I ❤️ AI Q&A: Leadership & Critical Thinking in the Age of AI & Frameworks for Scaling Responsibly

Goes direct to livestream. I don't get any choices. I don't even know what it's gonna say. Maybe it says nothing. I have no idea. I'll fix it in post, as they say. So welcome, happy Friday. This is our, you know, wonderful weekly call. I love AI. I got some cool— I'm not announcing the things you want me to announce, but I am gonna make an announcement today. We're doing some pretty cool stuff. I'm very excited about it. It's gonna be amazing. So I will share a little bit about those details and what that looks like. I'm just going to change it to this view so that everyone who doesn't want to be live on LinkedIn, um, doesn't see— wait, who, who's there now? Oh, that's Dawn's, uh, thing. All right, does it say you're speaking? I don't understand what's happening right now. All right, going back, going back. I'm just going to— let's see, find me in this gallery of people. It's good to see you all though. Uh, let's see, multi-gallery.

Here you go.

I can't even see myself. Maybe I need to do immersive. Oh my gosh, doing immersive! It's happening, people. If you are on camera, we're doing it. Um, it might just be a few of us, so let's see, let's see how it goes. Um, I'm starting. All right, there we are. Hello, my friends. Oh, oh, here, the reason why— this is my favorite part. Look, we are art in a gallery. Everyone strike a pose. Um, so cool, awesome, great. That's Perfect, perfect, perfect. So welcome everybody. My favorite part of the week. We just spent more time than I think everyone anticipated in our previous call with the AI Leadership Institute members. It was really fun. We talked about a lot of things, but the best part about those conversations is we talk about super secret stuff that's happening in our world. And so we won't share a lot of the details around that because, you know, if you know, you know. But we are going to talk about the news updates, things that are happening. And I would love it if any of you are in a situation where you are privy to information that's happening in the world of AI. This is not all about what I can share with you, but it's also what you can share with your friends. So if you have a new tool that you know or anything like that, like, raise your hand, let us know what you're playing around with. Do not be surprised if you say something. I mean, a lot of people are like, oh, I'm sure everybody knows this already. Like, You never know, and we are live, so, uh, I might even take the little thing, put it in Hey Jen, and, and advertise it to other people. But just be aware that a lot of people don't know the things that we do every day and that we think everybody else knows. So, um, so glad to see you, Jason. Glad you're safely, uh, back home with the fam. Uh, yes, give us update news. What do you got going on?

So Palantir is in a little bit of I don't know if you've seen the news, but their partnership with Apple and partnership with the Army. So they have— so it's Next Gen C2. It's this whatever, fixing the communications in the Army. But they're having problems getting their renewal of their ATO, which is their authority to operate basically on the Army network. So for the exercise, they get a basically like a CTO to basically like test it out in the experiment. But obviously after the experiment, they got to bring it to the real world. So it has to go through defense unicorns in their sandbox and then they'll get an ATO. But their MAVEN smart system, which they've partnered with Apple to be the future kind of computer system that the Army is going to use that will be in all the vehicles, is in a little bit of hot water at the moment. I'll put the article up on the, on I Love AI and the Leadership Institute here shortly. It hit Reuters, I think, a couple of hours ago.

Wow, amazing. Yes, I just saw it like right before our last meeting and I was like, oh, but you know, we're all— a lot of us are talking about the report that came out a couple weeks ago from— I mean, there were multiple reports, but Forbes did a— like they aggregated the results of that, letting us know that, you know, 95% of these projects are failing to ever reach production value. And like year 2 is when a lot of the implosion starts to happen, right? The baby tiger starts getting a bit unwieldy. And I honestly think like that's where we are with Palantir. Like they're just like the— what are they— the cracks are starting to show in the promise that they made. Um, so I think it's fascinating to see that happen. But yeah, at night, I mean, if you think about it, if 95% of projects fail, that's literally every one out of every 10 projects we're using, and that's being kind of conservative, um, is probably not going to deliver on the promise it made when we bought it. It's crazy. Really, really, uh, a crazy time. Um, so yeah, so that's an interesting story, kind of a sad story. I actually just uncovered, um, the 23andMe Harvard Business Study case. I don't know if you know, um, in Harvard Business School they do these case studies where they examine a project, a company, from start to finish or start to fail. Um, and they of course are asking these Harvard business school students to kind of figure out what went wrong and what would you have done different and how do we avoid doing things like this in the future. And for those of you who don't know what happened with 23andMe, I mean, I don't, I won't give you, I won't, what do they say? No spoilers. Like you can read the story, but I do have that Harvard Business School study, so I'm going to post it. I just found it on my, on my laptop. I think I got it when I was at Stanford. Stanford gave us that study. So I'll share it with you all, um, so you can kind of take a look. But fascinating stuff. I mean, 23andMe is one of those companies that, you know, took billions of people's DNA and then decided to not do that anymore. I don't know— I mean, I'm being very gracious in my definition of their failure, of the failure that they experience, but they don't do that anymore. And so where did all that DNA go? Who owns that DNA? These are really important questions to think about. They literally are my baby tiger becomes big tiger who— you should have thought of that when it was a baby kind of moment. So, so it's exciting, kind of, kind of interesting. Any other tools that anyone's using that they want to share? Anything you're playing around with, use cases? Otherwise I'll give you mine, but I like to hear from you all. I'm going to see— I don't know if I could see anyone's hands.

I've got one more.

Great.

So apparently the untapped market with all the AI now, I have a buddy who's out in Washington.. It does a lot of advertising, but the $32K market as far as video is untapped at the moment. So all these ad agencies that, you know, had cameras with all the AI now and Sora 2 coming out, there are very few companies that are doing, I guess, ultra high def advertising. So like, obviously the screens have gotten better at conferences and all these companies who are like, oh, well, we've always used Bob's Photo Company for our conference, like they're finding themselves kind of caught flat-footed. And then apparently he's the only ad agency that's open 24 hours a day now, which I thought everyone was now, but he's getting more business and they haven't, I guess, moved at the speed of technology. These larger companies, the Deloittes, Accenture, you know, not to name names, but you know, they they haven't caught up and like, oh well, we can always just do the conference the way we've always done it. And that's not the case, like if you want to put on something at the Sphere in Las Vegas as example.

Yes, yes, exactly. Interesting. Um, so cool. Well, on the, you know, Jason represents in his prior life, um, or soon to be already done, I can't remember. Uh, but on the, uh, kind of government side, legislation side, I always like to mention a couple things that are happening there. Many of you know we announced a few I don't know, I guess it's like 6 weeks ago now, maybe more. It feels like it was just yesterday. Uh, but the release of the AI Action Plan, um, and there were a couple really interesting initiatives that came out of that, but the AI Action Plan in general, we talked about it. People after that call were like, you should delete that recording. People are gonna come after you. And I was like, really? Um, so needless to say, like, I'm just gonna share with you, like, I'm the messenger, people. Uh, I'm just the messenger. I hope that what I share with you, you go and research for yourself. Um, by no means am I providing editorial, you know, um, John, like, uh, what is it, John Stewart-like commentary, you know, I'm not trying to poke any bears here, but, uh, there were some pretty tight deadlines with the AI Action Plan, uh, that was recently released in July, uh, that by the end of October, October 20th, federal agencies do have to go in and rewrite their policies. And I don't know if you remember, like, a year ago, maybe it feels like a year, maybe 2 years ago, the, um, there was an executive order released by the Biden administration and the OMB guidance, which is the guidance that they give federal agencies that the rules that they have to apply. Like, it was like this thick. I remember printing it and like highlighting it and like putting Post-its all over the place so I could help federal agencies figure it out. This one's a lot simpler, but it forces them to roll back a lot of the work that they did, right? Because there was a lot of like governance and what we would call today, according to this plan, restrictive innovation practices. So, um, bear— I think the words are remove barriers, um, to American AI leadership. And so that is the, the framing. And so by October 20th, these organizations have to kind of figure out ways to gracefully roll back some of the things that they've worked really hard to get in place. That I think is interesting, fascinating. I also think it means that your people in federal legislation, people running federal agencies, but also state and local agencies, are going to be desperate for some help. So I guess announcement number one, uh, I this last week was in Ohio. I were— I was working with, uh, the state and local governments in Cincinnati and Columbus, and we, um, and so I realized that this is This is going to be mass— like, it's going to be, um, what are you— ubiquitous, right? Every state's going to run into these challenges as they get less funding and still have to do more work. And so I created SLED AI, which is basically state, local government, and education, which is an area that I tend to focus in. Um, and that, that SLED AI piece of the world, like I said, I'm always telling people there's no scarcity. There are 50 states that are going to scramble to figure out what to do. In this world right now. Um, and they will have less funding, of course, from the federal government, but they will also see that the legislative bodies of their states are going to also reduce funding at the state level as a result of that. And so it's like a, a bit of a— what do they call it— uh, perfect storm, right? When a bunch of bad things happen and you're in a little boat and you're like, oh my gosh, we might die. Uh, so So I think if you are, I always say this, if you're called to this space to help people, I mean, goodness, you can help the state and local governments all over the United States, uh, really manage how, and, and I will share with you my philosophy is that, you know, I don't preach that you have to have a responsible AI checklist or even a responsible AI team. I think you can build AI responsibly and weave these practices right into the architecture of your solutions. Some of you took AI Solutions Architect class, you know that that's how I think and what I do. So that weaving in means that you're gonna build AI systems that do the evaluations for you and that those AI systems are integrated into the solution. So it's not a person checking off a checklist or a team meeting in a corner that can get slashed or gotten rid of, right? This is an opportunity for us to build systems that have echoing JEDI systems in place. And for those of you who remember, you know, JEDI is our code word for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. So we don't say it very often, though I just said it, but I do mention that in, you know, these rooms. And my justice, equity, diversity, inclusion— or diversity inclusion people, they know who I'm talking to. So there is a way to do what we we all think is important, build safe, responsible systems, in a way that's a little bit more, I think, integrated and part of the tapestry of how these systems are built, as opposed to these kind of more superfluous systems that maybe the previous administration had identified as the mechanism to achieve safety. I think there are ways to achieve it, even with, no matter what you think about this action plan, I actually think we can still do it, even with this action plan. As a matter of fact, There are portions of this action plan that was released that actually encourage the development of AI systems to do this work and that there's funding for that. So I, like I said, my hope is to just plant this seed, not dive too deep into it. But interesting stuff, right? What do you think? Oh, I have more people. I have to change my video because more people have joined the video party and I wouldn't want to leave you out, Kartiki, my friend. So I'm going to go back to, I'm going to change my immersion view. Let's see, we'll be in a— how about a classroom? How about that? It's going to make everyone— you all will— we could also sit by the fire. No, I'm going to go to— all right, I'll just go back to normal. I'll just reduce it. Oh no, I'm going to go to the classroom first. Hello, my friends. Hello. Look, look. Oh, it's so good to see you. Hello, Tara.

Hello.

It's Robert. What's up? We're going to have a call. My assistant just like double tapped me to be like, can we get on that? So we're gonna schedule that for next week, hopefully, if you're available. Very excited about what you had sent me. I was traveling this week, so sorry about that. But awesome, great to see your face. Awesome.

Yay. It's my first time in this classroom. This classroom actually is pretty cool. And I was wondering whether you guys wanna hear about some kind of fresh perspectives of the TED AI conference, the European one, which was in Vienna. There were actually 3,000 people and it was in the setting of the Emperor's Palace. So it's a little bit of a stretch between history and the future.

Amazing. Yes, definitely give us a recap. I would love to. That's a wonderful thing. Thank you, Robert.

So I think out of the many things I want to highlight, maybe 3 things. The first, there was a guy, a researcher from from Microsoft, you might know him. And he was actually researching the future of knowledge workers. And we are all knowledge workers here. And so I thought that was really interesting. More and more people use AI as an assistant. They do their job, it makes us faster, it gets us the right answers, it automates the known, right? But he also then did a research and said, actually, it reduces critical thinking of knowledge workers. It does not necessarily enhance creativity, but it limits creativity. People get lazy. It also even has an impact on meta-recognition patterns if you use it too much, lowers recall, and reduces intentionality of thinking. So I found it quite interesting. And he said what we really need to do for knowledge workers when we manage those, that we need to be careful that we use AI tools to still process things and not have the tool actually do the work. So an AI should be a tool for thought and not just an assistant executing. So it should help you understand the job better, but you still need to do the reading. It should help you, of course, create higher quality of work, ask the right questions, and explore less the unknown than just like have the known be executed by AI. I found that a quite provocative way of thinking, and he actually showed tools where they actually help you highlight things of text you read so that you actually have to read, but it engages you in a discussion and conversation versus just doing the job for you.

Oh my gosh, I love it.

So that's one thing which is, I think, good to highlight because when you look at some people, I always say AI makes smarter people smarter and dumber people not really smarter, right?

Right.

And I'm sorry for being so black and white, But if you do not ask the right question and cannot have this, I would say, iterative prompt conversation in a smart way, you're actually not getting the right answer, and you might even make wrong decisions.

Absolutely. Yeah, I agree with you. And there was a research study that was released in Forbes. I also wrote an article about it around brain atrophy. And I think you're tapping into that as well, that concept of what happens to our brain when we're not giving it the opportunity to do those synaptic activities, right, where we shortcut it. And this ultimately is, I think, a result of overreliance, right? When we start using these systems and we just overdelegate to these systems. And so that's part of, many of you know, we talk about this human AI experience, the AI safety system. And it's part of that first thing I always try to encourage an organization before they even start teaching their people how to prompt and how to use models that they first does like understand how human and AI systems are going to communicate, that you, you create a boundary between what you're gonna let an AI system do. And I will tell you, most companies, they don't actually realize that there's an opportunity to create that boundary. It's like a free-for-all over the fence to an AI system. What can it do? And I think that that naiveness, of course, is very baby tiger-like. That's gonna come back. It's what we're seeing now in the 95% of failures across the world is that people are like overzealously like, hey, I can do this, this, and this. And then they realize, wait a second, actually it isn't great at that. And as a matter of fact, I'm now losing like the retained talent that I've worked so hard to get. They are leaving and the AI system is not able to do the job at scale. So yeah, I think it's, it's really interesting. And Jason, for those of you not watching the chat, Jason is throwing in some really interesting info. I don't know, Jason, if you want to unmute and tell us a little bit about what you're sharing here, but really, really cool stuff.

Yeah.

Sure.

So the, the VALTIS is the old concept kind of under the Biden administration, the DOD strategy, AI strategy that was out there, which is, they're still using that. But based on, so I guess the previous defense, but obviously the government shut down, but ultimately the DOD's budget is now $1.02 trillion. They've added basically $300 mil for AI funding. And they're cost cutting because they've realized that we've paid— so everyone, every organization had an Azure instance or some other one. And basically they've, they're like, we're not doing this anymore. We're going to do a big contract with Microsoft, just like we have for Office 365 and say, this is what we're getting. So kind of what they have with Amazon Web Services, but it's just that that's just straight storage, not tokenization and all that because we're paying like Kerasoft basically gave the, which is a private company kind of outside of Dulles, gave Sage, which is an AI model that you can get all of them on there. But highly throttled the tokenization, but gave it to the government basically a free trial for 30 days. Here's your AOL disk.

Yeah.

And then after that, we charge you a crazy rate per token to use, uh, Sage.

Classic, classic marketing, right? Like, give them a lead magnet, get a hook them in, and then, uh, charge them now that they're using it, uh, charge them to keep it. Stickiness. Awesome. Hey, Robert, are you going to share something with us?

Yeah, the question is, if you guys are interested, I also consolidated across all the TEDi Talks a little bit some leadership learnings.

Absolutely.

I love it. And I can then also post it into the group. But I did that more for myself because a couple of people asked me. And so the one is, a lot of people, we had one huge chat about AI and leadership. I found it quite disappointing because in the end, initially disappointing, but we did a provocation and said the leadership mindset for AI is actually the same as for digital transformation. Also, more than 90% of digital transformation failed, but AI leadership mindset is even harder. And you shared it a lot of times in your things because employee fear comes on top. The speed and the depth of the change is kind of unpredictable and creates also more fear. And then the ethics guy and legal guys are also on board of making everything more difficult, right? So I think here the encouragement was every person in a company needs to be technology forward, otherwise they're gonna be replaced at some point, right? Even like HR and legal. So this was quite a spicy discussion where people also realized those problems are not new, they're just harder than before.

Absolutely. And you know, Robert, I always say like it in the world of AI, like we, you know, 5 years ago you would hire someone and you could actually be a pretty mediocre leader and that person just 'cause they're good might just do good work. But in the world of AI, as we begin delegating to these systems, if you are not good at leading these systems, right? Like you are more likely to lead a machine than a human in the next 5 years.. And it is much to your point, it's even harder to lead a machine, to tell a machine what to do, to guarantee its outcome, to put in evaluations, to validate, to do LLM as a judge. Like all of those things are much, much harder to do. And we're expecting every worker to kind of have that level of understanding and impact. So yeah, I agree. I think the work, the, the concept of AI leadership is, is not only how do you lead humans in the new world, but also How do you lead a hybrid team of humans and machines where machines—

Yeah, that's a good point.

—are gonna need a much higher level of mindset in exactly this. But I also think it's pretty cool that you correlated, or the Vienna TED Talks kind of correlated the exact same patterns we saw. You know, oh, I could see, I could still see it, but—

Okay, no, that's, I think you're absolutely right. Can you still guys hear me? I have a little bit of internet issues. I can hear you.

Can you hear me? Hello? Yes, I can. Anyone else hear me?

Can you all still hear me?

Tara, can you hear us?

And hear both of you?

Okay, I can hear you. I can hear you. Um, thank you. All right, well, I— maybe he asked— he— oh, I think he just left. Did you leave? Are you here? Where are you? I think he might— he might be back. So while he's doing that, um, let's, uh, let's go back to some— oh, you're back, Robert. Can you hear us? Okay. No, maybe not.

Are you back? Hello?

All right, you're still muted. If you know, I love the COVID throwback. We can't hear you. You're muted.

You cannot. There we go. It's interesting to you guys. I don't want to take too much time. Just the— do you want to—

I love it. Thank you. You're giving us a crash course in the TEDx conference. So it's like we were there.

Yeah, then scaling beyond pilots. And Noelle, you talk a lot about this, but a lot of people just underestimate, right? Once you get to scale, there's a lot of costs, right? When you just go with AWS, for example, you underestimate that they make you stuck, right? So you probably need to really talk about the AI factory and the structuring much more and need to have people who understand this. Then hands-on leadership. There was a guy of PwC leading AI worldwide. And he said, I had problems with my leaders. So he put them literally for half a day, like executives beyond him, right? The top leadership of PwC. And he put them literally in a room and let them build something in AI and doing this. Yes.

A few of you know this, but like, I wonder where they got that idea. Let me, anyway, but continue. Yeah, they might have like, Anyway, but yes, I love it. I'm glad to hear. I'm glad they did that. And you just said nobody actually understood.

And when they don't understand what AI is capable of, they cannot even lead anymore. Yes. Yes. They know that they could lead before, right? Then we talked about the critical thinking, right? It doesn't replace judgment so that people don't get lazy. And then I mentioned this already, embedding AI in workflows exposes underperformance like never before. And widens the gap to high performers. And you, you, this will change also the hierarchies and the dynamics in organization, right? Because you can no longer hide, right? Right. And then this trust, you mentioned that a lot, right? And you have to assume that somebody uses AI. So that also increases the expectations, but it also decreases trust. Yeah. Because it's unclear who actually did this, right? Right. And then for AI solutions, there is a lot of hesitancy of paying money for those. So success-based pricing is the key. And sometimes you even, like there's one company, Intercom, they even give a success guarantee and say, if you adopt us and we fail, we give you $1 million. Yeah. So that's actually quite interesting. And then the cultural lens, this was a very interesting study. That AI is viewed in different cultures, whether AI belongs here. And so the cultural lens, right? So one solution which works in one country might not work in others because if you're, let's say, in a country where it's, I don't want, I want to be politically correct, right? Where it's Jewish Orthodox, right? And you have certain things, it might not work in, let's keep Spain, right? So, and so this cultural lens is actually much more different. And in the US, it, I think, doesn't matter so much, but much more different than people expect, especially when you do a global solution. So that was a quick summary of the leadership insights across all. Yeah, amazing.

Thank you for sharing that. Like I said, we now got like a little crash course. Now, some of these talks are also available on YouTube. So if you all want, like you saw something interesting, you can go and actually see Some of those talks were recorded, as well. So no, it's amazing, Robert. Thank you for giving us a rundown. And here's, some of you who are in the AI leadership call earlier today, whenever I go to these events, I literally, you know, I think some of us who are in this space a lot, we tend to think everyone knows these things. And like you said, Robert, like, you know, some of these things I've been talking about for over a decade. But I, there are things that I talked about between 20, 13 and 2018 that I don't say anymore because I'm like, surely everyone knows this. And now there's a whole bunch of new people who are starting on this path and they're making choices. I'm like, so you, you don't, you don't know this. So I think it's an opportunity every time you hear someone speak to kind of look for these types of themes. And then even, you all know this, as a solution architect, I think our job is to create a brand for ourselves so people recognize us as us as a thought leader. So you can, you know, I wrote down like 16 different things during just what you were saying of little videos I could do about my experience that echo something that happened at that event, right? So I, like yesterday I was at a CEO, it was called AI Horizons. It was hosted by Rackspace. It was a bunch of CEOs and, and C-suite executives in the Ohio region, and I got a chance, like the questions they were asking, I was honestly surprised. I was like, wait, I mean, I stopped talking about that 4 years ago. So, so it really re— it, it reminded me to remind you that sometimes, you know, uh, who was it? A marketer told me once, they said, your audience, um, or, or you are going to, you as the, the person telling the story, you will grow tired of your message long before your audience even hears it the first time. And so, And in another one of, uh, my mentors would always tell me, pretend like no one ever heard you say it. Every day you say something, pretend no one's ever heard you say it. Because in the world of AI and social media and algorithms, you can say it and now a whole new room of people are gonna hear it. And so I, uh, I have to take that to heart cuz I often, I just presume people kind of know what they're doing and then I get this research and I hear people on stage talking about it like it's brand new. I'm like, Wait, I've been talking about this forever. So, so this is to inspire you that things you're learning now, 4 years from now, you're gonna think everyone must know this. I learned that 4 years ago. And the reality is, is that you are part of the 1% of the 1% and that you are learning things that other people aren't learning. And so you might not think like you're very far ahead, but in just a few years you will see how big that gap is getting and potentially an opportunity lies in that with you. Um, now I do want to mention a couple of the launches that happened in case you are unaware. Uh, some of you might have saw on Instagram, I posted Sora 2 came out this week. So that was super exciting. I think it is Sora, the first version of Sora, like leveled the playing field. Uh, I don't know if you remember, but Tyler Perry, if you're familiar with him, he was opening up a huge studio in Atlanta, like 8-mile studio. Um, not 8 Mile like Eminem, but like an 8 Mile studio. He was opening up this huge studio and he paused the development of that studio due to what he saw in Sora, the first version. And so I do think— I'm like, I'll tell you a fun story. This happens to me all the time. My orchid guy, do you all know orchid? They're like pet people, pest, pest people, pesticide people. Anyway, they come and spray. So my orchid man, And that's what they call, like, it wasn't a woman, or I would say organ woman, but my organ man comes to the door, knocks on the door. He sees, of course, Noelle's like sporting the, the swag today. So he sees my, my shirt and he's like, AI, huh? And he starts telling me about a musician that he loves who's using AI. And this musician is from like, um, I, I'm gonna date myself. Uh, some of you might know ELO from this. Anyway, so yeah, right? So he was like, this musician was taking ELO and putting it into like pop tracks or R&B tracks in like, so '70s to late '90s. And it was the same music but on in a, you know, 1990s style of R&B. And he was like, I was so amazed because he didn't tell you that that's what he did until after. But while you're like jamming, you're like, oh, it's pretty— I think he's this guy, he's a young kid. He's like, it was a pretty sick beat. And I was like, Yeah, I'm sure it was. And he is like, but only after did I find out when I started hearing certain words that were the same, he's like, wait a second, wait, wait, I know this music. And so anyway, he was a huge, of course he's an artist, musician, he loves all music. But it was very cool when he, I was like, I know Yello. So it was pretty cool. But musicians are still a little worried about this space, I think. But some of them are like locking in, right? And using it to actually grow. Their audience and create diversity in the way that they are creating music. And so I think, I think it's pretty interesting. So Sora too, I think is gonna do that for, for video. I mean, it is easier than ever. One of my favorite features of Sora, I use it every single day, not video, but image. I use, I don't have a lot of, I like to do videos, so I don't really use AI to do that. My human AI experience, I've not delegated video, like human video creation to that.. But I do use it for images all the time. And one of the things that I love about it is the image gallery where you have like incredible artists providing their prompts to build these incredible art. And maybe I'll, I'll quickly, I'll share my screen and share with you some of the, the fun that I've been having lately on this platform. But, but like I, anytime I saw, oh, I'll just show you. But anytime I saw anything, I would be like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I think I could turn this into a baby tiger. So let me share this with you really quick. Hopefully you can see it. Um, all right, y'all see a baby tiger? See it? All right, hopefully. Um, so this is actually old. I did this last year, but this is just my— meet the new Sora! Um, not yet. So I'm doing a video on Sora 2 right now. Um, but I want to show you old Sora because a lot of you— it'll take about 6 months for everyone to get invited due to throttling effects. Yeah, I know. Now that's everybody. You might get in early. I know with— I, I got one invite token, but I know some people who got 7, some people got 40. So, you know, if I had like a million followers, I would have got more. But anyway, so if I get an extra one, man, you're the first person. Oh, you're the first person I give it to, uh, my artist, uh, crew. So I'll just go to media and show you some of these, right? But But like this, I didn't do this. I didn't say build me a woman and a tiger. Like this came from, and I won't be able to find the exact video. I could probably look it up here, but I just explore the gallery, right? And so now there's a lot of images, but like, look how easy it is for me to just go in and be like, I love this. But instead of a magic pink, a majestic pink leopard, Noelle Russell Russell is gonna put in a baby tiger, right? So I, that's my brand. I use baby tigers to represent the, the kind of infancy in our mindset when we start using AI. So I use it everywhere, but it is catching, it is a hook. It is the way people stop on my stuff in very interesting ways. But this is what I like about it, right? Is that even though this technology, it's actually pretty hard to prompt something really good, but you can scroll through. I mean, you could just see a lot of things are cat or, I mean, oh my goodness. Oh my good. Anyway, but you scroll through, like I could create a baby tiger on that. I could create it like, there's so much that you can do. Um, I mean, a sea full of baby tigers, like, this is awesome. I love it. So that's what I do is I go through here, um, and I look for ideas that I can model against my own. And then, as you know, some of you, right, I can either storyboard a whole new complex thing, which I never do because this is not my game. That's something Mr. Don Rothman would do. Um, I think, you know, you know the vernacular of how to build something beautiful. I'm like, how do I copy this? Right? So these artists have published them into the Explorer, and now I can use this prompt and just edit it, or I can remix it, which means I'm gonna keep most of it. And I just, now notice here, I can actually say I don't want a moon, so I could just do this and say, now I want it to be Saturn, right? Um, uh, da da da. So it gives— I— and this is what I like about Sora too, right, is that it's giving us the ability to do super complex things in a hyper meta prompt world where I don't need to know what you did to do this and make this special. I can just remix it, turn it into what I want. We'll see if we get, get it in a recent reasonable period of time. But this, I think, the magic, right? Like somebody built this, they spent a long time on it, like it's cool, but I can now model after it. Um, and it's all generic, you know, generic. If you want, you can choose to create a store account. Oopsie, my screen just went dead. But, um, you can create a store account and in that store account you can, uh, choose not to be part of the explorer page. I choose not to because I think my stuff is awful. So I would never, you know, it's good for my purpose, but I don't think anyone wants to copy what I do. But that's also probably a mindset change I need to make. Who knows? Somebody might want a bunch of Baby Tiger stuff. Um, but it's pretty cool. So, so I think the evolution that's occurring with Sora is pretty, pretty exciting. Um, the next thing that I want to share with you, uh, so Sora 2 just came out, invites are going out, we'll see what happens. Um, they also, uh, one of the things that they've created that's new, uh, inside Sora that I wanted to mention that I am using specifically is the ability to create TikTok-style feeds from this content. So it'll allow you to— it, it's gonna turn Sora too into more like a social video app, which again, I think is great. I do a lot of remixing on TikTok too. I was mentioning some of my techniques. Now, did I talk about this? I think I did maybe a couple weeks ago, talked about e-commerce and ChatGPT and how right now there is a hockey stick-like behavior that's happening in ChatGPT around purchasing power. So people are asking ChatGPT, and ChatGPT created a relationship with— anyone remember who that was? Shopify. Or maybe it was Etsy. I think it was Shopify, but either way, created a relationship with Shopify like this was a month ago in order to allow people to ask for a product. It would show up inside ChatGPT and then you could check out. However, that checkout process was a bit scatter— let's say there was a little friction in there. So what they recently released was instant checkout inside ChatGPT. So I'm just saying, like, AI engine optimization, purchasing. This is something that I saw come out like 10 years ago when Amazon Alexa launched, and Amazon Alexa also launched X-Ray, which meant when you were watching a show on a Fire TV, it still exists, and you see something like someone wearing a cool dress, you could turn on the microphone and say, I wanna buy that dress. And if that, uh, vendor had implemented an API, they could immediately let you buy it right on your phone while you're watching the show. And that's kind of what ChatGPT is doing, right? It's opening up this world that as we talk about things, look at things, you know, I don't know how many of you remember, uh, this little baby tiger and its origin, right? But I like thought of him, like I was like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if I had a Beanie Baby that had like a little baby tiger and it had my shirt? Like, look at us, how cute, right? Um, and I thought of it on an airplane. I get off and I asked ChatGPT to create me an image of a Beanie Baby that looks just like this. And then I went to a website called customplushies.com and I was like, can you make this? And they're like Easy peasy. And in 3 weeks, something that I just, I anticipate took longer before that, in 3 weeks and 2 of those weeks were shipping. So, you know, ideation from ideation to execution, like the burden is on us, like whatever we want to do, an instant checkout I think is going to be revolutionary. So for those of you consultants out there, I really think it's, it's an opportunity to really think about if you're a consultant, maybe you start helping these e-commerce brands transition to what we used to call voice shopping now becomes chat shopping. And how do we enable, you know, help that and support that? So pretty cool stuff, I think. Any comments, questions, like any, any thoughts on that? Like, what do you think? Is that exciting? Nervous? Like, are you worried? What's happening? Any comments? Don, Kartiki?

Yeah, go ahead. I don't know. It's interesting to think that I mean, I think things are limitless, right? You think of something like— it's funny because I had that idea like, yeah, way, way back when I was talking. Yeah, like, you know, maybe doing something for the NBA. And I was like, it would be cool, you know, to have something similar. And we're like, yeah, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. And then, you know, it comes. But, um, I think also it's The craziest— or I don't know if you guys feel like this, I— but I sort of feel like the minute I come up with an idea, it's too old, you know? And it's not true, it's not true.

But you know, the minute you think that idea that you think everybody has done this already, everybody's already done it. It's only because you're in this little group of us that it makes you feel that way. But you step once, you go to one event, and you're like, wait, wait, I've been doing that like for years.

And then I was just going to mention like the Sora 2 thing. I, it seems like they have, I don't know what they're trying to do with it, but obviously they have some kind of strategy where they're, they're trying to make it like you were saying, like the TikTok thing, like they're trying to make sure it's on the app as opposed to like the desktop. Yeah. Um, so, you know, yeah.

And there's a couple of, um, products like that, right? Captions, which is the tool. Some of you wonder, I get asked all the time, like, who's the team that does your social? And it's all me, my selfie camera, and Captions. Uh, so Captions, like, does the B-roll editing, does all of that stuff. Um, and, but it doesn't do it on a desktop. It only does it on mobile. So if I can create a video in Sora, I can send it to Captions to do B-roll integration. And like, it's pretty magical stuff that we're, we're gonna start to see. So yeah, I agree with you. Um, some other, uh, cool updates. Notion 3.0 just came out. So for those of you who are Notion users, Agents, Memories, Connectors, Automation, MCP. Let's go. So it's pretty exciting if you're a Notion user that they— I won't even say caught up. They've just released a roadmap that they had long been talking about. It finally is available. So you should take a look at that. Perplexity. I actually am signing a new contract with— I got approved for a second book. I think I told y'all. So I am going to be working on that with my publisher. But they are working on a very cool agreement with Perplexity. Um, and I just want you to consider, so years ago, maybe 2 years ago, I bought, um, authorsagi.com, I think is what I called it, right? AGI. Is AGI the general intelligence one? Yeah. Yeah. So authorsagi.com. And my vision was that every time I delivered a book or you delivered a book, right? It would come with this AGI that would know my book, but also be able to advise you on all of the, Like if you go to the index of my book, right, which is here, um, like I reference MIT, Stanford scholars, researchers. Like there is a lot of stuff in here, right? So page after page. So it's not just Noelle's AGI, like it is an AGI that is like the known expert on the depth of content that this was based on and the research that it was based on. So it has a lot of, you know, it just has, it increases the depth and capability. And let's face it, I know there are some books which unfortunately they are not alive anymore, but there are some books where if I could have talked to the author or even a synthesized version of the author, that would have been pretty cool. So we're gonna see that start to release as part of these, these organizations. So I think that's pretty cool feature that is being released. I did just attend AWS and NVIDIA class. It wasn't a class, it was like a webinar. I took it as a class because I, I always, when they talk, I'm like in AWS trying to figure out how to do the thing they're saying. And, and I'm also the one being like, that's not possible. Can you go back and tell me why, why it's not working for me? In a loving way. Um, but it is, uh, so they, um, OpenAI and NVIDIA just struck a 10, uh, 10-gigawatt, uh, AI data centers 2026. So they've got a, I mean, I don't know if you've seen what's happening in this, in the infrastructure world, but like Oracle, like what are we doing anyway? Um, so we know that things are in an interesting space when Oracle gets one of these gigantic deals. Do y'all know Oracle? Like they have not been on the list of people we pay attention to for a very long time in the cloud space. Um, and now they're like, you know, their, their company's value doubled overnight. So it's equalized a little bit. But it's the only reason that happened was because a platform, an LLM provider needed their hardware, needed their infrastructure in order to scale. And that I think is going to continue. Meta is— and maybe Jason knows a little bit about this, but Meta is distributing models all across the United States through federal agencies and GSA. There's a GSA partnership that they've created. Meta, I like the direction they're going in. It's very open source, supportive, community-driven. I just know, I've known Meta so long, it's really hard for me to see them as not like the Thanos who could snap their fingers and like, you know, bad things could happen. Like half of our accounts could just disappear. And like, we wouldn't, like, where would our data go? We wouldn't have any idea. But that's not the new Meta. So I encourage you to kind of take a look at the things that Meta is doing as well. Now, in the last few minutes, I always want us to spend a little bit of time getting to know each other. So we drop into a breakout session, and I like to just ask a question. And I ask different questions of our Leadership Institute than I do here. But I'm very— I think it's usually interesting to just talk about what you're actually using AI for, like today, right now. Did you use it today is a great question. If you didn't, did you use it yesterday? When's the last time you used it? But actually talk about it because I think we all use AI very differently in our unique experiences and we think everyone uses it the way we do. And what I found out is that when we ask this question, we're like, wait, what? I never even thought to use it that way. So I think it'd be a great question to ask. But before we get to the breakouts and talk about how we're using AI today, couple of announcements. One, the AI Solution Architect certification is live on Maven. We are, uh, registration is open. It's an application process. We don't let— we can't let everyone in. It's 100 people or, um, only. But that is on Maven. You can go look at it, look at the syllabus. We had, uh, I think we have a 4.9 out of 5 star rating. It's very, very successful. Lots of happy people. Um, but go take a look at it. It's available. If you join that, you also get access to the AI Leadership Institute, which has an additional set of classes and certifications. And we are launching a brand new set of— we're calling it our AI Mastery Vault offer. It's the craziest thing we've ever done. For a dollar, you can join the waitlist and get access to this offer 24 hours before everyone else. Millions of people are gonna see this offer because we're driving traffic, we're doing paid ads. Like, it's gonna— it's massive. But you're my friends. So if you join the waitlist, which we'll put it in the chat for you, if you join the waitlist, you'll get a chance to actually be in the room where it happens. You know, I'll be playing the song, but you'll be in the room where it happens, where we announce it, describe it. And as I mentioned to my AI Leadership members, if you're already a member of the institute, it's locked now. You can't become a member until we launch this offer. So, but everyone who joined already is automatically grandfathered into the the new offer, but it's like crazy. I'm so excited. I can't wait. So I can't tell you anything about it. I want to tell you all the secrets. But that would be really, really amazing. Let's see. Let's see.

Oh yeah, go ahead, Don, please. So I just want to talk to everybody else here about the AI Solutions Architect program and tell you that it's amazing. You really won't regret being part of it. You know, Noelle does what she does here times X, and it really will help to grow your confidence in AI solutions architecture and get to meet a lot of really great people. And you should sign up. Yes, absolutely.

And actually, Sherilyn, I'm going to give you a direct— I just have a new— it's really fun. It's probably the best. It's like the culmination of my life's work but I'll give you a new link it's actually to The Vault itself and this is where you all will want to sign up— It's on school still but it's a waitlist; it'll only last for the next 12 days. But we're going to do like 7 days of reports that are coveted Stanford MIT and Noelle Russells' Reports that you'll get that we haven't ever released before but you only get them if you're in the Waitlist Community everyone in AILeadership Institute gets access! Soon will get to be a part of that. It's so funny because I did a thumb— like, I feel like I just did thumbs up, uh, like below the camera angle, and it still did it on the thing. Anyway, it's crazy. So it's called Vault Access, uh, on Skool. I'm gonna put it in the chat right now. So that— I'm gonna click on it, make sure I didn't spell it wrong. That— yep, that's it. So you can join. It's a buck, but the benefit is you get a bunch of bonuses. Just for joining the waitlist, being part of the, the crazy fanfare. It's super secretive. People are trying to like give me, like get me to tell them what's going to happen, but I'm not going to. I'm going to be strong. Uh, but it's so fun. We're going to have a great time over the next 12 days. So we will launch it officially on the 14th to our waitlist members. Then on the 15th, we will be launching it to everyone else and you will see a bunch of ads and, you know, Instagram, all the things. Uh, but for the first day, you all will get to see it before anyone else, and it's pretty cool. So I'm excited for that. So I just wanna let you know that that's happening. I'm super excited for it. We will continue the, the I Love AI community continues to continue. We get about, I don't know if you see our welcome post, but we get like a little over 25 members a week, and that's with zero advertising. It's all word of mouth, but all that's about to change. So we do evaluate every member that comes into this free community, even though it's free. It's not open. So every single one gets evaluated by me or one of the C-suite of AI, uh, LI, which means we look at you and we find out, did you answer the question? Which the number one question I ask you is, what do you want to do? Like, what are you trying to do with this stuff? Um, but we also check your email. Like, so that's why this community is so cool. It's safe. Uh, it allows you to have real communication. If someone's doing something that doesn't feel right, please just click on that little thing that says send a note to the admins, um, so that we can take a look at it. But I also have an AI system that monitors everything, so I get notified immediately if someone posts something weird, and I will ban them. Like, we, we have a zero tolerance policy. So even if it looks weird— and I mean weird in the sense like it's trying to sell you some tchotchke on the internet or get you to like buy into some insurance Ponzi scheme or something. Like, we're like, nope, nope, nope. So, uh, so it's pretty fun. Um, thank you, Sherilyn. So Sherilyn also put the link to, uh, the community. So for those of you can stay, I know it's right at the tip of the hour, uh, but we always like to end the call with those of you can stay. Getting to know each other is probably the most valuable thing we do here. Um, you never know who you're going to meet, and more importantly, you do not know what everyone here will do in the next 6 to 12 months. In the last month, we've had people, you know, join federal agencies, become leaders in top companies. So you never know what people are going to end up doing. Some have started companies that are now doing very well. So I encourage you to get to know each other because this— it moves fast. Success moves quickly. And I just— I encourage you all to meet each other and be part of each other's success. So let's— we're going to break out into breakout rooms. And like I said, I'm going to just give you about 7 to 8 minutes to just— so there'll be small groups, and that'll give you a chance to just say who you are and what you do, or if you have a question to ask, you know, ask a question. But then more importantly, how are you using AI right now? So just spend a couple minutes each. So that means, you know, everyone gets 4 to 5 minutes to chat. And hopefully— let me do this. Sign automatically. Here we go. And we have some bots in the house, so it'll take me a second to reorganize the bots a little bit, uh, but I'll give you a chance to, uh, chat it up with people. Um, let me make— I'm gonna— I'm trying to find the bot room. Okay, room 6 is the bot room, so I'm gonna move you to room 6. Um, so don't worry if you can't stay, no problem, I will move people around. Um, but Dawn, you're gonna like this one, so stay for this one. Um, let's see, room 2. Uh, I'm here, I'm here. Okay, cool, because sometimes you gotta go, so I just didn't want you to leave. Um, and of course, if you gotta go, now's the time because I'm about to put you in a room. So, Miguel, you're here. I don't think I got you in a room last time, so I'm gonna try and keep you in there. Um, everyone looks good. Oops, that's auto AI. Let me get that out of here. Um, move you to 4. Almost done, 2 seconds. Review to 1. All right, no taker, no taker, no taker. All right, I think we're good. I feel like we're good. Okay, I'm opening the rooms. You have about 7 minutes. I'm going to come over the loudspeaker. This is your captain speaking, so don't be startled. And I will let you know you just have a couple minutes left to wrap up any thoughts, and then we'll come back and say goodbye. All right, so I'll see you in just a few minutes.

Hey, Noelle Russell. Yeah, can I— so I want to redo that Solution Architect. I don't think I finished that course. Yes, it's possible for me to attend. How do I do— what, what do I need to do to—

yeah, so I mean, I know you, so I will. So just send me a message. I will share it with Sherilyn, and we'll just make sure that your email is on the invite list. We haven't opened Maven yet, but as soon as it opens, you'll get invited. Yeah, we'd be happy to have you.

OK, thank you. And other question, I missed today's session, AI leadership call, because the time changed. I just slipped.

Yes, I know. You're right. It's a new habit.

We have to— I know. So is there any recording I can watch?

Yes, I will post that recording. It's not on YouTube, so we just have to upload it from Zoom, but we will do that today on the community. Yeah, in the AI Leadership Institute community.

Okay. I will.

Okay, I'll tag you on it so you get notified. Okay.

All right. Thank you.

Yes, you're welcome.

Hey, how's it going, Noelle? Hello, what's up? How are you? Just getting through today.

Yes, well, hopefully a little happier, fun. You know, we add a little fun to your Friday, hopefully.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The time, the time had changed, so I was, um, Oh, that's right. Yeah, I'm still gonna attend. It's just, um, yeah, right at 9 o'clock I gotta answer calls or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's work. I know, I know it. Um, but the other thing is, is we are going to do it a late, like, uh, evening one, or no, early— I can't remember, but we're changing the time to accommodate, um— oh yeah, it's late evening to accommodate the European audience. Okay, that one. Yeah, great. That's great. And then they'll be both. So if you can join us on Friday, great, but they'll always be that midweek, uh, Central European Time call that you'll have a chance to, to join us. All right.

Yes, it'll be fine. Automate things with, um, ActiveCampaign right now.

Oh wow. Oh my gosh, that hurts my brain. I'm like, no, um. Actually haven't used— I mean, I used— I use old ActiveCampaign. I don't know, do they have new AI features that they've integrated or anything?

Maybe. I don't know. I, I signed up for their developer thing. Some people are kind of interested in it. I guess it manages their, um, you know, their, their users and stuff. People want to advertise or whatever, their clients. What's happening is, is that they're, um generating all this AI stuff and the clients are taking it in, but they're not able to like turn it off. Or—

yeah, yeah, exactly.

They're like, oh, keep up with them. Yeah, I was like, well, we could probably connect you to Stripe, that would take care of some things.

Yes, yes, that's great though. I mean, that's it. Um, no worries. Thank you, Nia. Oh, Noelle had to leave., but I hope, I don't know, she's probably already gone. Bye. Um, I forgot to put it in. Um, but yeah, that's awesome. It's fun though. I mean, ActiveCampaign, like I, that's how I used to just do that. Uh, but in no way I was involved. It was just like, cuz it's so much when people start trying to put in the backend systems to support a business. Mm-hmm. Like, you know, everything from funnels to lead magnets to getting them to buy, whether you have to get them like sales calls, sales calendars, but then What if I lower my price enough for them to buy without a sales call, but then now you need a cart? And like, yeah, upsells, downsells, order bumps. Um, it's crazy, crazy.

Yeah, I'm just focusing on payments and how they can kind of manage that. Yeah, it's great. It's been working on some hobby things, so, um, I'm just having a difficult time, um I would say leaving my job and starting a business. That's, that's my big thing right now. Yes, yes, start one without doing the other kind of thing. 100%, yes.

So yes, well, I'm not going to steal my own thunder with my, uh, cool offer, but it will— you'll benefit greatly from it because that's what we're doing. Like 2026, right? Q4 is a great time to like set in motion the things that you can do to like We're talking about getting your next 10 or first 10 customers. Um, but yeah, it'll be cool. Just another sprint.

And I, I sat down and actually did a budget last night. Budgets and me are not good friends, but you need, and I'm like, yeah, these are all things I want that I'm like, I'm like, okay, well, what do I need to maintain my lifestyle now? Like you said. Yes. Because I didn't know what I was spending or anything. It was just like money in, money out, you know.

Yes, that's the dream though. Like, that's when we were younger, right? Like, that was the dream. If you can just live your life and never care about money. But then you're— which I was like doing, and then I was like, wait a second, but like, I don't have savings. I don't have like, like, I don't have passive income.

Like, wait, wait, wait, that's a bit come extra income, but the salary was like the main point.

All right, yeah, you want some passive income.

You want money coming in whether it's the salary is going to be gone, so what is my, you know, what is my lowest goal?

Yes, yes, 100%. So everybody's good though. That's an evolution. Like, you've, you know, starting—

I'm doing things, you know.

That's great. Yeah, amazing. All right, well, I'm gonna, um, I'm gonna like stop our live stream, and so I won't be talking to you. We'd like to, you know— All right, have a good one. But, uh, but you're staying, or you're leaving?

I'm staying, but I just gotta blink out because I'm on the clock. Oh yeah, of course, of course.

All right, I'll see you later. Thank you. All right, everybody, we are about to come back from breakout rooms, but thank you so much for being here. Um, it is super exciting to have you, uh, as part of our community. Thank you for joining and watching our conversation. We had some really great stuff today. We talked about You know, being, you know, we had one of our members who attended the TEDx or the TED AI conferences in Vienna and gave us a rundown of some of those leadership principles, which is pretty cool, some of the leadership learnings that they gained. So it's kind of nice we get to vicariously be in Vienna with them. And then we also gave a couple updates on Sora 2 and Notion 3 and all of these products that are releasing with AI capability. And of course, with every product that launches, there's now a whole bunch of customers that don't know what they're doing. So one of the things that we focus on at the AI, uh, Leadership Institute is to help people actually fingers on keyboard, learn enough of this technology so they can go help someone else. Whether you do that in a nonprofit, uh, organization, helping students, uh, helping people that are in an aging community, um, or if you do it as a profession and become a consultant, uh, an advisor,, or even an educator and trainer. Um, just so you know, some fun facts. We are actually looking for interns right now. We will be launching an intern program. We are also hiring, uh, and looking for trainers. Uh, so we will be doing a train the trainer. So just reach out to me or reach out to our team. Uh, the AI, AI, AI LIC suite is available and ready to hear from you from that perspective. And then we also, uh, will be launching, uh, one, our big vault. So you can just head either, um, you can just head over to skool.com, S-K-O-O-L, and the URL is vault access. So I'll put that in the comments of the LinkedIn Live so you can see it, um, as well as on YouTube, but it's just skool.com/vault-access and you too can be part of this really cool exclusive community, this waitlist community We're gonna share some amazing bonuses, but the most important thing is that you get to see this crazy, amazing offer we are delivering. And the reason that you want to see this offer is 'cause you, once it goes live, we only have 100 seats that people can buy. And once you, once that happens, like they're gone for the rest until mid-year next year. Like this is it. This is your chance. If you wanna be in the cool kids club with us learning AI, building AI, and most importantly, sharing what you're learning with the world and learning how to build a personal brand as a thought leader in this space, definitely join the waitlist. At least see what we're doing. Maybe it's something that will change your life in 2026. So super excited about it. Thank you all for being here. I'm gonna shut off the, the livestream now, but it's always fun if you have questions or if you're just interested in joining us, we are here. Noelle Russell is how you join the I Love AI community. And, uh, you know, you have a shirt option just like this. So when you join our community and you level up, you can buy your own I Love AI swag. If that's not a reason to join, I don't know what is. Anyway, great to have you here. Thanks for following us. We'll see you next time. Bye.