Learning and Leveraging AI with Jordan Wilson

AR:
So tell me what inspired you to actually start Everyday AI? I mean, you mentioned briefly that you wanted to help the everyday person learn about it, but is this something you're super passionate about? I mean, obviously you're in digital and you've been in it for a while.

JW:
Yeah, even me personally, I'm part old school digital strategist, so I've been doing different, I guess, marketing deliverables for 20 years, but I'm also very much always a forward thinker, kind of looking at what's happening on the horizon. So I would say I'm also a very, very strong AI enthusiast, obviously. So kind of what prompted it to start was both, because I was trying to learn other things as well when I first started this. Our team had been using the GPT technology, which is, a lot of people, we talk about ChatGPT a lot, and I think it's integrated into a lot of people's daily workflows now, but that didn't come out in November 2022. The GPT technology has been out now for almost three years, and we've been using it since it was publicly available.
So part of it was with Everyday AI and the creation is I felt there wasn't a good resource for non-technical people. But also at the time, even the information I saw people putting out there specifically after ChatGPT was released, I just noticed a lot of it was just bad information. So it was kind of a combination of there's not anything for the everyday person, everything's very technical. And then also just seeing a lot of just bad information out there specifically on how to work with large language models. So it was kind of those two things combined that led me to say, "Okay, let's start a daily initiative," and hopefully start to be a voice for people that can come together and cut through the mess because there's a lot of mess out there in the generative AI space.

AR:
Yeah, that's awesome. So let's talk about the growth because you started, humble beginnings, and I noticed you had posted something maybe a month ago about how being consistent was key to your growth. I know it's not super relevant to AI itself, but I'm really curious to know how you kind of envisioned that growth. Did it surprise you and what does the future look like for your podcast?

JW:
Yeah, this might come off the wrong way, but the growth didn't necessarily surprise me. Being in digital strategy, this is something we talk to clients all the time. We say, "If you put out high quality content every single day, if you do it consistently, if you have all of your technical SEO in line, if you're doing the right types of paid promotions, all of those things will pay off eventually." So I guess I'm not surprised that the podcasts and the livestream and the newsletter have picked up steam, so to speak, because on the front end, we did our due diligence and we looked at, even as an example, we're getting more into the startup space here, but we looked at the product market fit and we said, "There's no one right now trying to help the everyday person, and the everyday person needs help."
And we looked at all the other newsletters out there, and they're great newsletters, don't get me wrong, but everything was very focused on here's these 10 new tools. So they were just really focused on the highly technical. It's like, "Oh, here's breaking down a 50-page study on transformers," but the everyday person, they don't care about that necessarily, and they don't want to use 20 new tools every single day.

AR:
Yeah, it's overwhelming.

JW:
Yeah, they just want to see how they can use it.

AR:
What do you guys talk about?

JW:
Everything. No, so I mean, a good example is when you came on the show and talked digital transformation. So we try to bring people who are both experts and leaders in the field, so we can kind of explain or demystify certain aspects of generative AI. But then we also like to bring up people who are everyday people, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small business owners, because I think you actually see from smaller businesses some very useful and applicable use cases of generative AI because there's less red tape, there's less bureaucracy. So we're actually seeing some exciting things that small businesses and entrepreneurs are doing that even bigger businesses or people that work in enterprise can learn from.

AR:
Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it reminds me of that statistic about how an insane majority of podcast hosts only have a couple episodes and then they give up. So I think it's a testament to what you're doing that, of course, it's going to yield results because you're being consistent. So I think that's a great lesson. As far as the AI itself and how everyday people can use it, I think that's really important. I think that enterprises are struggling to find a way to use it in a way that's secure, private, doesn't conflict with their data policies and their intellectual property rights and things like that. So I think that does give a ton of room for these smaller companies to quickly and rapidly prototype using generative AI and things like that. So that's really interesting. What would you say your favorite piece of news has been in the last few months? Or what is the coolest thing you've seen? I know I'm putting you on the spot here, but even if you have a few, what would you say really liked, made you think, "Wow, this is awesome"?

JW:
I promise this isn't extreme recency bias, but two things just over the past, one that was announced hours ago, not even two hours ago, and the other that was announced Thursday. So probably the two things that I'm really excited about is Microsoft Copilot. So Microsoft obviously announced this months ago, but they had some specifics that they announced Thursday and they're starting to roll out these different features. So by far, Microsoft Copilot is the thing I'm most excited about. I say that being, I have an iPhone, I think I own four Mac computers. I don't own anything Windows, but I will be literally going to buy a Windows PC or two just so I can take advantage of Windows Copilot.
And bringing generative AI to the operating system, to me, is going to be exponentially more impactful for businesses than any other generative AI tool or software that we've seen probably combined. Because we've been working in these gen AI silos that don't really talk to each other, unless you get into some deep automation and if you're great at ChatGPT plugins, you can start to have those tools work together. But we've largely been working in generative AI silos for the last couple of years. So that's one. And then the other thing, which was just announced two hours ago, which again, maybe this is more recency bias, but I spend so much time in ChatGPT and they finally just announced some basic multimodal features in...

AR:
You can use images now, right?

JW:
Well, I think they said over the next two weeks is they're going to roll it out. So they just announced it like it was at two and a half hours ago. I'm looking at my clock now because I was refreshing right before I went live this morning. So being able to chat with photos. So these are all things that have been available technically in other large language models, but I do think ChatGPT is the most powerful. So that's being able to chat with photos and then also being able to input with audio. So being able to talk by default to ChatGPT and have it release text to speech or audio back. So much more conversational with how we would want to use a large language model in our everyday life with voice and photos.

AR:
And for the audience, can you explain a little bit about Copilot? Because I know that there was Copilot for Office 365, and it sounds like this Copilot is for Windows. And when I think about it, I'm like the biggest use case for this, and the biggest reason why people hate Windows or hate macOS is because they don't know how to configure it the way they want. And I feel like AI is going to make settings pages basically obsolete because you can literally just talk to your Mac or your Windows and say, "Hey, when I close the laptop, I want you to hibernate, not go to sleep," or something like that, and it'll just do it. I mean, that's really cool, but what do you think the implications are? Are there any more details that came out that were interesting to you?

JW:
Sure. I guess it's also important because a lot of people are going to be talking about Copilot specifically like this week because on September 26th, it is their initial kind of rollout of Microsoft Copilot. So that's going to be a free update inside Windows 11, just bringing a lot of new Copilot or AI features to Windows. However, the bigger picture is integrating all of these generative AI tools inside of Microsoft's apps. So your Microsoft, your Outlook, your Microsoft Word, Sheets, all of those, PowerPoint, that's coming in November 1st. So there's two very distinct and separate rollouts. And then the one in November 1st, that's obviously the one that's going to be $30 per user per month. When I talk about bringing generative AI to the operating system, that's more referencing the rollout that's going to start in November versus the introductory rollout that's going to start this week that's going to be free for Windows 11 users.

AR:
Yeah, that's really exciting. I've been talking to my team in management about hopefully getting Copilot when it's released, and I think it's a game changer, especially when it comes to synthesizing information from meetings and things like that. So those are the two most exciting things on your radar this past couple months, correct?

JW:
Yeah. I mean, I do strongly believe that come November, December, it's going to, I think, feel weird on how differently we will be able to work if you understand how to work with generative AI, if you understand large language models, and even what a single person is capable of. I spend so many hours reading, researching, using generative AI, and when you bring it into an operating system and it can touch, and now all of a sudden these silos can talk to each other, what a single human will be capable of, especially if they really know how to use it, that's the key.
And it's going to be, I think, mind-blowing what individuals or small teams who really invest in gen AI learning and understand large language models, what they're capable of. I can't even communicate it effectively. The easiest thing is think of how work was before the internet, which not everyone can remember. I kind of can. I was a teenager, I think, when everyone got on the internet, so to speak. But I think it'll be much more impactful to business development, to even just the economy than even the internet was, if I'm being honest.

AR:
And so from you learning how to use it more effectively, what kind of advice can you give to others? Because I know that for me, for example, I set ChatGPT as my homepage because I wanted to use it more often, but what ended up happening is I just got used to the fact that it was my homepage and I stopped thinking about using it, and then I slowly stopped because I didn't build that habit, even though I can use it every day multiple times a day if I just was more mindful about it. So what do you think people are doing to get in a better habit of using generative AI to help them out?

JW:
What you said there's always my first piece of advice. So you've got that covered. And again, I'll even broaden it up a little bit. Make your homepage, whether you use ChatGPT or something else, make it generative search. So set it to Bing's default generative search. Google now has their SGE, search generative experience. So yes, set your homepage to, even one of those three is perfect. And if you set it to ChatGPT, which is amazing, always make sure that you have your quote unquote "default" mode is plugins, and always make sure you have an internet enabled plugin on any new chat. So that's always my first piece of advice is change where you start your day once you open your browser.
And then the next thing, my next piece of advice is don't, and this is going to sound funny, don't pay attention to people like me and you telling people, "Oh, go do this, go do that." No, don't. The best way to incorporate generative AI is to stop chasing these 20 new tools every day. Stop trying to fit new shiny things into your workflow. The best way to do it, which sounds backwards, is disconnect from all of these gen AI tools and keep track of how you work and where you spend your time and where is really that knowledge work, so to speak, because I think that's where generative AI is most impactful. Where are you spending the most time in that knowledge work, reading, researching, writing? So first, I like to encourage people to categorize your types of work and to do it manually, or use a time tracker if you're doing a lot of browser work, or a time tracker on your desktop and do it for a week. And don't use any generative AI tools and see where you're spending most of your time doing those repetitive, knowledge work tasks.
And then, and only then, you start at the top and you say, "I'm spending most of my, or our team is spending the most manual time in this type of work." And then you see which generative AI tool is going to be the best for that. Maybe it's ChatGPT. It's probably going to be Microsoft Copilot come November, but right now maybe it's ChatGPT, maybe it's Anthropic Claude, maybe it's Midjourney, depending on what type of work you do, I don't know. But you have to start at the end and work your way backwards and really reverse engineer to find out what are the best gen AI solutions for you and not just dive into what someone else is using.

AR:
That's great advice. So basically use first principles thinking, think about how you spend your day, how to be most effective, and then look at how generative AI can help accommodate or facilitate some of those tasks.

JW:
Exactly. People just want to jump into a shiny vehicle without knowing the destination or knowing the best route to get there. And don't get me wrong, it'll be fun when you're in that shiny vehicle, but you don't know if it's taking you to the correct destination or if you're taking the right route to get there. So yes, it's definitely shifting how you traditionally even use software, because it is foundational for how you work. So yeah, you do have to take a slightly different approach.

AR:
Yeah, that's great. I always talk to my clients, and I do, as you know, digital transformation, and one of the biggest mistakes is they look for how to implement a technology as opposed to looking how to elevate the user experience first and then finding the technology that's going to help them with that. So I love what you said about doing that introspection. On that note, what would you say businesses are doing correctly or not correctly now? What advice would you have to a small, medium-sized business and then maybe even enterprise businesses, although that's a separate beast, I think.

JW:
Yeah, I think enterprise business obviously are much more prepared for this generative AI transformation that I think is really going to, if I'm being honest, I don't think we've felt generative AI yet. The ChatGPT craze, I think is a small pebble in the ocean for what's coming. So in terms of what businesses are doing right or wrong, I think, like we talked about, enterprise companies are much more prepared. They already have all these policies in place. But for small and medium-sized businesses, the things that they're doing wrong, number one is, like company-wide, so many small and medium-sized businesses haven't adopted any policies.
So you have, and I've heard from people, they're like, "Oh, well, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be using ChatGPT or Bard. I don't know if it's allowed." So you already have, I guarantee, so if you're a CEO or the director of a large company and you're listening to this, your employees, whether you know it or not, they're already using generative AI. They just might not be telling you. Or what's crazy to me is you have companies, like medium-sized companies, that block. They just block OpenAI, ChatGPT, Bard, whatever. And it's like, that's wild to me.
So I do think now over the last month, some of those companies that originally said, "Hey, we're banning this gen AI tool, we're banning this," I think they've started to peel back on that as they've seen, "Okay, these companies are coming out with enterprise offerings, so we can't just ban people because it's the future of work." But you still have small, medium companies that don't even have policies, they don't have governance, they don't even have anything from human resources setting guidelines. So I'd say that's the number one thing is companies, I think for the first couple, quarter one, quarter two of 2023, they just ignored generative AI and said, "Ah, well, we'll figure this out later," or, "This isn't for us." And now I think over the last, starting in quarter three, starting in the summer, companies were like, "Oh, wait, yeah, we can't ignore this. This is the future of work." So they've been scrambling to get all these pieces in play.

AR:
Yeah, there's a big risk that if they just ignore it, they're going to become obsolete.

JW:
Absolutely. Large companies, I say this, if you've already ignored generative AI up until this point, you're in trouble. I don't care. I said this. Eight figure companies, nine figure companies, there's going to be some that either get acquired that maybe weren't in that position before, maybe they were the ones acquiring their smaller competitors. So if you're already that far behind, or if you're still, for whatever reason, ignoring generative AI, you're setting your company up to either get acquired by someone that's actually smaller than you now, or you could just start losing business at a rapid rate. And that's not hyperbole.
The analogy I always draw is when companies quote unquote "adapted" to Web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it, social media, marketing automation, whatever. And I think companies had a nice, cushy 10-year period where they could figure it out and they could push it off for a couple of years and be fine. I think companies had so long to adapt to the quote unquote "new" internet. It's not going to be like that with generative AI. You have a year tops, 18 months tops, but we're already on the clock. So if you already haven't started, your bottom line is in for a very rude awakening when maybe some of your smaller competitors or competitors of the same size, if they've already been using generative AI for months, yeah, you're in trouble.

AR:
Yeah, it's a sobering to think about that, but you're absolutely correct, and I'm just worried about the people that are too stuck in their old ways to even make that shift. But whether they like it or not, it's going to happen. I think ultimately, most of the software and tools and platforms that we use will incorporate AI such that it'll be easier for an everyday person to use it instead of going straight to ChatGPT and trying to engineer prompts and things like that. But what I'm noticing on enterprise level is they're essentially, other than using ChatGPT for the basics, they're waiting for enterprise platforms like Databricks, these different platforms, to incorporate AI for them. And then just by using those platforms, they're AI-enabled, right?

JW:
Yeah. Yeah. It's been a lot of wait and see, which I get, don't get me wrong. It makes sense because especially if your leadership is not tech focused, if you're in a traditionally non-technical industry, I get it, and I understand it. Old school industries, old school businesses. So I can put myself, I can try to practice sympathy there, but you still just can't wait and see anymore, right? We are past the point of wait and see, because within a couple of hours, some basics of Microsoft Copilot are going to be available for people, and then in less than two months, so in five weeks, it's going to be available in the operating system. So we are far past the wait and see time point. So this is the, you've got to get your ducks in a row, right?
I've been screaming out loud, all big companies need Chief AI Officers. Handling AI, it's not a role for your CMO, it's not a role for your CTO, it's not a role for your Chief Information Officer. Like bigger companies, if you have a C-suite, and if you don't already have a dedicated AI space at your C-suite table, again, you're asking to get lapped. You're asking to fall behind. So that's another thing is companies need to treat generative AI as its own entity because it is. It's not like your CTO's job is going to go away when AI comes. That's not how it works. Their normal workload is going to continue to grow and expand as more and more technology even outside of the AI bubble continues to infiltrate our daily lives and businesses, how they operate.

AR:
Yeah. Last question for you, Jordan. What are your future predictions? Five to 10 years. And I'll give you mine after you give me yours. How do you think it'll change work or life? I always joke with people and say that AI is going to force us all to learn how to juggle because entertainment is the only useful enterprise for humans in the future, but it's a little tongue-in-cheek. What do you think?

JW:
Yeah. Wow. Here's the thing. I always try to balance any sort of fears with excitement. I always try to take an optimistic approach. However, we have to also, as a society, especially here in the US, we also have to be real. And a lot of companies, some companies have already said it, right? Like, "Hey, we're," I think it was IBM with the 8,700 jobs a couple months ago, they said, "Nope, we're not hiring for these. These are going to be AI." So I do think that generative AI is going to be incredibly disruptive for the US economy. There's going to be a lot of uncertainty with what happens in a lot of sectors, if I'm being honest. When I try to talk about the future of generative AI, I always have to dispel what I personally find the most annoying and ill-informed saying there is out there when it comes to generative AI, because I think that business leaders have used this saying as a security blanket, and it's false.
When they say AI won't take your job, someone using AI will. It's not the truth because someone using AI will take five jobs, 10 jobs, 20 jobs, and as we work and get closer to agents, which we don't have to get into because that's a whole nother conversation, generative AI agents aren't fantastic right now, but companies are out there raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build generative AI agents that will do a lot of the knowledge work we do. So don't get me wrong, there will be millions of jobs created in the AI space that don't exist right now. So will AI lead to great job creation? Absolutely. But it will lead to much more, far more job displacement than creation. It is not a one-to-one. It is not this person uses AI, so they'll take over this person's job who doesn't use AI. It's not how it works.
The other thing that we have to keep in mind, which people just ignore this, maybe because they have clients and they don't want to make them mad, but Wall Street hates employees. Look what happens anytime a public company lays off 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 employees. Stock goes soaring. That's the other thing. We don't want to talk about it because it's uncomfortable. We say, "Oh, no, AI's great. It's going to create millions of jobs." Sure, yes, AI is great. Yes, it'll create millions of jobs. But it'll displace far more. And as the biggest companies figure this out, the same companies investing billions of dollars into their own AI, into their own large language models, into other generative AI companies, those same companies investing hundreds and millions or billions of dollars into generative AI are also laying off thousands of people. So you have to do the math, you have to be realistic about this, and it can be hard to be optimistic, but I still think you have to.
So my advice, and even as we look in the future, you just have to learn generative AI because it is going to greatly change how business is done, especially here in the US where we are not big on regulation. Other companies have figured it out and kind of put up quote unquote "safeguards", which we haven't done here in the US. So yeah, the future, even five years is hard for me to fathom. But to put it shortly, the future of work is way different. If you're not using generative AI now, or in five years, I don't see even your place at the table because generative AI, we're not going to have that 10-year window. We're going to have a year and a half, two years max. So in five years, everyone's going to be using generative AI in their day-to-day role if you work in front of a computer.

AR:
Absolutely. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And to piggyback off of what you said, one of my future predictions is, well, it's not even a prediction. In general, technology has a deflationary effect on the economy, so it will help with inflation. It will potentially reduce the cost without reducing the value of these companies, because it'll be easier to do everything that we're already doing. So I mean, what you said is spot on, and I think that this wave is going to sweep people away if they don't prepare themselves in advance. And I tell people that it's always better for you to strategize before you have to, as opposed to waiting and seeing what the market decides and then you just being kind of a victim of whatever is the result of that.
So I think that both organizations and individuals need to play a little bit of imaginative role-playing to see where can this industry go or what is the state of what I do and my position, and how can AI change it so that I'm ahead of the curve and not kind of on the losing end of the battle. Because at the end of the day, everyone's going to shuffle. But if you know where you might go, you can get behind that. So it's interesting, it's terrifying, it's exciting. It's all of the above, right? So that's really great. So we'll see, I guess, what happens, right?

JW:
Yeah, yeah. And like you said, I mean, you can't skip over the excitement aspect. You have to be optimistic because yeah, there's a lot of unknowns and you can't just put your pessimistic hat on, and that's not a fun world to live in when you're just scared or extremely hesitant to work or to dive headfirst into generative AI. Even the people who are building it aren't sure what the world's going to look like in two to five years. So I just think you have to look at the exciting aspects, you have to be optimistic, and you have to just dive in, and you have to learn it and put it to use. Because that's the only way, I think, that organizations can push their way forward is if you can adapt this head-on, quickly and throughout your entire organization. So yeah, the future, yes, it is exciting. There are some confusing and uncomfortable feelings that I think a lot of business leaders have, but you just have to meet all those things head-on with an optimistic point of view.

AR:
In conclusion, pay attention.

JW:
That's the best way to say it.

AR:
Jordan, this has been a great talk. It's really good to see you again. Where can people find you?

JW:
You can look for the Everyday AI podcast on Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Or you can go to youreverydayai.com, youreverydayai.com. We put all the information up there, the newsletter, podcasts, all that. So yeah, if people are interested in learning about AI every single day, yeah, we'd love to have you.

AR:
Awesome. Thanks so much, Jordan. It was good talking to you.

JW:
Thanks, Aimann. Appreciate it.