This week’s podcast is about how generative AI can start improving your business and career.
You can listen to this podcast here, which has the slides and graphics mentioned. Also available at iTunes and Google Podcasts.
Here is the link to TechMoat Consulting.
Here are three things you can (should) do right now:
Step 1: Develop Staff and Skills in Gen AI (DOB 5, DOB6)
Step 2: Use to Improve Internal Productivity
Step 3: Use to Improve Products, Services, and the Customer Experience (DOB2)
Here are the tools I use all day long:
- ChatGPT4 with Plugins and Web Browsing
- Plugins: Show Me, Zapier, SEO Optimizer
- Google Bard
- Bing AI
- Midjourney and Leonardo AI
- AgentGPT
Other tools I am experimenting with:
- Zapier
- Runway ML
- Opus Clips
- PDF.AI
- AskAI
- AI Transcriptions by Riverside and Otter.ai
- Docuask
- Lots of ChatGPT Plugins
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Related articles:
- AutoGPT and Other Tech I Am Super Excited About (Tech Strategy – Podcast 162)
- The Winners and Losers in ChatGPT (Tech Strategy – Daily Article)
- Why ChatGPT and Generative AI Are a Mortal Threat to Disney, Netflix and Most Hollywood Studios (Tech Strategy – Podcast 150)
From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:
- GPT and Generative AI
From the Company Library, companies for this article are:
- OpenAI / GPT / ChatGPT
- Google / Bard
- Microsoft / Bing AI
Welcome, welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Towson and this is the Tech Strategy podcast where we analyze the best digital businesses of the US, China and Asia. And the topic for today, three steps to supercharge your business and career with generative AI. Now those of you who are subscribers, I have sent you, I don’t know, three pretty, let’s call it wonky Articles about generative AI where I think it’s going who I think skin and like I was I was pretty deep in the weeds on that That’s kind of my best prediction thinking thus far, but I’m still sort of struggling to figure it out I think so I did send you a lot which I’m I’m cognizant of and and was a lot of theory, too I think I’m probably pretty close. I think the part three of the three articles, which I sent the other day It really talks about innovation platforms and business models that are going to emerge and that most of these AI apps are just going to be free commodities. And then it raised maybe one question I don’t feel like I really have the answer to, which is what’s the impact of open source? But anyway, I know that was a lot. I think I’m getting close. So I feel good about it, but I recognize that I did send you quite a bit of theory. So if you got through that, congratulations, it was quite a bit. Okay. So based on that, I thought I would sort of push that to the side, distill this all forward and say, look, you have a business, you work at a business, you have your career, what should you be doing right now? All that theory, all the thinking, things are changing so fast. What you should, what should you do right now? And I’m going to say basically do three things. If you want to supercharge your business, elevate your career, do these three things, and that’ll be the podcast for today. And it’s really what I’m doing. I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing with GEN.AI right now. Anyways, that will be the topic. Let’s see, anything going on? No real things. I am talking a lot more about Tecmo Consulting, which is the boutique consulting firm we do. which is really about digital strategy, identifying the winning strategy versus strategies that aren’t gonna work out well. If that’s something that’s of interest to you, give us a call. You can reach me on LinkedIn or on the website, techmoatconsulting.com, and we will do a pretty quick assessment of your company, what we think the likely winning and losing positions are, or if you have a plan already, we’ll give you a second opinion. So anyway, if that’s of interest, give us a call. All right, standard disclaimer. Nothing in this podcast or my writing or website is investment advice. The numbers and information for me and any guests may be incorrect. The views and opinions expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. Overall, investing is risky. This is not investment, legal or tax advice. Do your own research. And with that, let’s get into the topic. Now I don’t really have any concepts for you today, or even really any companies. Just want to sort of talk about something that is hopefully directly usable for you personally and in your business. So, you know, how do you sort of use all these tools? And I mean, it is changing so fast. It’s hard for me to catch up. I probably spend two hours a day exploring new gen AI apps. just trying them out and they keep coming. I’m not even keeping up. There are hundreds and hundreds of them and they’re getting better. So we’ll just talk about three things I think that are valuable at this time and no real concepts for today. Okay, so let me tee up the question of the second machine age, which I’ve talked about two years ago and I think I’ve referenced it a couple of times in these podcasts. You know, there’s a book called The Second Machine Age. Pretty good book, and it’s just sort of high level, what’s really going on. And the argument, which I am a believer in, and I think that’s what’s happening right now, is the argument is that human beings have been around for 200,000-ish years. Up until about 200 years ago, everything about the human civilization was dramatically curtailed. by the limitations of our physical bodies. We can’t bend metal. We can’t put concrete into 10-story buildings. We can only walk so fast. We can only walk so far. The wheel helps a little bit, but we mostly used horses. Tremendous limitations on what is possible because of basically your bodies, which is really effective, simply can’t do things. Okay, the first machine age comes along. The steam engines, the big invention. Basically, you fire up steam and you are able for the first time to exert physical force far beyond what your body can do. You can start to bend things, you can start to move locomotives, you can start to lose, tremendous things like suddenly bicycles. We had bicycles before in the sense that we could ride them. We just couldn’t make them. Then you get to things like railroads and cars and airplanes and submarines and all of it. So physical motion, dramatically escalated, improved. Making things, I mean, if you look around wherever you’re sitting right now, your office, the gym, whatever, what are you looking at that you could physically make without… some sort of mechanical force deployed. Could you make a table, really? Well, I mean, you could make a wooden one, I suppose, cut down a tree. What about those bolts? No, you can’t make the bolts. What about metal stands? Can’t make that. Ballpoint pens? Could you really make a ballpoint pen? There’s virtually nothing in the physical world that we use that we can make with just our bodies anymore. I mean, a couple things here and there, but very rare. So that was the first machine age and everything exploded from then on the 1800s onward. And the argument for the second machine age is we basically have the exact same scenario based on the limitations of our brains. Our brains do certain things incredibly well and they’re terrible at other things. We don’t remember things very well. We forget skills that we learn. If we don’t use them, they degrade. If you don’t speak a language, you forget it. We can’t pass things on easily. You have to have schools where every generation, you have to reteach everybody the stuff that everyone already knew. Our memories are not precise. We can’t do advanced computations. I mean, we’re really quite limited in what our brains can do. So it’s the same argument that digital tools and really AI. are gonna blow away those limitations the same way the steam engine did. Computers never forget. You tell a computer something, it knows it forever, and it doesn’t just know it, all computers know it. If one Tesla car knows about a pothole on a road, all the Tesla cars know about the pothole. All information is shared. If one Tesla knows how to break quickly on ice, They all know how and there’s no forgetting. If you ask a computer to do a calculation, it can do it a million times really fast and it will never make mistakes. So they’re just capable of things we’re not capable of. And that’s what I think about when I think about all these Gen.AI tools. It’s like suddenly we can do things that we just couldn’t do and I’ll give you some examples. But I’m using generative AI tools all day long now. I mean, all day long, it’s on my browser, three of them at least. I use three LLMs all day long. I probably have another 10 to 15 tabs open all the time. And it’s like having superpowers. I’ll give you a bunch of examples. Anyways, that’s sort of, we might be finally at that moment. People have talked about it for a long time. I think we’re there. I think 2023, 2024, 2025, that’s the second machine age. We’ll see. That’s a high level hand wavy thing, but it sure looks like it. Okay, that said, three steps. Three things that I think if you wanna elevate your business, supercharge your business, I’m sorry, supercharge your business, elevate your career, here’s what I think you should do, and this is what I’m doing, and I’ll tell you, it’s everything I do. Step one, staff and skills. So, digital operating basics, one of my six levels. If you look at digital operating basics, number five and number six are leadership and management and skills, culture, and training, or skills, culture, and talent. Basically, you have to build, if you’re gonna do anything in digital in this world, you’ve gotta have certain skills, talent, understanding at the leadership level, and you have to have it at the staff level. And this is the great bottleneck for virtually, well, not virtually all. 85% of companies I talk to, whatever digital strategy we come up with, the limitation, the bottleneck is people don’t understand it enough. They don’t have the skills yet to even understand what’s going on. Some people do, but it’s not uniform. So you always start talking about leadership and management and you start talking about skills, culture, and training. DOB5, DOB6. And so when we’re dealing with clients, we’ll talk about strategy, that’s the consulting hat, but then at a certain point I put on the professor hat and I say, let’s just do some training. I mean, you wanna really make a difference? Let’s do focused intensive training for everyone on your board in senior management over the next couple of months and sort of put them through a quick MBA on digital. Cause otherwise it doesn’t work. Anyways, everyone has to be doing this now for generative AI. everybody. You personally, you have to be using Generative AI tools every single day. And I’ll give you some specific companies you can look at. And everyone in senior management and everyone on the board. And you just have to do it. And you try and make it useful, you try and work, but it’s got to be mandatory. I mean, I would put a test at the end of every six weeks for everybody saying you’re going to have a test in six weeks. everybody on how good you are writing prompts for Google Bard, at how good you are generating images, at how good you are at doing data analysis using plugins on chat gbt. I would basically just give them a say a test is coming. Everybody has to get good at this, no exceptions. So what does that mean? You use it every single day everybody and you you should do what I’m doing is every day you try one to two new ones. because they keep coming. So master the common ones, keep on top of the new ones, make it mandatory, give everybody in the organization a test in a month. Have to do it. Now, as you do that as a business, you can start to collaborate. You can create like a library for good prompts. So you can sort of build a prompt library. Here are the best prompts I’ve been using for OpenAI for doing… regression analysis on consumer trends. Here’s the ones that work for me. You start to pool the expertise, you start to pool the knowledge. Here’s my process for redoing the creation of marketing materials. I do some research with this, I start to write a script with ChatGBT, I start to create images, then I go into Adobe, Firefox, or whatever you call it, FoxPro, and then I create images and you know. Lay out the process of all the tools you’re using, show the results. Everyone has to start collaborating and we all get smarter together. So that’s number one. Staffing and skills, you gotta build them out. You can’t have people on your team that aren’t good at this stuff. It’s like not being able to use a calculator. You gotta know how to use a calculator. Okay, step number two, internal productivity. Okay, let’s just take the stuff that we’re already doing. We’re not gonna change what we’re doing. We have certain things we do individually, certain things we do as a business. We’ll just map out all the current workflows and we’re gonna start plugging in generative AI tools so that hopefully we can do them better than before, but at the least we’ll be able to do them faster and cheaper. So we’re not gonna necessarily change our workflows. We’re just gonna, you know. Now what really has been happening for me is, I’m starting to do, one things are cheaper. You know, you can write cheaper, you can write faster. I’m just doing more of what I used to do. So yes, the productivity is improving, but really what’s happening is my volume of everything I do has just gone up by a factor of three. I’m creating more content now. Three times as, well not three times, about double. the amount of content with the same time spent, no money spent. I’m doing legal contract reviews that I used to, I’ll give you some examples, but I used to just do contract reviews myself for let’s say half of them, because I kinda like reading contracts, I think it’s fun. And then I would call a lawyer at a certain point if it was significant, but not if it was just a purchase order. I’m doing contract reviews for everything now. because, ah, let’s just throw the purchase order into Google Bard and see what it comes back with. And by the way, it’s quite good. So I make a list of everything I do, all the keyword steps for me personally and for business stuff, and then I have sort of three columns in an Excel spreadsheet, and I assign it. I say, is this something I do myself? That column’s me. The second column is copilot. where I’m using an AI tool with it. So it requires my time and attention, but I’m using a tool. And then the third column is autopilot. I’m just throwing it to the AI and I’m not even looking at it. And I basically go down the list and I put each step, I check the box and whatever tool I’m using. So if you’re looking at a business, the areas I would look for for increased productivity. Definitely operations. I mean, definitely data operations. So data gathering, data analysis, anything with a report, anything in a spreadsheet, anything that you’re generating a port, anything you’re generating a PowerPoint, anything that’s sort of operational where you’re doing some level of analysis, absolutely. That would be number one. Number two would be marketing and sales. So personalized marketing, social media post, CRM, any sort of marketing content, text, images, videos. So I’d start with operations and specifically sort of data operations. Number two would be marketing and sales. Depending if you’re a tech company or not, then you’re gonna look at IT and engineering. So that’s writing code. I mean, These things are very good at code. So writing code, reviewing code, debugging code, documenting, those three buckets alone, you’re gonna get a big hit in your productivity. Number four, let’s call it legal risk administration, things like that. Legal documentation, drafting anything required for compliance, checking. contracts, things like that. Those four buckets, you’re gonna get a big hit in productivity right now. Anything else beyond that, it’s gonna probably start to be more domain specific. Some AI tools are good at that, some are not. But those are sort of general across all businesses. All right, I’ll put this in the notes, sort of step one, step two. So step one, staffing, skills, training. Go, go, go. Number two, internal productivity. You’ll get some quick wins there very easily. Step three, last one. This is basically DOB2, Digital Operating Basics 2 on my list, which is personalization and never-ending customer improvements. So this is where we start to use tools to increase the customer experience. Maybe we offer them new products we were never doing, new services, maybe we’re just… studying all the interactions, but you wanna put points on the board, right? So productivity gains are points on the board. You’re saving money, you’re getting better. This is also about points on the board. You wanna have the customers start to get benefits from this. You want the user experience to be better. So start just dialing it into the process. things like that and it can be marketing, it can be communication, it can be looking at various, I mean you just map out the customer experience. all the key touch points and you start to study them. And then you start to think about things like, can we change our product? Can we improve our service? So this is sort of externally focused, internal productivity is obviously internal focus. That’s kind of step one, step two, step three. Now outside of that, I would start to think maybe about big moves, big strategic moves, where we might actually change our business model. But you don’t want to do that yet. You want to spend most of your time on one, two, and three, and then sort of start thinking about, okay, is it time to launch a new business unit? Is it time to change our business model entirely? We’ll call that sort of bigger strategic moves. But. I wouldn’t be doing that until you get really good at this stuff. That’s sort of a simple playbook. Let me give you sort of an example of what I’m doing, which is basically that playbook. Now for me, I mean, you know, I’m a small sort of boutique operation, which is, I mean, really I do two things, is there’s a consulting business, which is a boutique, small number of people, a lot of traveling, pretty awesome actually, pretty fun. So that’s fine, I think people understand that. And then there’s content creation, thought leader influencer thing, which is a lot of content creation, a lot of speaking around the world, a lot of writing. And those two things fortunately go hand in hand, but really I kind of wear two hats that are related. Okay, so what do I do? I mean, I’ll just read down. Here’s what’s open on my computer all the time. Number one, chat GPT with plugins and with web browsing. That’s absolutely key. Chat GPT everyone knows in the last week, They opened, I mean, I mentioned plugins. Plugins are a huge deal and web browsing is a huge deal. Plugins, I’ll explain in a minute. Web browsing, basically, you don’t have to study the corpus of data that they’ve uploaded that stopped into 2021. This allows it to look at real-time information. So I can give it a website and say, go look at that website right now and look at its traffic. So you can access the web in real time. That’s hugely important. So web browsing activated and then the chat GPT plugins which have just been launched. There’s about 90 of them right now where instead of going into chat GPT and saying, look this up for me in your corpus of information or look this up for me on the web right now, I can say, look this up for me within the Expedia plugin, let’s say plane flights. And that’s where it will pull the information from. Now when you have all three of these working together, incredibly powerful. If you don’t have these, go get them. They’ve made it available to everybody. If you sign up for Pro and then you have to go into settings and turn on beta functions, and you’ll see it in there. If you don’t know how to do it, just go online and say, how do I turn on plugins? And there’s a million little explanations for how to do that. I keep that open all the time, use it all day long. Google Bard, I use that all day long. And usually if I’m looking at something like a contract, I’ll throw it into both of those. And I’ll say, find me some risks in here and I’ll look at the two responses. And sometimes BARD is better and sometimes GPT is better. And then there’s Bing AI, which is a bit different. They don’t have plugins yet. BARD is kind of rolling out plugins right now, but they have web browsing. but they’re calling it the extensions or something else. But those three LLMs, I keep open all the time. Other ones I’m using, let’s just go down the list here. I use Mid Journey, which is just for creating images and things. I’ve started using Leonardo AI, which is basically like Mid Journey, but it’s built on stable diffusion, which is open source. So it’s free. So. Leonardo AI is free, mid-journey is paid and more proprietary. Basically, Leonardo AI is like Android, open source. It can do a lot more and there’s a lot more variables you can use, but it’s a little clunkier. Mid-journey is more like iOS. It’s an operating system versus Android that has less flexibility, but it works a little cleaner. That’s kind of the difference in those two. I use both of those all day. Runway ML, which is basically mid-journeyist text to image. Now Bing AI is actually kind of interesting because it’s a large language model, but because it’s Microsoft, they also own Dali. So in Bing AI, you can do large language, text to text, but you can also do text to image within Bing AI. So I can say, you know. find me a history of whatever and it’ll give me a text answer, give me an image for this that would be good in an article and it can generate an image. So they’re kind of combining those two. I know as a runway ml is text to video. Actually it’s more like video to video. You film on your iPhone, you upload it and you tell it to make it in animation style. But it’s getting close to text to video. Text to animation is pretty much here. We’re getting closer and closer. A couple more months, it’ll be there. I use those all the time. I use Agent GPT, which I talked about. That’s an example of Auto GPT, where you give it a goal and it does something. I’m still kind of playing with that. It looks like GPT with plugins is actually more effective for deploying digital agents than Agent GPT. I’m playing with that. It doesn’t work that awesome yet. Other ones, so those are my main ones. Other ones I’m playing with, Galileo AI, which basically it can design products and other things for you based on text. I convert a lot of podcasts directly to text. I’m making my website, you know, there’s SEO, search engine optimization. Well, now there’s LMLMO, which is large language model optimization. You wanna optimize your website so it’s easily understood by LLMs. So I’m currently transcribing all my podcasts and pasting the text in so it’s easy to read. Then I use a couple things for that. I use… company called AI Transcriptions by Riverside. I use Otter AI. That’s really easy, works pretty well. There’s a company called InVideo, which does a whole ton of stuff. I won’t cite that. I’ll put these in the notes for the show and you can kind of look them up. Eleven Labs is pretty fun. It converts text to speech. So if I wanted to create a video, Right now I’m recording it myself, but I could just as, I mean, I’ll tell you where I’m going with this. I can digitize it all. Everything on my website can now be scanned by an LLM. So I can task Google Bard to read 50 articles on my website, take that in as sort of the context and corpus of information, and then tell it to write me a compelling 500 word article. Well, let’s say a compelling 200 word article that’s catchy in my voice, in sort of my style of speaking, based only on my content. ChadGBT can do that now. I can then feed that into something like 11 Labs and say, now I want you to speak this so you could listen to it in a video or whatever. And pretty soon it’ll be, speak this in my voice. So basically I can just task it to look at my content, write new content. I can edit it, it can be an article, it can be a podcast, it can be a short video. I’m not there yet, but it could probably do it. I’m not sure it’s a tremendously good idea, but I’m playing with it. GitHub, I play with GitHub kind of a lot. Anyways, what else? Anything else? That’s probably most of what I’m doing. Let’s see if I’m playing with… I change these all the time. plugins on ChatGPT. I’m using ShowMe, which is a plugin where you can go on to ChatGPT and say, compare the census data of California to Massachusetts between 1980 and 2000. It can go pull that information from the public census, come back with a lot of data. I can then use the ShowMe plugin and say, turn this into three pie charts over time and it’ll generate. the pie charts or whatever I want. So it can take data and basically show it to you in whatever form that you want. Any others? I’m using Kayak and Expedia as plugins. I’ll give you an example of that. Like I was looking to do a trip in July and I wanna do hiking, like a two to three day hiking trek. somewhere fun. So I’m kind of looking at the northern parts of Georgia, the southern coast of Turkey, and a couple other places. So I go into Chachi BT and I tell it to use basically the kayak, which is a travel site plugin. And I say, I want you to find me five potential trips that meet these criteria. Criteria one. it must be a famous and very popular hiking trail that can be done in under two days. Factor number two, I need a round trip plane ticket from Bangkok to that place for under $1,000. And three, it needs to meet the visa requirements of blah, blah, blah. And basically, ChachiB2 will go on the web and it can answer the first factor very easily because you can look up reviews and things, what are the popular trails. Then it will go through the kayak plugin to pull. pretty much real time pricing information to screen out round trip flights in a certain time period. And then it can go online and also find up to date visa information. That’s where you need web browsing because that changes very quickly. The famous factor one, the famous hikes, that doesn’t change. So that sort of chat GPT-3 is fine. but you need the plugin for Factor 2 and you need web browsing for Factor 3. It does all of that. It comes up with three to four hikes and it was pretty great. So I’m doing that and I think that’s pretty much all I’m using. I’m making a comic book just for fun to see if I can do it. You can basically have it create all the images on mid-journey, write all the text, create the characters, and then there’s some sites you can go and you can basically make a comic book if you want. It’s pretty easy. It doesn’t take long. Okay. I think that’s pretty much other ones you should keep an eye on. Descript and Zapier are both good, but that’s where I am. So for me, that’s step one, which is learn, learn, learn. Okay. That’s what I basically just told you. We go to step two, productivity gains. How can I have productivity gains in my two sort of small related businesses? I’m basically using this stuff for legal at this point. As sort of mentioned, I’m throwing contracts and other things in there. And it’s probably not gonna save me any money because whenever I get to significant contracts, I’m gonna call the lawyer. But for all the other stuff. you know, that I would probably not call a lawyer for before because it’s, you know, small money and why would you spend that much money for something small? I use it for that now. So I just throw it into these large language models and I use it as sort of, you know, so I’m probably doing double the legal reviews I used to do, doesn’t cost anymore. So that’s a productivity gain. IT stuff, I mean, I got some websites and it’s pretty basic stuff. So it used to be I would hire people and I would have IT people I dealt with that would fix website issues. It’s pretty basic on my little websites. Yeah, I used to use something like Upwork or I knew people and I would call them and I would hire someone to make blah, blah, blah. I just do that on the LLMs now. I mean, it’s super easy. I say, here’s what I want you to change. I need you to improve. the load time speed for this website and it will go to the website, track the load time speed and tell me how to improve it. Pretty easy. So yeah, in terms of IT and legal, I’ve definitely, I’m twice to three times as productive as I used to be. Not terribly important for me to tell you the truth. Okay, the bigger one is content creation and digital marketing. I’m basically using these tools for digital marketing now. Every single thing I’m posting is getting search engine optimized, LLMO optimized, LLM optimized. Headlines are all being redone. Tweets are all being redone. Meta descriptions, keywords, excerpts, all basically everything on the marketing side. I’ve turned this into my own little personal marketing agent. Using it for almost everything. Super important. Here’s it like if you ever do a podcast or writing like I do, you basically get spammed every single day. I get emails from random people, usually in India, selling digital marketing services, SEO, optimum services. And literally every day I get unsolicited, let’s call them spam emails from two groups, I get SEO emails and I get, I have someone who would like to be a guest on your podcast. like every single day. Anyways, I’m using it as a digital marketing agent. It’s made a huge difference. And then the biggest bucket for me obviously is content creation, which is writing, image generation, things like that. I use it for translation. I’m gonna start basically creating versions of everything I do in different languages. Transcription, as mentioned, all the podcasts are getting transcribed. All the titles are checked. Copy editing, I use it as a fact checker. So first copy editing, find me any grammar mistakes, things like that. Fact checking. Find things that might be wrong. Find arguments where I’m incorrect. Charts and things like that. Pretty much every step of content creation. And then images and things like that, which now I’m generating, how many videos per week? 10 videos per week, whereas three weeks ago I was making none. Doesn’t take me any time at all. I’ll start to do text animation and other things. So content creation is pretty powerful. Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Now, one caveat within all of this. I very specifically don’t use it for certain things. The question is like, how good is AI gonna get at driving cars? How good is AI gonna get at writing? How good is AI gonna get at flying planes? That’s one question. The other question is, how bad are humans gonna get at that? Because anything humans don’t do, we lose those skills very quickly. So. If you go to a checkout counter, next time you see the checkout person, what do they do? They scan the item, they remember how much it costs, they do some basic math, $10 but $3, here’s your change. Those checkout people can’t do that math anymore. They can’t. They rely on the machine to tell them everything. They can’t remember what anything costs anymore. All those skills which checkout people used to have are gone. A couple years, I think people are going to get very, very bad at driving cars. You know, if you didn’t spend five years of your life driving cars in every scenario, those skills are going to degrade. So I don’t let any of these AI tools sync up articles or content to write. I don’t let them draft the articles. I don’t, until my version is done, I don’t touch them. Cause I don’t want my own skills to degrade. So that would be, that’s why when I told you like, when you make a list of activities and you put them in three columns, I do it, co-pilot, autopilot, very specifically carve out the things you’re not gonna let AI do at all and force yourself to do it. Because it’s really easy to just, oh, tell me an article to write. No, no, no, I don’t do that. Anyways, that’s basically it for me for productivity tools. And then step three is external customer expertise. I’m sorry, experience improvements, things like that. I’m starting to build those out right now. The one that I’ve been playing with the most, which I’ve talked about, there’s two things I’m playing with the most. Number one is to put a chat bar on the top of my website where instead of, you know, I’ve got, I don’t know, 160 hours worth of podcasts, 700 articles, you know, eight books. I’ve got a large library of content, but you have to search through it. I’m going to basically put a large language model, really a small language model, you know, that’s just a chat bot on the front of my webpage. And instead of doing that, you can just ask questions and it will only pull from my thinking. And I’ve been playing with this a little bit. I tried it out. There’s a new site called Ask AI. It’s one of these new apps that just popped up a couple of weeks ago. and you basically give it your websites and PDFs and it will create just such a chat bot and then you just put it as a embedded on your webpage. And I tried it and it worked great. I mean, it really worked quite well and it was just called Ask Jeff. And anything you’d wanna know, like what would Jeff think about Alibaba’s latest announcement, it would draw on all of that corpus of content and give you an answer. And… That turns out to be a little bit of a secret weapon I have, is I’ve been building content in one area for so long that I can basically build a language model that feeds on. So yeah, I’m trying to do that. I’m not totally sure how to, but I tried to trial of it and it worked really well. So that would be a new sort of user experience. And then I could easily just turn that into an app. Anyone wants to know what I would think about anything, put this app on your phone. It’s probably gonna get pretty close. So yeah, basically you move from reading content to having a conversation with content or having a conversation. So this is where sort of like you’re digitizing your brain at a certain point. and people can just chat with it. So anyways, I’m gonna try and roll that out. I think I’m getting pretty close. The other thing I’m doing is I’m trying to deploy digital agents that just do stuff for me all the time. Instead of having a certain number of staff, now I have a certain number of human staff and I have a certain number of digital staff in digital marketing and sales basically. So I’ve been playing with deploying a couple of digital agents at the same time. That’s basically my playbook. You know, but to be honest, it keeps changing every week. There’s so many tools every week that I keep changing. But I think that’s a comment I’m gonna stick with for now. Okay, I think I’ve made my point. I will put in the show notes the three steps, which are pretty straightforward. And I’ll also put sort of a list of the tools I use, like the ones I use absolutely every day. And then the other, let’s say 10, that I’m just sort of playing with. And I may end up using or not. Sometimes you use them and say, ah, it’s not that useful at the end of the day. I’ll put those in there too. My recommendation to you is start just doing it every day. Force yourself. It’s gonna be a big dividing line. People who use this stuff well are just gonna run circles around people who don’t. And I’d say the same for businesses. But anyways, that’s it. That’s the circling back to beginning. That’s the second machine age. There’s going to be people who are doing this stuff, you know, like people with cars compared to people with riding horses. Going to be the same thing. Anyways, that is it for me for the content for today. I hope that was helpful. And yeah, I think I’m going to switch next to JD and we’re going to talk about some ecommerce stuff. Get back to more sort of bread and butter digital businesses, digital strategy, because I’ve been sort of on this topic for quite a bit. Anyways, that’s it for me. I don’t really have any fun stuff for this week, it’s just been plowing away. I did finish The Last Kingdom, that Netflix special about English history and the forming of England. That was pretty awesome. Like, five seasons, I burned through all of them in a month or so. Season five was pretty awesome. That was really satisfying. Like, you know what I don’t like about these series is so often they start out great and then they go terrible. Right, like you get a couple good seasons, like House of Cards, several good seasons, and then it got stupid. You know, the worst one of all of these was Game of Thrones, right? It was really, really good, and then it got terrible. They don’t usually end stronger than they’ve started. The Last Kingdom, I think the fourth and fifth seasons were the strongest ones, and then it like put a bow on it, it was done. Like, it was really, I found that very satisfying. It’s very annoying when they sort of peter out like that. So anyways, I guess that’s one little recommendation for today. Other than that, hope everyone is doing well and I will talk to you next week. Bye bye.
I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.
I am the founder of TechMoat Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that helps retailers, brands, and technology companies exploit digital change to grow faster, innovate better and build digital moats. Get in touch here.
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