AI for Leaders: Shift Your Thinking, Boost Your Impact

We've all heard the hype. AI is the future. But what if I told you that the way most of us use AI right now, we're really stuck in the past? You know, you might be using AI like as if you were piloting a rocket ship with a handbrake on. And what you don't realize is it might be costing you time, money, and opportunity. And that's What we're talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode of Marc Haine Live. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them create the show-stopping, jaw-dropping experience that your customers and your employees deserve. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And today, I am so glad that you're here because my guest is author and keynote speaker, speaker, Andrew Davis. And today, we are putting a spotlight on how most of us are using AI all wrong. And we're going to show you how maybe to rethink its true power and how it can completely transform the way that you lead, create, and grow your business. My one request though is please make sure that you subscribe to this podcast. And please make sure if you find it valuable, make sure you share it with your circle. I'd love for the business community to really support the work that I've been doing for the last 5 years.

5 years!

Can you believe it? We're on episode 236. It's ridiculous and it's free. So, I think we really have to face the truth. AI has exploded onto the scene faster than a teenager on TikTok. And while everyone's talking about how it's going to revolutionize the way that we work, most businesses are just treating it like some fancy version of Google. We type. It answers. We copy. We paste. We done! And that brings us to our Question of the Day. So, are you using AI to truly transform your business? Or are you just asking it to write slightly better emails? I'd love to know what your experience is with AI. Why don't you go ahead and share a link to this episode on your favorite social media platform? Hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership and become part of this conversation. As I mentioned, my guest today is someone who doesn't just talk about innovation. He engineers it. Andrew Davis is an internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, author, and creative powerhouse. who helps brands think big, act bold, and deliver brilliance. With a media kit that reads like a blockbuster resume, maybe it's not blockbuster. Maybe it's Netflix resume.

Netflix resume.

Andrew has shared his insights with Fortune 500 companies and scrappy little startups. He's not only here to hype AI but he's here to show us a little bit about how maybe we could use it a little bit better. Andrew, welcome to the show!

Thank you, Marc. This is so much fun. I love it. I love the question of the day. I can't wait to see the answers.

Yeah, just follow along, right? Hopefully, people will post it with the hashtag. So, follow the hashtag. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. So Andrew, before we dig super deep into our content today, could you just tell us a little bit about who your customers are and how you serve them?

Yes, sure. Well, at this point, I just speak and write books. So, my customers are generally people who are inquisitive and excited about transforming their business in one way or another. And over the last 10 years, I've kind of explored everything from why people pay attention to stuff with a keynote all about called the Curiosity Factor, which is all about why you and how you can earn people's attention, all the way to things like the Loyalty Loop, which is very close to your heart. It's all about how you can actually create a customer experience that makes people feel something using little micro moments and really transform the way you show up in the world. So it's a wide variety of topics, but always fun. And this year, the last 2 years, I guess, I've been spending a lot of time trying to figure out what AI's true superpower is and how we can better use it and what it might mean to the future. So, that's been so much fun.

Yeah. And it's such an interesting divergence because you talk about customer experience and customer service and that whole thing about creating experiences. But then around AI, we now have a creative medium to help make some of that come to the forefront.

That's right.

And do it so much better.

That's right. So yeah, it's taken me some time to get, you know, to get the, the tools to think like me and, and act like me because like, if, you know, even if you just say, hey, like help me with my customer experience, you get the most generic output possible. And so it's taken some time for me to really understand how to, to get, you know, get thinking that helps me do my job better in a way that feels like me and, and thinks like me and acts like me. That's what the Yeah.

So, for people tuning in right now, I get a sense that a lot of people are still really scared of all the talk around AI.

Yeah.

What should we be concerned about? What should we be kind of thrilled about? What's scary, awful, and stupid about AI?

Well, okay. As you know, I think it boils down to the fact that we're kind of— whenever any new technology comes around, you find yourself vacillating in this like rubber band tug of war between wonder and amazement. Like, you know, oh my gosh, I can use Suno.ai to create my own music and songs and mimic any, you know, genre of music I want about any topic I want. Like, this is amazing. And then, you know, 15 minutes later, you find yourself having fears and concerns over what that might mean to creatives all around the world, or maybe to your job specifically. You know, all of a sudden you'll get it to execute something that's taken years for you to kind of learn and understand. And 2 seconds later you're thinking, wow, it did a pretty good job. It's like 90% of the way there. I wonder what this means to the future of people like me or my team. Uh, so there's all these personal fears and concerns. And then 10 minutes later, the rubber band snaps you to a, a totally new place where maybe you see one of those demos for like HeyGen, which, which is basically talking avatars. You know, you can upload some of your own video or, or take a photo and turn it into a talking avatar. And it's getting so good. I mean, it's getting better and better each month. And you think, wait a second, like, what does this mean ethically? Like, in the future, if anybody can create a video that looks so real, like, how are we going to know what's real and what's not? Or, you know, I heard the Zoom CEO, Mark, the other day say that he expects in a few years your AI, like, digital persona will be attending Zoom meetings on your behalf. And the first thing I thought was like, am I going to be the only, like, old guy attending Zoom meetings and I'm the only real person? Like, how am I going to know? So, you know, essentially there's kind of 3 things we have to navigate. I call this the disruption compass, but it's basically these 3 things that we have to reconcile as any technological revolution comes around. And this has happened with every technological revolution before us. So, you know, it could be small things like GPS, the same kind of fears and concerns and wonder and, and, and ethical unease came with that technology. And, you know, big things too, like the internet. Obviously, we still haven't even figured out all the fears and concerns and ethical unease that's surrounding the internet. So I think this is what people are struggling with. And each one of those has a series of bullet point lists of things that we're worried about, like how do you protect someone's intellectual property? Who owns the content that's created by these amazing machines? Uh, is it you? Is it them? Is it something in between? You know, no one really knows. So there's a lot to untangle, but you have to have a lens through which to then look at those problems and hope to solve them.

Yeah, I think because every new opportunity creates new challenges. And so, this is no different. I mean, we saw with the strikes in Hollywood a couple years ago, right? That it wasn't always— it wasn't just— it was the writer's strike. But it wasn't just about them wanting more wages. They tapped on, hey, but what about creative ownership? And what about if they bring you in just to get your voice sample, and then they do a whole feature film with you as an avatar with your voice. And it's like, oh my goodness, never even thought of that.

Oh yeah. Yeah, well, you know, I think people haven't thought about it because we haven't uncovered the true superpower yet. You know, like that, at the end of the day, in all of these technological revolutions, when you unleash the new and unique thing that this technology enables you to do, you then see the societal transformation. And that's, you know, that happened with the printing press. You know, like Gutenberg went around for years trying to convince people to print books. And when they said, well, why should I print books? I have a scribe that can do it over here. You know, they, he said, well, look, it's faster and cheaper than a scribe. And they were like, ah, we don't need faster and cheaper. You know, we only sell 4 books a year to very, very rich people like kings and oligarchs and, you know, czars. So we don't really need to make it faster and cheaper. And it took 44 years until Martin Luther said, wait a second. Gutenberg, you're getting it wrong, my friend. It's not just about faster and cheaper book production. The true superpower is the mass dissemination of information, which had never been available to us in the history of the world before. And, you know, overnight you can write something and print hundreds, even thousands of copies and distribute it on the street. That's how you get the Reformation. You know, so I think when you, when you then understand the true superpower, it gives you a lens to say, okay, what does the true superpower mean to Actors, what does it mean to a writer or an artist? What does it mean to a business with a lot of business processes and intellectual property behind the scenes, or a newspaper and a publisher and the talent they've garnered? You know, but you need a lens through which to fix these things and think them through. Otherwise, you're just kind of shooting in the dark, and I think people end up more scared than encouraged or or clear about what the opportunity. is and what the opportunity cost might be.

Right. And what's interesting as well is we are only connecting with the new tech through the lens of what we're used to doing. I love the very first episode of Downton Abbey when the daughter goes into the grandmother's house. And she says, the grandma's got the candles all over. And she's like, Granny, we have electricity now. You can turn on a switch. And she says, No, no, I don't want this fire inside the walls. And that's right. That's the frame of reference, right? Another story comes to mind was when the fax machine first came out. And there was an executive who went to his secretary and said, can you please send this letter by fax? And so, she typed up the notes and everything, put it in an envelope, and then faxed off the envelope.

That's true.

It is true. It is true. I promise you it's true.

Well, this is, Marc, this is actually called Lumière's Law.

Right.

So Lumière's Law states that we tend to use new innovations the way we view old technology. And your 2 examples are phenomenal, by the way. You know, my favorite one actually is television. You know, when television came around, we were so excited about the fact that you could now transmit images into anybody's home over the airwaves that we forgot to think about what we should transmit. So when they were like, well, turn on the cameras, they were like, well, what are we going to show? And they were like, just turn the camera on the radio show and show the radio. The news tonight. They never looked at the camera, you know, and it took years for us to realize that this is a new medium requiring a new kind of sensibility and a new way of thinking. And then you have artists like Ernie Kovacs who transformed the way television worked forever, you know. Uh, another one I like is, you know, when the telegram— telephone was invented and then they started installing telephones in cities and all around the United States, people didn't know how to use it because they only knew how to use a telegram. So when they first heard about this— and, and a lot of times you'd have to go to the telegram office to use the telephone— they would write out what they were going to say on the phone like it was a telegram, and then when they got there They would yell into the thing because they didn't know what talking to a machine had never been done before. And they would just yell. They would say like, come fast, you know, Papa's sick. And they would just scream it into the— and then they'd hang up because they didn't realize it's all about this two-way conversation. And so, you know, this happens every time. And you were right in the introduction when you mentioned we're falling victim to Lumière's law right now. Well, with AI, I think, You know, we're using AI just like it's search. We're thinking of it as a shortcut. Instead of Googling it like we did 20 years ago, we're now ChatGPTing it. And it's just, it's like you need something, put it in. Instead of doing all the research, you just ask the question, get the content out. It's mediocre at best. Like you're saying, you cut and paste it, which is the hardest part of the job. And then you edit it to make it feel or sound like you. And yeah, I think we're falling victim to Lumière's Law in a big way.

And so, how do we know we're in that state? Because we only know what we know. We don't know what we don't know. So, how do we know we're in that state?

Yeah, well, I think first of all, you have to be aware of Lumière's Law. So, anytime new technology comes around, the first thing you want to think about with any new technology and AI specifically is like, wait a second. How are people like if you watch a YouTube video, how are they thinking about using it? And so when most people talk about prompt engineering, they're cutting and pasting a prompt and filling in some blanks from somebody else. And that's basically an evolution of search. And then you're getting the output and saying, well, it's okay, I'll try again. And you're just revising the prompt constantly to get a better output. That's just like searching, not getting the right results, trying a new search to get better results, refining the search to get even better results, and then saying, oh, this is close enough. I think I'll choose that web page. So when you find yourself falling victim to Lumiere's Law, when you see that your pattern matches an old pattern, you immediately have to just take a step back, like literally push yourself back from the desk or the technology and say, wait a second, like in order to break this cycle, the only thing you need to identify is the true superpower. And, and the true superpower has— it just has one qualifier. It must be unique, meaning we can— we've never seen this before in the history of the world. So GPS is an easy one. You could never track down to, you know, a 6-foot radius or a 1-meter radius your position on the globe before GPS existed. That is unbelievably unique, but it's not the true superpower. Like, the true superpower has to take it that step further. So, uh, like, for example, Let's do the steam engine. That's a good one. So when the steam engine was invented, you know, James Watt just said, hey, look, like, you got to get one of these things. It's more reliable than oxen and faster and better than water. And people were like, hey, look, you know, if my oxen dies, I just buy a new oxen. But it took a long time. It took about 70 years for people to realize that the true superpower is the mechanization of power creation, right? Like, you can take a machine.

Yeah.

and actually then like convert the power so that you can actually power that machine. That was transformative. And that's what meant, that's what changed the world. So when it comes to AI, I think there's like 4 things that people talk about as transformative. Um, and only one of those I think has the potential to, to be the true superpower.

And so what are those 4 things?

I knew you'd ask. Okay, let's break them down. The first one, I think that people love, uh, and if you're starting out with any of these generative AI tools, it's, it's information retrieval and knowledge extraction. People are amazed that you can just ask in natural language a question and then you get the answer right back. It's like you have a librarian in your pocket. Well, that is great and that is amazing, and the conversation piece of it is new, but the real, you know, information retrieval and knowledge extraction is not new. Like Google when they started, you know, Marc, their, their mission was to organize the world's information. This has been around for a long time, so this is not a new thing. So that one doesn't qualify. Uh, what about natural language processing and understanding? Now that is pretty amazing. Like, you, you can have a human-like conversation, it can write a story, it can draft that email to your vendor that you're angry at and make it sound nice and professional. Like, those things are wonderful. But also, this is not new. Natural language processing as a field of study, that's been around like 75 years. And the very first chatbot was available to be used in 1963. And I get it. We all have access to it now. Yes, it's better. Yes, it's faster. But again, it has to be new. This is not new. So that one's disqualified as well. Let's talk about the third one. The third one really comes down to sentiment analysis and text classification, like its ability to take a large language model and then consume anything that's been created and then really dive deep into it, try to understand the nuances, the slang, the opinions. It can even determine the intent of the writer or reader given what is being consumed. That stuff is amazing. But again, this is also not a new thing. Like, we've had sentiment analysis as a marketer— you've seen it probably for 20 years in tools— and I get it. It used to just be like, this is a positive review. Like that's all I could tell, right? Now it's better and it's so much faster and it's nuanced and we all have access to it. But again, it's not new. So that leads me to number 4. The true superpower might be, and I don't know if this is the answer, but this is what I've been exploring. It might be mimicry and imitation because never before have we had access to a tool that can in an instant, if you're just talking about text, in an instant, It can mimic and imitate a writer's style, their tone, their voice, their language. It can, it can even take a character, a fictional character, pick someone from Star Wars, and it can then write and create in the style of that character. It adapts very, very quickly to new information. So you show it a new example and all of a sudden it can adapt and mimic and imitate that. It's really unique. And this has never been available. In the history of the world. And it's not just for text. I know, you know, because a lot of us are just using it for text right now. But, you know, if you've— have you tried Suno AI?

I have, yes.

Okay. For those of you watching, or if you haven't tried it, you should try Suno. Suno is a tool that allows you to use a text prompt to generate a song. And the whole platform is designed to help mimic and imitate genres of music. So you can not— and I don't mean just broadly, like I want a country song. You can do like a country rockabilly song with a hip-hop beat. Beat, and, uh, you can just keep at— and it—

the re—

the quality is amazing. It's mimicking and imitating each of those ideas and smashing them together into something brand new for you. Uh, take video. You know, if you're going to do stylized video, you can tell it to create a, a 3-second trailer for a new Wes Anderson-style movie, and it will look and feel like a Wes Anderson-style movie. It does the same for imagery. You want it to mimic a Polaroid photo, it can mimic a Polaroid photo. You want it to illustrate in a specific style. It can mimic and imitate an M.C. Escher drawing. Mimicry and imitation like this at this scale has never been available before. And with that, when you take that as the true superpower, you say, okay, if mimicry and imitation is our lens, let's return to the disruption compass. Okay, what fears and concerns do you have personally about mimicry and imitation? It can help shape What you should be really concerned about, like okay, I don't know if I want anybody to be able to mimic and imitate me. That means we should have personal protection on our likeness being used, etc., etc. When it comes to ethical unease, like okay, well that means if it can mimic and imitate anyone, we need to have some protections and copyright for the way the styles people have invented and created, not just the work itself. Mimicry and imitation gives you a lens. for the global landscape of AI, but then also for your personal use and the way you can get the most out of it.

Yeah. But there lies the liability component as well because we have copyrights for songs, so song patterns and for lyrics. But then, when you do it in the style of Drake and Elvis Presley and it comes up with something brand spanking unique, Well, what are the copyright implications there?

That's right. Which means you need a vehicle through which these ideas can be expressed and then owned and then used. And that's why, you know, I started like, you know, the 2 points that I try to help people understand when you think of the world this way, when you think of technological revolutions this way, is that when you take that superpower and you overlay the lens of of everything you're creating, it starts to help you make sense of what legal protections other people might need, what ethical concerns you should have as you're sharing information with these tools. It makes you really stop and think what you should do. But also, you know, I think it means you need like a third entity that is you but you own it. This is why— so one of the things I, I'm trying to encourage people to do is to create digital doppelgangers. And a digital doppelganger is like a— it's basically a virtual version of yourself, uh, that mimics and imitates the way you work. Yes, there's Drew Deeney. Oh my gosh, with Cyber Mark. We look fantastic, both of us. These are— But that, Mark, that's— I'm so glad you showed that because I think in the future these are the gateway to truly monetizing and protecting all of these middle ground things. Because like when you start thinking, okay, you need this second thing, this second, you know, doppelganger, you start to realize that, okay, that's really powerful. It gives you the ability to acknowledge that I didn't create this on my own. So I didn't write the song that I used Suno to create, right? But Suno didn't create it by itself. We, we had to work together to do that. And the intermediary is the digital doppelganger. It's that person in the middle. So here's an easy example, because I think we're probably losing viewers right now because they're like, this guy's lost it. Here's what, here's, here's what I mean. Just think about emails, Marc. Like a year ago, if you were going to send an email, 2 years ago, you would sit down at your laptop, you'd write an email to Andrew, you'd hit send. And when I get the email, I think, oh, look, Marc sent me an email. Let me read the email, right? Today, that's not the case. Today, if you sit down to write me an email and you're like, you know what, I don't really know what to say to Andrew, but I want to invite him to be on my podcast, or we haven't talked in a while, I'd love to chat with him and see how he's doing. You just go to ChatGPT and you say, hey, write an email. Here's Andrew. Here's what I'm trying to accomplish. Spit out an email. Now, right now, you get that email out and you do what we were just talking about. You cut and paste it. You put it back in Gmail. You edit it so it sounds more like me, or maybe you have to insert my last name, whatever. And then you hit send, right? Now, when I get that email, because of the way the world is, I start thinking, I wonder if Mark wrote this email or if this was just ChatGPT'd, right? And we have to be transparent about it. But the thing is, it doesn't— it wasn't created just by ChatGPT and it wasn't created just by Mark. It was created somewhere in the middle. And it's okay, I think, in the future to be transparent about the fact that I didn't write this. But Drudini did, or Drudini wrote a draft and then I edited it, which is how I've been trying to treat my interactions with, with AI. It's like I wrote an article just recently for the Native Advertising Institute. And in the byline, I said like written by Andrew Davis and Drudini Davis. And then in parentheses, my AI-powered digital doppelganger. And Jesper, the publisher of the magazine, was like, I don't, we don't have a way to deal with this. I was like, what do you mean deal with it? Like, just put 2 people in the byline. Like, I don't know what to tell you.

Yeah. Well, because it scares people, right? Because you're using AI. So then, the publisher is going to be putting that into their magazine. And so now, there's a fear that it's like, well, this is content that's out there then if ChatGPT was involved, if AI was involved. So, it's common stuff out there. So, what makes this uniquely An Andrew Davis article.

Aha. And here's when you get to the crux of it. Here's— so my approach to even just using generative AI right now has been training the tool to take squirrel-sized tasks and do them exactly the way I do, thinking the way I do, um, so that it's constantly learning and constantly getting better. And so when, when Drudini and I write an article, I, it's not like I cut and paste a prompt that's like, write me a 500-word thought leadership post about fill in the blank here. Make sure to include this. Do not use this kind of, never use an orchestra metaphor. Like I'm not trying to cheat the world, but what I do do is spend a huge amount of time, the majority of the time working with Drudgini to help him understand my perspective. He even shapes and kind of, um, pushes back on my ideas, but a lot of times he's really excited about my ideas. We try to solve the real problems. And then, and that's like a brainstorming Drudini that's just about this specific topic, the future of publishing, right? And then I take what the output of that and I take it into a Drudini that's just been trained to write the way I write, to think the way I think, to structure a document or a, you know, a blog post, a thought leadership piece the way I would. So at the end of the day, The doppelganger has been trained to think like me, not just the generic other stuff, which is why I don't mind giving Drudgini credit. It's like no one else could use ChatGPT, I firmly believe, to write the same piece I wrote for the Native Advertising Institute. I mean, you'd have to train it with the same ideas and teach it to think and write like me, which is possible because you can mimic and imitate my style with enough examples, but That's where we need the help with the protection of the style and the examples, which the machine can do because we already talked about it. We've mastered natural language processing and understanding. And if it seems too close to the way Andrew writes something, either Andrew should be paid like a penny and just say, okay, that's great. Or you should have the ability to say something about it, right?

Right, yeah. Well, and it's interesting because it kind of leads me into after the break. I want to talk about some strategies about how leaders can start leveraging Power of AI because you've done some really hard work with AI in order to do this. But too many people are going to the prompt and writing something cold and then using that information.

Yeah.

So, I'd love to uncover better strategies right after this.

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Welcome back! I am speaking with keynote speaker Andrew Davies and we are having a heck of a fun conversation. I don't know, is it Because we're 2 nerds talking about AI? Or is— I hope if you're tuning in, you're getting some real super value by this. So, we talked about this idea of mimicry. But yet, we know that organizations and leaders and even their teams might be using AI the wrong way. We're not leveraging that superpower of mimicry. We're just going to it and saying, oh, I need to create a policy on safe work habits. Please generate a policy on safe work habits. And then, all of a sudden, it comes up and then you copy paste it into your document and say, okay, we have a policy.

That's it.

That's right. Yeah, look, it's actually easier than you think. So like, if you just— there's just one caveat. Let me start with the caveat. There's a 4-step process you can use. And the preface to this is, right now, the large language models we're able to interact with on Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude, any of the tools you're using, Copilot, wherever you're using at work right now, those large language models have the brain size of about a squirrel. Okay, a squirrel. Like, it's not a very big brain. It's not a human-sized brain. And so the very first step in the process is before you even open up a tool, if you want to master mimicry and imitation and leverage these tools, generative AI, to the best of its ability with its superpower, you have to select a squirrel-sized scope, Mark. That means it cannot— you cannot create something that writes everything for you, right? Like, the very first thing I tried to do was like, Oh, well, Drudini will be able to write my books. He'll write my blog posts. He'll write my LinkedIn posts, my Instagram captions. Like, this guy's going to be amazing. That cannot be right now one Drudini. So think about the threads on the side of your ChatGPT sidebar, right? Like, think of those threads as really not just a history of the chats you've had, but little beginnings of a digital doppelganger. So let's say that one time, like you were saying, Marc, you know, if you said you needed that new, you know, HR policy created for safety, you know, regulations or whatever, if you started a thread that was like, help me write a safety regulations thing, and you're like, well, that was okay when you got the output, you can go back to that and you can name it like CyberMarc's Safety Guideline Writer. Just start with the name. Now you've got a squirrel-sized scope. The next step is to first don't ask the question, write me something. Go find your previous safety policies. Just 3, 4 examples. That's all you need. Pull them out of Google Drive or your shared drive or wherever, whoever your previous person was that wrote poor ones. That's okay. Go get those. Get the best ones, the ones that are closest to what you want. And then you're going to— now you've got examples. So, step 1, squirrel-sized scope. Marc, step 2. You got to get some examples. You got to get some, some little nuts you're going to feed this squirrel, right? Now, when you open up your tool and you go back to that thread, or you start a brand new thread for this, and you say, you don't need a prompt. You don't need some giant thing you need to cut and paste. All you have to say is, hey, I really want you to write the best, you know, HR safety policies possible. I'm going to give you 3 examples so you can mimic and imitate my style. Are you cool with that? And because it's a squirrel, the squirrel always goes like, oh yeah, okay, absolutely. Like, I'm, you know, and they sometimes they'll even start writing. They're like, oh, I can write one right now. Let me show you. Like, they spit one out. Just ignore that. You just say, hey, look, I'm going to give you an example right now. And you integrate that example, give them the example, and then ask, like, what do you notice about the way we write our safety and security things? What have you learned about this? So now you're monitoring kind of what it's learning as it goes along. Then integrate a second example. He'll say, the squirrel will say, oh, are you ready to write one now? You say, no, no, I'm going to give you another example. You give him another example. Do that 2 or 3 times. And on the 3rd or 4th try or time, that's when you can move into the testing phase. That's when you can say, okay, we need to write a safety policy about X, Y, and Z, you know, wearing boots in the office with steel toes. And you can say, like, give it a shot. And it will, you'll see almost immediately it's mimicking and imitating the formatting, the style, the voice. The tone, it's the, you know, the format all the way down to bullet points versus emojis. Like, it will do a really good job. And that's when you want to take a deep hard look at it before you do anything else and say, wait a second, is there anything wrong with this? Like, maybe the length is too short. You're like, hey, look, like, these need to be comprehensive. So you need to— you don't just say make it longer. You have to say— you have to get your digital doppelganger to think. So you need to say, hey, How many words is that? And it'll spit it out and say 220. And you say, okay, can you look at the examples I gave you? What's the average length of the examples I gave you? And then it'll say, oh, 490 words. And you say, okay, great. Can you try to get to 500 words each time? And he'll say, yeah, sure. Do you want me to rewrite that? And you say, yes, please. And then I'll rewrite it. Now, at this point, you should have a pretty good digital doppelganger. However, The fourth step, the fourth like cycle process here is you got to make sure that it's if it's like if you're getting frustrated and it's not like doing it right, it usually means something that you gave it in the example it made an incorrect assumption about. So you've got to monitor what it learns, and the way you can do that is just say, "Hey, look, tell me all the things you know about writing a great." safety policy like me. And it'll spit out some things. It'll say, you like it to be short. You like it to be under 500 words. You like it to be this voice, this tone. You like to make sure it covers these kinds of things. And if you see something in there that might be off, you say, hey, tell me about the tone. The tone seems off. So, dive into that. And you'll realize that when it gave you one line about tone, it actually knows a lot about your tone. It'll say, Here's all the things I know, and you'll see one line in there where it's like make it fun and folly, and you're like no no no. You see where you said make it fun and folly? Don't make it fun and folly. These are very serious documents, and then try again, and you'll notice an amazing difference. All of a sudden, you'll see that it's starting to mimic and imitate you really well. And next time you need to write another safety document, you don't start a new chat. You go back to that left-hand chat sidebar, and you search for your digital doppelganger safety, you know, manual writer. And you just say, are you ready to write another one? And your digital doppelganger is going to go, yeah, I've been waiting for you.

Where have you been?

Like, let's write one now. What's the topic? And I'm telling you, it'll be A- to A+ content every single time.

Yeah. And so, it really is this idea that it's not about creating. It's about augmenting. This is kind of like the world's best writer's room ever.

Exactly. So, I think of this not as AI but as intelligence augmentation. So, IA. And the whole idea is that together with AI, we can do more than we could do alone and we can do it better. So I'll give you a simple example. So this is close to us, Mark. You know, we, we both spend a lot of time on the road speaking at events and we both do promo videos for events. And for 10 years, I'm going to admit something just to you guys that are watching, but for 10 years, you know, I've been writing promo scripts. Like, like a robot. It's just like I know what I'm supposed to say, and then I write it down, and then I record it, and I'm like, okay, I was good. And honestly, they haven't gotten better in the last five years. I kind of phoned it in. Sorry to all my clients. But then when ChatGPT came along, and I built my first Drudini, my first Drudini, I taught him how to write promo video scripts like me. So immediately, within 25 minutes, he could write a script that sounded like me for any event I wanted. Perfectly timed, great promotion. It's just like I was amazed, right? And it used to take me about 40 minutes to write these, but now I spend about maybe 15, 20, 30 seconds on it. And here's the thing: it's not 20 seconds telling him what the event is. Instead, we're spending that 20, 30 seconds writing better promo scripts than I was writing 2 years ago without him because he knows the basics and we brainstorm together like, "Hey, this is a fun event. It's in Nashville." Like Let's add some sort of cowboy theme. And Drudini is always up for it. He's like, yeah, let's try it. And then, you know, it comes out and I'm like, okay, that's too cowboy. Like, can you scale it back a little bit? Like, we don't need that many cowboy puns. And then he'll deliver me like A+ cowboy-themed content that is definitely better than I would have written. So at the end of the day, it is intelligence augmentation. He's like my, my best creative collaborator. And we do do better promo videos today than I was doing for years.

Yeah. And what's interesting as well is you give them the website of the organization you're speaking to and it kind of bleeds. It can bleed it all in for you. So, we're talking about our usage of AI and of course, the intelligence augmentation, how we're using it. When people are thinking about their teams, when they're in the office, they're thinking about this thing, how are they to guide their team members when it comes down to this? Like what do they need to know in order to Get their team onside.

Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head. Okay, the first thing as a leader you need to do is you need to normalize the transparent use of AI.

Right.

So, like in the US, Marc, 75% of American employees are using ChatGPT. That's just for ChatGPT. They're using ChatGPT at work, but they're not telling their bosses or their coworkers. This survey included 11,297 participants. From some of the biggest companies in the world, one of which is Bank of America, which is my bank. And that immediately got me concerned because I'm thinking, is some employee like using their work laptop and then like cutting and pasting like my banking information into ChatGPT to like output an email to sell me a loan? Like, what are they doing with this stuff? So it's concerning. And they're only not being transparent about it because I think they're scared that it looks like they've cheated. Hmm. Quote unquote. So I think the first thing you can do as a leader is start using it yourself and being transparent about it. And that leads me to the easiest thing you can do. Like Cybermark and like Drudini, if you name your digital doppelganger, you take ownership of the AI you've created to write and think like you. So I get it. If you go on Slack and you say with your team, hey, I know we were supposed to brainstorm ideas for today's 10 AM meeting. And I did it with ChatGPT, and here's the ideas I got. They're like, "Are you kidding? My boss is phoning it in with ChatGPT." That's what goes through their mind. But if you say, "I I I was preparing for this morning's meeting, and Cyber Mark and I brainstormed a bunch of ideas," two things happen. One, they start to believe that it's not just generic AI; it's not ChatGPT. It's AI that you've trained to act and think like you. You know. So if you can do that, you all of a sudden are opening the door to others. Doing the same thing. So transparency is really, really important. The second thing that I just want to mention really quickly is that if you are going to invite your team to participate, I think you should invite them to make— to be clear about what digital doppelganger stuff they should own in the process and what the company should own. So I'll give you a really good example. Example. Um, I met a woman who's a brand director of a large beer company, and she has a bunch of writers, and she doesn't— she loves working with the writers. It's part of her favorite part of her job. She doesn't want to replace her writers. What she does want to do is make her writers better at writing for her brand faster. And a bunch of these writers are freelancers, so she doesn't want to create an AI agent or bot that writes for her website. She wants to have a writer who she doesn't mind if they want to use their own digital doppelganger to help them with the writing. But she then created her own digital doppelganger that reviews and coaches these writers on how to write better in the brand voice. So for example, let's say Mark, their writer, writes a great piece for their website for a new beer they're launching. Instead of what used to happen, which is they'd email it to this woman, She'd then have to scour over it and then give a bunch of feedback like, hey, you know, don't forget we're a fun, lighthearted brand. Like, maybe you need to punch that up a little bit. So, what she's done now is she has a little digital doppelganger where they submit the work to the doppelganger and the doppelganger comes back with coaching suggestions that she would have given. She trained this doppelganger in 20 minutes at an event with me. And she's thrilled at the outcome. Like, she's so happy with what it's been able to deliver to her, which is better job satisfaction for her. Her freelancers love it because they used to be nervous to send their stuff in because they'd get the feedback. So, it's really changed the way they work. So, 2 things, be transparent about your work. And second, encourage them to separate the things that should be owned by the business and the things that they should own with their own digital doppelganger.

Yeah, because I mean, there is intrinsic liabilities when somebody's taking internal documents and scanning it into ChatGPT. Now, it's part of the public domain. And I have no idea who can access it. So, it's better to keep it private domain.

That's so true. Like I do have the button pushed on ChatGPT and Claude and all the other tools that says, please don't share my information with the public domain. But you have to trust that they are really doing that. And I've even— I, I did read recently that OpenAI mistakenly got access to some of those things. So yeah, you have to be careful, and you need your employees to know that there are privacy and there are copyright concerns. Um, look, I'm not a lawyer, but these are important, you know. Oh, we got a question!

We got a question! I want to make ChatGPT as my personal assistant.

Perfect.

And then he follows up with, how can he?

Oh, okay. All right, Pish, here's the deal. It's really easy as long as you break it down into lots of squirrel-sized tasks. So you might need, like, for example, Drew— I have one Drudini that just helps draft email messages for me, right? That's all he can do. He looks at my inbox, he tries to determine how he should respond, he writes a little response, and then he drafts that email for me in my drafts folder. And then I go look at it to see if it's worth sending or not. And I'll be honest, about 50% of the time I just have to delete it. Like, he's not that good yet because the context is so large. He can't write all my emails. However, I have another Drudini that's just trained to ask— answer questions about my digital doppelganger speech. That Drudini is very good. He responds by himself to 99% of the emails he gets, and the quality of the output is so good. So you're going to need a a lot of little digital doppelgangers that do very specific things for you, manage your schedule or your calendar. And right now, Piyush, it's really difficult to do. You have to use tools like Zapier or Make or N8N. There's all these tools that are meant to connect AI tools together to help you get the output you're looking for. And, and this is a temporary problem. I just want to say, but if you start training those digital doppelgangers right now, In a very short order, I believe by 2027, all of these tools will be consolidated in a way that allows you to do all of this without really overthinking it. They'll just need to have been trained, so you'll be you'll have a head start. So hopefully that's helpful. I I don't I I can give if Pish if you want to email Drudini, his email address is drudini@monumentalshift.com. Just ask him for the tools I use and. the YouTube videos I've created on how to do this. And he'll send you some stuff to get you started.

And we'll put the link in the show notes.

Perfect!

Yes. And so, Andrew, one of my biggest challenges doing this kind of content is that somebody will trip over the content and think, oh my God, I got something now. And they rush back to the office and they say, I have a new thing that we're going to be doing. And so, the challenge with that is I find that we do all these little band-aided things. And we don't truly commit. And because of that, we have a whole bunch of cautionaries and a whole bunch of challenges. So, when we come back, I'd like to talk a little bit about what we should be aware of as far as pitfalls and cautionaries. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back! I hope you are getting tons and tons and tons of value from today's episode. As you can tell, Andrew and I are on a mission to support businesses just like yours. So, if you belong to an organization that could use our help, or you or someone you know might be planning a leadership retreat or a conference, drop us a line. We'd love to explore how we could be of service to you and your people. Our link is in the show notes. So, Andrew, if we really embrace this new way of thinking, what kind of future really are we looking at? Because this is still really early days in this evolution, right?

Oh yeah.

So what, in your mind, what's the future looking like?

So, okay, uh, well, I'll tell you that Drudini and I have kind of mapped out a future. So it's not just my future. He and I have tried to think it through together. But here's, here's how I see it. I kind of divided into 4 different versions of, of Drudini or of doppelgangers. So like right now, we already can mimic and imitate, you know, the, the creation and generation of content and ideas. In a pretty reliable way at a very high caliber. So that's like version 1.0. It's basically imitation. All right. The second one, which I think will be by the end of the year, actually, because I see we're getting really close with what they call agents, but what I call the ability to act. So not only will it be able to imitate and, and, you know, replicate what I'm, I'm creating at a very high caliber, it'll then be able to act On my behalf, it'll understand that it can execute the next step in the process. So I'll just give you an example with the promo videos we were talking about. When I write the script, you know, with Drudini, at the end of that process, I have to go shoot the video right now. But we're very close to having tools that that imitate and mimic my video creation skills at a very high caliber, and he'll just be able to say, "Okay, do you want to turn that into a video?" And I'll be able to use a tool. To do that next, right? So that's the second piece. And I know I just gave a video example, but it could act on your behalf. Like, for example, when we were talking about with Pasai, if you, if you're thinking about the personal assistant model right now, I have a Druddini that can just draft the email, but then I have to approve and send it. Well, the next step is it'll be able to approve and send it as its own entity. Like, wait a second, this is not ready to send yet. We need Andrew's input. Or, oh, this is ready to send. I'm going to send it because I know it's good. That's pretty amazing. That's by the end of 2025. By the end of 2027, we're talking version 3.0. Now, this is when it's starting to actually understand the process where it can predict what the next step is. So, in my case, that would be like, like, Drudini would just know that I booked a new event because it checks my website and notice I put up a new event. And I won't have to create the script for it. It'll just say, hey, Andrew, I noticed you, you got a new event. Do you want me to write the script? And it'll just write the script. I won't have to go to a prompt or give it any information. Drudino will just be able to do it. And then he might say, do you like this script? If you do, do you want me to create the video? And I'll just say, yeah, it's a great video. And he'll create the video. And then he'll say, do you want me to send this video to your client? And he'll just write the email and send it. So it's like kind of a stair-step approach where he's going to have to check with me because he's predicting what you think I'm going to do next. So that is like 2027. Now, 2030, is the point at which a lot of people predict we'll have not a squirrel-sized brain anymore, but access to a human-sized brain. And that's pretty amazing. But that means at that point, he'll be able to do all of those things and completely complete the process without any interaction from me. He'll be able to basically act on my behalf. So in that same example, he'll be able to see that I got a new event, And he'll just create the video and send it to the client with an email. And the next thing I'll see is a thank you from the client that it went out great. So that's, I think, where we're headed. We've got kind of the stair-step approach to understanding that mimicry and imitation is not just about the style, the, you know, the tone, the voice, or the look of a photo or a video, but it's also the way you work. How do you act? Predicting exactly the process you take, and then not using best practices from the rest of the world, but actually truly understanding what your processes are. And if you want, asking your digital doppelganger how it could be enhanced, because at that point, it understands what you're trying to accomplish. It understands how you do things, and it's going to make only the best suggestions instead of the most generic suggestions, which is what it's doing now.

Yeah, I love that. And, you know, as you were talking, I was thinking, you know, maybe the intellectual augmentation comes before the mimicry, right?

That's good.

That's true. It's working with it to help you think, get through your thoughts, brainstorm, get out everything doing. But then, what you're talking about is at some point, it'll be ready to do the mimicry, the taking over for some of the mundane tasks that we're doing.

Absolutely.

Because both of us are speakers, my concern— I'm also working with meeting planners. And so, my concern now is What are meeting planners going to be looking for when it comes down to, I'm going to hire a speaker. We've just reduced— I mean, the kind of barrier to entry in speaking business was pretty low before. But now, anybody can go on to ChatGPT and say, oh my God! I need to talk about the social and political ramifications of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Please write me a keynote. And all of a sudden, they're going to end up with content that they'll be able to So, what cautionary do we have for the speaking industry and for the meeting planning industry on how we make sure that when meeting planners do go out on a limb to purchase services from a professional speaker, that they're actually getting intellectual property and thought leadership rather than kind of this regurgitation?

It's funny, Marc, because I haven't thought much about this.

I only think of small questions, Andrew.

I'm, I, you know, I guess, uh, I'm not sure what the answer to that is, you know.

Okay, fair enough.

Because, uh, but here, I, I'll just give you my, my thoughts briefly. Um, I think most meeting planners and event organizers know that what makes a great speech isn't just what's said, but how it's delivered. Um, And I think, you know, by 2027, we'll have the ability to coach a virtual version of ourselves that'll actually deliver in whatever way we want to deliver. So, so, you know, if mimicry and imitation is its superpower, um, I think what I'd be worried about is if somebody said, hey, we wanted to hire Andrew Davis, but he's too expensive. Um, so we found another person named Drew Jeffries, uh, who's just gonna basically mimic and imitate Andrew's style and deliver it. Uh, that, yeah, that I think concerns me. But other— I don't know, I'm not sure how to think about that. Um, I do know that— I'll tell you what I, what I have thought about, Marc.

Sure.

I have thought about— I do think very soon Drudini will be able to do his own events. Like, I mean, in, in the next year. And so I'm kind of excited about being able to be part of events that I wouldn't normally be able to do, or do 2 events in a day in a way that people will be impressed with. I don't think he'll be as good as me, but I think he'll, he'll be able to deliver something that's valuable and people will enjoy and interact in a way that's meaningful. And it might be a novelty at first, but I think it's the first steps towards an opportunity for us to reach more people. What have you thought about it, Mark? I want to know.

You know, I do. I do. When it comes down to like the digital doppelganger, the one problem I always have with digital doppelgangers is I can't help but wonder why do they always have better hair than we do?

I think it's because DALL-E and OpenAI and Midjourney Does Future Journey have a deal with Sephora? We're just trying to encourage hair growth products.

Yeah.

So, I do know like I've done presentations to the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers when, you know, and this was 2 years ago when it was first launching out and kind of going through it. And one of the jokes I did was I had a digital doppelganger kind of reading a very dry kind of thing. But the The premise of it was if the digital doppelganger can do the work, why would they need to hire us? And so, that I believe is— and I believe this with leadership, with thought leaders, anybody who's a master of their domain— that we need to keep our skills up. We need to— and to your point, we need to be able to deliver in such a way that is going to be unique solely to us. Nobody can take our stories.

Right.

Nobody could take our presence. And to your point, the digital doppelganger is pretty static on the screen.

Right now, he is.

Right now, he is. For now, that'll change. So, as we wrap up, I'm really concerned about kind of the pitfalls and cautionaries people should be aware of as they try to explore this more openly within their organizations. Because to your point, lots of people are using it now and not revealing it. How do we normalize this? And what should we be cautious of as people jump into this technology? Yes.

We touched on them briefly. And again, I'm gonna tell you, I'm not a lawyer. I don't purport to be one. And Drudini is not a lawyer either, but he purports to be one. So, that's the problem. Here's the deal. I think there are 2 huge concerns at the very outset. One is privacy. I think you need to be, you know, I am an advocate of getting more out of AI by giving more of yourself to it. I think that's how mimicry and imitation works. So if you want it to think like you, you've got to be willing to share with it the way you think or how you approach problems or exactly what you're trying to solve, your opinions and intent. So you just need to be conscientious of that at the highest level, and you need to be conscientious of it anytime you're about to cut and paste something in. Like, I'll be honest, I, I have a very wide privacy tendency, so I don't mind sharing with ChatGPT my last last, you know, Citibank credit card statement because I'm really interested in trying to determine if, if Drudini can, you know, make me more fiscally responsible. Uh, and, you know, he's pretty good at it. So my Drudini financial advisor can look at that stuff. But if you don't feel comfortable with that, don't do it. And if you're a leader who has customer data, who has, uh, corporate, you know, policies and, uh, SOPs and, and intellectual property that you don't want to be sharing, Then you do need to make it very clear and apparent to your team that this is a concern and it cannot be done. I was just on a webinar. I'll tell you one last thing very briefly about privacy, where in the chat, as I was speaking, someone revealed that they were uploading their code to the free version of ChatGPT to do debugging. And the head of IT was in the chat and immediately said, You're joking, right? And the person was like, no, it's great. It's really good at this. And the head of IT said, I need to talk to you immediately. Leave this chat and meet me on Slack. So, it's just because they haven't been clear about it, right?

Right, right.

They just assumed. So, that's the first one.

Well, and I could think of along the way internal policies and stuff is you have leaders who don't know how to necessarily do write-ups or discipline actions. And so, all of a sudden, you're using people's names and letters and track records. And I mean, this could be all of a sudden public. We don't know where it's going to be 5 years from now when somebody Googles that poor employee's name.

Exactly! So, you need to be concerned about this stuff. The second thing you need to be concerned of and make your team aware of is the copyright and plagiarism concerns. There are a ton of concerns and legal gray area of who owns what. And so you need your team to be aware of the fact that this is an issue. Like, you need to know, you as the leader need to know if you used AI to create something, not because that's bad, but we need to know how to protect it and how to make it more ours after it comes out of ChatGPT. So we can say, oh no, ChatGPT didn't create that. It might have created the draft. We created the whole thing. Whatever it is, but it's a legal gray area and there's lots of controversy about it. So we don't know where it's going to land. And the last thing I want to tell you is the plagiarism piece. Yes, this is supposed to be generative AI, meaning everything it creates is supposed to be unique to you, your situation, and your conversation. I don't believe that's the case. For example, I asked it— I've asked a number of tools to make up a case study of a fictional thing. Right? And in like 8 out of the 12 tries, the the person they chose to be in the case study was a person named Sarah Chen. Now I don't know who Sarah Chen is, but this is a fictional case study I asked it to make up on numerous occasions on different days using very different tools, and it still gave me the same name. That's not original, and that might be plagiarism. I don't know how, but it just shows you that it's. Possible that it's pulling stuff from somewhere, and it is possible that it's using somebody else's words or imagery or style in a way that is a legal problem. So you— again, it comes back to transparency. Encourage your team to share these things because these are real legal concerns that could affect them, their work life, and the business itself. So if those are the biggest pitfalls I think in front of us, um, I do think Thinking like a digital doppelganger helps you navigate some of those and mitigate them because you can say it was written by Drudini Davis or it was written by Cybermark, whatever your digital doppelganger is, because then it gives the organization a clear way to delineate between what work you did on your own, what you two did together, and what the organization created as well. So, uh, I encourage you to just be clear and transparent, uh, with your team so they feel they can do the same with you.

I love that. Andrew, can you tell everybody how they can get a hold of you if this resonated and they want your help?

Well, the easiest way is to find me on LinkedIn, Andrew Davis. If you search Andrew Davis speaker or Andrew Davis author, I'm the only one on LinkedIn that's an Andrew Davis with a bow tie. Or you can find me at akadrewdavis.com. That's my website. But yeah, LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. Or you can email Drew Deeny. And if he doesn't know the answer to someone, something, he usually pings me and says, I tried to answer this email but I don't think I did it right. Please try to get in touch with this person. And his email address is drudini@monumentalshift.com.

Terrific! Andrew, thank you very much. As we wrap up, do you have any last thoughts about what we've been talking about today?

Oh, I would just say don't just chat with ChatGPT. Try to chisel it into a digital doppelganger that really truly reflects the quality of work you already do in a way that you two can work together productively and do better things together than you could do on your own.

Andrew, thank you so much. This has been such a great— I knew when you said yes to coming on the podcast, I knew we were going to have a lot of fun. And we did. And I hope people got huge value. Thank you so much for doing this with me today. Thank you. Bye everyone!

Appreciate it.

If you have any questions about today's episode, or maybe you're thinking, hey, we could really use a complimentary 30-minute brainstorming session with Marc or Cyber Marc. Good news! You can snag a spot on my online calendar. The link is below. It's the one marked meetwith.marchaine.com and you're all set to go. As always, I am at your service. And if you haven't done so yet, make sure you subscribe Subscribe to this podcast and follow me on social media. We put out all sorts of great content. And of course, you'll get notifications when we have new experts coming on each and every week. Experts just like Andrew Davis. So, join me, won't you? My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception.