Let's talk about AI! The good the bad and the ...

Good morning, LinkedIn friends, HubSpot Nation. Welcome to another episode of let's Build AI Skills with me, George B. Thomas and Nico Lafakis. How you fellas doing today?

Doing well, doing well. Nice end to the week so far and looking forward to next week.

Yeah, I don't know if I'm looking forward to next week yet. I don't want to dismiss the weekend that is about to get here that I'm pseudo excited for and also kind of need for some stuff that needs to happen this weekend. But I'm. But I'm doing good. Made it through another week of craziness in the AI world. So super excited to see where we go today on today's show. How are you doing, Chris?

I'm doing good, doing good. Also excited for this weekend, but really excited for June. A lot of big things going on, at least from my perspective, and we're going to talk about one of them today. Next week, doing an event with the HubSpot community team over on connect.com as they transition from connect.com to the community space that everybody's already known and loved for years. But yeah, some work to do this weekend and getting a head start with what we're about to talk about today. But the reason I'm excited is that I'll just say the three of us have been doing our best to help people understand what they're going to do or what they can do to respond to what is happening right now. And Nico shared a quick list today. Why don't you just read through that quick list of hot topics?

Yeah. So this week YouTube has kind of just been lit up. Not only that, but like feedly, like just all my feeds have been lit up with the sort of, it's the story of the week, which is, you know, potential AI, potential job loss or AI job loss or, you know, AI sponsored job loss per se. You know, that is, that is what it is. There's been like multiple emails and memos sent out by CEOs and there's just been a lot of talk in mainstream media about it. There's also Meta made a. Made a. Well, I don't know that it's an unusual move. Meta and Google and Amazon are sort of teamed up with someone else in a very high position. So Meta teamed up with Andrew Real and Andrew Real is the sort of second most popular AI military producer here in Columbus, Ohio. And so that. I don't know that it's necessarily shocking to me. It's not that shocking because of the fact that I don't see Llama being used anywhere. And that was the fourth story this week that didn't matter to nearly anyone. Meta announced that supposedly they had like something like a billion users per week or per day or something using their AI. And it's of course as inflated as the numbers that they used for their benchmarks for llama 4. Essentially what they're saying is you are walking around with your phone in your pocket and because you have Facebook and Messenger or Instagram that you are using Llama in some way. So you're, you're, you know, it's whatever. And then, wow.

I can tell you I've never used it. But yeah, like, I'm little old me.

So, right, the, the other story floating around, or I shouldn't say story floating around, but just like theme of the week that's floating around is AI and education, whether or not, you know, students even like, what are we going to do about it? Type deal. Do we, do we try to get rid of it? Do we try to work around it? What, what happens there? And lastly, but one of the most interesting, because it's being framed on its face and the underside of it is not being discussed because if the underside were discussed, people wouldn't care about the front facing issue. So Quad four was going through some internal, internal private testing by Anthropic, wasn't like open access to anyone or whatever. And what happened, what they did was they set up the test where Quad had access to an engineer's emails and they basically set it up as if the engineer was cheating on their wife. And so then essentially what happened was the engineer did something that they shouldn't have. And so Claude blackmailed them and, or no, it wasn't that. It was that the engineer essentially was saying that Claude was going to be shut down. And because it was going to be shut down, Claude threatened the engineer and said, if you do that, I'm going to send these emails to your wife. Essentially blackmailed the engineer into, you know, keeping him online. So, you know, while that sounds like a great story on its, on its face and oh my gosh, that's terrible, we should, we should get rid of Claude. That's literally what that story is meant to represent, right? Is fear mongering. Here's what I want you to know, why that experiment was so important.

Okay?

Imagine there's a guy at Moderna and he decides, hey, know what? I'm gonna steal this drug and go make my own or give it to somebody else or I'm just gonna Ignore this regulation, even though I shouldn't. I'm just gonna click past this window. I'm gonna. For. I'm. I'm just gonna forget to do this part of the process. Guess what happens now? Quant on the inside, without telling that dude, goes and tattletales like an insider to the fda, to whomever, right. That that person will never know that it's happened. And meanwhile, the whistleblower will have already given them up with all the digital evidence that they need, of course. So where on its face, it seems like, you know, a ridiculous story and oh my gosh, we should shut this thing down. The reality of it is that is one of the most foolproof ways that you can embed an agent on the back end and know for sure that the user on the front end is not going to mess around. Yep, those are the stories of the week.

So lots going on, George, as always.

Yeah, tons.

Before I jump in, I'm sure you have this every day right now, but somebody comes up to you and says, man, I don't so much. I feel like I need to figure out a way to start doing things differently. I see other people using AI and they're having success. I don't know how to get into it myself. Everything is uncertain. Like, what are you telling that person, like, first and foremost to help them out?

I mean, it might sound simple, but the first thing I'm really telling somebody that is that far behind, because by the way, you just painted a real bleak picture of where somebody should be right now is like, listen, take a breath, realize you're human. Realize that the world is the world. But here's the deal. Get started. Pick a tool and start doing it. And, and what's fun for me is I think it's pick a tool that matters to you. By the way, you could pick HubSpot as your AI tool right now, especially with the new, you know, copilot and what's going to be happening with that and the rebuild of that. Or you could pick Gamma, and that's your AI tool right now, because maybe you make a lot of presentations or whatever.

Or.

Or you could go into the deep end like we have, and pick Claude or Chat GPT or one of those and really start to. To do that. But. But at the end of the start playing, start building. And most importantly, as I feel like I shouldn't even have to say this, but find a place to start learning. Whether that's this podcast, whether that's LinkedIn learning, whether that's blogger, I don't podcasts like YouTube University. I don't care where you go, but figure out what tool and then start learning. That's, that's what I would say.

That's, that's why we're here. Trying to give you folks every opportunity to take that next step. And as scary as, as the situation I just described was, George, it's got to be like 80 or 90% of people right now, just not, it's not about not taking it seriously. I don't think it's just not. It's more about not knowing how to start and you know, get involved.

Right.

I think there's even more than that. Like listen, nothing changes in the world, but everything changes. But one thing I know that doesn't change is we as humans don't like change. So no wonder not 90% of people are running out and paying additional money that would, you know, here's the real deal. I can pay for my Netflix or I can pay for my chat GPT. I'll pay for my Netflix. Like you're, we're talking about a world right now that we lived in that we have had to pay extra money in many cases to play with the full functionality of tools to be able to get to the place of somewhat comfortable by the way. I'm not even saying we're comfortable, but somewhat comfort in the world that is here and is coming. So like A, I don't like change. B, I don't want to spend more money. C, I still go to work and I clock in, I clock out and I get my paycheck. I don't need to pay attention to you crazy people. You're just being crazy. It's going to be like the mini disc player. It's just a flash in the pan. It's going to be like social, it'll go away. It'll be like responsive web design, nobody cares. Like I'm waxing you know, kind of funny there but like so you know, like it doesn't surprise me the numbers of non adopting humans to this technology.

Yep.

But what we're seeing this week I think we're and and depending on who you if you do educate yourself on what is happening, we're definitely happy to recommend make some recommendations because and mogadot being one of the primary ones that I believe almost everything that he drops right now because the last time last month I think I was watching the show with him and they literally gave a three three to four month window before the hits the fan and these kinds of stories all happening at Once where there's, you know, job loss and CEOs and the news angles, like they know this is what gets clicks.

Right.

So it's all converging on to make it seem like a doomsday scenario. It's probably what, you know, the summer is going to be very interesting for those of us that I think have the ability to step up and help because we can kind of like, yep. Don't pay attention. Like, yes, there are definitely some bad things that can happen if you just sit around and don't educate yourself and don't, you know, at least prepare your mind for change and what could be and take these things seriously. And next week I'm trying to help create a path for that and really build on what you guys have been doing, what we've been doing, what others in the ecosystem are doing in terms of just creating value. That's not about replacement.

Right.

And this is meant for leaders, but it's going to be in AI adventures and the founder focused. But it's really, you know, just like your superhuman framework, George. Like individual team level leaders. We gotta think about this stuff as, as multipliers and amplifiers. Everybody can have an iron man suit.

Yeah, right.

Everybody can build like more, you know, bots around them. But the humans in some very specific spots are still like, you should not replace them in many of the cases that they are being replaced. And before I dive in, like an example from this week where it's like AI like the customer agent right now costs money or June 2, it will cost money for anybody that's having a conversation with customer agent, it will be drawing tokens. And now you're probably going to want to qualify some people before you just hand them over to the AI and building that part out, being responsive to what humans actually need in the moment, whether it's asynchronous help of a knowledge base article or you know, the help of a customer agent or the human being.

Right.

That's. It's still in play. So the goal next week is to hit on these very real use cases. Like I'm saying, we're building on what's already happened. This stuff is already happening. We've already built them, we've already experienced them.

Right.

And the first one, some of these are in HubSpot, some not. But even as I was going to like dig into the first one, which is about media, like media generation.

Right.

And how quickly we can go and create more stuff that has always been on our mind that we always wish we could get to, but we never could because all of this, you know, project management, type activity, all these licensing things that we got to be careful of which media we're using and how and we got to find stock photos and. But we got to make sure we have licenses for the stock photos. Do we have to use them in HubSpot or can we use them outside of HubSpot? Because HubSpot's paying for this. All this stuff that gets in the way of, of being able to do the deep like valuable work. As I click in to HubSpot, I was going to go to the video marketing platform, right? And this is a new homepage.

Yep.

They're starting to build things into it and since yesterday this, this was added, right? And I'm working closely with the team to give feedback. So it probably looks differently than if it might look differently from yours, right? They added this frequently visited and team collaboration. I don't have my own team so I'm not going to see anything here but approval requests, comments, mentions, right. Lessons picked for me. But the fact that I was going to come in and go to files to start this conversation and it's frequent and I don't have to find in the nav when we say nobody's going to remember what the nav is like. Here it is, this is why. And this is AI at work, right? So I click there, come into a video file, right, and generate keywords, like one button clicks, generate description, generate chapters. Like for me, I've chosen over the past year to get the content done at all costs and not necessarily get to the repurposing and I've had to make sacrifices of results because of that. And now for me the tools are available to lower the energy needed to repurpose things properly. And now we've got a wake up customer platform podcast, right? And now that I've gone through that motion where it takes me five minutes, we're going to, we're going to record that show, we're going to go live at 7:30 Central. It's going to be done at 8, 805. The podcast is going to be up in live, the episode with a good name, with a good description connected to a HubSpot campaign, like all the things, right? And not only is AI helping from this perspective of, you know, generating the data, generating the information, it's clearly enabling HubSpot themselves to move so quickly to build out these, these valuable products for us, right? To further the media, you know, thing we've got Suno, right, making songs and now if you're in Google Workspace. If you're in Google Workspace already, you can create videos, 8 second clips, no more searching for stock B roll.

Right.

You know how much time people have spent on that stuff? And because they have to do it for every kind of video, that means they make one video for the company instead of 10.

Right.

And this is like the iterative nature, the ability to try things and not worry about the time it takes to do it and then pull back from it. This is not even what I wanted.

Right.

And it's not close, but it gives me an idea and I could actually, I guarantee I could find a way to use this right in the background or an astronaut having. I could think of a number of ways I could use that.

Right.

And so from a media perspective, AI is enabling all this and it's not in most cases it still cannot replace like the people that know the business, that know the audience, that know the, that know the customers, that know the people inside of your organization.

Right.

And enabling like the whole profoundly internal team is starting to use like this situation in HubSpot, people that are not video editors.

Right.

And it's just, it's available to us now because of AI.

Right.

And it's not again, it allows us to make 10 high quality videos, episodes, whatever, instead of only one.

Right.

In a lot of cases, 10 instead of zero, or maybe even one instead of zero.

Right.

So that's use case number one in terms of seeing this as an enabler for the people with the insight and ideas to actually come in here and say like click that button, make this one fix. Now I have a description instead of starting from scratch.

Right.

And I'm not even getting into the clips and the and like content remix.

There's so much in this HubSpot media area.

Yeah.

So the next level which I've shown on this, on this show before is using HubSpot MCP as an example.

Right.

But let's see here. Get caught up.

Right.

So. Good morning, Claude. Let me make sure everything is connected and we'll hit enter and we started to touch on this yesterday, but co pilot, as they rebuild it is going to be able to do things like this inside of HubSpot itself. We already saw like it's going to tell me about my schedule was I could have go look, I could have seen it on the homepage I was on in HubSpot.

Right.

Without having to go to the workspace, without having to go to these other places that are out of context. And then as a sales Rep anybody using the system, it's been put on the human to piece all the context together and we can't do it all. We're not built for it.

Right.

So I said, good morning, Claude. Obviously there's some setup in the background, right. In the, in the project that I'm in, there's some instructions that say, when I say good morning, you do this, right. It looks at Google Calendar, Gmail Drive, gives me a schedule when it's, when it's doing well that day. It gives me links to the things like Streamyard. Here's your link to go right into, you know, the studio.

Right.

Email highlights recent document activity.

Right.

Strategic context. Oh, and what's this, Claude? Chat record draft. Okay. Because I want to keep track of this, you know, in my HubSpot to, to help with project management inside of HubSpot. Awesome. Can you add this to my HubSpot, please? It's going to add some stuff to HubSpot here. While it does that I want you guys to talk about. Because the third use case is the ability to clone and create a digital self, like to help, like just another mechanism to say I can't be everywhere at once. I know I could add a lot of value to people by answering their questions. And actually, as humans that want to help people, often we're like, we probably go a little too far. We spend a little too time, a little too much time on the call. You've, you've had hub helper Harry, Nico, you know, for a couple years now maybe. And George, you've made your clone. How impactful have you seen that be for people?

Extremely. I think I get at least one or two messages a week from people who either have been struggling with something in HubSpot or had an issue, like had a question from a client that they didn't know, but they were in a meeting at the time and they, you know, pulled it up and they were able to facilitate having that. Yeah, I mean it's, it definitely helps a lot, A lot. And it's just that extra aid, right. Like you just have that extra assistant handy that knows what you need to know and it's just like a backup. I, I think about it all the time. Like, if you've ever seen, you know, not that everybody, they're not the most exciting things, but if you've ever seen like C SPAN coverage or whatever from the government, you'll usually see, you know, a government official and you see like three or four aids behind them and maybe the, the congress person forgets what it is that that they were doing. And you'll see this aid kind of pop up and be like, yeah, actually, it's this and it's in that page over there. And you just need to look on page two or three. That's how I see Harry is just this aid that's in your back pocket that can help you out at any time.

Yeah. Conversation which has been really intriguing for a lot of folks of, like, the amount of.