55: Using AI for Upscaling Your Career Trajectory with Chris Daigle

This podcast episode is sponsored by chiefaiofficer.com offering training and certification through the International association of Chief AI Officers. Interested in a new career or leveling up your value in the marketplace? Chiefaiofficer.com can help. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Okay. Welcome to the Using AI at Work podcast. My name is Chris Daigle, I'm the host and we're flipping the table a little bit. I am going to be the guest on this and I'd like to introduce. The host of today's podcast episode is Segovia Smith. Segovia is the co founder of chiefaiofficer.com and as smart about AI as anybody I know. I actually learned something from him today with that lip reading thing that was pretty cool. Anyway, Segovia, if you want to take a second and introduce yourself and then let's talk about AI.

All right. Well, it is fun. You know, after putting a year behind us in the rear view on this podcast, certainly exciting. Not only have I been a guest, but now you get to be the guest. So it'll be good to see. You know, what, what is the story behind Chief AI Officer? And I guess that's kind of a beginner question. I mean, as a Chief Product officer, what I do is, you know, look at the lens of how do we create better product? How do we create, you know, training and education that's both forward thinking. What can meet the demands of the market today and what can we, you know, look forward to as this role evolves? So what, I guess you, you started this before I got on the scene. You know, you had a kind of a year of rumbling in creating product. What inspired you to the name Chief AI Officer versus anything else you could have picked off the AI landscape?

So ChatGPT comes out end of November 2022. It wasn't until January of 2023 where I was in a meeting and some guy, honestly, he told me I used AI to solve the mystery of the universe. I was like, what? He was a bit of a goofball. So. But it opened, I was like, you were able to do what? Now obviously he didn't. He became a self titled astrophysicist, I think at that point because of his output from Chat GPT. So I said, okay, I'm gonna go try this out. This is pretty Cool. You know, what can I do with it? And like most people, I set up an account, a free account, and I didn't really know how to communicate with an LLM. So it's my first exposure to using AI. I think I asked it something dumb like War of 1812. Kind of like the same, kind of like a Google search. And okay, whatever. This is cool. I guess I didn't know how to think in AI. It's a term we use a lot in Chief AI Officer. It's when you've had that aha moment where you're like, oh. And like all of a sudden your brain goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Like, oh, can I do this? Can I do this? Can I do this? Can I do this? Right, you have that moment. And anybody listening who is, has been using the tools, you've had that moment. You know what I'm talking about? We actually have a book coming out called on the topic of thinking and AI co written with one of our chief AI officers. So didn't think much of it, but for whatever reason, I kept going back to it and I had that moment. I was like, oh. Because I was doing a lot of business consulting at the time, helping companies scale and grow, and I realized, like, oh my goodness, I can use it like this. Very similar to the concept that Jeff share, Jeff woods shares in his book AI Driven Leader, the Thought Partner. And instantly I was like, more. All these, all these clients that I'm working with, everybody, every single person in their business would get lifted up in their, their ability to ideate, to perform whatever if they knew about it. So I instantly wanted to begin sharing it with my clients. And I talked to a friend of mine at the time who was very early into like, within three months he had already. He was doing stuff that is just now being talked about with agents. Actually, he was way ahead of it. And, and he told me about like the, the impact that this role would have in businesses. And I started putting the two together. Okay, I'm, I'm coming into businesses, I'm helping them a lot. I want to bring in generative AI so that they can understand, to use it. And I pretty quickly saw that without an understanding of a business, big deal. If you know AI, it's helpful, but you don't know where to, where the pieces fit, how to, oh, in this workflow. Oh, they do it this way. AI, like. So he introduced me to this concept and just form I was like, they need to have somebody in the company who's like the AI person And if, if. And anybody listening, if you're the AI person, you think you're an expert, you know that you don't have to know at all. Somebody can come to you with a question. You can go, let's see. Well, the answer to that is like, you know how to get the information, and that's as important as knowing the information. Right. You become more of an architect rather than, you know, the, the researcher or whatever. You just happen to know the questions to answer. And it was a natural. I saw this being wasted at a tactical level. So if somebody was exclusively using it in their job, not to say that anybody doing that is wasting it, but for a company, if they had that, that, that center of gravity around the conversation of AI and the company, and that was some frontline person or just, you know, a programmer maybe, whatever, but it wasn't getting distributed, that person would shine, but the company wouldn't get the benefit. The promise that we're seeing from generative AI and business operations, operationalizing it, as my friend Rachel woods says, and it just made sense. Chief. It's a C suite role. It's a strategic role that also has a tactical understanding. And it just made sense. Chief AI officer. And then, like, within 24 hours, I heard two other people using it. One of them, Peter Diamandis from the stage at Abundance360, an event that he hosts. And this was, you know, early 20, spring of 2023. So I realized, like, okay, I'm not the only one with this idea. And I said, I wonder if their chief AI officer dot com. Right. I come from a digital marketing background. You know, if you want to leverage this identity, you want a platform on the Internet where people can go, what is that? Who is it? How do you become that? That kind of thing, right? And I bought the domain. It was a premium domain at the time. It's 10x in value since I bought it. And I ended up running into somebody at an event, and I know the date that I bought it. I looked it up and he said, oh, you know, I went and tried to get it, and it was, it was already taken. And I asked him, when did you do it? And I had gotten that domain 24, 28 hours before he had gone to try to get the same domain. So I, at that point, I knew, I like, this is a thing. This is gonna stick around. This is a, a source of counsel and subject matter expertise that companies need. So that was the inspiration.

Yeah. And I mean, like, when I jumped on and, you know, kind of got on the scene here, it was before you guys were, you're in pre. Mark, we call.

We're still developing the content.

Yeah, Pre revenue, still developing product. And I kind of bumped into you through LinkedIn, just through some networking and outreach.

Super random.

And I, I was like, saw the idea that you guys had, you had at least, you know, some stuff up on the website. And I was like, okay, this is cool. Let me go see like, how popular this is. Right? Because 10, 15 years ago, a product manager wasn't a role that anybody. It was a role people had, but not a title they had. Right. They were doing things in scrum teams. And then all of a sudden now it's like, there's millions of product managers. Every company has an army of product managers. And it's like, where does the AI fit into this? I saw that, like trajectory and so I went to LinkedIn. I'm like, okay, how many people actually have chief AI officer or C, A I O? And it was like 200, 250, 300, something like that. And I mean, now we're obviously graduating, like way more than even that as people are putting their shingle out there to say, I'm an AI expert. So why is now the perfect time for a business or an individual on a career path? Why is it the perfect time to really get into AI? Because 2023 was one kind of kernel of the seed. But it's like popcorn, right? It starts in, it's getting hotter and it takes some time before they just start popping. And 2024 was like starting, starting to see some, some early kernels. But 2025 is going to blow the lid off this. So what do you see in terms of the role of a chief AI officer as that transforms with the AI evolution?

First, I want to address something. A statistic that I bring up a lot in training that we do is from a recent Forbes article about the growth of the role of like AI being in vp, Executive director, like all those levels in companies. And the C suite role of chief AI officer had grown 428% in like 18 months or something. Right. I wonder how much of an impact of that if they went to LinkedIn and it's because we've been graduating to. Anyway, just a random thought. Yeah, right. And there's no doubt that this is something, you know, I, when I, whenever I do training, the question comes up, is AI going to take my job? It's not as much now I think people know that that's not the case, but they don't really, they did. They just know that they're safe from the robot walking in and replacing them one day. However, people haven't quite made the connection that, well, the robot's not going to do it or AI by itself isn't going to do it. But what about somebody that knows my job from another company or whatever and they know AI they're like, people are starting to wake up to like, oh, wait a minute, that's the threat. It's not. It's AI is not going to take my job. Someone who knows AI will take my job. So I think it's important just whether you want to be a chief AI officer or you don't. Hell, you don't even want people to know that you know AI. You need to know AI. Right? Like, like the category of employee, the category of business that is AI enabled, you know, doesn't even have to be like all the way through it, but they, they've introduced gen AI into some processes and marketing, maybe finance, use it a little bit. Maybe the CEOs over there rising articles, whatever. That company is operating at a different level than a company that is putting the brakes. Oh no, no one can use AI at work. And I get it. There's, there's, you know, been, I would say in inaccurate information in the current environment about security risks. I mean, it's very easy. There's, you know, simple ways to get around that. So that company that's not letting their people use it, one for one, there's people using it. The company just doesn't know about it. And that's the dangerous part.

Right?

There's no guidelines in place. Yeah, there's no, but no, no training or anything like that. So that company is operating at the status quo. The company that has any part of it AI enabled or, or AI literacy is part of the culture. That company is at status quo plus. Plus what? I don't know. But they're not at status quo. So like that concept needs to land with people for sure. Because if you are curious or you've heard about it, but you don't really think it's going to stick around or it's just a fad or whatever, whatever. I don't, I don't know what those stories are, but whatever that story is, I would tell you that prepare for disruption in your, you're like your, your reality at work because the guy next to you, the lady sitting across the desk from you, whatever, if they're using AI, they're going to be done with whatever the task was before you've, you know, cracked your knuckles to start typing. It really is that fast. So the chief AI officer role, I don't see it, I don't see it transforming like it's. First off, it's not a technical role though at least our approach there is a chief AI officer category of someone who is a data scientist or someone who has been PhD in machine learning or whatever. That's not the, that's not the real impact for the companies that we address for a big multinational billion, multi billion. Sure you need both actually. You need that technical because there's data to extract or insight to extract from your own, you know, housed data for sure. But there needs to be somebody that can translate usage into a customer service agent or a finance analyst or a human resource specialist. And that's not the same person. Our definition of a chief AI officer is it's a non technical role. It's somebody actually what they bring to the table is business experience. Way more so than any kind of like you know, they know how to fine tune an LLM. And that individual, here's how I see that role changing. What, how that role is defined is the individual who understands business and has had that aha moment about generative AI and they've started putting them together and they can walk into any department and they can say okay, how do you do this? And that person's like, oh, you know what, they could be using this tool or oh, this should, here is exactly how I'm going to build the prompt to help them do that faster. Whatever that thing is, that person is the chief AI officer in our definition. It's non technical business professional, understands gen AI and you go into any environment and go boom, use it here, hey, try it this way and all that. The only thing I would say about the role would be that it might be getting easier for that chief AI officer simply because the technology continues to improve. Any tool that we've used, I mean we've been active power users of most of the, you know, category of AI generated or generative AI tool for going on two years now. They've changed, they've gotten better. The tool, a perfect example, if you're familiar, if you're listening to this and you're familiar with eleven labs, it's a text to voice. I can type in a script, copy a script out of chat GPT and paste it in there and then I can select the voices and one of those options is for me to have my own voice. And they had a, what they call a pro Version or a fine tuned version. And I was early in. I set this thing up. I set it up about a year ago, probably no, maybe even longer than that. And it was good. But my wife knew it wasn't me, right? She's like, that doesn't sound like you. I thought it did. And somebody who didn't know me would think that it did. And then somebody that shares the co working space with me said something about. And I remembered, I was like, these things constantly improve. Let me go try it. I had just recorded a training. I took 20 minutes of that training, uploaded it into. And here's the difference. A year ago or a year and a half ago, it was minimum two to three hours recommended dialog of me talking and it was two to four weeks of synthesis before you got your. I think I got my back in 18 days or something like that. Right, 18 days, great. I was happy. But that's just the process. The other night, 20 minutes of audio and it said it can take up to two hours. I think I got it in 20 minutes about the same time. And it. That one, you cannot tell the difference.

So.

The tools are constantly changing. So it's not something. And that's a big source of anxiety for a lot of people that, you know, come to our trainings or enroll in the program. Which tool do I use? Right. Because there's so many. So may I share some advice on that? And that would be find one that works for you for the application and don't worry about all the 50 million other tools that are out there that say they do the same thing or this one's better at this. Your. The, the tool that you select will be good enough for you. You're not a power user, or maybe you are a power user, but even so it's good enough for you. And if whatever their competitor comes up with the tool you're using will most likely have it in short order. That's just how fast these things are developing.

Everybody's gotta like rise.

Yeah, yeah. So that's how I define the role. If anything it's going to get easier just because the technology is getting better for that Chief AI officer.

So let's take it down step from that. So we've got chief AI officers. Obviously that's the top of the org chart. And we get a lot of people coming through our program that are cio, you know, cmo, cfo. Right. They're coming from a different leadership space and they're moving into that like, hey, I understand, I've got a Decade or two decades of experience in a vertical edtech, medtech, you know, fintech, whatever it is. And, and they've got, you know, career advancement. They're at the top of the org chart already, but they're seeing around corners and they're looking for AI to like, you know, augment that career shift or they want to go fractional, they want to change, you know, maybe leave corporate America and go be like a consultant of sorts. If we take it down from there, the way we were talking about data, right, You've got people who are maybe in a large, you know, enterprise organization, you might have a C, A, I, O and then you've got like the AI, you know, engineer kind of side of that and there's a few people that report up to that person. But even further down when you get to VP Director level or even the ic, individual contributors, what is the AI literacy across the organizational chart and how is that changing and where that non technical role kind of comes in?

Yeah, I don't know that it would be more at the C level, less at the executive VP level, less at the vp. I don't think it's like that. I think you've got frontline users that could probably be, you know, sitting in my seat right now who. Because they got it. And I'm telling you folks, if you haven't had that aha moment yet, once you do, you're like oh, like what can I do now? Right? And that, that can happen with somebody tinkering, you know, on the weekend and they have that moment, they're like, oh, there's no way it can do this. Oh, I could use it for this. And then they just bam, bam, bam. And then they bring that with them to work. There are people at the highest tier of the business, the CEO level, that are scared to death of it, right? And there's also CEOs. I mean Jeff woods with his program covers exclusively CEO. So I, but I don't know that that like a difference would be let's say business, business understanding, like MBA level stuff at the highest level, high density of that knowledge as you go down to middle management and below it can it dilutes. There's not nearly as much or any at all. AI is so accessible, generative AI is so accessible that there is no four year degree for me to be the MBA to understand business or two year, you know, degree to get that. It's, it's. Oh, I've been, I've been using it for you know, a few days and I got it like, I mean you continue to get better but like you can use it all day long effectively after, I don't know, a couple of hours of using it. Maybe watching somebody do a training on that thinking like how to make that switch into thinking in AI.

It's funny inside of our course as a product guy thinking about reverse engineering, what's the most important pathway we solve a problem which is how do you develop a course that's all about AI, which I like to joke, the minute you press stop, it's almost obsolete. But how do you make this a course for non technical business people who are leaders And I think at every junction, whether you, you know, as individuals, depending on where they come from, they're walking through module one, module six, module eight, at some point they hit that C, A I O and like the clouds part, you know, and it's like this moment. So I feel like that's part of the journey that I want everybody to hit and they'll all trip over that line at some point in the what's relevant to their existing experience of using AI and things of that nature. Across other industries, when we think about the different categories, is there a particular business industry that's better suited? We get people that are from medical background fields or other areas. But is there industries that are more suited than others when it comes to early adoption of AI, besides just the general laggards that like to kick and drag their way into technology?

I would say that at the broadest level, knowledge works. So if you have a physical service business or a home service business, can you use it? Yeah, you can use it for creating communications with company and blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's not something that you're hammering away at all day long as if, as, as it would be with a knowledge worker. Right. So I'd start there. I would say small teams or solopreneurs, 100% because yes, you still wear a lot of hats a la the E myth from Michael Gerber talking about that. But you're thinking that way. You're not necessarily having to do the thing. Like for instance with marketing, you want to come up with an email sequence. Well, and you also have to maybe take a look at the, the finances and analyze those. Without generative AI and understanding how to use it and how to think in AI you can do all those things, but they will take, they'll take time. I have to sit, I have to think about what am I going to write. And I've written thousands of, you know, marketing emails and it's a process with this. Now, that same entrepreneur or small team can go to and say, hey, I need, you know, anything, any role. And they're going to. It may not be like here, Bing, here's the answer wrapped in a ribbon. But. But the person's not gonna have to spend as much time thinking about it if they do it all. We usually talk about an expectation for people of 10, 80, 10 when they're using chat GPT or Claude or whatever. And that's the, that's the first 10%. Is you as a human being able to type into the box the input what you want, the context if there's a role that you want it to evaluate it through extra instructions. When you're getting started, you don't know all that stuff. But after you've kind of watched enough trainings or practiced enough or seen some articles about how to prompt, you understand that there's, there's garbage in, garbage out. Accurate input result results in accurate output. So that's the first 10. That's you, that's a human, or you borrowing a prompt or something like, we have 2,000 prompts available for, for listeners. Reach out and then you hit submit. The next 80% of the work, if your prompt was good on the front end, your instructions were good on the front end. 80% of the work gets done. The next 80% leaving only the final 10%. 10, 80, 10. That final 10% is you reading the output is this good? Ah, you know what? I should modify my prompt. That's not exactly what I was looking for. Whatever. But it's not you sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and going, okay, I need to write an email. I need to write five emails, right? Or not. Sheet of paper, blank Google Doc or whatever. But it's. That would be a great place to start. Entrepreneurs, small teams, honestly, you know, cfo, the basics of analysis, but certainly asking the models, what am I not seeing? What are, what are some trends that I should, you know, what are some threads I should pull on related to these numbers? It just, again, it's cutting that time down. Marketing early users. Jarvis was, you know, early in. I think they might have been on like chat GPT 3 way before or. It wasn't even chat, I was a chat. Anyway, version 3, most of us didn't see it till 3.5 or 4, so marketing for sure. You know, honestly, doctors, I was working with a group out of Harvard Medical School and they were telling me all about how they don't call it artificial, they call it augmented intelligence. In the medical field. But the suggestion was that at some point in the future with the development of this technology, if a doctor doesn't consult an AI evaluation of their diagnosis of an individual, that they could be, as a second opinion, the doctor could be held liable for malpractice because AI is going to be, it's going to catch the human error element. So I don't know that there is a role. When you say customer service easy. I am operations easy. I am in HR easy. Like once you know how this is like perfect example of a chief AI officer capabilities. Once you know business and you know what is possible with the tools, you can walk into any department and go, hey, are you guys doing this? Well, let me save you an hour today, right? Are you guys doing this? Hey, you never have to do that again. Here's a custom GPT or an automation that was, whatever. So I don't know that there is a role that's excluded. There might be some industries that were excluded. As I, as I mentioned, like.

Yeah, yeah, I think like finance. I mean there's the, the quantitative number crunching stuff that's, you know, here it lends itself really well to the use of AI. But I think that there's a hesitancy to, you know, I know people in accounting, they tend to be like, well, we want to hang onto that, you know, three year old version, four year old version of QuickBooks for as long as we can. We're being dragged into the future. Yeah, but I'm sure that there are people that are just going to come in there on the finance side and you know, as long as they know they've got a walled garden that's safe from, you know, letting your data leak out. And that comes down to ethics, privacy and the whole nine yards which we cover in the course. What makes, you know, this program, the certificate, you know, to become a chief officer and the certificate program that we offer, what makes that different across the landscape of other AI training that you see.

Yeah, easy answer. We've had many people come through our program who've done other, you know, AI certifications or whatever and I hear some version of this. I learned a lot, but I didn't learn what to do. And our, the way that we approach things is that I, again, I can't just teach you the tools. That's great, but that's not the, that's not the whole, that's not both sides of the Oreo. The other half of that is something that we offer that people tell me they're not seeing in other programs. And that is like the, okay, how do I actually do it? Okay, great, I understand the tools. I'm going to go into the business. Then what? Well, you need to sit with the executive team and make sure that they're all, you know, that, that they understand what's possible. So they're not asking you to, you know, automate the entire business. It's not, it's not going to happen. Then you, you know, then you forecast an ROI based on some information that you ask them. And then they, they can kind of start to put some math together and go, okay, okay, is this work? Like we walk you through step by step and then what do I do? I go find the, find individuals within the company who are like, hey, I'm interested in participating in any pilot projects or, you know, helping to bring this into my department. You get those people assembled, you get them all on the same page, you start training them, they become the, like Jesus and the disciples. They're the ones that go, they're going back into their departments and saying, hey, try it this way. Hey, I just learned something at our AI Council meeting or whatever that like, we walk them through all of those things and it's stuff that you wouldn't, it's not necessarily like innate to have thought about all that stuff, but that's what took us months of development and was doing this and realizing, oh, if somebody's going to do this job effectively, they need to plan to do this, and here's the slide, whatever.

And in terms of like people, they come to us, right? And they've taken MIT courses or take any name brand off the shelf brand that everybody knows for online training. How does this program sort of come across in that space where people, I've got some money, I want to figure out where am I going to, you know, career level up? Do I put my, you know, bet on this horse or I do put my bet on that horse? And what's been our feedback, you know, from the customers that you've talked to?

Well, I'll tell you, like, you know, everybody's heard of MIT and if you show up with a certificate, it says mit. People can be, oh, okay, right. They don't know anything about it, but they don't know if it's good or bad. They just know that MIT endorsed it or whatever. But that program, I'm sure, and I'm sure it's fantastic, but that program is. Most programs think that you need to, we should at least cover what machine learning is and deep learning and neural networks. And none of that stuff matters for a user, right? Like that's the architecture of what's going on behind the screen when I push enter. You don't need to like, you're not gonna, you knowing that isn't going to impact the business one lick. They're not going to say, hey, does anybody, what do we do about a neural network? You're not going to go and roll up your sleeves and say, hold on, I've got the tools for that. That's not what this is about. And I think that most executives that go through that I would want, I would ask for my money back. Nothing against mit, but that's not like. So I need to learn some intellectual, theoretical understanding of architecture of a generative pre trained transformer. No, I need to figure out, okay, great, here's a situation. We want to increase revenue by, you know, enriching our data. We want to make better hires by faster processing of resumes so that we're not, you know, people aren't getting placed before we get around. Like you don't need to know anything about machine learning to know that. You just need to know how to go into the models. So the big difference is that ours is geared towards somebody who is ready to get down to business. Like let's use AI at work and what we hear regularly. And this guys, this is the sign of a good training wherever you go, you know, start learning about AI. If it's a YouTube video, a TikTok, whatever, you're able to put it to work as soon as you learn it, right? Like, oh, this is easy. It's not, you're not going to do anything with spending two hours going through a module on machine learning. It's not going to help you. So you know, I, I think that that's probably one of the, the things that we hear the most is that I'm not through with the course, but I'm already using AI, right? Like, thank you, I'm already, I'm getting the benefit. So that needs to be a hallmark of any, any training that you're getting. Don't, don't just sit there and watch a video just so that you can know more about how it's working. Maybe do that later if you have a deep interest. But to get results, like to start using AI at work, that is not going to help you make sure that, that it's something that if I want to sit here for 15 minutes, I can turn around and go use it tomorrow at work. If you're enjoying this Episode and want to learn more about how to start using AI at work, We've made it easy for you. For just $1, you can have full access to the Chief AI Officer community which will give you additional training, custom software, daily Training, calls on AI tools, using AI automations, getting more from your ChatGPT sessions, and the business of being an AI consultant. Simply go to chiefaiofficer.com insiders to accelerate your AI journey. Now back to the episode.

And we hear that regularly from as the product guy who interviews customers who are going through the program, going to get their caps down, graduating, going out into the workforce. I get to hear them. And a lot of times, oh, this isn't my first course in AI. I've been on this bandwagon for six months. Or I recently was laid off. X company laid off 10,000 people. I was a part of that. I've gone in and I've gone all in on AI. I went to this program and that program, the other program, and boy do I feel smart at the end of that. But I didn't really know what to do. Like once I got into your course, it was like, oh, now everything opened up. It's that C I, oh shoot, now I get how the rubber hits the road from the application of AI to the solving of an actual real business problem. I kind of think about it in regards to, and look, I got a background in programming from 20 years ago. Like I was, you know, behind the scenes on coding on some pretty cool projects in E commerce when it was first getting started. But now it'd be like taking a leader and saying, oh yeah, in order for you to hold your title in the executive suite, you must know PHP or Python or whatever the language of coding is in the day we're moving and one of the fastest growing areas because, well, who's the ones actually programming the machines? It's the programmers. Don't you think they're going to scratch their own itch? Some of the best AI uses are actually tandem coding with AI. Like, hey, I don't have to write 20,000 lines of code today. Let's have AI help me do it. And I'm just going to be checking it. It's going to do all my bugs, et cetera, 1080. But the new, the new programming language of the future, especially where leadership is concerned, is that, you know, how do you get those good inputs, the 1080, 10, you give it a good prompt. How do you look at that? And I like to think of the way we teach, like you Know, change the telescope from. You're looking through the wrong end, like flip it around. Right. I think in the case, I don't know if Jeff woods uses this analogy, but it's like where if you think of AI as an assistant, a virtual assistant or whatever, even if you think of it as an executive assistant, that's going to be the best you're ever going to get from it. But if you think of it as like a coach for somebody who's at that executive level dealing with boardrooms, dealing with, you know, multimillion or billion dollar decisions, you can get that kind of, you know, feedback and interaction with it. So great point. When we, when we talk about, like, what's the ROI for a business that's going to take the leap and either in training a CEO, like a chief, a officer of their own, send somebody, you know, to go get that title, you know, groom somebody from another role, like we're going to take our CIO and make him a caio, or for somebody who's investing in their own, like, what does that ROI look like for a business to get on board with this new role?

So I don't know the size of the business of each of you that's listening to this, but I'm going to give you some numbers that you can kind of use as a heuristic and ballpark your own roi. What we normally tell clients when we're working with them on the service side of things is expect a positive impact of 10 to 40% on any KPI where we're able to introduce generative AI. So, you know, run the numbers on any, any process in your own business and you can start to figure out what that ROI would be. There's a number of things to, to factor into it. The first off, the cost is very low for generative, like if I want to go use Watson or something from IBM and use the analytical AI, that's not cheap for me to go and sign up for perplexity and chat. GBT is 50 bucks a month and I'm like, I'm covered. So the ROI would be immense if you had, if you were able to get a 10% improvement on one process that saved, you know, an executive one hour a week and they make better decisions in the process from using the tool. The ROI is already immense, right? So the impact is, the impact should be measured. What if we did 10 to 40, what if we said we weren't able to do 10 to 40% improvement across every department in the company and then like take a Look at the payroll. Take a look at how much more sales output would happening would be happening. I mean more, you know, all like all that stuff, better hires, it would just improve the business. It's not, it's. And it's not like, oh, I thought this house was blue, now it's yellow. It's not some major change like that. It's all of a sudden drag is being removed, friction is being removed from the operation of the business and things move faster and you don't have to wait as long for that report. And hey, that's actually a pretty good idea. Where'd you come up with that? Oh, I use chat gp like everywhere around the business drag is being removed from the the business vehicle. So it's not just about the money. I mean there's certainly creating more money is, is an obvious output or result from this effort, but it's also creating more time. And one thing that gets often overlooked is creating more enjoyment. The way that we teach stuff, we do a training the two day challenge and in there we help people identify. Like I don't know where to use it, right? That's why we did this podcast. Not this particular episode, but that's why I launched the podcast. People like, I'd love to, but how do I use it right? And using AI work, we show them how to start to figure out where am I going to use a. Now that I know this stuff, this is great. I just learned a whole bunch. Where am I going to use AI? And we have them start to list out the things that are required for their role and that sort of thing and then we show them where to start. Okay, this one low hanging fruit, let's make sure. Blah, blah, blah. Here's the solution, right? So when, when an individual does that, they're usually starting with things that either require a lot of time or they, they don't like doing them. Right? But it's I gotta do this I right. So if I take that off an employee's plate or take it off a department's deliverable. All of a sudden people are like hey, like that's cool, I don't have to do that anymore or man, that just saved me a bunch of time and I didn't like doing it. So it does create more enjoyment as well. And you got happy people who are learning how to use AI in their role. They have that aha moment. They understand how valuable that skill is. Like I'm going to stick around if these guys are supporting my, you know, they let me use AI with No issues. Heck, they teach me about it. This is a good job. And I got AI doing the crap work. Like I'm happy. I'm going to stick around. So that's my thoughts.

So let's take the position of a listener for a second. So I stumbled across this or somebody recommended the podcast to me. I just typed in AI into iTunes and happen to think that the COVID art was interesting enough to press play. Now I'm 10 episodes deep here and I'm kind of thinking about. Okay, I like where you're going as an interviewer. I love the questions you ask. I love the fact that we're covering experts both on the tools SaaS side of the market as well as in the business use case, the consulting. For someone who's actually interested in venturing out and making a career lateral move or a career upward move or even just breaking out as a consultant, what's the next step to becoming a certified chief officer? How do they begin this? And what's the best way they can kind of get started?

So look, if you went and locked yourself in a cabin with YouTube and the Internet for 30 days, could you learn a lot about AI? Yes, you could maybe learn as much as I know or you know. Yes. But when you showed up, companies are, they're, they're interested, but they're not going to jump in with both feet. They want to make sure that they're not going to screw things up or AI is going to steal our data, whatever their concerns are. Right. And it's just the way, it's the way of the world. That's why people put letters after their name. MBA, PhD, MD, whatever. Right. If you don't have some sort of a credential that said, hey, some certifying body evaluated my skills to the degree that I am, I'm worthy to receive this, you know, credential companies are going to be, doesn't, doesn't mean they won't hire the tick tock YouTube person. But I would imagine that all things being equal, this one has the, the degree, this one doesn't. It's, it's a safer bet to engage with the resource that has gone through some sort of a testing or evaluation environment as compared to somebody who just learned it on their own, doesn't mean that person's not as good. So my advice would be do both. Do the YouTube stuff on your own, like continue to study this stuff, listen to podcasts, blah, blah, blah. But also if you want to leverage this into a career boost, or maybe you start taking on some clients on the side or you start doing some whatever. I mean, what they pay these AI experts and businesses is crazy. But I would find a, a way to get some sort of a, a badge, I mean, ideally a legit certification. But. But something is better than nothing, I would say so.

And, and I know that one of the roadmaps that we have out there because we, we've been doing these challenges for the better part of all of last year, 2024, I think we did 11 months out of 12, and we just finished last week doing our 13th one. We're slated for coming up on 14 in February. So the challenge, we started it as a three day challenge and the idea, we took the podcast name Using AI at Work and we kind of made it the Using AI at Work challenge. It's like, how do you actually use this stuff? Okay, it's nice to see that candy out there and somebody can whiz bang. Oh, wow, look at this new thing that just dropped four. Oh, mini or whatever. Like you kind of get the Sora of Halo effect. Oh, look what I can do. Oh, wait, it only does it for 5 seconds of video clip. But how do you actually make practical use of this? So that was kind of the idea behind the podcast as well as the idea behind what we do with the challenge. What are, you know, when somebody goes to a challenge, like, how do you even go to a challenge if somebody has never even stepped onto our website before? What's the roadmap and what does that look like? What do they learn through the process?

Yeah, I'll tell you the thing that I and sure like, it's my podcast. I want you to buy my product or whatever. That's not what this is about because the challenge is free. The thing that I like the most about it and that we get the feedback the most about is that there's a structure to it. It's not just a bunch of information. It's like a sequential. From an understanding of generative AI into hey, let's move straight into a situation that you'd be at at work and here's the tools to use for it and here's where to go. Like, go sign up for the free accounts up and start practicing with it. Okay. Then, you know, great. Now that I know I'm not scared of these tools anymore and I got my own little toolkit of AI tools, where else can I use them? Right? And then like showing them how to find those things and then, you know, well, I'm concerned that I'm Getting all this productivity game, but I haven't really. Our company doesn't have a policy in place. Right. So how to talk to the boss and show that, like demonstrate. Watch this. This is why we need AI with, with usage policies and training, of course, but like how to do all of that stuff so that by the end of this using AI at work challenge, you don't only know what tools to use, you know where to use it in your role and you know how to, I guess we'll call it change management. How to facilitate the conversations with the team or the boss about like this. It's cool. It's cool that we use AI. This is why. Let me show you. And you know, by the end of that, I'm not, I'm not pulling this out of the air is the first time we've had this happen. But on the last one, we opened up the Q and A and we were talking to people and we had two separate people say that, listen, I've been doing a lot of trainings over the past two years and this is the best one that I've seen now that like, we've, we do a good job. We know our stuff, there's no question. But I'm not, I don't have time to go watch other people's trainings and see how like, and honestly, I don't care. I know that like, we're focused on our way of doing things, but it was certainly an endorsement not to hear it from one, but from two people on the same day that, that, that was like, this is high quality training. So regardless. And listen, we have people that are already chief AI Officers. They've gone through our certification program. They're out there working with clients and they come back to the challenges every month or every week or however often you, you find yourself in the situation to attend one of our challenges. So it's not like. And we've done a good job like beginners because we ask at the beginning, on a scale of 1 to 10, put in the comments, where are you at with AI you? A 1. That means I don't know much, I'm glad I'm here. Or a 10. Hey, Chris, get out of the way. I'm going to teach this thing. And we get, we don't get tens very often, but we get somewhere between, I would say 7 and 2. And all across that spectrum, people are having the same feedback which was, oh my gosh, I learned so much. Like, we don't, we're not like, oh, and behind this wall, if you jump through this hoop, you get to see what's really happening. We don't. There's no teasers in here. It's all like, look, if you can make it for 30 minutes, you walk away. That's the way AI is. You walk away. Like, that's something I can use. Sorry, guys. Had the jet. It's an hour each day, so it's very bite size. And there's homework. And the homework is. People tell me it's fun because it's. You just learned. You watched me demonstrate, hey, I'd use that tool for this, and then I'd take that to do that. And the homework is. Every tool that you just saw me use, they're all free. They have free versions. Go sign up for an account. That's the homework. And then what happens is people get in there and they say, I'm going to try what Chris did on the. On the challenge. And they're like, oh, my gosh, it worked. So people come back. Day two, super jazz. Like. Like, guys, I got it. Like, I. I can do. I can do AI or whatever, right? And it's like that both days. So I would tell people to. You're gonna have a lot of training options. Try this out. Look, 100 money back guarantee. It's free, right? But, like, based on that feedback, based on what you've heard on this, I think that you can kind of understand that, hey, they know what they're talking about. It seems accessible. The way that they're talking about it. They're not talking about, you know, Omnithink framework was just released by a Chinese agent. I'm looking at Omnithink articles, but we're not going to talk about that stuff. And because it's free, we often encourage people. If there's other people on your team that either are interested or, you know, they're already into AI or they don't know anything about it, oops, invite them. And that's the cool thing about it, is that because it's free, like, we don't care. Bring your.

Bring your spouse, Bring your, Bring your team. We actually have chief officers that come in. They'll graduate. They'll be like, I went through the challenge. I signed up for the program. I'm now graduated, and I've been, like, blown out of my mind. I now see things. I'm almost, like, looking in ones and zeros at business problems, and, gosh, do I need to go bring, like, four of my team members so that maybe I am never intending on being a chief Officer because I'm like the owner of my 30 person company, right. But it's like, I don't want to be the only guy who knows this stuff. I need my lieutenant, my right arm, you know, my left arm. They all have to know this stuff. We've seen people come through and bring their entire department just to go, hey, just all they need to do is go through that training and it's just going to unlock new capabilities. And I think that the differentiator, like if you go to AI summits or you know, AI events and you hear people talking to, generally speaking, there's always going to be at least one or multiple talks where they're going to go into like the, the shiny tools talk. Like, okay, here's a cool tool and it's like boom, tool, tool, tool, tool. And it's amazing when you can hear about new tools, especially if you've not played with one. Like if I go to one of these tool talks and they drop, you know, 10 to 30 tools, I'll probably have tried 90% of them. But it's that one extra tool that I've never heard of that's like, cool, let me go play with that. But on the whole, I think the difference that we do and why people say, oh, I've been to two years worth of this stuff, but now it's finally clicking. We're doing that extra legwork for you to think. And this is another thing we do with smart cuts, which we don't really have time to get into. But it's this idea of marrying here's an actual business problem and here's how I use tool A and I linked it to tool B and did something else to tool C and the whole architecture of what could happen in a 10 or 15 minute experience using three or four different tools, that's kind of a difference maker. As opposed to. Well, you know, there's voice, there's video, there's audio, there's text to speech, speech to text, you know, but how do I get all this stuff to work with the real space?

Well, that's a good point. Those, those talks are fun because it's like, it can do that, it can do that. But like, okay, well how am I going to use it? Right? And that's, that's the big difference. Yeah, like we walk through business use cases. Like here's something everybody does, here's the tools that I would use and that's situation. Oh, I can do that too.

So obviously anybody that's listening, you can, you know, drop into the show notes, there'll be a link to how to get to the challenge. Yeah. If you are driving and you can just remember our brand chiefai officer.com forward/challenge that'll take you to a page where you can enroll and register. We do them pretty regularly. Outside of that, can you share? Like maybe if anything comes to mind in the last year of graduates, like some success stories, you know, something that comes to mind that's like, what are people that are kind of coming off the conveyor belt wearing their capstone graduation and going out into the workforce? Like, what are some of those success stories we're hearing that jump out for you?

So I'll start with something that's just basic. I routinely, because we're, you know, we are in communication with all the candidates and the graduates and all that stuff. And I'll check in with them. And I, I've heard this numerous times from again, not like, you know, 24 year old startup kid grinding it out under the desk, but seasoned business people with families and obligations. They're like, man, I've been at it for 13 hours today. I'm like, what? They said time has flown by. They're, they're like, it's like they, they found a toy that they had lost. They're just like enthused. And I think that that's one benefit, that that's a success story that you get reinvigorated about your work. Right. You're like all that stuff that's been loose ends in the back of my mind. Let me prompt the solution for that. Oh, let me get the answer for that being right. Right. We all of us do a success story that I think is probably one that, that very inspirational because it's very universal. Early in, one of our first participants in the certification program had a background in more like the, the design side of business. Had worked in, you know, big companies, Fortune 500 stuff, but not in any type of strategic or anything like that. Just had done a, you know, they were a more creative type, let's say. So I get a call or text me, hey, Chris, I've got an interview tomorrow. Can I after.

He's already graduated.

But he's already graduated. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. So we got on the phone, he told me who the company was. It's a company that does $34 billion a year. They big name. If I mentioned it, you'd know the company said, I've got an interview tomorrow as, as their AI strategist. I was like, dang, okay. Good job. So we talked through kind of. I was like, I'd focus on these things, you know, blah, blah, blah. Said, man, call me back after that. That's exciting. Like, the next day he calls me back. I said, how'd it go? He said, man, I got there, got checked in. They gave me directions to. I went to the office, I opened the door and there's 14 people staring at me. 14 people sitting around, you know, a big boardroom table. They'd obviously been doing something else, but like they knew I was coming to talk about AI. I was like, oof. Like, that's a tough crowd. And he said two of them were the AI experts that they had, you know, they were contracting or consulting the consultants from one of the big firms, Deloitte or Accenture, something. And I was like, okay, how'd it go? He said the interview lasted about an hour and they asked me a ton of questions. They said by the end of that hour there was no question in the room who the AI expert was. And it was not the consultant. So I was like, and this is a guy like what? Had never been a programmer, had never. I don't even know that he had really messed around with anything other than chat GBT a little bit before he enrolled in the program. And now he sits as the, I don't know if it's the AI strategist, but, but an strategic AI leader within this huge company. And he didn't know anything about AI. Not maybe, you know, he probably watched the YouTube videos on the weekends or whatever. But our course set him up and the certification gave him the credential to go and have that meeting. And like, I wasn't there. I don't know if he put the consultants to shame or anything, but it was obvious that he knew more about AI and its application in their business than the high priced consultants did. So I mean, that's a. What, what is he making? I don't know. But I would imagine if you're first off, people that know AI, like Forbes came out with an article, actually interviewed somebody that's on our board, interviewed a bunch of like, okay, I see these people out here that are putting out content on LinkedIn or whatever, like, and the lady from Forbes reached out to him and said, what does an AI consultant make? And I think that one person was charging 530 bucks an hour to do basically what we do in the challenge, honestly, like, like explain the basics to individuals or teams. Another person was charging $2,000 for a two hour Zoom training that they would do. And you may be listening to this and you're like, damn, that's a lot of money for two hours. Yeah. Thousand dollars an hour is a lot of money. However, that's the going like, they don't trust it if I'll do it for 100 bucks. Like businesses, they don't. They. That would make them nervous even if you knew the stuff again, that credential. Right. Another one would do one day hackathons. And a hackathon to us and to him is go into a company, kind of do a little training at the beginning of the day, kind of do what we do in the challenge. Say, here's some applications of tools in different departments. And then, I mean, I guess it's kind of what we do with the challenge. Get them to identify some opportunities that they think. Now that you understand it, you know what the tools can do, where do you think you could use it? Well, I think we could use it for this. And then the people actually start working on the tools and solving the problems in the room. That's what they call a hackathon. $8,000 for a day. Another Rachel, I mentioned her earlier. She and I and Kurt Malley, co host of an AI founders meet up in Austin every month. Rachel does AI services for agencies at $10,000 per month per client and has, you know, because she's using AI, a lot of bandwidth. So she's got, you know, numerous clients at $10,000 a month. And then Ashley Gross, who is friend of the family Here at Chief AI Officer Ashley, gets paid $175,000 for each project that she does. And she can simultaneously manage two or three of these with, I think her team consists of her and one other person. Now she's working with, you know, huge companies. I'm not saying that that's going to happen for everybody, but with those with that information, like, you should understand that. I mean, there's so much more we could go into about the. Here's all the data showing the demand and the gap and, you know, leadership. If you were to go behind closed doors or meet them at the 19th hole at the country club and AI comes up, they're going to go, don't even talk about it. Right. Like, they don't have an answer for that. And they're looking like. And they're like, we don't know what to do. But you show up, you've got certification, you school the consultants that are in front of them, and all of a sudden you're, you know, an unknown. Like, here's The AI guy.

Right.

So I would suggest that anybody listening to this would expect to see increase in income for sure. Is that $8,000 a day if you run one of those hackathons? Hell yeah, it is. But regardless, you're producing more, you're producing it faster, and you're producing at a better quality than you would without AI. And that gets noticed. That gets the attention of your boss, your boss's boss, your teammates, hey, Chris, can you show me how to do this? Hey, Chris. And then that chatter starts going, hey, we got somebody that knows AI. Who. Who knows AI. And right, like all of, oh, it's him, it's him, it's him. Right? They keep pointing at me, right? Like, that is a good place to be in a business, a corporate environment, a team environment, anything like that. That's a good place to be. So I can tell everybody to expect at least that.

So as we wrap down, you know, the rest of this, let me just ask, we've been doing this for a year with the podcast. What's one of the most surprising insights you've gained about AI in business through, you know, 50 odd episodes?

You probably think that you're behind right now if you're listening to this. You probably think, oh, man, like, I'm not that good at it. You're better than most. The fact that you are investing the 45 minutes, hour, whatever this is, into finding out more about AI. Other. Most people. Most people aren't doing this. The fact that you, wherever you were and you found this, you, like AI, was on your mind. So is that my insight? Is that, like, surprising? To me, no. But to you it might be. Who's listening to this? It might be, you might think, like that, that you're just like, you are in it. You are like, you've already started. And what I would tell you is you can learn even more. So and once you have that aha moment and you start using it, you're kind of like, this is fun. Like, oh, I wonder if I could do that. Wow. And you kind of feel like a badass because you just, like, you're doing more, you're doing it better, and you're doing it faster, and it's kind of fun.

Here will be my pro tip. For anybody I know there's a time and a journey, like in your AI journey. Like at the beginning of my explorative, AI and I, it feels long, long back. But in the age of era of AI, it goes quickly. And I remember, like, man, this like a superpower. Nobody can know that I know this and man, I'll just be able to crank out and I'll be like working half as much and I could do all these things. But let me just tell you, as a person who wants to go and elevate your career, you need to quickly move past that and actually go and shout from the tops of mountains, tell everybody, hey, I just took like, when you go through the two, we do either a two or a three day challenge. When you go through that, we tell people like, here's your certificate. Go put it on your LinkedIn. Go announce this stuff. Tell people around the office, hey, I just did this workshop, you know, I'm, you know, show them that you are that person. Because if you're silently trying to like, get an advantage here, it's going to be, you know, in no time, everybody else is going to be at parity with your knowledge. And you had that opportunity to get a lane ahead. It's like the old outrace or out chase the bear. Like, hey, Dave, what are you doing? I'm tying my shoes. What are you doing that for? The bear's barreling down the hill. I just got to outrun you.

Yeah, I'm not going to outrun the bear, just outrun you. I think that's a great point. The. I mean, you want to be, you want people to be like, oh, he knows AI. Like, like it's not something you want to hide. Like, you want. On every level with your teammates, you get elevated. Like, oh, that's the AI person, right? With the boss, you get noticed with clients. Like, oh, this is impressive. Oh, yeah, I use AI right With vendors, you know, like, this negotiation is rather strong, Chris, where the, like, yeah, I used AI. Like you want people knowing you're using AI and, and you start to. You're no longer a sheep in the herd. You're the, you're that one. You're the outlier, right? You're the one who knows. I'm telling you, look around your office next time you go in or join a zoom and say, how many people on this zoom that I know that I work with are like into AI, right? Maybe they're using a tool like everybody's got copilot if you're in a Microsoft environment or whatever. But not the way not. Not thinking in AI, they're using a tool. They're not thinking in AI. That's a big difference.

So fabulous. Well, this was fun. Let's do this again. I've got another army of questions. My AI Army 10 fingers yeah, let's cover podcast episode. You know, we'll do it before another hundred episodes.

Well, thanks for taking time out of the day to do this. I know we're all very busy, so everybody listening, Listen. The challenge, Chief. AIOfficer.com forward slash challenge. It's free. No. No gimmicks. And I mean, honestly, it's more than free because we end up giving you our prompt vault software on day one and on day two, we have, what, Smart cuts and prompt packs.

Unannounced goodies.

Unannounced goodies. Like, and the stuff that we're giving away, we just haven't had time to figure out how to sell it. Like, it's. It's good quality stuff, right? It's. We routinely have people. You use it and get the results that we expect from it. So it's not just like, hey, I gave you a PDF of a bunch of ideas or something. It's. It's actual things that you're able to use in your work for free that we just give you for.

For showing up.

People tell us too much. They tell us all the time, too generous. Hey, too generous.

Speaking of generous, if you don't know, head down to the show notes, because in every episode, whether it's this 1 or episode 28 or 32 or, you know, all the way through, there's actually something called a smart cut that's related to all the episodes that we cover. I don't know what the team's going to cook up for this episode. We'll give them the challenge. Wink, wink. But I would say if you wanted to go back into the books and listen to some of our earlier episodes in the last year, you can certainly get some great, good knowledge about how to, like, use some of the tools that are out there.

Yeah, please do that, because I think that you'll see, like, oh, they weren't kidding. This is valuable. Okay, great.

Awesome.

Everybody. If you're listening to this while you're driving, drive safe, walking, Walk safe, whatever you're doing. We'll see you on the next episode. Hopefully, we'll see you on the next challenge. Thank you so much, Segovia.

Cheers.

Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefai officer.com thanks to our producer Evan Desaunier for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle usingaiatwork and visit www.usingaiatwork.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.