Day of the I ️ AI Challenge : Sales

¡Hola! Hey everybody, I'm super excited to be here with you today. Um, we're just getting started, we're actually a little bit early, so I wanted to give people a chance chance to join in. I'm going to give you a lay of the land, a little bit about what we're going to do here on the challenge over the next 5 days. Ah, but don't worry, we are going to be sharing a bunch of things across a bunch of topics. For those of you in my VIPs, we will have a Zoom tomorrow. Today I had a, uh, someone I wanted to involve and they could not do the Zoom thing, so I decided instead that we would just go live today. And it's great. It's day 1. This way you can invite anyone you think might be interested in joining us. Also, I'll be keeping an eye on the chat. We are live streaming across, I don't know, I think 8 or 9 different platforms. So please be aware, I'm going to do my best to keep track of the chats across all those different platforms. But super excited. You'll notice here we have the QR code that is at the top. That's our community code. It is the iHeartAI community. It is a free community. It's hosted on Skool, and this gives us a chance to post all of the great things that we come across as a community, right? It's not— it, of course, is a— it's led by me and my team, but we moderate it. We make sure it's safe and not full of any kind of nonsense or spam, but We also encourage everyone who participates in the community to share what they're learning as well. So it ends up being this incredibly enriching experience. So welcome, very excited to see you all here. And we're going to get started in just, oh my goodness, a minute or so. And what I want to do is just first give you a sense of how the, the morning is going to run. And some of you might be catching this on the replay. And actually, if you catch this live, just put #live right into the chat so I know you're here. And of course, so that other people know you were here live. But if you're watching on the replay, just put #replay. You will not be alone. Most of my viewers actually watch this on the replay. You'll also notice the orientation for today. I'm trying to make it as accessible as possible. Those of you on your desktop computer computer, hopefully we'll be able to see it just fine, but it is actually oriented for mobile. So we found that about 85% of the people— what's up, Dan? Um, 85% of the people that attend my sessions happen to do it from their phone. So though I won't make you call it out, because of that, we decided to go ahead and, um, and do it in portrait mode to make it easy for everyone. So Let me know later, maybe at the end of today's session, if you hated it in portrait and we'll, we'll see if we can change it up. I'm definitely, I'm super coachable. If you want to give me some feedback, I'll try to change it on the fly as we present this content. Also, this will be recorded. Your comments will not be recorded, but the content will be recorded and it'll be made available in our AI Leadership Community. So just, uh, just so you know. Um, Julia, what's up? Hi, Sky, my friend. Francois, thank you all for joining. This is awesome. I'm super excited. All right, all cool. So the funny thing about the platform that I'm using to stream is that it never tells me how many people I have, so I'll just have to ask you questions from now, from time to time, and ask you to respond via chat just so I know that you're here. Though I do know you're here because I have other mechanisms in place, but just so I could have some interaction because it's way more fun. I wish we were in a classroom together. If we were in like a room full of big round tables and we could hang out together, that would be awesome. Maybe that's coming for some of you. As a matter of fact, maybe I'll use this few minutes as we get started here to share some announcements that we have coming up in South Florida, which is where I'm from. In South Florida, I am the the host and organizer of the South Florida Generative AI User Group. And we meet the first Saturday of every month. So if you wanna come and see us live, feel free, we'd love to have you. It is a meetup on meetup.com. So you could just go and search for South Florida GenAI User Group and you'll find us. We're the picture of a beautifully diverse and amazing group of people, super happy on the front page. So if you don't see that, it's probably not mine. The second thing is this Saturday we're actually doing two things. One, in South Florida, we are hosting at Miami Dade College, we're hosting an Advancing Women in AI Leadership course. Now, this course is actually going to be recorded and we'll end up bundling it and making it available for people. But for right now, those of you who can attend in person, you'll get a chance to sit in the class, take it live, and it's free. I just want a chance for people anywhere within my own community to be able to access this content where others will probably later. So super exciting if you happen to be in the area. That's from 9:30 AM to 1:30. And the reason it ends at 1:30 is because at 2 o'clock some of you will be joining me for Pi and AI. This is a networking session that we do from 2 to 4 on the 17th of February, which is just a few days away. We'll be celebrating the close of our challenge and we'll be eating PI, yes, real pie. Not like the mathematical pi, though I love the mathematical pi. It'll be real pie and we'll be learning a little bit about artificial intelligence through the lens of deeplearning.ai, of which I am a PI and AI ambassador. So super fun. Max, what's up? That's so cool. Good to see you, Max. Max is one of my son's friends. So super great to see you on here. Okay, awesome. So I am gonna be showing you a couple things today through a couple different lenses. First, so I'm gonna walk you through the agenda that we have today. You can see here right above me, that is my screen. So you can kind of see, oh wait, there we go. See, it's the same image, but I wanted to give you a chance to see what I am writing. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes I write off the screen. So this makes it a little bit easier for us. I love my digital board. It is a Vibe, vibe.us. For those of you who want one in your own house, you could of course get a Surface Hub. Don't let me stop you. But this is the one my husband bought for me and I absolutely love it. So I do most of my classes using this board. To help demonstrate some of the concepts. But here's the best part. We actually will be able to shrink it into a nice PDF if I write something useful, and I'll be able to send it to everybody who attended today. So that is amazing. The next thing that I want to share with you is the community. So as I mentioned at the beginning, for those of you who are watching and you're not part of our community, you can join the community. Let's see if I could do this anyway. The QR code that you see on the screen right in front of that whiteboard, and that will give you a chance to join. Again, it's a free community. It's full of about 80 of my bestest, closest friends right now in the AI world. New people join every single day. So really excited to, to launch this. But like I said, it's more about how do we help each other learn really a bunch of different things about AI from lots of different lenses, not just my own, though I, of course, have a lot of opinions in this space. So for those of you who don't know me, I'll start with a quick introduction and then we'll get right into the content of our challenge. So I'm Noelle Russell. Many of you do know me. Hi. Yay, what's up, Rick in the class in Broward, Broward College. Amazing. Good to see you guys. So hopefully we'll see you all in person. Great to have that class here. And oh, wow. It tells us that someone scanned the code.

Cool.

Scan away, my friends. Um, all right, awesome. So I'm gonna start first. Let me grab one of my handy pens. Um, and I'm going to start by sharing with you a little bit about the plan for today. So this challenge is meant to be 5 days in 5 different areas that I personally felt very— I felt like it changed my career last year when I dove into the world of generative AI. Now I say that, but I, I dove in from the perspective of my job. I have actually been in generative AI for a little bit, and I'll give you a brief example of my history in just a second. But this challenge was built based on the learning curve that I taught a bunch of consultants over the last year and a half, and I want to share the exact same thing with you. So the I Heart AI Challenge is geared up because It— the reason that I named it that is because I personally love AI. I think it's incredible. I actually heard someone on a call I was on the other day also say they love AI, and I— without knowing me, and I was like, oh my gosh, we're friends. Um, we also have a set of VIPs here with us today. I just shipped our VIP kits. It's not too late if you want to join us in the VIP. You get a half an hour with me, Um, at the end of the week, we'll set up those times. You'll see that, uh, invite will go out on Friday to give you a chance to set up time with me because I want you to learn all the things before you ask me a bunch of questions. Um, and that could be for founders who want— and some of— half of our VIPs are founders or startup, uh, owners or executives that are building a business. So their, their questions are a little bit different, right? They're looking at how do I use this sales, marketing, you know, AI in my everyday, to actually grow a business. Some of you, the other half, about 40% of the people who joined our VIPs, they actually were more interested in how do I grow my career in this space. And that's a slightly different journey, right? Because sales and marketing is going to be really all about you and how do you sell yourself. And that is critical. I can't tell you how many people I talk to and they end up telling me like They're not in sales or they don't like sales. And I was like, well, in the world we are in right now, I mean, social media is literally sales, right? You are going to be, you're going to have to get into a mode where you reframe your mind around what sales is. And that's what today is really all about. And I'm going to share with you how I use AI to kind of rethink my sales motions, both in growing a business, but also as an individual. And I think you'll find it interesting on both counts. Remember, we only have an hour of training today, and then we have at 11 o'clock, we're going to transition to my expert interview. Super excited to have Dr. Lisa on today. So I'll, she'll be joining us at around 11. I'll be pulling her on camera and we'll be having a fun conversation, um, all about, and she's one of those who has really been able to grow her own success and her own business, both professionally and from a business development perspective. So I think it'd be really great to hear from her. Um, So, so, so excited to be here with you all. Oops, let me make sure I don't do that. Okay, so here are the main topics we are going to cover. Let's see. Oh yeah, we're good. Okay, so the first one we're gonna cover is sales evolution. And it's funny because when I asked ChatGPT—

oh dear—

um, when I asked ChatGPT to give me some ideas for this, it was funny because it kept framing it as a revolution, as this brand new way to sell and to engage with customers. And I was like, huh, it's really interesting because I don't know, I would imagine that means that it was somehow trained to think that the things it was saying was new. But me having been in this space a really long time, well, it's not that new. And so it was, it was interesting. And so I'm going to share with you some of the ways to make sure that when you're using some of these tools, that you recognize maybe where they might be extremely helpful and areas where you might need to kind of think for yourself. And hopefully some of you will find that quite refreshing. So first, we're going to talk about sales evolution, and it might get blurry when I write on it, but it will refocus hopefully. And if not, I have a trick for that. So the sales evolution is the first piece. The second piece is how are you going to take care of your customers in this new world? Because sales, unlike marketing, sales means you've sold something and whoever you sold it to is now your customer. And the world of customer relationship management, right, CRM, that world is changing. Today isn't about marketing. We're going to talk all about that tomorrow. Today is really about how do you sell and then how do you take care of the people you sold to. And I think much of the work, the maybe hard part of doing that work was very manual, right? Like I, at least personally, would do a lot of manual tasks to make sure my customers were taken care of, to make sure my clients felt like they had, you know, were given every resource at my disposal. But doing that took time and it actually shrunk the amount of people I could serve because I could only run around and do, you know, print things and build things at a certain pace. With AI, we can actually massively grow the impact we can have because we can take what we know and what we build, and we can build tools to actually duplicate our efforts. And I'll share with you more about that. The second— the third thing we're going to talk about, and I think there's only— maybe there's four— is automation, and specifically around admin tasks. Because like I said, sales, much of the sales process is a lot of administrative work, taking notes during calls, following up. I have a phrase that I use, fortune is in the follow-up. Most organizations, when they start a relationship with a customer, never follow up with them. And you know how I know that? Yeah, they never follow up with me. I wanna buy things and the people I wanna buy it from, never follow up with me. And of course, many of you know, I'm kind of busy. So I'll eventually forget that I even wanted it, even though I would have purchased it. In some cases, I mean, price tags on the things that I've purchased, $25,000, $15,000, you would think they'd want that money. But many times organizations and individuals, they don't follow up. And a lot of times it's because they're bogged down by a lot of administrative tasks. The last thing that I'm super passionate about is training. How do we constantly uplevel our skills in this area? And how does AI help us with that? So that's kind of our roadmap for the next few sessions, and certainly inside of the context of this challenge. And so hopefully you'll, you'll enjoy it as we go along. All right, awesome. I'm just going through— oh, good morning, Virol. Great to see you. Talisha, nice to see you as well. So I'm going to to kind of just keep track of everyone. Roger, yes, love it. You're right. Most people do drop the ball. And it's a shame because I actually think those organizations and humans that are trying to do something and then they eventually say, oh, it didn't work. Oftentimes, it was working and they just stopped doing the thing that was working. And I wonder why that is. But many times, it's often fear. Fear keeps us from doing things. And that's a very human emotion, a very human tendency.. And it's something that I can actually, when harnessed correctly, can propel us to do much more interesting things. So great, nice to see you all. Okay, all right, I'm just checking our notes to make sure. What's up, Michael Novak from DC? Good to see you. Oh yes, awesome, I will. Thank you. Yes, so, and actually, if I have a friend in the community, if you want to grab the link to the LinkedIn event and post it into the community, that would be amazing. That would be amazing. I have some community members here and even a moderator or two, so that would be awesome. But this is actually broadcasting on every place I am, so YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, like all the things. So hopefully you found it. And if not, like I said, it will get much easier to find tomorrow. And this will be recorded, so if you missed the first part, don't worry. You didn't miss too much. We were just getting started. So the reason that I am passionate about these things is because I, in my career, have been in the position to grow businesses. And that's been true since I started way back, you know, in Y2K. I was given an opportunity to participate in a brand new project at that time. It was called IBM WebSphere. I don't know if y'all remember this, but it was right at the beginning of like taking, you know, server, like, uh, monolithic code and trying to break it up, turn it into web services, which today is— everyone seems, you know, knows a little bit about. Um, but back then was a brand new idea, very similar today to like AI. But everyone was looking at how do I, you know, create more, uh, more deliberate separation of functionality in my application to reduce the level of brittleness that was in it. So super exciting, I loved it, but I had to start from nothing, right? I had to start in an environment where nobody knew what Java was. Nobody knew what enterprise code looked like. Like it was very new. Everyone was taking the world of the mainframe and trying to learn this new skill. And so it was very exciting for me, at least, to kind of be part of this new thing. Little did I know that would create a pattern of behavior for me my entire career. Once I was at IBM for 12 years, so service-oriented architecture, Building web services, master data management, all of that was happening like in the 2000s and probably before, but that's when I was doing that work for the most part for IBM. And then I moved and ended up being part of VMware. And VMware gave me an opportunity to see the world a bit different because all of that code was running on-premises, meaning inside data centers owned by companies. And the world was just now starting to think about Wow, we really should figure out how to diversify usage of that hardware. How do we use more of it? Back then, I don't know if you remember. I mean, does any of you, do any of you remember those days of like DR, disaster recovery? And like we would spend entire weekends simulating disasters to make sure our systems were like, those were tough days. If you were around back then, like those were tough times. But we were just moving into the world of the cloud. And that's when I took an opportunity to work for a company called Pivotal in the big data world. And that led me to Amazon. Now, 10 years ago, I was invited to join a team at Amazon called the Amazon Alexa team. Many of you know, and I jumped in with all the things, my feet, my hands. I became a builder. I built over 100 applications for Amazon Alexa. And I was driven because I have a son. Many of you know him, Max. Who was born with Down syndrome. And I also have my dad who lives with me. As a matter of fact, he just had a seizure yesterday. It was really, ugh, heart-wrenching. But he's fine. He has epilepsy, so it's a thing we live with, but it is really hard to go through. And so he lives with me and has, you know, these needs. And like, even after his seizure last night, the first thing he did was ask Alexa, and he actually was asking Alexa for help initially, which I love it. I love that he thinks he has this like companion that he can ask help of. Luckily, Alexa did not call 911 when he was like, I need help. It just gave him some services and pinged me using this cool application that we use. So it's interesting how my life and the people in my life have really fueled me to go after AI solutions in a very big way. Now, I ended up going to Amazon. I was there for several years building out these Alexa skills and creating a— I was evangelizing Alexa and voice as a technology all before LLMs were a thing. We were building natural language the hard way, I always say. Like, I looked at that code and was like, wow, that's a lot. And we had thousands of data scientists working on this effort where now, of course, that same effort can be done with less because our architecture have improved. But after that, I went to Microsoft, helped launch Microsoft Cognitive Services, and in doing my— that, that work, I learned about the beauty of amplifying AI, making AI available to everyone. And that's exactly what this challenge is all about. Like, these AI systems, you don't have to build yourself. As a matter of fact, I encourage you to really, even if you're a startup owner, to really think hard about whether you're going to build a model yourself and think What could I do differently? What could I reinvent leveraging these tools? Because lots of companies are going to be bogged down by the way they used to do things. And they're not going to be in a very comfortable place where they can reinvent the way. It's just like, just think, I always tell this to executives when I talk to them. I will say, you know, you can either be Blockbuster or you can be Netflix. Netflix reinvented it. And only a little, if you remember back in the day, right? They only said, well, what if we just shipped the thing that you're getting at Blockbuster? What if we just shipped it door to door? It wasn't this massive transition. It was just a little move in that innovative direction. But it required a significant mindset shift. And I truly believe that that shift is what's happening in every company I talk to. I have dozens of clients that I work with that I'm constantly like, you're gonna have to think differently about this. You're gonna have to think differently about how you're going to engage your customers. You're gonna have to think differently about how you manage the work that you need to do. But here's the good news. You will increase the funnel. You're going to increase the size of how many customers are interested in the thing that you sell. Your prospect lists will grow in the next 3 to 5 years massively if you leverage AI to help you get there. And I'll of course remind you of that meme that we all, many of us know, right? That AI is, you know, AI is not actually going around. It's not a job killer, right? It's not taking your job, but people leveraging AI are definitely going to be better suited in the market to satisfy the needs of their customers, satisfy the needs of their employers. When you leverage AI, you get better. Your own personal skills are amplified. And in that world, it's pretty exciting. Exciting. No worries. Oh no, no, don't do it. So my moderators will monitor the chat. And if people start spamming to my community, which I think is awesome. I mean, it means something if people want to spam to my audience, but I prefer it if they don't. So I appreciate you, Genetic AP. But let's not do that. And honestly, I would love for you all to get to know each other on here. But definitely don't use this as an opportunity to like irritate people. Oh my gosh, we're talking about sales. It's like the literally the worst thing you could do to sell. So let's dive, let's dive right in. The first one is evolution, and this is that Blockbuster or Netflix paradigm, right? So the evolution of sales, I've seen this happen right before my eyes, is that we are in the world now where 3 things have basically changed. The first one that has changed is we are in a— and I say this all the time— we are in a show versus tell world. People don't want you to tell them what you can do, especially in the world of artificial intelligence. I'll give you an example. As a matter of fact, in our community, I have a bunch of videos that I've put demos that I use for clients that I have, and one of them is for, um, I think it was for, uh, an airline. And I wanted to demonstrate in my conversation with them, as I'm trying to win their business, I wanted to demonstrate how they might simulate booking, um, rebooking, right? So sometimes, very rarely, an airline might not get where it needs to go on time. And that will cause other people to have delays, canceled connections, missed connections. They call it irregular operations or IROPS. And I wanted to— now I've never talked to them before, like I'm going in kind of cold, but I don't have to go in cold today. And again, as part of a sales message, I can evolve my thinking and think, can I solve this problem with as much information as I know? Can I solve this problem and simulate a demonstration with generative AI? And I absolutely can, right? I can go in and I can tell generative AI, you are an IROPS executive, or you manage IROPS as a practitioner, whatever framing I want to use to help the, the model understand my perspective. And then I can ask it, what are 3 things you would change about the way it works today? And I'm not using it as a definitive answer. I'm certainly not using it to build my production solution, but it helps me get into a conversation where when I'm talking to my client, they know I know what they're talking about. Like, they know I understand their problem. Now, I don't advise you to blindly ask these questions and not actually know your client or your prospect, right? It requires you to show versus tell, which means you need to know a little bit about it just by asking questions of a model, by being a consumer yourself. I for example, fly a lot. And many of you know that, right? Looking along around. If you, if you look at all of the, you know, flight irregular operations that I have succumbed to and been a victim of, I guess you'd say, I have a lot of ideas about how that could be fixed. But here's one thing I didn't know. In a show versus tell mindset, I start researching. And one of the pieces of research I found out was that humans actually prefer to get bad or disappointing or change news. They prefer to get that. And I say prefer, but really they react better when they get that information from a machine versus getting that information from a human. Anyone care to guess why that would be? And ultimately it comes down to Yeah, emotion, emotion, right? Like if someone's going to change my flight, do you know that customer satisfaction actually went up when it came to irregular operations for this airline? When they shifted to letting a machine tell people that things had changed, they said, hey, things have changed. We automatically booked you on the next possible. But if you want to change that, go ahead. It already put them— it put their customers in this solution mode. Right? Like, oh, this bad thing happened, completely distracted them from that being a bad thing and said, but don't worry, we rebooked you. And we also want to give you an opportunity to find your next flight if you don't like what we rebooked you on. Amazing. Do you know today when I walk in through the airport, I know that that's a thing. I know it's available and I still walk up and the customer service line for individuals, humans who want to stand online to get to the end, by which case a bunch of those seats you want are gone, by the way, but They're standing in line for over an hour, sometimes 2 hours, when these big regular operations activities happen. And, and there's signs everywhere, use the app, use the automated system, but people won't do it. I think it's a very interesting conversation to have, right, about like, why won't people do that? Adoption is key. But when I realized that, I am now— the first thing I do, I don't even think about getting in customer service. I don't even think about it. I immediately get on my phone and use the robot to my advantage, and it almost always works out. Um, so very interesting, uh, environment. Okay. Uh, yes, exactly.

Thank you.

Oh, Joe, what's up? I haven't had a chance to say hi to you. Thank you for joining us. Okay, so show versus tell mentality means when you start selling something, you are now not going to say Here's my slideware. Here's my PowerPoint presentation. You're going to show them. Now, I'm not saying— okay, I should clarify, it's not either or. I'm very rarely an either or person. It's actually a both and. I leverage a technology, a website called Beautiful, and this is not the only one, but beautiful.ai. And it allows you to give your idea for a pitch, give that, or, or a prospect meeting or a performance review, whatever you want to do. You give it this prompt and you use that prompt in order to help you build a presentation. It removes the drudgery of slide creation, organization of content on a slide. When you move things, it's much easier. So something to look at to help augment, because you just want to tell the story. You want to show. Let the machines do some of that administrative work around it. So I'll probably come back to that in our administrative tasks.

Thank you.

What's up, Talisha?

You're awesome.

So thank you for that. So you'll see Beautiful.ai is a presentation tool, but it'll help augment this for you. Now you can let the Beautiful.ai do your telling.. But if you're looking for a ratio, 80/20 is always good. Show 80%, tell 20%. My, my keynotes that I do all over the world, very much the same. I want to demonstrate. And sometimes demonstration might be a story that you tell of a real customer that has done that thing, or maybe it's a story of you personally who have experienced something. Those are good. But I also think it's really important that you actually put fingers on a keyboard and build something. And you can now in less time with less effort than ever before. That does require you to have a bit of skills in the area of prompt engineering. So I have a class on prompt engineering, but I also encourage you to— and what this means is that it is not completely intuitive how to talk to a machine. Machines require a certain setup. And actually, Rick teaches his— I was gonna say his kids, Sorry, his students, teaches his students something similar. He shared it with us at our last user group meeting. But it's really important when you're building prompts, when you're telling a machine how to help you, that you do at least 3 things. You, one, tell it the context you want it to be thinking in. In other words, tell it who you want it to act like. As you heard me say in the airline, right? Act like an IROPS representative. Or a call center agent or a digital marketing copywriter. Like give it a role to play. So they— because remember, a GenAI model or these models we're using today are massive. They're trained on trillions of words across hundreds of millions of websites. So you need to tell it, okay, I don't need you to know all the things. I need you to really laser focus in on this. Then be extremely clear in what you want. And this It's an interesting time because I think over time we've actually gotten less good as you— at you— like, humans are less good at clarity of thought in our communication, probably because we're, you know, we're leveraging our smartphone, we're using emojis. Um, Will.i.am actually had a— I think it was a TikTok or a video, and he said, I'm really worried about, you know, humanity because we're making machines that can create beautiful verbose words and stories. And we as humans are using less words and we're, you know, abbreviating words with these things like IRL and LOL, and we're using emojis to represent emotion rather than describing them. And so I think it's an interesting opportunity for you. You're not really going to let go of that. You're going to use that clarity to build better prompts. And you'll notice the more clear you are, the better your results. The other thing about prompt engineering is that it does take patience. I always say my prompt engineers, my favorites, the ones that I think are the best, are typically empathetic, which means that they have patience in the process, but they're also pet owners or parents or caregivers. They're people that are often in a situation where they have to say the same thing over and over again, but change it just a little bit to try and get different behaviors. Parenting specifically. And so prompt engineering, if you have any of those things inherent, you might be set up to be a great prompt engineer. Usha, what's up? Good to see you, my friend. So we have, oh my gosh, you all should say where you're from so people know where you're coming from. So we have people from all over the world, all over the US joining us today. So super cool. Usha's from Phoenix or Scottsdale, actually. So amazing. Leonard's here too. What? So good to see you all. Okay. So that evolution right now, you're already thinking very differently than the typical salesperson, right? Showing versus telling. You're already thinking differently than the sea of people that do this work, that consult, that advise because they're really focused. And this is coming from my, just my experience in the field. They're focused on how do I tell this good story, and they think by telling it they will get you to say yes as a prospect. But the reality is, is that when we see it demonstrated, we are so much more inclined to say yes. So that's the first one. The second one— oh my gosh, yes. So we're gonna go into this in a little bit more detail tomorrow when we talk about marketing and advertising, right? Because I wanted to start with sales because that's where my heart is. I'm a seller. I like— and, and the reason I love sales, and maybe some of you, when you think of selling, it kind of creates this weird feeling in your brain, like you don't like it, or that it's slimy, or it's weird, or, you know, I, I maybe used to think the same thing until I realized that the only way people get better, the only way they get access to what they need to achieve their goals, is if they acquire something. Sales is just literally the transaction that happens between someone who needs something and someone who has what they need, and you then create a transaction. A sale is not necessarily always financial. As a matter of fact, most times it's not. It might be in terms of time. I can't tell you how many people I've spent time with giving them advice and ideas, um, that I didn't charge them for, but I created a relationship with them. Reciprocity. Many of them are going to be joining me on the stage. Like, we're not financially transacting, but we definitely have a relationship together. Business-wise that allows us to share contacts, that allows us to promote each other's work. So sales is all about like, how do I take what I have, my ideas, my value that I've learned? How do I take the decades of work that I have and turn it into days for you, right? As somebody who's listening to me, like, how do I take all the things I learned over the last 2 and a half decades of my career and ball it up so that in 5 days you get all the best stuff. Like, that is a transaction. That is me selling you on, hey, I think this is going to save you time. I think this is going to make you a better seller. Um, it doesn't mean you have to buy it. It doesn't mean you have to believe it. But that is always what's happening. Someone's always selling and someone's always buying. And it's better if you know who you are in that transaction. Many of us have suffered from this on the social media side, right, where We're like trolling through or looking through social media, like scanning through content, and we don't realize that our attention, our eyes on that content is really what's being sold, which means we're the product. And if you are not intentional about that, well, I'm going to encourage you to take a closer look. But, but evolution of sales, show versus tell will change everything about how this works. And AI, generative AI allows you to ask a model, what's the best way to show this? And I'm going to talk more about that in just a second. Okay, so let's move on to customers. So I like this because it's very Stephen Covey of me, dare I say. Um, Stephen Covey says that you should begin with the end in mind. Anyone take that class or read the— oh my gosh, I think it was like tapes or DVDs or something. Um, But begin with the end in mind. Customers— what that means is that the reason I start this challenge with sales is because at the end of the day, I want you to sell your hiring manager on hiring you. I want you to sell your value, your products, your services to prospects that you want to work with. And customers, the way you treat someone once they become your customer is critical, and now it's easier than ever. So today there are tools, they're called CRMs, customer relationship management tools. These are not new, these are not, um, you know, they're not new, they've been around for a while. But as everything in this world has become, they are now AI enabled, right? They're AI enabled. So I'll give you a couple of examples of HRM tools that you— or HRM— CRM tools that you could look at. One is called Keep. It used to have a different name, um, but it has a bunch of AI systems in it to help you manage your content. I personally, uh, have used another one called ClickFunnels, which is a sales, marketing, and CRM tool. There's also— oh my goodness, oh yeah, of course, HubSpot. If you know another CRM, throw it in the chat. HubSpot, you're welcome. I mean, this is your chance. What's up? Welcome from ATL. Um, so keep— ClickFunnels, HubSpot, these are only a few. Here's what I'm going to encourage you to do, actually look at their AI capability. First, if they have none, I can't— well, I mean, that's a sign of trouble. Like, even if they, they took something they already had and just renamed it AI, they should be at least marketing that they have it. But inside of it, look for the features that are provided. Things that should be in there are your ability to connect, which is exactly what I do with my CRM today. I connect— when I connect to the person, I connect to their LinkedIn, and then I'm able to actually take information about the things that they like that I'm providing them on LinkedIn and create— help me create strategies for interacting with those clients. This is known as personalized— I'll just write personalized— but personalized customer relationships. Before, this was hard. I actually used to call it scaling the unscalable because it was really hard to— like, I would every day I would talk to a client and I'd have my notebook and I would write down all the things I learned and I'd be like, okay, they're really worried about this, or they really need sales here. And I would manually write it out. Today I don't have to do as much of that. I still have to have the conversation, but I leverage a tool. Actually, there's a really cool tool called Rewind. It's listening to me right now. I think it's rewind.ai. Rewind.ai actually records all of my sessions. So when I have a collection of private clients that I work with one-on-one, to help grow their business. And these are businesses like $1 to $10 million in business. And when I have a call with them, I'm talking about like action items and things that they have to do. Before, I would have to like scribble down these notes as I was talking to them. And it's funny, it's very similar as what I saw in the contact center industry, that whenever you start writing and you're trying to listen to someone, it's very hard to write and listen at the same time. You ultimately end up missing things.. So as someone who cares about my customers, when I talk to them, I want to create an AI that can listen on my behalf, take good notes. You can also throw in other ideas for notes. Um, oh, okay. Yeah, hopefully you guys could see my screen. That would be bad. Um, but it's not really a screen, it's actually kind of in the same thing. Anyway, hopefully we'll see. Uh, but Rewind AI will take notes There's also, of course, I'll throw in the, the old legacy providers. These guys have been out for quite a few years. Otter, Rev was the original that I used. Not original to the industry. Rev.com, I think it's called. So these are all note-taking tools. They've gotten better and better. Rewind not just takes notes, it actually records my entire session and then it allows me to ask questions of the session. Hey, when, when did I tell them the actions I needed for them this week? Rewind. And then it presents me with myself saying those things. And then I can summarize that. It also summarizes into an email my entire notes that I took. It allows me to provide parameterized access to the recordings. And of course, I do all of this responsibly, right? So No matter what you're using AI for, it's important— I'm going to just abbreviate it— to be thinking about how to responsibly use these tools. Because the vendors who are providing it to you, maybe they were responsible, but it's— the burden is on you as the consumer of these tools to ask these questions like, where did the data come from? What is the data policy? These data policies are in a EULA, a user agreement that you sign when you use them. 99.9% of us never read that agreement. Today more than ever, you want to know what those data policies are, especially if it's your customer data. Like, be careful. The next thing you want to do is find out what their process is, how transparent they are, how explainable they're willing to be. Meaning, are they going to tell you? They don't have to show you the code. They don't have to give you any, you know, GitHub repo. But for goodness sakes, I want to at least understand how you're using AI to do this work. And that's why this challenge is so important, is that it doesn't— I'm not going to teach you in an hour a day how to build or leverage AI, but I am going to teach you what I think is the most important thing of all. Which is what questions do you ask? And if you don't know what a good answer to that question is, that's where you start, right? If you don't know, like, what is data? I guess I should put in like policy maybe to make it easier. But what's a data policy? Start there. Find out what data policies are. Research data policies that have been implemented at the federal government level, at— in the EU. Like, these policies are not new. You can go and do this work. But it does require you to be much more diligent when you're using these tools. Will they help you? Yes. Will they massively grow the amount of clients you can support? Yes. That's awesome. But they will also hurt you if you don't know what you're using, right? It's called— like, this used to be called black box AI, and it was called that for a reason, because black box, Pandora's box, right? Like, if you don't know, it could end up hurting you and hurt the people you care about. Like, your customers. So you want to ask these questions. I mean, of course, I'll add in, you know, how are they monitoring fairness in the models that they use? Now, do not— some of you know me, I go around sometimes in these expo halls when I'm a keynote speaker at these big events, and all these companies have AI, you know, plastered all over their marketing inside these expo halls. So I'll stop and I'll ask them these questions. Like, oh, wonderful, you use AI, great. Tell me about your, you know, data policies. Like, how does, how does that work? Where do you, do you keep it? Do you get rid of it? Is it transient, ephemeral? Like, how does that work? And of course, these people at the booth are not AI people, so they don't know the answers. Um, so I kind of put them on the spot, but I use it as a demonstration of like, A, they should know, I think, but B, They maybe they'll put me in contact with somebody that knows, but I don't want to invest in a technology that I don't understand how to use it in a way that will not be unfair to others, hurt my customers, or hurt my company. And fun fact, the number one thing that— number one question I get asked when I go into an executive, like, meeting, they're called executive briefings. I do them all the time and I'll go in and I'll educate them before they become a client of mine. And I'll educate them on what generative AI is and how it might change their business. And they will say— the number one question I get after hundreds of these kinds of conversations is, how do I protect myself, my company, and my employees? How do I harness their enthusiasm but protect us against doing something that lands us in the news in a negative way? I call it AI gone wrong. And the best way to do that is by understanding what responsible use looks like and then creating processes, even if it's just asking the right questions of your vendors to make sure that when you leverage one of these tools, you're using it safely and that data is protected. All right, um, oh cool! Oh, did I spell Otter right?

Oh, I did.

Okay, I saw it on yours, I'm like, that looks good. Okay, awesome. Thank you, people! What's up? All right, awesome. Sheila, good to see you as well. Um, okay, so we've now gone through— I like my little infinity board, right? So we've gone through customers. We're going to end with my two favorites, um, automation. So how do you automate your tasks every day? What kinds of things should you focus on automation? Remember, we are talking about sales. So here is a fun, fun fact. I don't know if you know this, you probably do know this, but I don't know how many of you have given your email, uh, to, uh, someone when you bought something. Probably all of us, um, but I do it all the time. I give my email to companies I buy things from them, and about— it's an 80/20 thing, Pareto principle. About 20% of those businesses ever reach out to me via email, even though I bought from them. So I trust them. One thing you should know about sales in general is that the first dollar you get from someone is the hardest, right? Because I have to really like you in order to give you my money. And so my first transaction with you establishes a relationship, and now I'm actually quite interested in validating that I made a good decision. And most companies, 80% of them roughly, never talk to you again via email. Or worse, they wait a year, they launch a new product, and that's the next time you hear from them. And usually when that happens, I'm like, yeah, I remember you. I don't have that warm fuzzy feeling. So automation, number one, and I mentioned this at the beginning, is use this technology to help you follow up with your customers. Now I'm going to share a couple of fun, um, things that I personally do. One is I create what's called— and it's not SOAP as in WSDLs and service-oriented architecture stuff, um, Simple Object Access Protocol, anyone? Anyway, um, okay, but it's soap opera. Actually, telenovela, for those of you who know, right? So I have this soap opera sequence, and what this means is it's, let's say, 4 to 5 emails. And here's the cool thing, you can just ask generative AI, you can, and I'll be sending out the prompts that I use for this. Um, after in my follow-up sequence with all of you. Um, but 4 to 5 emails, and these emails will— and you can ask ChatGPT or, oh goodness, Claude, any of these, they will be happy to do it for you. But you'll say, create me a soap opera sequence. Oh, first remember, you have to give it the role. So you'll say, you are an expert digital marketing copywriter, and I want you to create me a soap opera email sequence But then remember the second step, you have to create clarity. So it's not going to know what soap opera to write. So you have to tell it. And the soap opera guidance or rough, you know, outline of that is you're going to tell the model, write a story about how I, Noelle Russell, I'm giving you my soap opera sequence, how I was super excited to get into the world of tech. But, and I even joined the Amazon Alexa team, but I eventually got to a point where, you know, I got on the team and I was like, oh no, I actually don't know AI. I'm in, I'm kind of in trouble here, right? Like how the wall I hit, right? Noelle Russell gets excited, says yes to Alexa, walks in the first day and is like, I need to learn this technology. Now, I was a developer already. I'd been writing Java for 12 years, so I was an engineer at heart.

I know how to write code.

But here's the fun fact. I walk in, they're like, oh yeah, we don't support Java, we only support Node.js. And I was like, oh, I don't, I don't know Node.js. This is me in my mind, I never said it, right? So imagine you get this sequence that says I get this amazing job, and, and then I walk in the door and I find out I have to write in a language I don't know. Stay tuned for the next email that'll tell you what happened and how I handled it. So you leave these, you leave them on a cliffhanger. Now some of us are not I am not great at crafting cliffhanger emails, but guess who is? It is— how do you say that? Guess what is? ChatGPT or Claude or Anthropic, any of these models, right? They actually know how to craft it. They need to understand the clarity of your story, which you can describe, and some of us will be more verbose than others, but I can create a soap opera sequence. This is the first 5 emails that everybody who joins my list get. The second thing— and these are my customers, remember? So if you, you know, become a customer of mine, you get the soap opera sequence. Then I have a fun sequence, and I'm gonna date myself. Is that right? Oh my gosh, I don't even know how to spell it. Um, Seinfeld. I have a Seinfeld sequence. Anyone remember Seinfeld? Um, and if you don't, you probably maybe caught on the TBS Um, but Seinfeld was a show about nothing. Like, they advertised about nothing. Like, they were a show about nothing specific. It was just like life. And so Seinfeld series is a series of emails that you send every day or every other day or whenever life happens. For example, I just recently— some of you saw me there— I just recently was over at Um, uh, I was in DC actually with Tech Duels, and I got to participate in a debate. And then at the end of that debate, I ended up— my team won the debate. We were, uh, our, our— we were arguing that AI was better than augmented AI, which was bizarre because I actually didn't believe that at the time. Um, but AI is better than augmented AI, and so our team won. But then I also— they did an audience poll. And I also won— did I bring it in here? Oh, I left it in my— on my bed by my suitcase. I'll show it to you tomorrow because I'm super proud of it. But I also got this beautiful award called Most Valuable Debater. So everyone voted that I was the most valuable debater. And, and so my Seinfeld series that next day was— I have about 40,000 executives on my list that have been a customer of mine. And I sent them this series, right? I sent them a Seinfeld email. It's not called Seinfeld, but it was just a daily email that said, oh my gosh, I did this thing. And then at the end, I said, one of the things I talked about in my debate was responsible use of technology. If you want help with responsible AI or to build a responsible AI strategy, contact me here, right? So I tie in whatever I'm selling, whatever my offer is, into a daily thing that's happening to me every day. And here's the cool thing. It drives you to be more interesting, have more fun experiences so you can talk about them in your Seinfeld series. But even the least interesting things can become interesting and then tie those things to what you're doing, what you're selling, what you're interested in now, because crafting that again, some of us are writers. I'm actually due to write an article today, my first one of a column that I'm being asked to write. Eee!. And many of us are not great writers. I do like to write, but not, not all of us are good at writing these kinds of emails. So you can instead, again, harness the story that you want to tell and ask the model to create some examples of how that might be framed in an email. Usually that'll get you, guess what, 80% there. And then 20% of your time will be like editing it, making it a little bit more your voice. I use GPT. And in order to help with the automation of these types of tasks, I add custom instructions, which means that I tell GPT who I am, what I do, what I sell, what my products are, what my core values are, what my leadership principles are. Like, I give all of this in about 1,500 characters in the custom instructions on the GPT paid version. That way, when it does this work and I ask it to act like a copywriter, it's acting like Noelle Russell's copywriter, not like a generic copywriter. So my soap opera sequence has within it my Lamplighter philosophy, and it has within it my Mindful Leadership principles because it's part of the training I gave it in what's called— this is otherwise known as like a system prompt. Right? I'm telling it how to behave. Now, if you wanted to take that to a whole nother level, it's important to kind of educate yourself. So, so I'm going to now move into that last phase before we bring on our guest speaker today of how— so we've talked about, right, how do we, you know, reframe our thinking now that we have a tool that can help us build demonstrations of the thing we're selling, whether it's consulting, products, e-commerce, vitamins, coaching. Like, it doesn't really matter whether I'm trying to sell myself to a hiring manager or to a recruiter. Like, when you come to that recruiter or hiring manager and you say, here's a project I built, many— and I will tell you, I am one of them— many people will go to GitHub and see if you even have a GitHub repo that you've contributed to. These days you do not need to be a coder, right, to be able to build these technologies. Having a GitHub repo with your contributions might actually be documentation, it might be demonstration, it might be, um, a forked, like, a forked, uh, repository that you customized, but it's a story you can tell and it's a story you can show. And I think that that's a big part. So You'll see this as we go over the next Friday for sure. We're going to be dedicating time to the way that I learn how to build demos that help all the conversations I have, whether I'm doing private consulting, whether I am teaching a class, whether I'm doing a keynote, like the ability to build demos quickly with generative AI. There's— I mean, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you do that? And our audience you all, the world is asking for more real scenario, like more reality in what they're working with. They don't want to just see a PowerPoint deck anymore. They know the world's better and more rich. It has a richer experience than that available. Okay, so the last thing is training. So I, as a salesperson, I think it's incredibly important that you roleplay sales conversations. And I used to, with my clients, I used to make them sell to me. And you'd be surprised how awkward people get. They're super cool and awesome and everything's good until they're trying to sell something like themselves or their product. And they get like— it's almost like I watch them shrink right before my eyes. Like, they get all like So I might, I might have a thing I did. It might be available. So hopefully, you know, it'd be great if you want, if you're interested, but if you're not, that's cool.

Right?

Like they get, they become a shadow of themselves. And so role-playing allows you to A, watch that behavior and then get very aware of your persona when you're selling. Now there are cool tools, AI tools today. In Teams. It's called the Speaker Coach, I think. I think so. It's called a Speaker Coach, and the Speaker Coach allows you to record yourself. And so now you don't even have to be that embarrassed. You don't have to role play with me. Role play with yourself looking into the camera and saying whatever you're gonna say. And I encourage you, this is exactly what I did to pass my AWS Solutions Architect certification. I did VPCs over and over and over again until it became second nature. And that way, when I got in front of the test, it was easy. As a matter of fact, I was like, that's it. That's all you're going to ask me. I know all the things. So it's really important that you— I can't remember who said it, but like, you want to practice. Oh, Actually, it was this guy, his last name is Voss, Chris Voss, maybe. He's like this expert negotiator. He wrote this bestselling book. He has a class on MasterClass, but it's also on Delta. And I saw it when I was flying on Delta. But he talks about you want to use low-stakes environments to practice high-stakes work. And that's why AI in this speaker coach. Allows you to practice high-stakes conversations. Imagine asking for a raise, asking for a promotion. You'll be shocked. And if you do it seriously, which I do, if you do it seriously, you'll be like, what am I talking about? Like, the first couple times you do it, you'll be like, I am all over the place. It allows you to crystallize what you're trying to say, get efficient with your words. It's the only way I won the debate was because the first time I did it, I was everywhere. I recorded myself, I listened to it, and I was like, what are you even talking about? Maybe some of you feel like I'm a little bit like that today, but that's because I'm here with you live and I'm sharing with you from my heart and I don't mind so much. But, but in my classes or in a client presentation, or if I'm, you know, being recruited for a job and I want to talk to someone, I want to be— I don't want that to be the first time I'm having that conversation. So use AI inside Teams or other tools to look at how you're speaking and give you feedback. Filler words. Okay, so that's kind of the hard part of sales. The easier part is to become a better prompt engineer. And there's lots of different ways to do this. I actually have a few classes on LinkedIn that I helped to create. And I have a collection of these, but I'm going to put— and if any of you know it, you could put it in the chat, but I'm going to put into the note that I sent to you all. And of course, if you didn't join the challenge and you're here because you just happened upon the live, you won't get the notes. So go log into the challenge. You can do it by joining the community. The community will also get the notes as well. Noelle Russell. But there is a prompt engineering class available on GitHub. And actually, I think it's been so popular that they created a whole separate site for it. But it's my favorite. It has a bunch of books and all these things on how to— here's the fun thing— it's how to be a better communicator, because these models require you to be a good communicator to understand. In order for it to understand what you want it to do, it needs clarity of thought.. And so a lot of prompt engineering work is really how do you just get clear on what you need? How do you set the right context? How do you leverage system prompts? So all of those types of things. So I'd encourage you to do that. For those of you who— so if you join, when you scan the QR code, you'll see there is a collection of resources. I actually think— oh, it's also on my Microsoft Expert page, which is a link right on the underneath the group in the community, you'll see Noelle Russell's Microsoft Expert, I think it says, and it's a page you can click on it. It'll give you all these links to my favorite prompt engineering classes. So start educating yourself. Now here's the good news. You might remember at the beginning I talked about being a Pi and AI ambassador. One of my favorite places to go and learn this is Deep Learning AI. They're not paying me to say this. I actually learned a lot of what I love about prompt engineering a long time ago from the people who taught these classes. I didn't learn— they didn't— it wasn't available in deep learning when I needed to learn it. One of my first opportunities to work with a large language model at scale was I was invited to participate in the GitHub Copilot beta during COVID And so I've been working on it for a while. Who knew it would just like blow up a year later, but— or 2 years later, but I've been working on that for a while, but the people who taught me what I needed to know then ended up building classes that are currently hosted on Deep Learning AI. So I encourage you, I'm also, I think I'm a moderator, or at least I'm very active in that community. So I'll look for you, I'll comment on your post if you have questions, I try to answer them. But I do like this platform. I also like it because it's platform agnostic. So when you use these labs, they are in browser. Which I am a huge fan of, right? For those of us who know what it's like to set up an environment to do some of these lab exercises, we have to like get all of our Python packages correct and set up the whole thing. With Deep Learning AI, when you start a class, they give you an in-browser learning environment on AWS, on Azure, on Google, depending on the class that you're taking. And they let you do all the exercises as if you owned your own instance. But you don't, right? They do all that setup. It's great when you're just getting started. Obviously, I encourage you as you get more and more proficient that you really think about potentially building your own sandbox to play with so you can keep that code when you're done with it. It does allow you to export everything out, but you still have to set up your environment eventually. So, so this has been super fun. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm gonna zoom back out and just recap what what we've covered, right? So we talked about the evolution of sales and that our mindset really needs to shift into a world where we can show what we want someone to experience, whether that's show our value, our expertise, or show the ex— the, the value of our products or services. Um, definitely a new world in CRM. So if you're not using an AI-powered CRM— well, I shouldn't say that, you're probably using an AI-powered CRM— but if you're not leveraging the AI tools Definitely start looking into those, but don't look into them lightly. Don't just flip the switch on them. Ask some questions, figure out what their data policies are, figure out how they're protecting your customer's data, how they're protecting you as an individual. I don't want to go too dark, but indemnification is something you should look into as well. How to automate tasks, use generative models to automate your sales emails. Again, these are not like— you're not automating the selling, or the interaction with your customer. It's just, hey, this cool thing just happened. How do you articulate that better and more consistently? And I'm hoping that when generative AI helps you build an email you're proud of, you'll actually send it. You'll send it to the people that are on your newsletter. How many of you have newsletters on LinkedIn? Most people who have newsletters, I sign up for every single one of them, and I don't get any emails. From them, which means they don't publish them anymore. And so that's a bit sad. Like, use the vehicles that you have been given— newsletters on LinkedIn, for example— and use generative AI to— don't use it to write it because we don't enjoy reading content 100% written, but use it to help give you some confidence so that you can start talking and connecting with the people that want to connect with you. So that is us, uh, for sales. I will zip all this up into a nice little Oh, you can't really see that very well, but I promise you'll be able to see it a little bit better when we get to— when I send it out to you in PDF form, I'll break it up and move it around. For those of you who are asking, let's see, I'm just going through to make sure we are going to— right now, I'm going to invite Dr. Lisa up to the stage and I'm going to ask her to introduce herself, but super excited. We've been in this space for quite some time. We've watched the evolution of AI is Not Cool. And great, you're there. I'm going to pull you up right now. I'm going to shut off my whiteboard and pull up Dr. Lisa. Hi, great to see you.

Hi, Noelle. Oh, it's great to see you too. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So I just wanted to tell everybody a little bit about how we met and then I would love to go through these questions with you. So I have questions. I'm going to ask the same questions of all of our guests so that you can get kind of their perspective. And their answers are going to be very different because our guests are very different. But Lisa was one of the first person I asked because I wanted to— we are on a lot of panels together and we often have connected but very different approaches to things because her— well, she's a doctor, number one. So she comes from a slightly more academic perspective. But also the area of the world that she comes from and what she cares about is also different. So awesome. There's people who already know you here. So that's amazing. So yeah, if I don't mind, maybe starting with an introduction and tell us a little bit about the world that you're, you're in right now.

Absolutely. So I have spent my life in corporate America until a year and a half ago when I decided I was going to be an entrepreneur and went out on my own. So I founded an AI strategy advising and consulting firm that is targeted— it's a B2B firm, and I typically work with sales leaders and with CIOs across a myriad of different industries. And the reason that I have kind of the permission to do that is because I have a little bit of an interesting journey I took to get here. So I started out I'm actually a farm kid. You know, I grew up in a super rural area and I knew from early on that that wasn't going to be a good fit for me. And so I'm incredibly blessed to say that I got this great education and I worked really hard so I could get a scholarship because I couldn't afford to go to college back in the day. And so I got a full ride scholarship to the Colorado School of Mines, which is an engineering school. And I will tell you, Noelle, I knew nothing. I did not have a clue what engineering even was. I just knew that it was going to be a ticket to a different life for myself, and I was really excited about that. So I have been an IT practitioner. I started— obviously, I'm an engineer. I started as an IT practitioner and ultimately worked my way up to where I ran infrastructure for ConocoPhillips, which was like 45,000 desktops around the world. I did programming, I ran help desk, I have been across the gamut until I ultimately became a Chief Information Officer for a financial services org. And I also have a big family and my life was very full and I was trying to balance all of these things with this fantastic global job and I was I was like, I really need, I really need more time for my family. I want to be able to be here to be more engaged. And I had Microsoft approach me about a job in sales. And I thought, hmm, sales, okay, I've been a practitioner my whole life at this point, right? But we started talking about what that quality of life would look like and what my daily, what my daily schedule would look like, and it sounded pretty exciting. And frankly, I'd been on the other side of the table negotiating these deals for years, so why not? So I decided I was going to take on that kind of second part of my journey and became an enterprise seller for Microsoft. I did that for years. I ran a territory for them, and it was tremendous. I loved it. That's what I learned, is I absolutely loved it. I loved all of the client contact. I loved working with different types of environments and different customers and really helping people to be successful. I felt like I had kind of found a home and I was gonna stay in sales for the rest of my life. And I definitely have continued along that vein. And then my kind of my third journey, and I've been in high-tech companies, I worked for Teradata, I worked for Splunk, The common denominator here is data, data, data everywhere. I love data. And so, you know, kind of the third lens I see things through is that about 5 and a half years ago, I decided that I wanted to get my doctorate, and I picked artificial intelligence because it was just exploding and it's the wave of the future. And I was so excited to learn more and dig deeply into it and So I added researcher to, you know, to my core skill set and my approach to the world. So as a result of those kind of three lenses that I see the world through, I have the opportunity to work with just some fantastic customers because I, I see the world in a truly unique to me way, as every one of us do. And I want to encourage everybody on here, Noelle, I love how you do that. You encourage people to lean into who they are as individuals And that's the superpower.

100%. Oh my gosh. Yes. And that's why I think it's so interesting for people to realize, like, no one's born in this field, right? Like, we're all— the richer the experience, the better. It forces us to ask different questions and be willing to see the world differently. And so that's why I really— and I also uncovered how much I loved the customer experience, right? How do we make the dream? I always used to talk about the art of the possible with AI. You know, here's all the things you could do. And then I realized that clients really struggled to implement those things. And so both you and I went from, hey, how do we help them realize it's even a possibility to how do we actually help them do the thing we said was possible? And I love that. And that's— I also am very excited about the sales side. But recently, like over the last, I don't know, 2 years, you and I both have kind of experienced this shift in the world. And I was just curious, you know, I think you've had to maybe rethink, I don't know, maybe rethink or maybe not. But what has been your approach from the perspective of like going to market? And I know you wrote a book. So I'd like to talk about like, what provoked you to kind of build what you're doing now. And did you use AI in doing that? How did that play a role? And maybe even if it's just like the thing you do and not how you did it, I don't know, but would love to hear your perspective on that.

So first of all, I use AI tools all day, every day. I use AI tools when I'm sleeping. I, I use them. I believe that I have quadrupled my productivity, and I'm, I'm not exaggerating. Like, I literally believe I've quadrupled my personal productivity through using AI tools. And frankly, that very personal experience for me becoming an entrepreneur and having to do a little bit of everything— anybody that has founded a startup knows that you end up doing everything from super minutia all the way to what is the strategy for my organization and how do I get investment and all of these things along that whole journey from top to bottom. And you can use artificial intelligence from, for all of those pieces to help you. And so my personal journey in leveraging these tools has really informed the way that I help my enterprise clients. So I am quite literally talking about awareness. So Noelle Russell Russell, I love what you said about the fact that we've kind of had to shift before generative AI, before ChatGPT was, you know, really access to GenAI was democratized back on November, back in November of '22. Before that point, we were talking, we were raising awareness, we were spending a lot of time helping people understand why they care about artificial intelligence. And then, you know, when ChatGPT was released, it really captured the imagination of the public. And as a result of that, all of these executive clients and boards of directors, and now all of a sudden they're like, oh, I get it, I'm paying attention. So what happens is in these conversations, you go from awareness, 30,000-foot view, to how can I use that every day? Teach me how to use ChatGPT. I mean, it's like, it's so fast how, uh, people want, how quickly they move to that phase of wanting to dig into it themselves.

Oh, 100%. Yes. And as a result, I love that because I also have watched the questions. It was like vegetables to kids over the last 10 years or so. We're like, no, no, you're going to need this. You need to do this data stuff. You're going to want AI. And it was not it was a— it was a harder sell, uh, to be very frank about it. And, um, but what we've seen now transition over the last— and it's so funny because I would have said like, you know, last year when it came out, but it's actually now been over like the October before last. Um, so yeah, I love that the new world is— it's nice because at least we're having, um, you know, situations where our clients are asking us, uh, as opposed us being like, no, you need to ask these questions. I also am very refreshed that a lot of these clients are also asking us about responsible use. And that seems to be an area that you also— that's why I love that you've gone into research and have really decided to focus on that part of— and researcher, you know, is a kind of layman term for that might be listener, right? Like that you are listening to the world, listening to people, and being able to bring those into reality for companies. I think it's extremely, extremely important. So I know personally I learned a ton over the last year and a half. What would you say maybe is one of the biggest lessons that you've learned, you know, in just acquiring this knowledge or making a shift to go in one direction versus another? What kind of lessons would— could you share with some of us that are on this journey ourselves?

I think the first one is a lesson that we relearn throughout our lives, which is the constant is change. The only constant in life is change, and we have to lean into that. You have to embrace it. You have to be willing to get out of your comfort zone and try something you haven't tried before. And although that's kind of my natural way of being, I love that next thing. I'm always looking for the innovation and how do we, how do we use innovation to drive profit and to drive from a productivity perspective, to drive profit and to drive revenue. But that realization at a truly organization-wide scale is so important for people to understand that every one of us has the opportunity to be leaders at this moment in time. You, if you're the only person on your sales team that is willing to get out there and try AI, I guarantee you, you are gonna be teaching those that are around you and you're gonna be pulling people with you. So my, my number one takeaway for people is just try it. Just try it. If you don't have a ChatGPT account or, or an Anthropic account, or whatever, I mean, it doesn't matter. Pick your tool. I love Poe.com. Poe, multiple language models you can use all in the same place. Love that tool. If you don't have one of those, do it today. Like, just do it. Just open it, you know, get an account and just start asking it questions. I think that personal experience, the hands-on experience, There is nothing like that to increase your own, your own appetite for embracing change. Because once you see how powerful it is, you are, you're never going to want to do without it. Somebody asked me the other day, what would you do if you lost all your AI tools today? And I was like, I know it's like losing our cell phone. Not really sure I remember how to work it. Work without them, right? So I— it would be, it would be really tough.

I 100% agree. Um, yes, I also, I have like on my phone, I have a, you know, on the home screen I have a shortcut to ChatGPT, so I don't even have to log into my phone to use it now. Um, so it has definitely become an integral part of like the way that I just ideate about things. Um, but I do think that custom customizing of these models, right? So that it doesn't— I mean, a lot of people, I think executives, when they first start playing around with it, are like, well, I mean, that doesn't sound anything like me. Like, I have to rewrite the whole thing. They don't see a lot of value, and they don't realize that there is this level of customization of prompting that you have to do to educate it on who you are, how you think, so that it does generate valuable or meaningful results. Now, I also, you know, So I appreciate that. I'm wondering if there's anything, you know, because I feel like that's good advice and POE is also one of my favorite tools. So I'm glad you mentioned that. We'll definitely be adding that to our notes for everyone who's listening. One of— I'm curious if there's any experiences, and this might not be in my list of questions, I'm just curious, like, was there any experience over the last year and a half that you were kind of like, I don't know, that you struggled with or you found your clients struggled with? What was the hardest thing? Like, obviously trying something new, but was there a specific use case that you saw being more popular than others or a specific struggle that you saw? Because I think a lot of us are in this space now where, you know, I'm hoping people are going to go try, but I don't even know if some people don't even know what to ask it. So just would love your intuition based on the last year or so of watching all these clients go down this path, if there's any, any other things that you'd like to mention to people to help them navigate the world, the new world.

So the biggest shift that I have seen, and, you know, I work with, I work with dozens and dozens of clients, right? So across all different industries, but in general, the biggest shift that I've seen is that this time last year, people were just almost panicked. Like, I don't understand what this means to me, what this means to my organization. And so they were just like reaching out for any kind of help to give them structure and a new way to think about what artificial intelligence meant to them. And now what I'm seeing is more of a shift to, okay, we get it, we understand, we're not, we're not afraid anymore, we're curious now. So I think we've emotionally evolved from, from some fear to curiosity into— and then those that are more on the leading edge are excited. I mean, they're generally genuinely excited about what is possible for them inside of their environments. But people are still trying to find their footing, like, what is— how do I You know, how does my team, how does my sales organization, uh, get traction as thought leaders? And here's the thing that I'm seeing, um, play out, and these are big customers, right? These are enterprise-sized customers. But what they're trying— they're being expected to be thought leaders around artificial intelligence. When they go to talk to their clients, they, they are being expected to have a point of view to help them to see what they could potentially do, be doing with AI. And that's very disconcerting for these sellers who are like, I can barely use this thing myself. How am I going to be a thought leader? Right? So that is, that's kind of the shift that I've seen happen is that it's, we've moved out of fear and into some pragmatic realization that We've got to step forward here. We're expected, particularly high-tech software-providing companies, we are expected to have a point of view.

Oh my gosh. So I'm debating on whether I want to talk about this now or maybe we'll save it for Q&A. But I absolutely love the thought leadership idea. I run into this all the time where people— and it's a bit intimidating because of the matrices of skills that often we think you have to have in order to be able to have a thought around this, like data. You know, I saw a bunch of comments, um, in the chat about, you know, the importance of data. So how much do you need to know about data and data strategy? And how much do you need to know about cloud? And how much do you need to know? I think both of us have kind of grew up at these companies, and so we've, we've been in the companies when they when they were going through their cloud phase and when they were going through their data phase. But for those of us who don't have that experience, like, it can be very intimidating. But I, I think you also mentioned this at the beginning. It's so critical that we actually just look at it from our own unique perspective and that that perspective alone can be a platform for developing thought leadership. Like me, like, I, my perspective was very much accessibility driven because of my son and my dad. Like, I was always looking through the lens of accessibility. And if we increase accessibility of something, we increase our funnel, and so more people can buy it. But that— and that's just was my perspective. But it was not uniquely, you know, because I had 15 years of experience in, you know, data migration or in master data management, though I do have that experience. But that's not really what my thought leadership ended up being about, and it ended up being about something that was quite personal. And I do think we are in a world now where that personalization of your, like, the ability for you to tell stories about how this technology will help you personally, but also you professionally, or you, you as a, a service provider or product provider, I think that's going to be critical. I would— I'm curious what your favorite use case is that you've, you know, seen. Maybe not the most common, but like, do you have something where like, oh my gosh, that was pretty Cool. Would love to know your, your thoughts on that.

So my favorite is role-playing with generative AI tools as a, from a sales lens. My favorite use case is using generative AI tools. There's a tool called Brevity that's fantastic. There's several on the market that allow you to craft target personas and load the, because context is everything, right? When you, when you talk about the quality that we get out of our generative AI tools, context is everything. So The more that you can load into it about who your target customer is exactly, what your sales force's strengths are, what your product strengths are, etc., etc., the more context you give to any generative AI tools, the higher quality output that you get when working in partnership. I always say that I work in partnership with AI every day, and I encourage my clients to think about it like a partnership. And you have to onboard a new hire You also give them all this background context, right? Like, think about it like you're onboarding a new team member and you've gotta give 'em all this background context so that they can be wildly effective as a teammate. That same process has to happen when you're onboarding your AI partner. So when we can use these role-playing tools, load in that context. Who are you targeting? What is your message? What are your strengths? What are your strengths as an individual seller? You can give so much fantastic context to these generative AI role-playing tools. And then to your point, when you were talking about earlier, Noelle Russell Russell, that you don't have to worry about the, you know, about your own discomfort or your own embarrassment when you're practicing with these tools. It's just you and your computer, right? But you get that opportunity to play over and over over again, and it's just incredibly powerful. I have seen sellers go from feeling completely incompetent with what they are delivering to 2 hours later, they're just beaming, like they get it. They know how to get in front of their clients and they're really confident. And that is fun.

Yes, I agree. I remember working for a company and the CTO would walk down the halls and people were terrified. Because he would pull you aside and put you in a room and be like, I want you to whiteboard out, like, as if you were having a conversation with a customer, whiteboard out our value proposition. And people would be like, and there was really no vehicle for doing that other than like talking to yourself in the mirror, which not a lot of people did. And so, and you get no feedback, right? You only have this like slight visceral sensation when you're doing it. So The fact that you could do this now and actually get real feedback on how concise you were with your message and how well it landed. I love that idea because it does, it's energizing. And the reality is, is that sales is like a huge part of sales is confidence. It's just your confidence to deliver the message and tell the truth about the thing that you're talking about. And so, yeah, I love that. That's amazing. All right, and we've got lots of questions coming in. I want to see if there's any for you specifically. But before we do that, I want to give you a chance also to share. Oftentimes we— I have a podcast called Good Morning AI, and in our last few episodes, we've developed this practice of like, what can we give to people that would help them? And I know you've got lots of initiatives that you have, so I want to give you an opportunity to share anything that like with the audience. And then also if they want to just stay in touch with you or in contact with you or follow your work, like, what's the best way for them to do that as well?

You know, Nicole— I'm sorry, Noelle— my, my personal journey was so heavily impacted by education. I invest a lot in writing education pieces and trying to help people feel more confident. I try to bridge the gap between the things that are talked about in the market and what does that mean to your average business user, your average business leader. So I write a lot. Um, I encourage you to follow me on drlisa.ai. I have a blog where I write education pieces, and my entire intent is just to, uh, what's the old adage, that rising tides raise all ships? And I want to— I want that for us. So please follow me there. As far as specifically For sales assets, I actually have, again, on drlisa.ai, there is a training, there are training classes that are off that I offer that are specific to sellers and sales leaders, as well as I am a huge believer in frameworks. And this is something that came to me as a result of the research lens that I added. And what that means is that In addition to the context that you add to generative AI tools, I love to give it frameworks to work with. So for example, if I'm trying to solve a strategy problem, I will tell it, I will, you know, I give it those custom instructions and then I will also tell it that I want you to help me to build a strategy for this using a SWOT framework or using a PESTEL framework or et cetera, et cetera. So I'm looking for those frameworks that I can help to give the system to work in partnership with me. And the reason that I feel so strongly about that is because if you think about what a framework does, a framework has thousands of words of context involved in it. All of the research that was, was created to in concert with that framework, all of the times that it's been used and applied in all of these customer use cases, et cetera. So if you give the GenAI context to use in the form of frameworks, it just explodes the quality of what you create. So I created a digital asset that lives on my website that is called— let's see, it's called 6 Thought Leadership Selling Stages and Supporting AI Tools. And that is available on my website and it will take you through where you're at in your selling stages and specifically give you tools to use in that part of your selling stage. And that has been a really popular tool, um, with my sales community.

Oh my gosh, I, I'm like, I should have led with that. But that's amazing. What a great gift. So I encourage— and thank you, of course, Talisha. So grateful for you jotting these URLs down for everyone listening. So thank you for doing that.

Thank you.

But yeah, so head on over, grab that. I know I'm going to grab it. We'll also make it available. We'll put the link in the community for everyone. But it's been amazing. We're super excited that you had a chance to join us. Your skill set was perfect for our first day in sales, um, and I think we both come from different perspectives, but it was so awesome to just hear your, your history and your humble beginnings, you know, in farm world. That's awesome. I was actually just at Land O'Lakes talking to, um, Winfield United, which is Dairy Farmers of America, basically.

Of course.

Yeah. And very similarly, helping them transition their mindset into a world where how can AI help them every day? And it's interesting because as someone actually put in the chat, like, AI user, the AI user journey, like, it starts with anxiety. And that's literally when they introduced me, they were like, I know you all are afraid of this. And I was like, well, don't start that way. But it's true, a lot of people are worried. So hopefully today, I mean, I love the tools that you shared. Hopefully you all have a little bit more understanding of some of the things that you can do. This is such a huge area. As Dr. Lisa mentioned, education is key, paramount really, to our experience. So, so grateful that you shared your time. If you want to stay, you're welcome to. I'm going to open it up for questions. I saw a bunch come in on the chat. If not, you're welcome to also go. It's up to you.

I'd love to stay. Thanks for having me. And hear, hear what your audience has to say.

All right, awesome. That's amazing. Thank you very much. All right, cool. So I am going to flip through the chat and try— and if you have a question, now's your chance. So we spend the last half hour doing just some Q&A. I saw a few come in, and Mike Novak has been generous with his time and resources and saying, but definitely this is a great opportunity to also say this is what the community is all about. So if you join the I Heart AI community, Mike's part of that community, um, Joe is part of that community, myself, Stephen, like a lot of us are in there just trying to answer a lot of questions, but also learning from each other. It's very much we're trying to kind of diffuse the echo chambers in the world, um, and make it a lot easier for us to share knowledge. We do find, or at least I find, that sometimes I'm in a room and those people talk as if everyone already knows the answer. And even if there are people in the room who don't know the answer, they're too afraid to even say they don't know. And so because I've experienced that so often, I really want to encourage us to have these spaces where you can ask questions, um, and even if it's direct message to me, um, but I can then, realizing that that's a question being asked, I can share that answer to everyone. So even those who are too afraid to ask can get The answer, and I love that idea. I love the vision of being able to create a world where we can all move from anxiety. So thank you for posting that, from anxiety to a place where we actually love this technology. And just like you said, Dr. Elise, we use it every day. Like, I can't remember a day that I didn't use it because it's so— it's changed the way I work so intimately. Okay, so let's go through one of the questions that I saw was around copyright. And I wanted to share a story. I thought it was really interesting. My son, who's 17, said this to me. I said, hey, you know, you could use this tool. And I started talking about some of the digital tools that are available. And he was like, oh yeah, I don't use tools like that. And I felt like he was a bit representative of a generation who was like, I'm not going to use tools that I think are going to infringe on the copyright or not give credit or financial support to the people who created it. And so at 17, his perspective was already that there were these tools that would not serve the creators, right? That the creators would be taken advantage of in this space. And I explained to him some of the new advancements that are happening like in blockchain, um, and Adobe and Microsoft are investing in these blockchain type, uh, scenarios that allow you when you publish content for it to be, uh, identified on a transactional journal so that you could actually get paid or at least get attribution so that you can get paid later, um, for assets that you're using inside of these large language models. And when I explained that to him, he was like, like, oh, well, that would be interesting. But I realized his default was no, because I don't want to use something— and, you know, it goes back to our responsible AI discussion, right? Like, how, how do you— where did the data come from? If you're using an image generator, where did those images come from? Like, whose, whose were they? Did they agree to let you use them? It's okay if you did, if they did. Like, if it's all good, great. But get answers first. And I'm now watching a generation of kids in my house anyway ask very different questions than like me, where I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing, I can do all sorts of cool stuff without really thinking, why can't I create? I mean, I should show you, I'll show you all a picture maybe tomorrow in marketing. I created a Funko, actually. I think Dr. Lee, we were on this like chain of creating Funkos. It was super fun. It went like a little viral on, on LinkedIn. Did. And then, um, but then I also created a mini Lego figure of myself. It was a little harder to do, but like, I don't own Lego, I have no relationship with Funko, but I'm able to use that. And what is my responsibility in that? And so, um, so I think— thank you for the question— I think it's still very much up for debate. The legal— our own legal system in the United States is still debating on what what copyright means in this new world. So I don't think we've got a definitive legalistic answer to that. But I do think it all boils down to like, be responsible, like ask the questions about where did it come from? Who owns it? How do they get attributed? How do they get credit? And that may, as it was with one of my clients, it may actually shift them to a place where you don't want to use tools like that, that don't have have a good answer when it comes to attribution and copyright management. And if that's true, you might not end up using AI that generates images for a while until that settles. Dr. Lisa, any opinions on the copyright? Have you run into that in your experience on the copyright side?

Oh my gosh, yes. So first of all, demographically, the— those using generative AI tools most prolifically are 30 to 44 4-year-olds in the United States, which I find really interesting, right? Um, that our younger demographic— and one of the reasons cited is what you just shared, that they're worried about the attribution pieces, as well as the fact that our education system has not been supportive. They have been actively discouraging the use of these tools, which I think is incredibly concerning from a workforce development perspective. I want And, you know, so I'm, I'm always trying to influence higher education about making sure that we are looking forward to workforce development. But from an IP perspective, I always make sure when I use these tools that even, even if I just say, you know, created in partnership with ChatGPT or with DALL-E 3 or whatever the case may be, right, that I, that I at least point that out because if anybody ever comes back and says, I, I don't want them to think that I was trying to take credit even for something that I'm using from a tool, um, that I think is— this is still going to have to play out in the legal system, right? We've got to figure this out. It's also playing out in media because these media outlets are very concerned about their, their own— the news content that they're creating being used that way. So what I think is going to happen is we're going to see a complete business model shift. Blockchain underpinning technologies that bring this to life. But I always tell— please don't believe the, uh, that when somebody tells you that they can 100% attribute something to AI, please don't believe that. Like the tech's not that good yet. Yeah, you can't. And even if you could attribute it today, by tomorrow that they've probably learned how to get around that and it's no longer going to be correct. So please be very careful about decisions that you make, um, based off of AI identifying systems.

I 100% agree. And, and to extend that, Samantha actually wrote, um, that she was curious, and you talked this already, um, about attribution. Like, when you are using these tools, how do you at least show intentionality in this? And I, I think I do something similar that to you. I, I actually disclose that I use these tools all the time. Of course, I just said it to all of you, but I use them. I showed you how I use it in my sales process and helping me draft funnel content. Um, but I also disclose it like on my website. I'll say, you know, this website's content was generated in partnership or in collaboration with generative AI tools. And that invites the conversation, should someone want to have it, about the same thing I do to other people. Like, hey, if you say AI, I want to know, how do you do that and what do you do? It also, though, forced me to update my privacy policy, which is something that most consumers are not looking for. For, but every company has a privacy policy. It's legally required by the SEC, and that privacy policy does need to now include what— how your content was generated, how it might be using content that is going to be provided by your customers. And so I think there is some additional conversations there. Is there any other guidance you might want to provide or share how you are kind of disclosing to your customers or, or to social media when you're using this kind of tool?

I think we do really similar things, Noelle. I, um, in individual posts on LinkedIn, if, if there's any visuals that I include, I always state these are the, you know, um, there are— I overtly tell people every day in conversations that I use generative AI repeatedly throughout the day. I really try to be as open and transparent as possible, definitely definitely having privacy, having a privacy policy. I, I have crafted an executive communications matrix that's also a free asset on my, on my website to help people to identify, and it's, it's in a very simple format to help them identify how to address issues like this with their internal employees. And then what are they saying to their customers as well. So really just trying to put some wrappers around being transparent. I mean, I think that's the— that is the underlying, uh, the underlying element that we all need right now because the regulations are still playing out, the laws are still playing out, the, the market is moving forward so, so fast with thousands of tools being created every year now. So And, you know, to me, the best we can do is to be transparent in the moment and to behave as, as responsibly as possible, knowing what we know in that moment in time.

100%. Sorry, I had to step out of my computer, lost its power. I kicked it, I guess. I got the notice. I was like, oh wait. So yeah, I think that's— I think it's always a good practice, right? Mainly because good use of this technology means that you're amplifying your own voice. And so I have no problem disclosing this. And if you do have a problem disclosing it, maybe it might end up leaning towards this feeling like the content you're generating is not uniquely yours. And there's work you can do to make it uniquely yours. I think some of the content in your sales process work that you've done also leads to that. Like you're using this— as a matter of fact, I saw a question, or maybe it was more of a comment earlier about how this technology is maybe not— oh, let me just go look. I think it was Virol, maybe. Let me see. Hold on. Yeah, there it is. Oh yeah, it says this background work, like we were talking about policy and that these policies and automations is not the exciting stuff that you can do with generative AI. How do you change this behavior when preparing the use of AI? And since it's so critical to have policies in place. Yeah. So I think, well, what I'm interpreting from that is lots of people wanna do really exciting stuff, like cool cutting-edge things with generative AI. And I found, I actually take a note from Satya Nadella. He, in his keynote announcing OpenAI in January of last year, or last year, yeah, in 2023, right after this happened, he said like, this isn't actually for the exciting things. And this is how I get executives to think differently. Like generative AI is actually for the least exciting things that you're gonna do. Like your humans are gonna do the exciting stuff. The GenAI is meant to take over the human drudgery, tasks like PowerPoint creation and funnels, you know, management and sales capture and all these types of things that like, you know, some— I talked to some people and they're like, this is like soul, you know, soul-crushing work. You're not joyful in doing like these mundane tasks that AI is uniquely good at. But at the same time, what that means though is that, okay, so you're going to use it to do these kind of rudimentary, redundant, mundane tasks. But this, the policy work is what helps those tasks execute flawlessly, like execute in a way that is actually helpful to the business instead of harmful to the business. So I think those two things go hand in hand, but it does require a mind shift, kind of a paradigm shift of an executive who's like, I want to use this to like, you know, create a brand new brand or for a beverage company to say, I want to use generative AI to draft me a new formula for a beverage. Sure, you could possibly do that. Or you could say, what humans are creative in that way that I already employ, and how do I free up more of their time in order for them to do those creative things and think of those things? And again, this is not a definitive answer. There's lots of debate going on about how much AI to use in the creative space and what is human and what is machine. That symbiotic relationship, we're still figuring it out as humanity. But I think the policy part is, it's kind of like the vegetables to children part, right? Like it's the necessary work in order to even see the light of AI start to shine in an organization. Otherwise, you end up in a Black Mirror episode where you accidentally created a machine that hurts people, and that's not, not what we want at all. Um, yeah, so I agree.

I would say very practical, a very practical— I actually have a sample policy too that's for free on my site if anybody needs one, if anybody needs one, um, at least to get started, because nobody wants to eat the vegetables. So if we can at least give them something to to start with. It's faster for them to get through the vegetables part of their work. But I think that a very pragmatic, practical thing to do is to use large language models to assess the terms of conditions that you are accepting when you use these, when you use generative AI tools. So anytime that I'm going to start to play with a new tool, I go into their terms of conditions, I copy it out, I toss it into one of the large language models, and I tell it, to identify risks to me or the creators behind this tool and give me a summary in bullet points. And then you decide. It's very simple instead of you trying to read the legalese, right? So those are the kinds of— that's a perfect example of drudgery kind of work that now I can apply my human thought to the summary that it provides. And go, oh, am I OK with that? Am I not OK with that? I need to dig deeper into this bullet point. That's how you work in partnership with AI and kind of outsource the drudgery.

Absolutely. And I think it's important. It requires us to kind of reinvent what humans are doing today. Because in some cases, much of our— and that's why, you know, you can definitely make a case that jobs are going to go away. But in many cases, those humans that are doing the drudgery work are actually great at higher value tasks. For example, contact center. That was an easy place that initially, you know, our, our clients, people we talked to were like, oh my gosh, we can go and we can cut full-time headcount. We can, you know, save costs. But what they realized very quickly was that they didn't actually want to cut that headcount, although some companies did prematurely and it's hurting them now because they ended up cutting into the muscle of their organization that would actually help them grow. Like, those people who've been spending the last, you know, year, 2 years answering calls, they know what customers need, and they are actually the best, uh, like, positioned to cross-sell and upsell to those clients, right? So now that some of the drudgery of password resets and, you know, how— where's my order is taken care of by AI, now when someone calls in, we can actually take care of these customers, um, and we can give that guidance to people, uh, that have been talking to them and understand their problems at a much deeper level. Uh, and we're starting to see that, at least I am. You know, last year a lot of people were like, how do I cut costs with this technology? And this year a lot more people are— and even some of the same are like, actually, okay, I don't want to cut costs, how do I increase revenue, how do I grow? And again, one of the reasons why we wanted to start with, uh, with sales. Um, let's see.

So one of the, one of the core tenets for me is that if a customer— I will outright tell them when we begin our conversations that if they are intending to use AI to cut positions, then I'm not the right advisor for them.

Right.

Because I really truly believe that this is how we unleash all of this pent-up human potential is through creating these partnerships with AI. I saw this too, to build on your contact center example, I had a client who was able to use artificial intelligence to manage their— the problem they were trying to solve for is they had 2 times a year where they had so much demand that it was killing their staff. They were having to work huge amounts of hours and it was very low-value stuff, um, but they had to parse through all of the inbound email they were getting to be able to identify those those 10% that needed a really high-end conversation, somebody with capability from a customer service management perspective. And so that was the problem they were trying to solve for. But ultimately what they learned in leveraging artificial intelligence in that process was that the customers were all happier. So they were able to handle the drudgery really quickly using artificial intelligence. And then they were able to identify those ones that really needed the human touch. And to your point, Noelle Russell Russell, they were able to drive significant revenue because they took customers that were potentially at risk, and because they identified them and were able to give them white glove treatment, they turned those around and drove it into additional revenue instead. And those are the kinds of situations that are playing out all over the world for those organizations that are open-minded about really thinking about the partnership between AI and human creativity.

Absolutely. There is a question here directly towards you. And actually, Noelle Russell and I've answered this question from my perspective, so I'm super interested to hear yours. What's the most important aspect of conveying credibility as a thought leader to your to your clients. So for those of us as executives, as chief AI officers, or as those advisors, strategists, how do you establish yourself as a thought leader? How do you establish your credibility? And then also, how do you empathize with the concerns that you have about AI and their concerns, right? If they're worried about stuff, how do you empathize with the concerns that they might have?

I think number one, you need to be realistic about where you are at in the thought leadership vein. And what I mean by that is that if you are at a 101 level of understanding about some particular piece of AI, and by the way, if anyone tells you they are an AI expert, please run away screaming because it's all moving way too fast. There's too many categories and too many pieces. Nobody can be a holistic AI expert. Expert. Okay, so if you are at a 101 level in some particular area of AI, then you are going to be able to be a thought leader to somebody that's just getting started, that's at a zero level. If you're at a 301 level or a 401 level in that space, then you're going to have different individuals that you can be thought leaders for. So when I think about being— behaving responsibly and building credibility, you have to say what you're good at and, and also be willing to say, hey, that's not my area of expertise. I have lots of areas in, in AI where I have built out an ecosystem of partners for my business because I know that those aren't areas that I have core competency in. So I would encourage people to be realistic about where you can provide thought leadership and to whom it's appropriate for you to do that. And make sure that you're not representing yourself in a way that is disingenuous.

Great. And I 100% agree. I think disingenuous is probably like the keyword that sticks out to me because I want to act from a place of integrity, act from a place of personal knowledge, or at least passion, where I've done my research and I've done— that's why I tend to speak from very personal experience, but it then leads to very practical professional examples and ideas. So I love that. Thank you very much. Okay. So as we close this out, one more question, and Virol asked this question before in a slightly different way. So I'm hoping we can answer both of them at the same time. But that question is, how do you address the fear your clients have on their internal business data being like— when a company's internal business data is being used to train AI models, making their information public? Now, this is a fear that companies have. It's— may— well, I'll let you answer what, what your position is on whether that's true or not. But like, it's definitely a real fear I've seen clients have, like, hey, I don't want to use GPT because my stuff's going to end up on the internet like Samsung, right? Like they've got these bad examples in their mind. So what are some of your thoughts on that?

Well, some of the examples are real, right? I mean, that these, these behaviors have happened, these things have happened. Um, prompt injections is an area in generative AI that really concerns me. But as far as helping your your clients to address the fears that they have. There are lots of things that we can do from an architectural perspective to 100% make them feel confident that that is not going to happen. But one of the things that is really important is helping them to understand what is a public access tool. So, you know, Noelle Russell Russell, you talked about this earlier, which is that are you the product?

Yeah.

When you are in a situation where you are getting something for free, um, let's take a social media site like Facebook, for example. If you're not paying for Facebook, then you are the product, right? So taking that same B2C mentality and applying that, helping leaders to understand that if you are looking for a free ride, then you are the product, and you need to be understanding that. You need to understand what their terms are. You need to be really clear about that. There's actually this kind of a personal soapbox for me because I think that many times our software providing companies, they, they have no limits to what they can put into their terms of service. And then you're sort of like, if you just pop pop up tomorrow and they say, here's your new terms of service, and this is a key element to, you know, to the way you're doing your business, do you decide you're not going to do business with them as of today with their new terms of service? Or are you somewhat being ransomed into agreeing to whatever the terms of service are? Check, you know, check the box, move on. So I think it's really important for people to apply that same B2C model mentality to B2B. And if you are the product, you need to be aware of that.

100%, I agree. Well, thank you for staying extra and answering questions. I tried to scan through all of our questions. If anything was missed, um, I will make sure that we provide at least a text-based answer to the community. But I tried to— I went back a couple times, so I think we got them all. Um, and of course she had a few seconds. We will have Q&A at the end of every session this week. Tomorrow we will be focused on marketing. On Wednesday, we're going to cover all of the beautiful things that go into how people like Dr. Lisa and myself, how we use AI every single day, like practical everyday things that I use it for. Everything from recipes I use to come up with creative ways to get vegetables in my mac and cheese that my only one food my child leads, all the way to how do I actually grow revenue for a business leveraging these tools. And then another on Thursday will be focused on professionally, how can you use this? And that'll go to the question you just answered as well, how to safely and responsibly use generative tools in the workplace. And there are ways to do that. There are architectures you can use. Number one, though, it's really about moving past kind of playing around with public tools and building your own safe and responsible sandbox for play. And that's something that Dr. Lisa focuses on a lot with her clients as she moves in. So, so building those responsible sandbox is so critically important as you move away from that anxiety stage to the excitement stage to the execution stage. Like, how do you actually do this? You're going to have to build something inside your company. And then on Friday, we're going to have a a fun day where we just kind of wrap everything up together. I'll share with you a couple of the projects that we have launching. I want to tell you right now, but I'm gonna wait. Friday's like a big announce day, not just of things that are coming, but also some fun deals that I have asked— been asked to participate in. Um, and then yes, please connect with Dr. Lisa. Head over to drlisa.ai. I am already on her list, um, and get fun things all the time, especially your new book. Or I mean, I guess it's not new anymore, but it was new to me when I found it. But I loved it. So hopefully others will as well. Thanks for coming, Dr. Lisa. Thanks everyone for your attention. The replay will be available, so I hope you enjoy it. And we are also going to create a highlight reel so that you can, if you just want to hear kind of our conversation with Dr. Lisa or just want to hear a quick recap of the lessons that we learned today, you'll be able to do that at your leisure. So don't forget to join the community. It's been amazing. If you liked it, you might see a survey that asks you, please let us know feedback. Obviously I did take notes of some of the technical stuff. I'm a one-person show. So hopefully— thanks for having grace with me as I tried to put links where I'm supposed to while talking and interviewing. But we do the best we can. And I had a lot of fun doing it. I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. We'll do a better job. I think we did pretty good today, but we'll do even better tomorrow. So thanks very much. Thanks, Dr. Lisa. Have a great day.

You too. Thank you. Bye.

Bye, everyone.