content and training. And so we give away a lot of like, killer stuff for free.

Mm.

I love it.

You know, Chris, I'm glad we finally got to talk. I learned more today than in the years that you were right here behind me. And so, you know, thank you so much for taking the time to spend with our audience and let them learn from you. And I look forward to just kind of watching what you're doing. If you're listening and you want to watch what's cutting edge and where things are going, just keep an eye on Chris because that's what he's all about. So thank you so much for being here today.

See, everybody.

I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest, you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to why institute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez, and I'll see you on the next episode.