How to Become an AI Solutions Archiect part 7

Mute site. All right, let's see. Oh, I'm sure you have, Patricia. But here I am. Like, this week has been crazy. I was in Sydney all last week. I landed— just to let y'all know, I landed on— oh, whoopsie. Hold on. Wait, wait for it. Hold on. There we go. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Australia was amazing. I loved it. Daniel's in Australia too. Uh, but that being said, I was— yeah, I landed on Sunday from Australia on Sunday at 5 PM. At Sunday at 10:45 PM, I was on a plane to DC. I did the keynote in DC on Monday. I think I slept there, can't remember. And then on Tuesday— oh yeah, I did. I, I, uh, hung out with a bunch of people. I actually did a keynote and a panel on Monday. Then on Tuesday I left for Rhode Island, which was yesterday. Yesterday I was in Rhode Island, or yesterday I flew to Rhode Island. Today I did the keynote at Yankee Alliance, which is a healthcare conglomerate of organizations, healthcare providers and payers and pharmacy professionals. So that was amazing. So it feels like I really don't feel like I've fully rested since I got home from Australia. I have been talking a lot, so my voice is not what it could be. Oh, yeah. And last night we kicked off the Bot Building Bootcamp. So for those of you in the AI Leadership Institute, it was recorded. I haven't posted yet. But last night we did. We started day 1 of the Bot Building Bootcamp. It's not too late to join, but we do do them every single month. And then on Monday night, we started my brand new Maven class of my cohort. We have 40 people in the cohort on Maven. It's how to be an AI Solutions Architect. So it's literally This is like the light version of the, the class. The— we just kicked off a 5, a 6-week course on the details and project-driven cohort on how to become an AI Solutions Architect. So that launched, and there was— there is a special only because this was supposed to be done last week, but because of the hurricane, we actually pushed into the launch date. So that was an accident. That was not supposed to happen. So it was supposed to be done last week so that you could have a chance to take advantage of a crazy good opportunity. Community, which is if you want to participate in the Maven class, it's a $3,000 class. It's kind of expensive. I get it. It is my best work. So I actually think it's quite— it's worth the value. You will be able to make many, many times more money than the 3 grand it would cost you. However, for those of you who are in my AI Leadership Institute, which only costs $100 a month or $797 or $747, I can't remember, for the year, You get access not only to that Maven class, but you get a pass as a VIP, one of my people. You get a pass into all my Maven classes that'll be coming out over the next year, and we've got 4 of them. So huge. I mean, it's like a $12,000 value. It's crazy. So if you haven't joined the AI Leadership Institute yet, you can easily do it, right? Exactly, Dan. It's gonna be so good. And with— here's the thing we found out over the last year of building our community. The other big thing that happened on Monday, we crossed 1,000 members of our our AI community. I'm gonna throw the link into the chat here so you all can have it. HTTP— I probably should let you do this, Sherilyn, but it's very simple. Noelle Russell AI. And so the free community, we're gonna be doing a lot more content. We have a lot of really awesome, amazing people that are at different levels of maturity in their AI journey, and everyone wants to share what they know. So really cool stuff happening there. But in the AI Leadership Institute, we have the bot building certification. We have, this, we have the Maven classes that you'll get access to. And then we also are launching next Tuesday. Maybe it's next Wednesday. On next Wednesday, we're gonna do a session. I don't know if you know this, but the Azure Skills Challenge, the Azure AI Skills Challenge is currently in effect, which means you can take a class and get a badge, and you can promote it on LinkedIn. It's, it's good. It's a good algorithmic driver that you know what you're doing in this space. It's worth doing. However, it's pretty boring. So I don't want you to have a boring experience learning about Azure Document Intelligence, which is an AI product that I help build. I'm going to actually teach it to you, and then we're gonna all take the test at the end, the knowledge checks as we go through, so that you'll end up with that badge. So we're gonna spend 2 hours together next Wednesday night because this one is done. This is the last one. So we're gonna do that together. It'll be really fun. So I encourage you to just think about it. Head over to noelle.ai. And again, if nothing else, if you're not in the community, which I think all of you are, or most of you are, but if you're not, join the community. Join us on our free calls on Friday. It's a Zoom, not like this. This is a webinar because I'm short on time, so I'm trying to be disciplined. But on Fridays, it's not very disciplined at all. I just open up the mic, and it's a Ask Noelle Anything, ask each other anything, learn from each other. It's awesome. We have great, great people who come. We have founders of really cool companies coming. We have young people that are just learning. We have people in career transition. We have people who are in roles that are happily in roles and looking to hire people. I mean, it's, it's a great collection of people. So join us every Friday. We do it at— it's 4:00 PM on Fridays. And that, of course, means it's a little bit early on Saturday. But anyway, it's 4:00 PM every single Friday. It's called Friday AI Leadership Happy Hour. And I always do broadcast those live on YouTube as well. So if you want— if you can't get into the community and be part of that, you can at least watch the sessions after their recordings. So awesome. Well, welcome. Oh, that's okay. So for some of you, this is your first AI Solutions Architect webinar. It was a series of 7. I wrote a booklet. This is how it was born. I wrote a booklet booklet. And actually what it started off as is a piece of paper where I wrote down— I was just trying to brainstorm all the things that make me successful. And I, I struggle to say this out loud for many reasons, but I'm very good at what I do, like exceptionally good. Like I've, I've got lots of receipts, lots of proof, lots of successful projects under my belt. So I'm very good at what I do. And what I wanted to do was make more of me, literally clone what I do in as many people as possible because I'm growing a business and I need mini Noelles. And I did that when I was at Accenture last year. I was able to create a, a couple of mini people. But I didn't have their dedicated time, their dedicated effort. They, they couldn't really go all in on the thing that we were doing. And so I was like, you know what? I'm gonna do this myself. So that's kind of the dream is if I teach you to be an AI solution architect, I might be able to hire you to actually help me change the world in building AI responsibly for some of these companies that I'm working for. And I'm working with some of the top brands in the world that have asked me to come help them. But I'm also helping a demographic that I'm very passionate about, which are all these companies that are financially viable. They're making over $1 million to $5 million in revenue up to $100 million in revenue. That's a big swath. However, many of these companies are still pretty small, right? Until they hit, like, $100 million $1 million in revenue is still kind of a small to medium-sized business. And so I really wanna help those companies because those companies have great cultures. They care about their people. They're likely family-owned. They're likely owned by a person like me that wanted to create a new experience, a new employment experience for people. So I really have a heart for them. So that's why I built this list, thinking, what would I need to teach someone to do what I do in front of an executive group or in front of a technology group or in front of a workforce, how do I get my— what's in my head out on paper? So I ended up with about 22 principles that I had uncovered that I kind of model myself against. And when you hear them, I— hopefully some of you have been on these calls. You were like, that's totally Noelle. Like, they're very— it's— I didn't ChatGPT it. Like, it's very raw, very specifically how Noelle thinks. But how I think is not unique to me. Like, everything I learned, I learned from modeling the success of other people. But I've collected a bunch of different models of success from different types of people, from sellers, from engineers, from data scientists, from executives. I pull all of this in, and that's what makes a good Solutions Architect is our ability to be empathetic across all the lines of the business, across all the roles in the business. So when I walk into a room, no matter who it is, they feel like I'm one of them. No matter who it is. It could be an executive, and they're like, oh, I see you, Noelle. Or it could be someone who's in the, front office. And they're like, oh, you, you see me, you understand me. And that, I think, is part of the magic of being a great AI solutions architect is being able to put yourself empathetically in the shoes of the person that you're trying to help and then genuinely help them. So that is how this was born. I ended up drafting a 21 solutions architecture, a booklet on that. I don't know, Sherylyn, if you can throw that in the chat for me. I don't know if you have it. I'm gonna go— I'm actually gonna pull it up really quick. AI, AI, I think I called it. There it is. Maybe. Oh, goodness. I don't know. I don't know if that's gonna be right. We'll see. There we go. So I built it. It's attached to my Maven cohort. We had— I got really great feedback on it. People loved it. But it's not deep. Like, it's just— it, it was literally like my notes, um, a bit of high-level understanding of these principles. So that gave me the idea of, why don't I put together a 7-week series covering 3 laws at a time? And we are now at the end of that. So if you were just getting involved, there are a bunch more. But I'll keep doing these because every time I teach it, I teach new stuff, and it's super fun and very exciting. Um, yeah, it's on my YouTube channel, but you will all— because you because you registered for this webinar, I will be— as soon as this one's done, you'll get an email with all of the YouTube videos from before. So it'll just be an itemized list. You can go through them. You can save the email. You can share with people. It's not private. You didn't have to pay to be here. I don't think— maybe I got you to pay with your email address. But other than that, like, it's for everyone. And so if you think someone else would be benefited by it, please, please feel free to share it. All right, that is the link. Oh, that was a long link. It's got some targeting on it. But anyway, that link goes to the Maven account where, where you can provide your email address and it will send you this document, the 21 Laws. I am going to print it though, because I wonder if I can show you one that I have here. I've recently started— I really like them. I'm going to use Deepak Chopra's version. So it's like a little booklet, right? This is I have lots of books like this. I like them because I can completely read the whole thing in one sitting, or I can just open it to a page. And so this is like the A to Z steps for affluence or whatever. So every pa— every chapter is only like 3 or 4 sentences. Like, it's really easy to consume. And, um, as someone who doesn't have a lot of time, um, I just got— oh, do I have it here? I don't. I just got a new book. Uh, I don't know where it is. Darn. It's really funny. It's huge. So I did a podcast in Australia and the podcast director gave me not Sapiens, but Nexus. Does anyone know the book Nexus? It's like this thick. I would prefer it be in a little tiny book form, but, um, it's an amazing book. Don't get me wrong. But, uh, Nexus is huge. So anyway, I am a— oh my gosh, yes. So Randall, great question. And, and this is— I'm gonna, I'm gonna claim this as a solution architect tool. So one thing that as an architect I try to do is get my ideas, my concepts, my frameworks, and create them in a way that's super accessible for my audience. And when I go into an executive boardroom or I go into a keynote, I like to— in the very front row are usually reserved seating for the highest valued people in the room. I don't pick that room. I don't pick those seats, but I always like to put something special in that seat. I usually put in, like, I'll show you. Yes. So I have these stickers, these I Heart AI stickers. So I will usually put a sticker like that was what I used to do. Then I got this idea for this booklet. I use Lulu to do these booklet printing, but you could probably do it at Kinko's, for goodness sakes. I don't know. Canva might even do it, but I know Lulu's I like because I've published other books with them, and I really like what they do there. So So I use Lulu to do it. But now imagine you build like a very simple— you don't have to write a 60,000-word book, which I just finished mine. You don't have to write a 60— you could just write, you know, I don't know, I don't even know how big this document is, but it's like, I don't know, 15 pages. And now you take it and you put it in this nice little booklet and it becomes a tangible thing of value. And it's not like a business card where people kind of throw it in a pile. They like keep it on their desk. I've walked into offices where it's on their desk. And I'm like, alright. So creating things of value and tangible value is unique in the world, right? Most of us are giving away ebooks or audio or, you know, a web asset in a world where everything's digital and everything's AI-driven. Giving something, some physical thing to someone like a book or a booklet is really impactful to the people. So just a little side, side, side tidbit, a little side quest we just went on, but really cool. Awesome, Carol. Nice to see you. Peter, what's up? Oh my gosh. Sapiens. Oh my gosh. You will love— if you like Sapiens, you will love Nexus. It's the same thing as for Sapiens, except rather than like on Homo sapiens and like the genesis of the species, it's talking about the genesis of technology. And it is, is fire. So it's just long. Like, it takes— every time I pick it up, I'm like, you're in. You could do this, Noelle. Like, finish a chapter. And I try my best to stay committed to that. Awesome. Awesome, Patricia. Oh my gosh, yes, let's do it. Okay, amazing. So I'm gonna— I got your message, Patricia. We are definitely gonna talk. I'm actually gonna send you my cell phone number so you could just text me because it's ridiculous. I know, I'm so sorry, but I'm home now for a few days until DC. All right, so I'm gonna share my screen and take you through the last 3 little tears. The last 3 use cases that we will be talking about. I think this is it. Yes, save. But for some of you who are brand new to this, I'm gonna go ahead and put it in presentation mode. Hopefully. Yes, that looks good. I think you can see it. I hope you could see it. So this presentation that I put together, I literally, it's the same presentation every time. So it's not fancy. It just will give you an opportunity to write things down if you want to, as I begin talking, and it'll contextualize some of the things that we're gonna say. I do always like to start by saying who I am and what I do. So of course, most of you know who I am. I'm not currently advertising this webinar series to strangers, though that will happen eventually. Right now you all know me, but some of you may not know my history or why I do what I do. Of course, that is my high school sweetheart, my husband Warren Russell, and all of my kiddos in the bottom there. But I do what I do or at least I was highly motivated to do what I do in the world of technology and artificial intelligence because my first son, Max, there in the pool, he was born with a condition known as Down syndrome. And it highly motivated me to build a world that would be better for him, that would welcome him, that would make it easy for him to interact, that people wouldn't laugh at him or look at him funny or make him feel different. And it was the sad— I won't get emotional, but it was a really sad moment in my life when he— like, this was 6 years ago. When he was like, I just want to be the same as everybody. And up until that point, I never thought he— I didn't think he thought he was different. And it made me realize, like, there's a way for me to help him acclimate. And we at that time were just getting involved in artificial intelligence and using technology in our house. Now we've integrated over 100 devices in our household so he can do his own dishes. Not that he will, but sometimes if I force him, but he could if he wanted to. He can cook his own food, he can do his own, like, laundry, all because we have systems in place that allow that to be possible. And creating that level of independence was really important to me, and artificial intelligence played a pivotal role in making that possible. It was hard to do before I joined the Amazon Alexa team. It got much easier when I learned about voice-to-tech, when I realized that I could create an opportunity for him to talk and that tech would react as a result. Like, I can, I can now— thank you, CES, the Consumer Electronics Show— I can now talk to our microwave and have it cook something. And because of the sensors in the microwave, it'll never burn it, it'll never overcook it, it'll never explode it. The— this is the magic that is the world that we live in today. And that's why I'm so passionate about it. But it is this passion. The reason I share this with you, it is, it is this passion that I have that I use in every sales conversation. So it is important if you haven't done this yet to kind of think, Why are you doing this? You don't have to learn AI. I mean, okay, maybe you do, but you don't have to become an advocate for AI. You don't have to become a seller, a architect. Like, you don't have to be all in in this technology. There's a reason that draws you to learning more about this tech when many people, and I would say 80% of the planet, is not doing what we're doing, is not upskilling in the way that I really hope they will. So why do you do it? What is the driver? And how do you leverage that message in every story that you tell, in every pitch that you give, that you don't just jump in? I always say you wanna talk about the who, not just the what. And actually, you wanna lead with the who. You wanna lead with who are you, why do you care about this? Because when you do that, before you start talking about the bullet points of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the framework and the teaching, before you do any of that, people aren't gonna be able to listen to you as well as they will listen to you if they think you have something in common, if they think you are the same. So oftentimes in my introduction, I will say, just like you, I struggled with blah, blah, blah. Just like companies your size, just like organizations, I was just like that. I try to let them know that I was exactly where they were. I'm not now. But the, the mission, right? The dream is that I can carry them with me. I can bring them to where I am, and ideally, they're where I'm where they wanna be. Right? That's, that's the whole making sure I'm talking to the right person and the right decision maker and the right client. But once I do that, it's extremely important to lead with who, not what, especially again in the world of AI and technology in robot interaction. People are gonna be hungry for the who. They're gonna wanna know, who are you? Why do you care about this? Would we be friends? I had this amazing client. They're a multi— maybe, I mean, they're a multi-billion, like, valued person. However, but their interaction with me, I've now made multiple six figures from the client relationship that I've built with them from the things that I built. And but what, what surprised me the most was at the end of my very first meeting, they were like, I mean, can we be friends? Like they literally said that, can we be friends? And I was like, yeah, of course we can be friends. Now, not everybody you're going to maybe want to say yes to, but in, in this case, I was like, absolutely. But that's the vibe, right? That's what you want to get. You want to get to someone where they're leaning in and wonder— wanting to know more, wanting to work with you. So the other, you know, 15— wait, no, 17, 18, 19, yeah, 18 other principles were all about how do we make sure that we are someone that people want to bring in. People want to, you know, like a lot of— there's at least 3 people that I can see right now that have brought me into their companies, right, that have asked me to come deliver sessions for them. Because, you know, right, like, you're like, ah, Noelle's cool, and she's excited, and she's high energy. I want that. In our company. I want that person to help us with this problem. In a world where lots of people are gonna say they can help, you're gonna— customers, clients are going to lean into those people that they actually feel connected to. And it's an incredibly important part. Oh, that's cool, Evan. I didn't— did I know that? I don't think I knew that. That's amazing. Awesome. So moving on to our actual laws. So these are the most important laws we're gonna talk about today, the most important ones. I always encourage you to connect, you know, if we're not connected, of course connect with me. I think all of you are connected with me because that's how I got you here. But, um, I want to encourage you to kind of think about, as we're talking about these last 3 laws, realize there's of course much more to it. But also, this is from my perspective. I do think though that it's a bit scientific. So All of these laws come from a data-driven approach to selling AI solutions. At Microsoft, I was there just 2 years, 2 and a half years. And in my time there, I sold over $1 billion of Microsoft AI to 100, over 100 companies. So $1 billion of Microsoft AI. So that's a lot of money. So I, and that was before AI was cool, right? It was before ChatGPT. So I understand a lot about kind of objections and why people say they don't want a thing. And, and so if you're either building a product or you're selling, you know, building a product that has AI in it, or you're selling an AI platform, or, and this is true for everyone, you're selling to people that need to understand AI in order to value what you're offering them. This is why I built these practices, right? How did I get people who didn't know anything about AI, or worse, were afraid of AI to in the course of an hour turn into someone who's like, this is awesome. I wanna do this. How do we get started? That is my goal. At the end of every call, I want my client to say, okay, so what do we do next? How do, what, how do we get there? What do you know? And they're almost like little kids bouncing in their chair. Like, what do we do? And it's possible. I've seen it consistently, but it comes when you put all these 21 things together and it seems like a lot, but most of you, I would guess, have at least 10 of them kind of working for you already. Because if you're here, you know me and you have— we have a lot in common. And, and usually people that show up to this, like, you already have some of these characteristics, but it's really about rounding out your expertise, rounding out your selling capability, rounding out your architecture capability in order to make room for, and build a career that actually does more than what you do now. And that's— I'm always striving for more. Some people find it exhausting. Some people look at me and they're like, I'm exhausted just watching you, Noelle Russell Russell. And I love it. But I'm doing what I do for a very important reason. I have a very noble cause, and it is my family. And I try to sleep. I do try to sleep, but I find it hard to sleep when I have such an important mission. I find it— I don't get tired. I don't get burned out because I'm not I'm not doing things I don't want to do. I'm doing things I love doing, and I still have to take time for myself. Like, this is why I like flying, because on a plane, I literally have moments where I'm like, I'm not going to connect to the internet. I'm completely— it's silent unless someone sees my t-shirt that says I love AI, and then they start talking to me. But it's really, it's really important to have a purpose that drives you, because people will see it. They will sense it. If you're just selling a thing to sell a thing, you'll be— maybe you'll be somewhat successful, but nowhere near as successful as you can be if you actually tie what you personally care about to the success of your clients. So the first thing, um, I'm gonna talk to you about is this concept of leading by example. And it's a bit more compli— complicated than what it sounds like. Leading by example sounds pretty simple. However, in the booklet, you'll see I have lots of things that I lead by example, like lots of different aspects of myself that I'm looking at to be the example in my family, in my professional life, in my personal life. So when I say lead by example, the number one thing that I think about is the word congruence, that what I think is the same as what I say, and it's the same as what I do. I do what I say. I say what I think. Like, it's all congruent. And you can see this over decades. Some of you might find it entertaining to go to my YouTube in the olden days. So I think my first YouTube video is like in 2008 or something. I used to do lots of videos, lots of presentations. And in 2008, you, you'll look at that and be like, oh my gosh, that's the same exact Noelle as I just saw 2 days ago. Like, I'm very congruent. There's evolution, of course, in my thought. There's evolution in the things I think are right and wrong. Because I'm growing. But one of the most important things you can do as a leader and as someone who's leading by example is also demonstrate that you have the right to evolve your thinking. It's the most important thing for people to see that they realize, like, you've been in the space long enough to start with one idea and then think about, oh wait, I've done this enough times to realize I'm not doing it perfectly. I can pivot and do something slightly different and get new results. It's incredibly— oh, thanks, Sherilyn. It's incredibly important to show the world that you can evolve your thought process. It's a sign of a growth mindset. Most people struggle to evolve their thinking. For example, I won't name anyone, but there are people in my family that once they say a thing, they are— that's the thing, no matter what. Even if much evidence has presented itself to the opposite, they're like, but I said that. I stand by it. It's the truth for me. I will never budge my perspective. As a solution architect, that philosophy, that mindset, that paradigm will hurt your ability to convert your customers. It will hurt because you won't be able to put yourself in your customer's position. You will stand— I mentioned this last week or the week before— you'll stand on the opposite side of the table. When you're leading by example, you want to come and you sit on the same side of the table as the people that you're talking to. You don't do an us and them. At IBM, that's all we would do. IBMers would be on one side of the table, customers would be on the other side of the table, and it was like we were like talking over them almost. It was crazy. And so I would always be the one who would walk in and I'd come early and I would wait for the customer to sit down, and then I'd sit down right next to them and I would fruit basket turnover everything. People would be like, I don't know where to sit. Pretty awesome. But, but these fine-grained, like, pathways that we've created over decades of experience, when we're leading by example, we also wanna lead by example by showing that we have the ability to change the way we think. That being said, we're still congruent, right? Even if I learn something new, I'm still gonna have— I'm gonna think thoughts that lead to words that I say that lead to things that I do. It's all the same. It's all consistent. Yes. Be agile. Exactly. I think empathy is critical. Exactly. Yes. This is the way. Oh my gosh. Do I have my little guy? I have a— a Mando doll around here somewhere. It's too funny that you said that. I'm a huge fan. I 100% like— and I've become so committed to it because I've watched clients who would say no to something that was very good for them because they felt like they were in an adversarial conversation. When I sit next to them, they realize I'm actually on their side. There is no, I'm on this side, you're— I'm on their side. What do you need? What do you want? And when the rest of the room— and many of you know, if you work in a big consultancy firm, you'll go in, but you're never alone. Like, I would go in and there'd be 10 other IBMers with me or 10 other Accenture people with me. When you do this, you set the example for everyone on your team and they literally will be like, wait, I didn't know we could sit on that side like that. I've had people say that to me. I didn't know we could choose. Like, I thought I didn't— it never occurred to me. So you become an example that pushes the boundaries of what people think is possible and you get to now reap the benefit of that, of course, because everyone's gonna— everyone gets better, everyone starts winning. Uh, at least that's been my example, my— or my experience. So the other thing, so there's a bunch, if you look in the booklet, there's like, I don't know, 10 or 11 things, but The things that were most important that I wanna focus on in this session was being congruent in your, in your ideas, in your thoughts, in your words, and in your actions. They should all represent the same core values. They should all represent the same you, right? So for me, my husband actually created a, a brand for me called Uniquely Noelle, and it's because in podcasts I would say something and I'd do something goofy. I'd be telling some story and I'd be like, oh, it's just uniquely Noelle. It's just, It's just me. And he was like, it's such an important concept that you develop your own uniquely you perspective and that you embrace it and you talk about it like you are uniquely you in certain ways. Sprinkle that over everything because people want to know you. I know you might not believe it yet if you haven't done this, but, but people do actually appreciate authentic sharing of who you are in addition to what you do and what you sell or what you're supporting. So authentic, uh, authenticity is another part of that, right? So there's congruence, there is authenticity, and of course, there's our, you know, our ability as we lead by example to just be willing to evolve our thinking over time and share that evolution with our audience, whether that's in a room or whether that's on social media. Um, so leading by example, it, it sounds simple. It's actually quite hard. One of the other things I do is, of course, I lead by example for my children. And I want to— I kind of— I have to think intentionally every single day. I'm gonna see if I have it here. It's in my book bag, which I just got out of the airplane. So everything's in my book bag over there. But I have a book that I write in every day, and I set an intention every single day about every 30-minute block in my day is preplanned. So if any of you ever walk up to me, you can be like, hey, show me your planner, and you'll see every single block has— it's not that every block has a meeting or has a task, but everyone is associated with something I'm going to do. And I do that on a daily basis because I should know for a specific day, the day I'm in, I should know how I'm going to spend my time. And I use that precision thinking around my time to lead by example in my family that we don't do anything haphazardly. We, we set intention, especially when we have a purpose. Like when I'm trying to do something in the world, if I don't do things specifically in alignment with my goal, I will never get there, right? If I want to lose 35 pounds, which I just lost like 25, so I'm 35 more to go. If I lose— I want to lose 35 pounds, COVID weight or whatever. But and I look at what I'm doing every day. If I don't do something every single day to attack that goal, to reach that goal, I'm not going to get there. And I'm— I can't be surprised at the end of 3 months if I didn't get there, right? I can't let that surprise me if I didn't do the needful things on a daily basis. Daily. And I'm about to jump into my next one, but I'm not going to do that yet. So I'll hold off. But it's really important to document your day. I absolutely do. Thanks, Jessica. Great question. So one of the things I use to organize my day, I do— I have— I'm a planner. Like I buy planners and notebooks all the time. One thing I personally use now is the reMarkable. I have a reMarkable 2. I will be soon getting a reMarkable Pro, I hope, honey. And in the reMarkable, I got— I went to Etsy, I downloaded— I actually purchased a planner. It's an ADHD planner, but it's a planner for 2024 and 2025, and it is amazing. You know what I'm going to do? I'm actually going to write this down. Or Sherilyn, you could write this down and remind me that I said this. But I'm going to actually do a class on what I do every— like, not a class, you know what I mean? Like a 30-minute or an hour LinkedIn Live on how I plan my day, because it's no joke. Like, it's, it's pretty cool. I— and it's come from years and years of practice, but it now works. So I use this planner. It plans out my day. It allows me to— every meeting I have is indexed against the days that I have. So when I click on a day, it'll show me all the meetings I had that day. And then when I click on the meeting, it'll show me all the notes I have. So it's this Really great collection. I used to use Moleskine notebooks, and it was really hard to plan and organize because everything was all over the place. But with this Remarkable, it's kind of like a Moleskine notebook, but everything's indexed and tagged so I can get to everything. It's really cool. Yes, agreed. What, Alicia? Yes, we are doing that. Get ready for 2025. We are going to do a Q4 session on setting up and planning for your year. Okay, so leading by example, I think we covered it, but it really is about figuring out how do you become successful and then be willing to share that, those success ideas, just like I'm sharing with you. This is part of me leading by example, being willing to authentically share what's working for me, not being worried about, oh, if I share this with you, somehow my world gets smaller. My world only gets bigger when I share anything, everything. When I teach people things, the world gets bigger. People do more and, and get and experience more and get more value. So I'm not one— I don't have a scarcity mindset, but that is a mindset that can hold you back. So leading by example also includes creating an abundance mindset. I just showed you that book that I took out. It was like Creating Affluence by Deepak Chopra. I mean, I have so many books. I have so many books on tech, but I have equally as many books on like the right side and the left side of my brain. And I do think that part of that congruence is creating balance in your understanding of yourself, both the super technical part of me that likes to code on the weekends, and then that also part of me that wants to spend time in meditation and in prayer and in planning my day. Awesome. Okay, so that is great. So thanks, Jessica. I'm definitely going to do a class on that. I gave you a little bit— Remarkable plus an Etsy template. And if you have a Remarkable, I'm happy to share the template that I use with you. And it's a couple other things because I use some software as well. Okay. So the next thing, hopefully you all will, will 100% understand why I do this. Part of me building. So, oh, and I forgot to mention these 3 rules are inside the section of building an authentic, authentic authority brand, like becoming an authority inside your industry or inside your space. So these are all things that lead to building authority. So when I talked about, you know, leading by example and demonstrating that in the content that you write, in the podcast that you do, in your parenting, like, as it sprinkles all over what you're doing, what you end up finding is when people look you up, they see this consistency, right? They see that you are intentional about what you do, and that makes them trust you, which makes it easier for you to now have a sales conversation with them. Mentoring and inspiring others is actually double-edged. The one— first, it's good for you as soon as you learn something to teach it. I'm a big believer in this. I learn almost everything this way. As soon as I learn it, I teach it. The other thing though is that, um, once you learn it and then you teach it, it's really useful to not just kind of fire and forget. I did a lot of teaching on Twitch for a while, but the challenge with that is I was teaching into the ether and I would have hundreds of people join, but I didn't know any of them. I didn't— I couldn't follow up with them. I couldn't hold them accountable. I couldn't ask them if it went well, if it worked, if it didn't work. That's why I ended up creating the I Love AI community, because I was like, I actually wanna know if what I'm saying is working, and I wanna know how you've evolved what I told you 2 years ago. Based on your industry, based on your practice. I don't know if Blanca's here, but like, I learned so much. Like when Blanca, Talisha, you know, a lot of you, some of you are new, like in our community, everyone has this unique lived experience. But I only get to have that, have access to that because I'm willing to put myself in an environment where I can help inspire others and mentor others. Because when I try to mentor others, I end up getting mentored myself. I'm sure some of you who mentor people know that, like, you learn so much when you start trying to help someone do something. And many times, or I'll just speak for me, I struggle sometimes to teach my— to take my own medicine, right? I'm easy to like, oh my gosh, you should do this, this, and this. And then I sit here at my computer and I'm like, why am I not doing the thing I just told that person to do? So it's really inspiring because it forces me to really kind of, again, in the spirit of congruence, it forces me— if I say it, my actions need to match the things I say. So if I have as a motive that I'm gonna be congruent in my thinking and I'm gonna lead by example and I wanna inspire other people, I need to actually authentically deliver on the things that I talk about. And so it helps keep me accountable. It helps me if I say, hey, and sometimes I blow it. Don't get me wrong. Sometimes I get it all wrong and I mess up lives and I, like, and many of you have been there and patted me on the back and told me it would be okay. So thank you for that. But it's in the effort. And here's— I mentioned this in a previous call as well, but the most important word I have in my vocabulary when it comes to doing things is recommit. Is when I do something and I totally mess it up, or I try to publish every day. I don't, I can't, but I try every day. I'm like, I'm gonna publish content every day. I'm gonna create a podcast every day. It's ridiculous expectation. However, when I set that expectation, I publish multiple times a week, which is way more than I used to publish when I would only publish once a week. If I said once a week, I'd let those weeks sometimes pass, so it would be once a month. When I say every day, it actually accelerates the things that I do, even if I don't hit every day. But the word recommit is so important to me because when I do forget, if I say I'm gonna do it every day and I miss a day, or if let's say I'm gonna eat really well, and I end up at the Cheesecake Factory. Yes, I love the cheesecake. Anyway, judge me if you will, but I end up there and I'm like, I'm totally going to get 3 different cheesecakes. I don't eat them all. Don't judge me, but I like to try them all. So I buy a bunch of cheesecakes and I taste a bunch of them and I'm like, oh my gosh, I just had like my calorie intake for like the next 3 days. I just did in one sitting. But I don't let that— like sometimes when we make these mistakes or when we feel like we've done— we've missed the mark in our intention and what we were trying to do, we let that turn into not just one day, but like a few days, a week, a month, a year. Like, we basically say, well, since we failed at it that day, we, we, we struggle to just get back on, on track. So what I do now is as soon as I make a mistake, I acknowledge it and I accept it and I love myself for it. But then I immediately say, I recommit right now. Not tomorrow, right now. I'm recommitting to no longer doing that. Now I make these choices intentionally, sometimes, sometimes unintentionally. But when I make a mistake or hit a roadblock or forget to do something I promised myself I would do, I immediately recommit as if I'd never recommitted, as if I'd never failed. I'm like, okay, starting tomorrow I'm going to do it. And it's super helpful to me because otherwise, if I don't— like, let's say I miss a day on a podcast, the next day comes, I'm like, well, I didn't do it yesterday, so I guess maybe I'll do it next week. And then another week goes by and then I don't do it at all and it just becomes a slippery slope. So recommitting immediately upon failure is really important. I do have a saying that I say, a quote that people have quoted me saying, which is when something bad happens or you fall off the wagon or whatever, you feel the feels like you should really— that's why I acknowledge it first. I feel bad about it. I often am very hard on myself when this happens, but I try not to stay in that zone for more than about 90 seconds. And granted, I'm good at this. I've done this for a long time. I'm very practiced. It used to take me— sometimes it would take me 2 weeks to recover from a failure or 2 weeks to recover from disappointing myself or disappointing my family. Now I can acknowledge it almost immediately. I can now identify that I, you know, identify what I'm feeling, that I feel bad about it. I then almost immediately, though, I go from feeling the feels to making a plan. And that is the spirit of solutions architecture. You have a problem, and you can wallow in the problem a little bit. You can be like, oh, this is terrible. I can't believe this happened. That's so— but then you immediately start thinking about the solution. That's the art of solutions architecture is how quickly can you go from this is a really bad problem to I can think about solutions. So many of us get stuck in the story of the problem. Even executives that you'll talk to, they are gonna be all in the story. Sometimes I have to— I just sit there and I will have an entire meeting where all they did was complain. And I have to come back to actually start talking about solutions because they're just so ingrained. But as a Solutions Architect, the power we have is to certainly enjoy that moment for a second, be in that moment, be present, understand the feelings that you're feeling. But then as soon as you possibly can, move into solution mode. How do I resolve this? And I now have done this. I've had very bad things happen in my life. One day I'll write a book and you'll be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe on top of all the things, very bad things have happened in my life. And in those scenarios, I've— and the most recent, so like in the last 10 years when something really bad would happen within a day or two, I've recovered. And I'm always thinking like as soon as something bad is happening to me, whether it's me disappointing myself or I'm disappointing someone else, in my mind I'm already thinking like, This is awful. How am I gonna figure this out? How am I gonna make up for this? How am I going to right the wrong that I've either done or has been done to me? And it's that mindset, I think, that makes me extremely nimble and agile when I'm helping customers solve problems. Because as soon as they say something, it's kinda like The Matrix, right? I see the, the whole digital matrix of problems. But as soon as they start talking and they start explaining their pain, I'm immediately in solution mode. Not that I'm gonna present them that solution because sometimes people just need to talk. Right? We know this. People just need to talk about the problem. But if they're hiring me to help them, I constantly am starting to iterate in my mind through what are the different ways that I can help them? How— what have I heard in the message so far in this conversation that I can use to help them get what they need? And of course, align what they need to what I sell or what, what I'm offering or what I'm architecting. And when I say sales, I know I, I— it sounds like I mean, like, I'm not— I don't ever— I don't do, like, sales, sales, meaning I'm not the one who owns accounts. I'm not an account executive. So if you're in that role, I, I would imagine this applies. But this is more like I'm, I'm being brought in to help a customer who has a problem with the technology. And it's my job to sell them on the idea that I have that will solve their problem. And me selling them is maybe 50%, maybe 70%, me selling me that they are like, alright, Noelle, you got some street cred, you've got some credibility, you've done some things. I can hear this from you, but it's a long road for them to see what I'm architecting for them and then agree that it's good for them. Like, in that long road, it might be long and tedious, but I can usually get them to believe it's possible in the span of an hour. And that's kind of what— yeah, exactly. Pitching the idea. So I like being solutions driven, I think, is a philosophy. And I think all of us can— we can do it in every area of our life. And when you think this way, it's easy to get excited and be energetic and be like happy because you're constantly finding answers to problems. It's literally why I love being an entrepreneur, because my job is to identify problems and build solutions. Like, literally, we just created a new product about me. I'm going to go and now build out a 2025 roadmap, you know, session with you all. Like, that's how it works. We just built a solution to the challenge of me. Oh wait, I can't use this class to talk about all this. Like, I love it. I love building solutions to problems. And I think all of us, if you don't feel that way now, you'll wanna do as much as you can to move yourself in that direction. So mentoring and inspiring others, it starts by you giving before you get. I have a mantra that I use all the time. It's in my mind, it's on my wall where I say, I nourish the world and the world nourishes me. And then in fine print on the bottom, and it's not a linear equation because oftentimes we think, I want something. And so sometimes we give in order to get. Sometimes we won't give it all until we get. And so my philosophy is I give and give and give and give, knowing that the world is going to provide. And it always does. This is, granted, a philosophy. It's not really a spiritual one, though I guess it could be, but it is more of the law. I have understood it to be the law of reciprocity, that as I give, as I share, as I help people, when they need something, when they need someone to help them build something, I'm the first person that comes to mind because I was so giving in the transaction or in the project that I worked on with them in the past. They also are very quick to refer me to people. Oh my gosh, Noelle is amazing to work with. You got to go work with her. Like, it's not an accident that they think this way, right? They— I am— I'm building that by making sure that I'm constantly in a mindset, in a mode of, of giving. So the last one, and this is a great one to end on because there's a lot of homework assigned to this one, is being consistent and being persistent. So when you are consistent and persistent, I mean, really, you can do anything. I have found now that I can do anything. I will give you an example. Some of you know this, but I have long— I don't know, for the first 20, 30 years of my life, I would say I was not a runner. Runner, right? I was not a runner. I don't like running. I actually hate running. And, and then I all of a sudden was like, well, maybe I can run. So I wanted to do a half marathon. And the only reason I wanted to do it was because it was a Disney half marathon and it was the first ever Disney Princess half marathon. It's now been running for 10 years, but at this time is the first one ever. And I was like, oh, and I'm, I'm very big on being like the first to do something. Some of you know this about me. So I'm like, oh, I'm going to be there. I'm going to be the first. It's going to be amazing. I— but I'm not a runner and it's a half marathon, so I need to start training. So the way I got to the finish line was not, you know, I didn't just run like I trained for 9 months in order to prepare to finish that course. And of course I did. Now I got to the Princess Half Marathon and found out that people actually dress like princesses. So I had to go back because I didn't dress like a princess the first time. I didn't know. So I just thought princesses would be there. I didn't know I could be one. So I'll share all with all of you some of these photos. But I've been— I've now done it actually on the 5th anniversary, the 5th one. I got crowned Perfect Princess because I ran every single half marathon. But then I had a baby and my baby was born on February 15th and the half marathon was on February 28th. So I missed a year, but that's OK. But I've still now done, I think, 12 half marathons because I also ran a couple that were not associated with Disney. But I love them. I love doing them. I don't love preparing or running, but the only reason or the only way I'm able to complete them is because I am consistent and persistent in my goal of wearing a crown and running around. I mean, I've worn— like, I was Snow White. I was Aurora. If you don't know, that's Sleeping Beauty. I was Moana. Moana, I didn't need a wig, but Snow White and Aurora, Aurora, I totally— I wore a short bob black wig. I wore a long blonde wig. Ridiculous to run in a wig like that. But I loved it and I love it every time. Every time it comes around, I love it. I'll be running again next year so you all can cheer me on. So I really think it's, it's incredibly important to identify first your targets. That is your goal. And we're now going to build a class that's going to help you set your targets for 2025. I've already set my targets for 2025, but what that means is you need to have actual metric-driven results you're going to go after. How many clients are you going to have? How much sales are you going to do? What's commission? You know, what commission are you going to make? Whatever metrics you're going to use to drive your success. I have— it's like the Wheel of Life, if some of you have heard of this. I have like 10 different buckets that I'm— that I care about. And in one of the planners that I use in my Remarkable, it's a wheel of life that I measure on a weekly basis. How well am I doing in the area of, you know, personal relationships, finance, spirituality, health care or health wellness? Like there's 10 different areas. There's— and you can Google it like wheel of life and you'll see examples. You can print one off. But there are a lot of these habit tracking kind of journals, and one is in my Remarkable. So every week I analyze my life and say, okay, how am I doing in all the different areas that I have metrics of success I'm measuring against? I can't do something for every one of my 10 goals. I can't do something every single day. So I use the week to kind of balance out, okay, one day maybe I overindexed on selling for my company, another I need to One of my goals is to spend quality time, experience-driven time with my family, with my kids. And I just spent a week away with my husband in Australia, which was phenomenal. But I'm now— my bank account is a little short, not physically, like metaphorically. My family bank account is a little low because I haven't invested in that relationship. So I'm low in the wheel of life. My family relationships this week are really low because I haven't had a chance to spend time with them. So now next week, or now coming up this, the end of this week, I'm prioritizing spending more time so I can build that balance back up. So these are the types of things— create mechanisms for, to, for establishing consistency. But it all starts with the targets that you set. How much money do you want to make? I actually— let me give you an exercise that I use. I'll type in the words here. I create— what, Cyclist? Me too. Well, okay, you're gonna laugh at me because I am not a cyclist. I'm a Peloton person. They are not the same. I've uncovered since I recently tried to ride a bike outside. They're not the same. But I do love my Peloton, and I'm a huge— I use that thing when I'm home every, every day that I'm home. So that's really cool. We can be friends. So one of the things, there's an exercise, and what I'd encourage you to do is grab a piece of paper. Like this one, and you're gonna draw basically a table, and it's gonna have 3 columns in this table, and the 3 columns are have— I'm just gonna type it in, but you could write it down— have, and then do, and then be. So 3 columns: have, do, and be. And my husband and I do this every quarter. We go in and we look. I don't know if I— oh, I might even have it here. Oh, I do. So every quarter we sit down and we've already— we did it for Q3. We'll be doing it again for Q4. But we sit down and this is our 10. I'll just let you see a little bit of it. But this is like the 10 wheels, right? And all of our goals per each wheel. And then, yeah. And then this is our have, do, and be. So we were actually not at home, otherwise we'd use our digital whiteboard, which we have right over there. But this is our have, do, and be section, right? So you can see I use different colors. He used— I think he used blue. I use purple. Literally, blue is his favorite color. Purple's mine. So we write it down and we say, here's all the things we want to have, like the physical stuff, big house, lots of cars, whatever it is. Then what do you want to do? Like, what if— like the things you want to do or experience? And then who do you want to be? I want to be a good spouse. I want to be a great mom. I want to be a great spouse. Anyway, you know what I mean? I want to like— I'll just give you some of them. I want to be a world-renowned author and speaker. I'm on my way, right? Some of you might agree. I want to be in the best shape of my life. I want to be the CEO of a multi— of a billion-dollar company. I'm already the CEO. I thought becoming a CEO of a million-dollar company, that was my goal for the last 25 years. But I hit a million and I'm like, oh, now it's a billion. So I just updated that. I want to be a role model to my family and children. I want to be inspirational. I want to be stress-free. Like, so those are like their beingness, right? Like, how do I want to exist in the world? And that's not the whole list. I just gave you a sample. But writing these 3 things allow you to establish what are you going to be persistent and consistent about? How do you drive towards a desired outcome? If you can't think about where you want to be, it's going to be very hard to get motivated on a daily basis to do that thing. So for me, like, financial freedom is a big thing for my family. I have a son with Down syndrome. He's not gonna be able to, to be by himself. So I need to make sure that there's generational wealth that my family will be taken care of when I can't be here. Right? And, and, and that's my number 1 goal. So I'm doing whatever I can to grow that, that part of my world. And so everything I do kind of stems from how do I protect my family? How do I serve my family? And, and of course, technology is a big part of that. But yeah, I think have Do and Be Oh, you can't see me? I don't know. Oh, I can see me. I don't know, Padme. Maybe it's just you. Did anyone— can anyone see me? Okay. Yeah, Daniel can see me. So maybe I got hidden. My little box got hidden. Sorry. Yeah, they can see me. So this concept, again, we do it every single quarter and we also do it every year. For those of you who are in relationships, one of the most important things that you can do in your relationship to help you be consistent and persistent is to build your plan together. So my my husband and I sit and we do this together. We write on the same page. We also do what's called a, uh, a role blending exercise. So right now our roles are very blended. Um, so we out loud say, here's the role I'm going to play in the family for the next 3 months. And we often don't change them too much, but sometimes they do change. And we outline, here's the role that I'm gonna play. Here's the role he says, here's what I'm gonna do. And it's sometimes there's a conflict, but only one person can have the role. So we will have to negotiate who's going to do what, like dishes. We fight over the dishes every quarter. So we alternate. We don't, you know, so that person is now responsible for dishes and somebody is responsible for laundry and some. And it's not the same. Like we are in a house where we have to distribute the work equally because there's so much work to be done. And so I can't do what I do and have to take care of the whole house and feed everyone. He's a great cook, so he cooks. I don't ever want to cook. He doesn't want me to cook. So that's a role that he has that doesn't ever change. But doing that role definition is extremely important because now everybody knows what their job is in the CEO of your home life, in the CEO of your personal life. It's important to know who's doing what job. The other thing we do is we write down our goals. And we write down our personal goals and our joint goals. So I write my goals, he writes his, and then we write the we goals. What do we wanna do together? What we end up finding out is that when we write the goals we wanna do together, which are the most important goals in my relationship, we're trying to build an empire together. When we do that, it's so critically important that we recognize each one of us has independent goals. That may or may not like serve each other, right? They might be completely off. But there are a set of goals that we will work on together and that we'll prioritize. And again, that's why we do this work, so that we all— we are now on the exact same page. We also plan together every morning that I am home. We also, we plan quarterly live together. We, we review monthly our business and financial accounts, like We run our family like a business, but a loving, kind, amazing business. Like, not a hard, cold business. Like, it's, it's awesome, but it is intentional and it is planned and it's beautiful. So that's why I end our 21 Laws with consistency and persistence, because in order to get what you want, you're gonna have to figure out what that is and then consistently and persistently drive to that. End. And it's okay if you don't know what you want. I didn't know for a long time, so I would just pick things. I would say, I wanna go to Italy, and that would be my thing. And so I'd save money and I'd take pictures and I'd get a camera and I'd do all these things to prepare for that trip. I wanna take my kids on a Disney cruise. Like, these were all— but I was thinking so small when I was like, I actually want to change the world by teaching the world artificial intelligence. Like, that became my goal 8 years ago where I was like, I could make a huge impact if I could just teach people that this is not, you know, this isn't science fiction. This is happening. And I feel like I've impacted lots of companies doing that work. So how— what do you want to do? How do you want to measure that success? And then build out your goals to match. Dishes, Verole. Good for you, buddy. Verole does dishes. So good. Somebody should. I— we both don't like them. So, but you have to think in our household, we have 6 kids, both me and my husband and my dad. So it's ridiculous. It's like a party every day. I get— I get that we're both like, I don't know. But I think this mutual, mutually beneficial attack of what you want to do in the world and how you're going to do that together, it's really saved a lot of argument. We don't argue about things anymore because we might argue for a minute. Remember, feel the feels, then make a plan. We might argue for a minute and then we're like, well, what are we trying to do here? How does this align with our goals? And that almost always, like, will kind of de-escalate a situation because we're like, oh, well, that's not really— that's not what we're doing. That's not what we're doing together. That's not the plan. Otherwise, and or, or we really have to revisit the plan, which does happen on occasion where we're like, I thought this is what we wanted. If we want that, we can't do this other thing. And then we're like, no, we really want to do the other thing. So we have to revisit the plan. At which point do you realize you had to leave your previous job and dedicate yourself 100% to building your own company? Well, Daniel, that's a great question. Unfortunately, and I share this experience with lots of people on this call, it was not a choice. So I found I was in a repeating cycle that was getting shorter and shorter and shorter. I would— I am very transparent about who I am and the value that I provide, and I consistently identify when I get into a company, the first thing I do is ask for metrics. Metrics. That's first. What are my metrics? What's my 30, 60, 90-day plan? What numbers do I need to hit so that you look at me and go, you are a good investment, Noelle. I'm glad you're here. Every company I do this, and every company I overdeliver. I don't just deliver, I overdeliver on those numbers. And sometimes, so at IBM, it took 12 years before I got into a team where a manager was like, it doesn't matter how good you do, I just don't really like you. I don't want you here. You should go. And so I left. At AWS, same thing. I was doing really good, 4 years delivering, overdelivering. I was— I mean, my numbers were phenomenal. And then I got a manager who was like, Noelle, your excitement annoys me. I would really like you to just leave. And so I left. Not, not— I didn't get fired. Not that time. I didn't get fired. I was just, like, put in a position where they didn't— they no longer appreciated the value that I brought, even though that was the value they brought me to bring. Like, that, that was the reason I joined the company. It's the reason they hired me. It's the reason they gave me stock options. It's the reason they gave me a signing bonus. And but by the end of a certain cycle, and really what ended up happening is as leadership changes, I end up get reporting to a manager that did not get it, did not understand the world of Noelle Russell Russell and what value I could bring. And as a matter of fact, it irritated them because I was so ambitious that I would often drive numbers that they themselves couldn't drive. And that is really irritating, by the way. I'm not irritated by it. I love getting people who outperform me, especially if they work for me. I want everyone on my team to outperform me. That is my goal. But in corporate America, that's not how it worked out. At least that's not how it's worked out for me. And it's happened so consistently. The last 6 companies, same exact thing where I'm excited when I get there, I deliver, I'm excited, performance review comes and some nonsense shows up. Well, you didn't communicate well in this blah blah blah. I'm like, communication? That's not— I'm not, I'm not measuring that. That's not a metric you gave me. Like, and he's like, oh, well, we expected you to build a report and you didn't build a report, or you returned the report late. Report? What? I never— that was not a thing. You've never told me about that thing. How are we talking about a thing in my performance review that I've never heard about? Anyway, I just realized that this is how the game was played. And so Eventually, though, I did. I delivered enough value in a corporate setting that I realized with extreme confidence that I could deliver that value without the corporate setting. And that is when I decided not to get another job. So I was let go from Accenture. Well, I, it was a mutually discussed and agreed upon departure, so I wasn't really let go. But it was a situation where the person that I was working for was like, I don't really want you here. And I was like, well, I could stay and not be wanted. Or I could take what I know I can do and deliver that to the world. And so that's, that's really— it became a— it's a confidence thing. How confident are you in your ability to deliver this value without the safety net of a company? And it took me 25 years to, to cut that net, but I definitely did. Yeah, exactly. A lot of— I mean, I would imagine— thanks, Alonzo. Yeah, that is how becoming an entrepreneur It, it is exact— many entrepreneurs, I shouldn't— definitely not all, because some people are just born to not work for other people and they know it before they go down this path. But I firmly thought I was like, I can be a team player. I, I build teams. I'm a great manager. I'm a great people manager. I'm a great hirer of talent. I'm like, I'm a great asset for a company. But I didn't realize until much later that that skill set is actually the great skill set of, of a founder, like being able to find talent and attract people that outperform you and put them together and deliver results. That is how companies are made. And so, yeah, it took me a while to be willing to accept my fate. I called myself an intrapreneur for like 20 years. I was like, I'm an intrapreneur. I go into companies and start new things. I'm much happier now. And I just know, like, I'm not saying that I won't get you know, convinced to go work for another company ever again. I might, you know, these offers are crazy, so I might go work for them. But I know now that there's a pattern that these companies go through and that within a couple of years, some leader grows tired of the excitement, enthusiasm, nonstop go, crushing numbers. Like, they, they just grow tired of it. Oh, thank you. Hi, Christine. Good to see you. Yes, I thought I would share that. So thank you for asking the question. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Agreed. So we're just going to start being friends now, Kristen, but I'm happy to jump on a call with you too, because it's tough though. Like, the part you're in is very hard. Like, the negotiation part, the departure part, it's called chemicalization in certain philosophies, but it like causes a lot of disruption in your confidence, in your— like, you're like, did I do something wrong? Like, am I not— did I not deliver on the numbers? Did I deliver on the wrong numbers? What's wrong with me? Why don't you like me? All to— and it all comes down to it's not about me at all. It's about them. And, and that's okay. Like, I, I've never struggled to get a new role. I probably would now in this market. Now, I don't know if I would or not, but it's hard now. So I want for anyone who's in transition and trying to find it, like, It is legit difficult. Like, people who have always gotten jobs easily have struggled in this new market. Like, people that are— many of you have stacked resumes and it's a struggle. So something weird is happening. I personally feel like it's the universe telling you to go solo. Like, that's my personal belief. So as a result, I ended up— oh my gosh, I must be over on time. 6 minutes. Sorry, guys. All right, I'm going to wrap it up. But I One of the things, the reason I share with you this list of use cases is that for— it's actually a good segue. For those of you who are either in a job or going to work in corporate America, this works for you too. But for those of us that are being called, like myself, to build solutions for companies, these are the boxes— excuse me— based on a study, done at Microsoft. These are the boxes where companies are currently investing in AI architecture, not necessarily their own teams, but that are hiring out consultancies to help them build a plan in these areas. If you already have an intuitive, like, knowledge of this space, like fraud or networking or predictive maintenance or just infrastructure, if you already have a knowledge base in one of these areas, dive in and learn how to use AI, like how to use AI as a tool to solve those problems. And right now you would be an anomaly, especially if you start building, which is my belief. If you start building some sample apps on your own in your own time, on GitHub, you just start building applications to solve these problems, fictitious applications based on the context of these, uh, conditions, right? Based on these different boxes, you will become one of— I mean, you can easily— I did it myself. Like, you can become a thought leader or an expert in that area for that domain. It will require you to become a thought leader, meaning you'll have to get out there. I always tell people, best Known beats best. So no matter how good you are at something, if you are not known, you will not get customers. You will not be able to succeed. You have to be known. People have to know your name. They have to know who you are and what you do. They have to understand that you have something to sell. This is hard for most of us. Most of us are not used to like self-promotion. Most of us apologize when we self-promote, but it is a critical skill. That you learn as a solution architect that you tell people, oh, yeah, I'm an expert in fraud analysis and investigation. I leverage AI to do that. And every day post a tip on how you might do that every single day or set an intention every day and do it 3 times a week or 4 times a week. But start to get out there with— put a stake in the ground and say, I know this stuff. I consistently and persistently will put myself out in the market and say, this is what I know and this is what I do. The bad news is, is that it takes a little bit of time for the algorithms to recognize that you're actually saying that. It could take 2 years, but 2 years is nothing in the big scheme of things. But most people are not consistent and persistent. They will not keep going for 2 years thinking no one's listening, no one pays attention, no one's watching their blog. But if you look at the best, uh, personalities in the world, if you look at their Google Trends,. They start with this flatline, and I call it the valley of death. They start with 2, 3, 5, 7 years of no one looking at them. And then all of a sudden, when they've got this collected consistency, they skyrocket and become an overnight success. ChatGPT is a great example. It's been out and available. You could actually use it in beta for 7 years. They were working on that model. It took 7 years before the hockey stick. And you have to be committed to go into an environment where you're failing for 7 years. That's a long time. So that is a skill set you need to acquire, is being willing to put yourself out there, stake your claim on a knowledge base, become an expert in that space, and continuously talk about it until you hit that hockey stick motion. And usually the way that happens is when you identify what you do well, what you love to do, and what the world needs right now and is willing to pay for, right? IKIGAI or IKIGAI, if you've heard of that term. That's the, the framework is when you find this Venn diagram of, oh, I love doing this, I'm good at doing this, and guess what? It's an AI thing, so the world needs it right now and is willing to pay for it. Now all of a sudden you're doing work you love to do, you're getting paid to do that, paid well to do that work, and the world needs your services. So it's, it's, it's worth the effort going through. I'm just reading through our comments. There is definitely a recording. We are recording this right now. It's actually available on my YouTube channel, but you will all, because you registered to be part of this webinar. I know it's annoying to, like, go and register, but the benefit of that is that I have a list of everyone who's attended one or more of these sessions. So you're gonna get a list tomorrow of all of these sessions, all 7 sessions. And I will also, though, be taking the transcript of those sessions and synthesizing it with artificial intelligence. And sending you out a, hopefully, a very small booklet about what we talked about, which is very different than the booklet I generated earlier. So just a small little write-up that was the top takeaways from every session. Alright. So there are a couple of use cases that I— this is called the money slide. These use cases are the highest valued ROI use cases in AI right now. So if you decide, if you want to make a lot of money very quickly, if you wanna sell a lot of stuff very quickly, being in one of these buckets, there's big demand in large amounts. There's no scarcity, lots of opportunity, and the ROI is significant, hundreds of percent return on individual investments in these technologies. So becoming an expert in any of these spaces will allow you to really tap into either customers that want it, clients that want it, or potentially even building in organization. Cabbage Patch. Oh, that's awesome. Okay. Where can we get more? Oh, well, you can hang out with us, Dorisa. So I talk about these. We have calls every Friday. Our AI leadership— this is a good segue. We have our AI leadership calls that we're doing. The, the most important thing you can do, though, is actually learn by doing. That's the philosophy that I believe in, which means you'll get into the AI Leadership Institute. This is where we have access to the Maven course. We have access to our Bot Builder, but we will also have use case driven sessions. We're adding more all the time, but we have 19 different use cases, or I should say I have 19 different use cases that I've built out projects for in GitHub. And so we're gonna start walking through those one at a time. So you'll learn about each one, but it's a great, great question. But the best thing to do is kinda tap in and become part of it. The other thing, let's see, do solution. Oh, Do AI solutions architects deliver on AI governance requirements as well? Great question, Evan. Whether they— I don't know if they deliver, but they definitely set— they basically plant the seed and set the stage and position the sale for governance work. So our job is to provide a holistic representation of what is needed to provide an AI solution. So that would include ethics. I think I went over the Lead AI Framework. I think it was like in call 3 or 4. But You'll wanna talk about what the leadership team is gonna need to do differently in an AI project. You're gonna need to talk about the ethical foundations that are necessary, how to build an AI safety system when they build their AI projects. Most of these companies have no clue what they're doing. Like, I walk in and they might have really smart data scientists, but those data scientists have never productized AI. So they have not thought about any of the risks really. Like, they're just like, but it works. It's good. Like, let's go. And so when I get there, absolutely our job is to not just outline kind of the, the process of problem identification and solving that problem, but actually to outline all the things that we'll use to mitigate risk in that solution. So as part of that answer though, Evan, I'll quickly say there is a cycle for this. And, and it starts— the very first thing I do is, of course, I do an executive briefing, which is like a leadership session. I did that today and yesterday. But once they say, okay, we're interested in this, I take them through a process. I guess I started to call it model evaluation and selection, but that's even more too specific because it's really problem identification. So the very first thing I do is say, okay, what problem are you gonna solve and what metric are we gonna use to measure that solution? Then I ask them, what data do you have and what are the policies around that data? That's a deep section. I could spend 3 weeks at a client just digging into their data. And doing a data analysis of what data is available for this problem. So the benefit of starting with the very specific problem and metric is that you're not gonna go in and look at all their data. You're just gonna look at the data that's relative to the problem you're trying to solve. And you're gonna encourage the organization, hey, let's start small with a minimum product, a minimum remarkable product so that we just do that. So we start problem identified, metric identified. Now we know the data that we have or don't have. The next step is picking the model. So now I go into model selection where I find out, you know, do you wanna buy a model? Do you wanna fine-tune a smaller model? What is your infrastructure? Are you in the camp of building a model from scratch, which I have yet to have a client actually say yes to when I show them the price tag. But I give them all those options. And then I talk to them about how do you evaluate a model for fairness, toxicity, and transparency. And there are standards and benchmarks for doing that. Now that I've got a model, so now we've got a problem, we've got some data, and now we've built a model to solve the problem with that data. And it's kind of working. It's probably broken half the time, but the, the hypothesis has tested true. Now what you're gonna do is the hard part, which is where your question comes in, is you need a team that's gonna identify and manage and mitigate accuracy concerns. So you need an accuracy review team, sometimes an AI red team or purple team. Or blue team might take on some of these roles. But you need someone who cares about accuracy. Is the model saying the right things? Then you need someone who— a team that cares about fairness. So a bias mitigation team. So their job is to attack the model and see how it can provoke bad or poor behavior. And then you need a defense team. And the defense team is all like cybersecurity. How do we make sure that we can defend against prompt injection and cross-prompt injection and jailbreaking, but also how do we make sure that we've got policies in place to mitigate risk in an AI solution. Now that's granted a 4-minute, like, crash course in a very deep conversation that I have. I have taught this though, and it's on YouTube, so I can send you the link. It is a, it's one of my favorite lessons to teach because it, nobody does this stuff. And it's shocking to me. Nobody, once you deploy a model, very few companies, I can count them on a hand, have an accuracy review team. I mean, Amazon even struggles with this. An accuracy review team, a bias mitigation team, and a defense team. If you're a cyber-aware company, you'll focus on defense. If you are a social impact company, you're gonna focus on bias mitigation. If you are, you know, if you're a retail company or finance or a healthcare company, you tend to focus on accuracy. Right? I wanna make sure, especially in regulated industries, but you actually need all 3 for you to build a sustainable solution. Yeah. Yeah. I will. Oh, good. Awesome. Yeah. It's my favorite thing. We'll also do another one. It was a whiteboard session. So for those of you who don't know, at the AI Leadership Institute, I do a lot of these workshops inside companies. And I always say I go from the boardroom to the whiteboard to the keyboard and more recently to the chalkboard because I care about education. But I go from the boardroom to the whiteboard to the keyboard. The boardroom is like a keynote presentation. It's like me talking and asking questions and interacting. The whiteboard is when we get into the details of how is this actually going to work. And that's what I just described to you is actually a, a whiteboard activity I do. And as an essay, as an AI essay, it's incredibly important that you learn to take what someone would give you in a PowerPoint. You need to craft that in your mind into a whiteboard because whiteboards are so much more engaging. You can build it along as the person you're talking to, as they gain understanding, you can build on top of that understanding. When you present it in a slide, it's like, blah. It's like all one. It's very hard to see. It's usually like lots of words and not a lot of pictures. So whiteboarding is a beautiful thing. And so I demonstrate that. I lead by example by teaching a lot of my most technical content in a whiteboard format. And then the keyboard is all of the things that I do once the company leadership is on board, once the technical team and architecture teams are on board, then I go to the workforce and I teach them how to write prompts. So we have a whole bunch of prompt engineering classes, and we have lots of resources for this too. So hopefully you all are part of our family in the I Love AI community. We share this stuff all the time. It's not just me. There's lots of us. I am passionate about this specific topic, which is why I'm doing this session, but we have lots of really great resources and, and humans and leaders and visionaries inside the community. You are probably one of them in your own right. So I'm, I encourage you to use this community to find your voice. Most of us don't publish stuff because we're like, ah, I don't know who's gonna what, read it. Is it right? Should I worry? The safest place you can publish this content is inside our community. Get in a habit of just publishing ideas. Don't, you know, I'm not saying like spam sales messages to my community. That's, that's not what I'm saying. But like, think about like thought leadership. What kind of things do you think about? What are the number 1 questions? What are the number 1 takeaways? Like, I, I encourage you because I didn't have that. Every time I hit the publish button, I kind of was like, I hope I don't break anything. I hope somebody doesn't think I'm dumb. I, I would go through all these weird emotions. And that's another reason why I built the community. I wanted a safe space where no matter what you publish, we're gonna be like, oh, that's pretty cool. Good for you for having a perspective. It doesn't have to be right. We're not gonna fight you on it, but I am gonna encourage you to constantly evolve your thinking. No matter what you think today, in 2 weeks, that thinking should be a little bit different because the world is changing just that fast. Amazing. Thank you, Alonso. So good to see you. I'm excited to see you. So on Fridays, I do 2 calls. One is an open call. It's very different for the AI Leadership Institute. So those are the paid members. We talk about much more in-depth technical things. I talk a lot about my company and I'm very, very vulnerable about how my company is growing. So if you're building a company, you'll see my progress through the eyes of, of that session. And then at 4:00, we do an open call for everyone. It's free to join. That's for the I Love AI community. And, and we're gonna do more and more of these calls, especially as we move into the holidays. I do lots and lots of, like, live calls every day because I'm not on the road anymore. Right now, I'm in the highest peak season I'm on the road like 5 days a week, so it's hard for me to do these live calls. But Friday I'm always on. But moving into November, as my schedule gets lighter, I'll be doing a lot more of these live sessions. So I hope you all will. Yeah, I know. Yes, I was. I was. I spoke 3 times in one day. That was crazy. But it's fun and obviously I love it. I do think I'm on a mission. I have a purpose. I hope if you have one, I hope you will use what you learned today to help push it even further. I'm excited to share with you. I mean, this is our last session, so thank you for being here with me. I will share with you all of the sessions, all 7 sessions, and the synthesized transcript in a PDF form so you can choose how you want to consume it. But it's, it's been really fun. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for coming today. If you've not been to any of them, it's awesome. Thank you for being here. It is. Oh, great. Awesome. Congratulations. Welcome aboard, Sandrika. Awesome. Oh my gosh. So cool. Fine. Nice to see you. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you very much, Alonzo. Patricia. Claire. So good to see you all. I like doing lives on LinkedIn all the time. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you could even go in and tell LinkedIn you want to hear more from me, like turn on the little bell. But when I go live, join live, you can ask questions. I now realize that during a live I can actually turn on my microphone and bring you on the call. I just found that out like 2 weeks ago, so I'm really excited to be able to do that with you all. But let's learn together. The more you learn, I hope you will share that with someone. On Peloton, I follow an instructor and he always says at the end of every session, he says, hopefully something today impacted you. Have the courage to, you know, like, not only learn, of course, for me, but have the courage to teach someone else, maybe someone you know, but even more importantly, someone you don't know. Share what you're learning. You don't even have to say where it came from. None of this is private information. Everyone should know what we're doing. Everyone should use this information to get their message into the world and really have their purpose, their purpose drive what they get to do every day. It's, it's a gift I'm very thankful for, but I don't think it's unique to me. And so whatever I can do to help you all either get a career that you love or grow a business that you love, I am here for it. I am very much— I hope you know, like, more so than you, you know, I'm 100% supportive of your, your success and will follow all the things and like all the things that I can find. LinkedIn doesn't share everything with me, so if I don't like it, it's not because I didn't see it. So I often tell everyone, if you post something, just send me a message or tag me in it or something so I can see it. You can put copy, like, CC, and just add people's names at the bottom of every post, and I will support everything that you all are doing. I'm so grateful to be friends. So thanks for coming. We'll see you next time. I'm just going to go and make sure I don't have any Q&A in the chat. There were questions, but I think I answered them. Where did they go? So I'm just going to check and make sure. Oh, I'm going to stop sharing. Stop sharing. And then I'll go into the chat and make sure, and I'll just— I'll record. I'm going to— if there are questions in here that I didn't answer— oh no, you guys were just nice. You're saying thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, good. So we answered all the questions. We are good. Amazing. Thank you for joining me. Happy Wednesday. 2 more days to crush it this week. Let's go get them. Thanks, everybody. I'll see you next time. And don't forget, if you're in the community, you'll know next Wednesday we're going to be doing same time, same place, but we're going to be doing the AI Skills Challenge in Document Intelligence. So if you want to join us, you'll get it. You'll get a text message or an instant message from me on LinkedIn. So I'll see you all soon. Bye everybody. Talk to you later. Have a great day.