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Unlocked Professional: AI and Future of Work: It was interesting because I was doing a lot of training on some of the things I just talked about, like basic structure to help people with iteration. And I realized with that team that they had already gotten strong with that piece and that they really needed more help with agents. And so the first thing I had to do was really figure out where the problems lie within the team and what solution would look best for them. Just like I was saying, like with working with AI, I have to Do that when you're trying to solve a business problem. So once I figured that out, we were able to do a training for them to find use cases for agents. Specifically, the type of agents I'm talking about are gyms. So because they use Gemini. We were able to figure out what kinds of gyms would work best with that group and to give them a bunch of examples of when they needed to identify use cases for creating gyms so that It could help them all move a lot faster. And by the end of that training, every single person in that room had made a custom gym for themselves. A new coworker, as it were, that could help them to be more efficient in their job. Stacking personas is such a cool thing to consider. Well, first of all, you gotta understand what a persona is. So this was a mind-blowing moment for me when I realized if I asked AI to act. As something or someone that it did take on that persona, which gave it a much stronger response back to me. So I have a friend who's a therapist, and she said, Man, Kiara, I wish I could talk to Brene Brown every day. And I was like, You can. ⁓ if you have AI act as Brene Brown. And so that's the first place. Is if anyone is unfamiliar with that, that's what that is. So we've talked about like having it act as a data analyst or having it act as a project manager or have it act as a coach. So those are all great things to do. For me, I grew up, well, grew up, ⁓ my my work career, I worked a lot with software development teams. You know, we talked a little bit about how I created an app in two days. So with that app, the way that I was able to create it was with a stacked persona team. Most people think AI adoption is a technology problem, but the companies actually moving fastest have figured out it's not. It's a people problem. And the ones winning are the ones that are doing the hard work of training their teams, not just handing them a new tool and hoping something sticks. My guest today spent 20 years in HR. For six of those years, she was at Capital One, where she served as one of their HR AI ambassadors, training over five hundred associates across recruiting, HR risk marketing teams, facilitating 15 plus workshops, and helping design a Gemini powered knowledge system on the talent side. She led strategy for national university partnerships, running over 45 events a year at Grace Hopper, Afrotech, and grew students' events by engagement. Earlier this year, she went out on her own and launched Better by Design AI, where she helps HR teams, nonprofits, and small businesses do the hardest part of AI adoption, which is getting people to actually use it in a way that sticks. She's the creator of two practical systems that help people stop fighting with AI and start getting real work done with it. She also coded her own thrifting app in 24 hours, which I think tells you everything you need to know about the way that she thinks. I've been looking forward to this one. Kiara Barton, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Jeff. I'm really excited to be here. Before launching Better by AI Capital One and years building those recruiting programs across staffing and corporate HR, what was the early version of Kiara like? Yeah, I have always been really entrepreneurial. And so my family has always like joked and laughed about how I just was always somebody who was looking to be innovative with everything around me. And when I was in college this continued. I remember doing an internship where I was explaining to people that one day people were gonna actually use video to talk to each other online. And this was back when dial up was the way that people accessed the internet. So I had so many people. How did you how did you know that? How did you know that? It was crazy. I worked for a company that was selling packages where main their main package was actually video email. And they had this side package that was where you could do video on demand and you could also get video on your website. And people constantly were telling us no. They said that it was crazy. They said this would never take off. And I was like, no, I really feel like it's the future. And so I've always been very innovative, very futuristic about using technology. And when I first started working back at Capital One, I was still doing that innovation piece where I would go into teams or groups and figure out how things would work and function the best possible way. And then I would figure out how to do it faster and implement those tools for large groups, which was really exciting. And once AI dropped, it was no different. I just jumped right on it and was like, this is something that I think is gonna be really big. So I started learning what it was, learning the history of it. And I just really loved being able to help other people get that aha moment when they would start using the tool. But I really have always been just a person who's been trying to think on the forefront of what's next. And this kind of industrial revolution that we're going through right now with AI is not just coming anymore. I mean, it's here. And and I'm really excited to help people who feel like they're lagging behind. be able to feel like they're getting up to speed. So if I'm hearing it right, early adopter embracing tech and also somebody who's looking to identify how they can solve problems. Yes, 100%. So great. So you mentioned road trips are a big family thing and you also
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do karaoke almost every week now. Tell us some of the highlights, especially what like what what songs do you lean into with karaoke? ⁓ my goodness. So I have the ability to do this kind of raspy thing with my voice. So What's Up by Four Non Blondes is a staple for me. I absolutely love that. And then also I was just singing the Nirvana song with my daughter, Smells Like Teen Spirit, which we both love singing, but I can really get into that raspiness. And I was in show choir when I was younger, so love performing on stage. And that's just been a really fun hobby of mine that helps me to be able to be more comfortable and confident in front of groups. And allows me to to hop on stage again one more time. And it's just so exciting when the entire room is singing along with you and they're having a great time and you're having a great time. I'm a huge fan of a karaoke myself. Actually, we're heading out to the Philippines here soon and I think it's pretty much a national pastime there. So we'll be doing a lot of karaoke soon. So you said most people know how to prompt, but almost nobody knows how to iterate. What does someone doing it wrong actually look like? Yeah, so I think that what we're finding is a lot of people are using AI like Google. So they go in and they ask it a very simple question. And then I often find that the people I work with get really frustrated because it gives them a very complicated response or a response that doesn't have the proper context. So one of the things that I teach a lot of the people I work with is how to have a really great informed logic behind how you work with AI and how to be able to spot what's missing when it comes back to you with information that isn't correct and how to be able to help it to get to that point much quicker. I find that forty percent of the time that people spend wasted is wasted in going back and forth with AI. So I help people be able to figure that out really quickly. One of the ways that that how that might look is I usually work with a lot of people to figure out first of all their problem and what good looks like. So sometimes people race to use AI before they should because sometimes you shouldn't even be using AI to solve your problem. Sometimes it's something that you really should be solving yourself. And then other times you should be giving parts of AI your problem to be able to solve it. Like it's really good at syntax, it's really good at finding patterns, but when it comes to things like judgment, that really should fall back on the human. So we figure out Really, what the problem is, what would good look like and what are we going to use AI for? And then once we figure out what we're going to use AI for, we really structure a great first prompt that has a lot of different features to it. It looks at things like the context that's really important for it to know. We'll often give it one or multiple personas to help it understand the person we're essentially hiring to help
us through the AI. And we'll look at things like format. And so by being able to structure, and there's five different things that I go through with people to be like, here's some things you should consider when you're creating this. Once we do that, most of the time they get where they're going really quickly with that first initial prompt. But if they don't, that's where iteration comes in. By understanding the logic behind how to get it to fix something, then you know exactly which step. you need to dig in more with to get there faster. And so that's something I really enjoy working with teams on and seeing them get to that aha moment and see them produce their outputs much faster. So as AI changes, this is something that people are just going to need to go back to the basics on with having great problem solving skills. And that even goes into like when we think about data analytics, which I just finished a course on data analytics for a few different colleges with using AI. Outside of just using the AI, you have to understand what can go wrong with data. You have to understand things like the difference between correlation and causation, which might sound foreign to people, but once they understand those pieces, they can spot issues that's happening with AI and they can also figure out how to get to the solution. Because we know that AI can be wrong, in some cases up to forty percent of the time wrong, which is is terrifying. But it's getting so much better, but it can be wrong. And so by being able to figure out how to get it to stop having hallucinations or wrong outputs and how to frame that conversation with it in a stronger way, you can use it faster and get more of your time back. That's one of the things I'm really excited about with AI is people getting their time back, being able to spend more time doing the things you love, more time. working on bettering yourself or more time doing whatever that is that you want to do because you're able to use this tool effectively. Yeah, and I agree. Not AI is not great at everything. And we so I like to treat it more as a coworker and monitor it, make sure that we're keeping an eye on it. And back at Capital One, you trained an executive recruiting team on using the AI tools. So What were you what were the things that you noticed about how they were using AI and what did you help change in that process? Yeah, so with that team, it was interesting because I was doing a lot of training on some of the things I just talked about, like basic structure to help people with iteration. And I realized with that team that they had already gotten strong with that piece and that they really needed more help with agents. And so the first thing I had to do was really figure out where the problems lie within the team. And what solution would look best for them. Just like I was saying, like with working with AI, you have to do that when you're trying to solve a business problem. So once I figured that out, we were able to do a training for them to find use cases for agents. Specifically, the type of agents I'm talking about are gyms. So because they use Gemini. So we were able to figure out what kinds of gyms would work best with that group and to give them a bunch of examples of when They needed to identify use cases for creating gyms so that it could help them all move a lot faster. And by the end of that training, every single person in that room had made a custom gym for themselves, a new coworker, as it were, that could help them to be more efficient in their jobs. And that was really exciting because that was a room of about 30 people who got such good feedback on how it just helped them from their manager and from that team. It just helped them to work more efficiently and they all had these aha moments as they went through that training of okay, wow, I can do this and this is when I should use it, which is something that I think is so helpful. What are some practical examples of what they the agents that they built with these gems? Yeah, so when you're thinking about it from an HR perspective, there were individuals that used it to be able to have as a reference gem. So things like if you have a document that lists every single person on your team. So one of those maps that just show every single individual, but you don't want to have to go through all 500 names to be able to find a specific individual in a specific department. A reference gym can act as a chat for you. So they're able to upload that document into Gemini and then ask it questions versus having to go through that document themselves. Another really great one that that I love is the calendar, the calendar helper. So one of the things that some organizations that I've worked on have been very, very, very, very meeting heavy. And so if you're in a meeting heavy organization, you know that you have to constantly create these new invites. And you're often probably invited to meetings where there is no description, there is no goal, there is no like information about what the takeaways will be. And so one of the gyms that they also created, some of them created was a calendar buddy is what some of them call it. A few people named it other things. But essentially what it did is you could drop very little information into it. I'm meeting with Mike on Tuesday to talk about onboarding and it would create an entire like invite for you that was really well thought out. And what that in turn did was by using this tool, the meetings got richer and some meetings got taken off the calendar. Because when you saw the description, you saw what the goal was. Sometimes people would email that person back and go, ⁓ here's the information that you need. We don't need to meet anymore. So it helped them to all be more efficient in their day, day-to-day work, which was really, really great. So those were two. And then the other one I think that a lot of people did was learning and development as well.
So being able to and professional development. Learning and development is great because that's just helpful to be able to teach you things you don't already know, like being able to have a data analyst tool that teaches you how to create formulas for work that you do. So that was one that someone created. And then there was one that was more about professional development. So being able to be a coach to that person, which is also kind of a little bit of a form of learning and development too. where they would go to them and say, here's something I'm struggling with. And then the AI would actually give them advice about how to solve for it. And so these gems all had knowledge and information on the back end that made it so they could give very specific advice on the front end. So it's very different as you and I know from just having a general chat. But it helped them to be able to to be more efficient in so many different ways. Yeah. Yeah. Having that preloaded logic and again kind of leverage being able to leverage it as that that co-pilot experience is I is is what the future looks like. That I think more companies are starting to adopt those practices and I think people are definitely seeing the value behind them. I know I am in the businesses that I work in as well. And one thing that I you mentioned that just stood out to me, especially from my corporate days, which was frustrating, was those those calendar invites without context. Some of those can be nightmarish, right? Ultimate especially if it's from like somebody you report to and you're like, wait a minute. What what are we talking about here? Let's make sure like I haven't heard from this person in six months and all of a sudden they want to meet with me right now, or you like an hour about what? Like so yeah, I like give give me some context is is my suggestion to the audience on that point. But I think there's nothing worse than being called into a meeting that you have been BCC'd on with no context, and then five minutes in whoever's hosting the meeting turns the mic to you. And says, okay, so now Jeff is gonna walk us through this. Right. And that happened way too many times. So I was like, I didn't want to do that. Anyone else. So like, let me make sure I provide context to others. And people love those emails. And I think that that's one thing that people don't realize too, is once you start using AI effectively, other people are going to notice that you are becoming more polished. That you are doing work faster and they are going to reach out to you to say, Hey, how are you doing this? And one of the things I I do try and warn people about too with that is, and we say this all the time, you have to review what AI creates, right? Because if you're not doing that, you could put out information that is incorrect, you could put out information that just looks like AI made it and really lose credibility, which is something that is so hard to be able to recover from. But if you're doing it well, then people will definitely see that as an AI fluency and they'll be like, wow, I really need to reach out to that person. Or maybe we should give this person opportunities to speak in front of these groups, which I've seen so many people. There's been people who've been asked to take over whole departments for AI, because this is new, right? There isn't a lot of people doing it just yet. Because they were that one person who took the initiative to teach themselves and train themselves and to share that information with others, which has been really cool to see. So so for context too, in terms of your role and the experience, let's let's even go back into your last role in a traditional HR. Were you doing like tactical HR, like actually dealing with employment related issues, or were you more on that learning and development side the whole time? Yeah. So my Work with an HR has been really interesting because I have been in the employee relations side. When I worked at a civil engineering company, I did nuts to bolts HR work. So onboarding, offboarding, employee relations, benefits, payroll, like the gamut. And I did that before too. So in my last role though, for the last like six or seven years or so, I was working as a project manager. And so I was really working to be able to help the organization work with external organizations to identify top talent to bring into the company. And so that was my my position. It was a lot of data analytics. It was a lot of doing workshops and presentations for students and internally I turned it into a role that where I was really working with people with AI more specifically in the last, I'd say maybe year or so. Because it was something I was just passionate about. And that was interesting because I was doing that side of desk work, right? So I was doing my my job where I had to work with like twenty different organizations, which was really cool. But then I also was doing this other work too that I found to be so valuable. And then Jeff, on top of all of that, for me personally, I actually was going through so much because My daughter, she has a very, very rare neurological disorder. It's called functional neurological disorder. And it it's really interesting because if she gets really high anxiety, her body will start to shut down in different ways. So we were going through this whole year of sometimes she would need a wheelchair, sometimes she wouldn't. She was dealing with all of these really odd symptoms. And I was also trying to be in this this position that was very demanding. and doing this additional work. But the reason why I was able to do that was because I leaned in with AI and was able to figure out ways to take tasks that were repeatable tasks, like sending a calendar invite, and be able to do that so much faster and so much more efficiently so that I had more space and time to take time off to take her to doctor's visits and to be able to still travel, which I had to do quite
a bit for my my last role. to show up at conferences and events. So it was just a very interesting time. And I was really thankful that AI came into that space when it did. And and I'm glad to hear that you were able to successfully find a a way to make it work with you and to complement some of what you're doing and hopefully yeah take that workload off off of you that otherwise would have taken you away from other priorities that you had. And as from the business perspective, as long as they're getting the results that they're looking for, like how the sausage is being made sometimes matters less or should matter less. And I'm hopeful for a future where we can leverage these tools in order to make the employee experience and our lives better, such as that experience that you had. Really cool to hear that and glad that that worked out well. And now you're obviously on this new exciting, different journey too and and those skills that you've learned and the way that you've been able to leverage the tools will play into this. W one thing that I was thinking about as you were talking about like your trajectory and experience and something that we talk about on the show a lot is that trade whether you're HR practitioner actually in the weeds or job seeker looking for jobs, the I is creating this environment that's just a lot different. And that cognitive overload of information that you might get and or the things that you can you do with these tools sometimes are great, sometimes can be harmful and or create challenges or bottlenecks that are there. Like I've had practical examples from let's say like HR professionals now that are getting maybe they would Sally would send an email complaining about something that happened and it would be a paragraph, but now it's like a four page essay with references on it. And so as an example, there's only so much time in a day. And those are practical examples of things and how they play out. You mentioned you were focused on that talent side and trying to figure out and attract talent. What are good practices that Maybe help organizations find that better or best talent for them. From an HR perspective as a whole, in terms of being able to find talent through my career and the differences that I'm seeing now and how people are leveraging AI, both from the HR side and from the recruiter side, from the job seeker side, because I spoke with a lot of students over my time and saw the work that they were doing and worked with a lot of different organizations. and saw the changes that they were having. So from my perspective, what I've really seen is a lot of companies are starting to move towards asking more AI questions in the interview process and are starting to force use more tools and systems that are screening for screening with AI ⁓ when it comes to resumes. And so that's been really interesting to watch because it took the universities a while to get on board with helping students. And we are starting to see that more, but we weren't seeing that as much before. And so now students are starting to be able to leverage AI a bit more, but it's still restrained in some ways in some colleges and universities. And we are seeing a bit of an imbalance because you're seeing people come out of school without a lot of practical advice from their universities, but companies looking for entry level people who have a lot of AI experience. So I really encourage students a lot in those cases to really try to seek out ways that they could build up those AI skills on their own, but ethically, because you don't want to use it to write all of your essays, right? You don't want it to write your resume and put information on there that isn't true. So there has to be an ethical balance with the way that they're they were look usually using it. And one of the things I want to even Take a step back even further with Jeff as we're thinking about like the employment sector as a whole, is what's coming next. So as I mentioned, I have a daughter, so she's 11 and she's spoken at AI conferences now, which is crazy because she has built apps. And so that's again where I'm seeing a little bit of a gap because these kids who are coming up behind our college stage students and even some of the high school students now. are really taking on and adapting to AI in ways that are gonna help them to accelerate really quickly. So I think that that is going to create a very interesting job market in the next maybe two to three years. Because one of the things that she said in her 11 year old self was, Mommy, I want to make enough money with AI where I don't have to go to college, where I can go to college if I want to. And so it is creating this kind of new job market. That we haven't seen before, where people are able to make money in broadly new ways. And so that's going to be interesting to see how that affects our corporate environment and affects the job market in the next couple of years. Yeah, and I think you made an important point, which is broad sweeping, leveraging AI, not just prompting it and asking it questions, but being able to actually understand and how to use it, ⁓ how to use it safely at work. Those are skills that will continue to become more and more necessary in most organizations over in the future. And so I not a bad place to start. I always say this, but if you're that person at work who has the AI skills, you're going to be somebody that's likely going to have a better chance of advancement. And so great takeaway. Appreciate you sharing that. Well walk me through what stacking personas look like in a real work situation. ⁓ yes. Stacking personas is such a cool thing to consider. Well, first of all, you gotta understand what a persona is. So this was a mind blowing moment for me when I realized I if I asked AI to act as something or someone that it did take on that persona, which gave it a much stronger response back to me. So I have a friend who's a therapist and
she said, Man, Kiara, I wish I could talk to Brene Brown every day. And I was like, You can if you have AI act as Brene Brown. And so that's the first place. If anyone is unfamiliar with that, that's what that is. So we've talked about like having it act as a data analyst or having it act as a project manager or having it act as a coach. So those are all great things to do. For me, I grew up grew up my my work career, I worked a lot with software development teams. And so we talked a little bit about how I created an app in two days. So with that app, The way that I was able to create it was with a stacked persona team. So I was able to take multiple different roles that you would find in a software development team and make AI act as all of them. So where someone might have one one chat or one project, because some people just like to use chat, but someone has a project that is a web designer, and then someone has a project that is a back-end developer, and then someone has a project that is a systems architect. And they're going back and forth between all of these different personas and asking them questions. I built teams. So I have AI worked as a software development team for me. And I will ask it questions so that because I have a I use Replit as one of my design tools. And so when I go to Replit, instead of having to use my tokens for Replit, because I'm not a software developer. Instead of me going back and forth with it saying, I would like it to do this and I would like it to do that, I can go to Claude and my software development team and say, Hey, here are the issues I'm seeing with my website, review it, and it will review it as all of those individuals. Sometimes people also use this as groups where it creates loops with AI. So it'll have it act as a as a kind of as a team that's going to review things over and over again. So it'll have it have different personas and tell it to review information before it provides it back to you, which is also a really interesting concept in how I've seen other people stack personas to problem solve. But think about the departments that are within your own company or companies that you've worked for, HR departments, marketing departments, software development departments, you can stack all of those personas to be able to have it be able to respond to you. And personas are great. Software engineering teams are very expensive. You mentioned Replit, so you're doing some development on your own. You're going to CLOD, you have this group of engineers that you can talk to and get questions or get questions answered about things that you want to build. And now that process is instantaneous, but in this world before AI, it was We need to schedule a meeting with this team of software engineers who then we need to have a conversation with about what it is we want them to build. And not only do we have to have a conversation, we have to get to the point where they really understand what it is that we're looking to achieve and what our goals are. And a lot can get lost in that translation of when you're taking functional business needs or what's in your mind and trying to get somebody else to understand it. Luckily, AI can be the same way. It can get confused. But again, just like you've that transaction speed of question getting answered to building is such a massive level up right now with those tools. And it's like it's just unbelievable, I think, what people are able to build these days. And I know you mentioned like that thrifting app that you built, which was really cool. You talked about at the beginning. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit more about that experience of. what building that app was like and what the end result was. Yeah, so the company that I have is called Better by Design on Purpose because I don't just want to copy what other people are doing with the work that I do. I really want to create new things that are better and I want to put that out there so the world will do it too. And I say that because that's the way I approach making my app. So part of that group of my software development team is a market researcher. And so when I'm making something like an app, I will say, this is my idea, go out and research it, find everything that is similar to it that is currently publicly available, find out the review the reviews of it, find out what's wrong with it, and help me to create something better. And so that's what I love about this particular app is I know that it has features that other apps don't have. I created it a few months ago, so by now other apps might have those features, but at the time they didn't, which is crazy to be able to say, but based on my market research, it it didn't. And so the app itself, I really wanted the user experience to be one that elevated thrifting. And in talking with a lot of my friends and a lot of people who just absolutely love thrifting too, and doing the market research on what the app could be. really grounded in having basically three parts. So one part is when I go thrifting, I often like will see a map and go, okay, I think I kinda want to go to these places, but I won't know anything about those places. So for this, because it's called the AI treasure hunter hat. So for this treasure hunt that I'm going on, because that's what it feels like, because you find all these cool treasures along the way, I wanted my map to be one that could actually optimize so to tell me what I should do when what's open and what's closed and to give me feedback from other users. So as a user, if I go someplace and I really like it, I can tag that place as a great place for clothes or as a really great place for finding rare finds. And so you can give little awards to the stores that you go to. So it creates a great experience for anybody who's going on because they already know what they might be getting into when they choose different places to go to. And then you start your treasure hunt.
So when you show up at a place, it will allow you to tag different things that you're seeing and you can share it back to that store so people can see it, or you can just save it for yourself privately and be able to track. What I love about this is it's helped me to see value and to find value. So I can find places where I'm getting a great deal, or I can find places that are overpriced. And so I can know whether or not I want to purchase this item. Whether I'm purchasing it for myself or I flip things or I'm looking to flip, the AI tells me that. Now to do that, I also had to become a Google developer and an eBay developer. Because I'm using eBay as a way to be able to tell what the value is of an items, and I'm using Google to help people figure out where they need to go. So those pieces were things that my Claude helped me to figure out what I needed to do to be able to become those. those individuals and to get what's called API keys, which I didn't even know what those were, to be able to have them be a part of my app. And the end result of that now is you have this great experience you can treasure hunt. You have this also really cool experience you can scan things and see what their value is and be able to search on eBay to know if that value is true, to do more research for yourself really quickly and easily and to save that information and promote great places. So It just really is a a fun way to enjoy thrifting. And I'm so happy I was able to do it because now I get to go do that with my family and my friends and we do it all the time on the weekends and whenever or we find things around our house because you can scan things at your house and see what the value is too, or go out to a garage sale. It's just a really fun, fun app to use for all those things. Yeah, and I think that's a really good example too of how you can r you can leverage AI to do something. that aligns to your interests and your hobbies and your goals, something that's fun for you. And then you learn this skill set that you can now apply to whatever you want to do in the future, whether it's improving in your job or starting a business, but it's going through that experience that again just helps you iterate with new cool things in the future. And I'm just kind of curious again, kind of going back to this HR and hiring side of the house, just from your perspective, like what do you think are Given that lens and what you've learned and how you how some of those tools work. And then look just looking back on your experience over time, what do you think are some of the areas that are like the top areas that are just ripe for disruption with AI as it relates to HR or hiring in the future? That's a really good question. And when I think about HR, ⁓ years before Chat GPT came out, I was following AI. And one of the things that I've heard a lot is how it's going to impact recruiting. I think that it makes sense to keep the human in the loop when it comes to recruiting, but
I do see that changing a lot. And what I'm hoping is that the people who are able to maintain in the space are able to do more with less. But then that also means there'll be a shift in the people who are in that space right now. One of the things that I have always loved about recruiting is it's been a great entryway into human resources because you can learn so much about an organization and so much about other potential places inside of the company through that. But I do see that being a major area of disrupt of being disturbed or disrupted. Payroll is another one that's quite interesting. Anything that has repetitive steps to it is something that could be done in a large portion by AI. There's a lot of people who have scheduling jobs where their job is just to for larger organizations, just to schedule interviews. That's another one that clearly could be very disturbed by AI by being able to set up the systems that allow you to schedule and change your schedules as you need to. You're already seeing that. You and I use that to connect. So we're already seeing those tools available. But one of the things that I really want people to realize is what I was just talking about a second ago. While AI is going to be a disruptor, right? It just it is because it's gonna change the way people do their work. You can also use it as an elevator for yourself to learn and to develop new tools and new skill sets that you never thought you would ever be able to have. Like I became a really strong business analyst in my role because I was able to do data analytics that I was never able to do. I was able to figure out formulas that I wouldn't have been able to figure out on my own without hours of trying to figure out research of what would work and what wouldn't work. Within minutes, I was able to figure those things out. And so I want to encourage people to not walk in fear as these changes are happening, but to lean in and to embrace them. Because if your department does get shifted or changed because of AI, you want to be the person who was already using the tool a lot. So they're like, ⁓ no, we want to keep that person because they understand how to work with multiple agents and do a lot of outputs versus the person who has been doing this job for a really long time, but has really kicked their heels on embracing the tool. Because what's awesome about that person who's been doing this for a really long time and when they embrace these tools is I call it the Van Gogh effect. So you have Van Gogh and you have a novice, and you give them both a paintbrush and you ask them to paint a tree, you're gonna get a very different. Tree, right? So for all of my folks who've been working in spaces for a really long period of time, you are Van Gogh's. You have the knowledge and the information that can really help you to take this tool and run past other people because you understand where the best places are to have shortcuts, because you know what you wish you could have done faster for such a long period of time. And then you can either train others, or like I said, when that point, when it comes to the point where they're like, we want to cut back on resources and leverage AI more, you can be one of those people who really preserves your position because you've already shown your value in multiple ways. Yeah, and I I think those are all valid points. I when I think of the disruption component of it, oftentimes, as you mentioned, there's a lot of fear that comes into play. This this is a tough one because I wouldn't say I love change, but I'm open to change and i think a is going is tapping into that and if if you're somebody that's just utterly against change then you're gonna have a challenge ⁓ you're gonna have a challenge working in the future because the rapid change is is not that's not changing anytime soon when i think of the disruption i like to embrace the idea that disruption means opportunity as well what you were hinting at earlier which is you learn these tools so you can level up your own capability And hopefully the end goal is that you can now do things that maybe you you didn't love doing, right? I definitely never loved sending calendar invites or scheduling meetings or a lot of the task base things that you have to do in work. And so if if the workplace sh shifts and responsibilities shift and you're aligning to again, tapping into the parts that are more interesting and more more of the human aspects of things, I'm I I think that's gonna be a hopefully a much better workplace of the future. And again, that's that that's the hope. And so I there's a lot of noise out there. Obviously, we don't all know exactly how everything's going to play out, but what I do know and what I again that I'm hopeful about is that generally w change is not new. And it's happened whether you're talking about historically going back to the cotton gin days or the industrial revolution, like things changed, jobs change. We were A lot of us were farmers, right? Not too long ago. And now we're in big buildings with big glass windows that didn't exist. And so I like to think of AI as that versus just this disruptor that's gonna take things on. And again, hopefully more of something that we can leverage as a partner to us that makes our life easier, going back to what we said before, where you found that that space in at your work as well. And I will say that I think we're gonna see a shift in trade. So I think you're gonna see more people moving towards the trade industry. as we see this disruption happening with AI and as we still need people who are going to be mechanics and electricians and roofers. And so I do think that it's going to be interesting to see how that shift happens because those jobs are not going to go away. We still need to be able to get water coming to and leaving our buildings. And so that's going to be quite interesting too. And then with change, you said something so interesting. I heard
someone once say that people are not People don't hate change. They hate when it happens to them versus when they're a part of the process. And this is a choice, right? We can be a part of the process of the change that's happening, or we can have it happen to us. And the last thing that came to mind to me, so I grew up in a household with a father who was an executive. And so because I grew up with a father who was an executive, one of the things that he had us do, I'm one of seven kids. One of the things he had all of his kids do. or he tried to get us all to do, was to read this book called The Goal. The goal has been around since the 80s and for anyone who just went, ⁓ my gosh, yes, the goal, they know what I'm talking about. The the premise of that book is how do the things in your business make money? And if something is not making money, you might need to get rid of it. So once I understood that premise, every position that I've been in I've always tried to figure out how does my role help the company make money? And if I don't understand what that is, then I would start to actually have more fear. So then I'd be like, wait a second, if I'm not helping the company make money, then that's a problem. So everyone's role is in some way helping the company function better. If you are in recruiting, your role is to be able to bring in the best talent so the organization can function better. So if you're bringing in tech talent, that tech talent is in turn. to create better products for the organization or is going to create create better infrastructure support for the organization. So that's how you're making the company money. But people do need to understand that point as this big shift is happening because there are some positions that are there that aren't making the company money but are more cost centers. And if your cost center is of value to still help the organization, then great. But if your cost center isn't really creating a high level value That's when you'll really start to try and figure out how can I make more value for the company, or maybe I need to find another organization where I can be of more value. Yeah. And we've seen also like those companies that have maybe thought that cost savings was that by making some cuts they were going to see some cost savings. We're seeing some of those companies walk back on that, right? Maybe the tools didn't actually give them the results that they were looking for. Again, we're just in this wild, wild, wild west right now of of things evolving. And and but I I think all that that you said is absolutely valid. And you know, the thing is that I was thinking about as you talked about this is that the goal book and the theory behind that and the understanding of what our purpose is in this organization and what value we provide. And I think I'm gonna have to send that out to a couple of my employees to remind them of that too. So I th that was a good takeaway. But I appreciate And it sounds your dad gave you some some strong advice there. Is there anything else that you wanted to say that we didn't get a chance to to get into today? I think that I would really want to encourage people if they want to connect with me or if they want to learn more about the work that I'm doing to please check out my website. ⁓ are these free Fridays. I love giving back and informing people on how to learn and to grow. And so if you would like to learn some new AI tools for free while I'm doing them, because I'm only going to be doing them through August right now and then I'll see if I'll be doing another session as other work starts to pick up. But would love for people to join me and I love hearing about people's experiences. So please feel free to connect and to just keep playing around with the tools, keep trying new things. It's so cool to see the things that people are creating. And I can't wait to see what happens in I used to say in the next few years, but with the way AI is moving, I can't wait to see what happens in the next few days, honestly. Yeah. Rapid change. So everything we talked about today is in the show notes as well. And thanks for helping our audience stay unlocked and don't be a stranger. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jeff. It was a wonderful time.