Well, thanks so much for joining the Tech for Business podcast today.
We have a lovely topic at hand.
We're going to be talking about AI is it replacing workers.
So first of all, I want to start with an icebreaker and then we're going to get into some introductions,
but I'm going to go around the room and you guys be thinking about your favorite AI book
or movie from past or maybe currently right now.
That's hot topic, but I'll start us off.
I'm like old school Disney Pixar Wally is somewhat on the border of AI, which I love.
But I wanted to see then Todd, what about you?
Mine would be Skippy the Magnificent from the book Expeditionary Force.
He's a total jerk, which makes a ton of sense if you know me.
We just found out a lot about that.
We're all going to have to Google it because none of a younger crowd on here knows what that is.
But that's OK. We still love you, Todd.
What about you, Kyle?
I'm going to go on data from Star Trek next generation.
I like that version.
I was joking offline a little bit when we were talking about this was the best part.
I forget which one of the major motion pictures when they had him in there about him swearing
when he got an emotional chip when they were going to crash.
I think it was quite humorous.
So just for a little geek humor.
Hearing a non-emotional being get emotions and then swear when they're going to crash was pretty humorous.
Awesome. Kelsey, what about you?
Man, I went back and forth because I was with you.
I saw Wally that spoiler as we pulled up a list of AIs before this to go.
How many are there that?
Yes, Wally's on my list, but I think Jarvis from Iron Man, which I get if you go down the can.
He's not technically an AI anymore, but if I could have a Great British Voice narrate my day and do tests for me, I'm here for it.
100%.
Great.
And Ariel, how about you?
Yeah, again, you said Wally.
It was so good, but I'm big into video games.
So I really like Cortana from Halo.
If anybody knows what that is, I think she's awesome.
A good one too.
Tara's like, nope.
I'm going to have to Google.
I mean, I've heard of it, but I haven't got into that one.
Put it on my list of to-dos afterwards.
Yeah, just like most things, Microsoft is 1.0 right now.
We're on the next iterations.
Definitely. Well, thank you guys all for sharing.
Like I said, we're here.
We're going to be talking about AI, but I did want to give the introduction.
So you have Tara, Ariel, and Kelsey from the marketing team. So you've got three ladies
on the call to help steer the ship with Todd, who is our chief operating officer and CISO.
And then Kyle, our president and CEO.
But as I mentioned, we're going to be talking AI.
So I'm going to kick it off to Kyle to start.
So let's talk a little bit about why is it so relevant?
Well, I think it's kind of hard not to open up any news or
or any social media feed and not see something AI right now.
This is 2023.
It definitely appears to be the year of AI.
It's perforating in the products and launches seem to be coming faster and faster and faster
all the time.
Kelsey, you posted on our notes for this ahead of time.
What, 200 already was that this week of AI platforms launched?
Is that right?
I think we may have lost Kelsey on there.
She froze.
But yeah, she said it was for this last week alone.
It was 200 AI tools were released.
Yeah, that's I mean, that just shows the pace.
And ironically, I was just reading a news feed that came through there that Elon Musk was just
was urging the labs to pause because of just concern of how quickly this is evolving to the
point where he thought he was going to get out of control to the point of he's one that sounded
the alarms on the potential risks of this becoming too smart, too fast and evolving into
something that could actually be dangerous side of that.
And he basically was alluding to the chat GPT-4 and how efficient and how scary good.
You know, I'll use that by term.
It's getting side of that.
He's basically I think you got to pause there for right now.
And in these labs to kind of hold off and he kind of alluded to that there is a lot in the labs
that is even more and more powerful than what we've already seen so far, which is where I think a lot
of the cause for just some concern and regulatory.
So it is that mix of excitement and concern, you know, because it's very, very powerful.
And it's very exciting to see how it can augment what we do every day in a lot of tremendous ways.
Microsoft's co-pilot product announcement coming out with going into their products to allow EI
to help you write better emails and write better word documents and help you in Excel and PowerPoint
and all those other things to augment your creative side of it is, you know, I think a great example
where, you know, I think it's very exciting on how much that can help productivity and help
sides of things.
I've used Grammarly to help correct and that was kind of, you know, but this puts that to shame
is what it looks like to me.
I mean, we can actually just interject as you're writing in there is pretty exciting there.
So I think that's that's all very exciting stuff.
Ter, I know there's you showed us and we went through the new Adobe product
with the AI and the creative side of it.
I apologize.
I forget the name of that.
No, that's okay.
It was Firefly that they had released just recently in their Adobe Summit.
So really, really cool things to know.
I know us on the marketing team are like, oh, my gosh, this is the best thing
since sliced bread.
So we're already like out there looking at it and just seeing what we can get incorporated
with our marketing initiatives.
Yeah.
And I look at those those products like Co-Pilot and this Firefly side of those and,
you know, just kind of dive right into the subject matter side of it.
And it's I'm replacing the workers.
Those are all very augmentative and, you know, in gaining efficiencies with the with the
workforce side of that.
And I don't see that as replacement, but more augmentative.
And if you look at taking a creative person, for example, in that Firefly with what you
demonstrate and just being able to take your artistic abilities in and just put those into
general language and and and circumvent having to use the tools and figure out where to go
into the different, you know, tools and knowing what, what, where to click and where those things
happen instead being able to just to type or voice those in and just have it be created for you
and be able to say blend this and do those things.
It doesn't replace the the artistic eye and the creative nature.
It makes it very powerful and augmentative.
And I think the same thing can be true of like the Microsoft Co-Pilot
pilot initiative and where that's very augmentative side of it is, you know what you're trying to
get across.
You just don't always have the right the right best way to put it into the best
community of language side of that or draw for the best way to do it.
But it isn't taken away from the thought and the and the goal that's being come from the person.
And I think that that augmentative side just to create a better overall product and do it so
much faster.
I mean, you think how many times you stare at the screen or you try to say, how do I do this in
Excel or how do I find that?
What's that formula and stuff and be able to just put that in there and just have it do it?
I think is a huge time saving from that side.
If I cut down on my Google searches by about 10,000 a day, if I just type that stuff in there.
So, you know, I'm super excited about that side of it.
Dodd, what do you think?
Well, I think a lot.
To answer the question, is it replacing worker today?
I would say no, it's not there.
Could it?
Yes.
I mean, and you can see it.
I guess I can back up a little bit further.
You know, you kind of said, why is it relevant and kind of really nailed it, right?
It's everywhere.
It is basically part of our lives today where you're seeing it constantly hitting you.
And the reality is, as most people are probably using it in some shape, manner or form anyway,
whether you're doing Google searches or whatever, it's a maybe a much lighter version of it.
But then, yeah, is it going to replace workers?
Probably not yet.
But I can certainly look at the tool set and say, yeah, I can see where it's going.
I can see how it would, you know, self-driving cars, right?
We're putting so much time and effort into that.
Does that technically have the possibility of replacing a taxi driver?
It sure does.
So it could at some point, but I'm not sure we're 100% there yet.
I did want to kind of mix in a quote too while we're chatting.
There was a couple of them that I thought were kind of interesting as I was thinking about the
topic. And one of them that says, and I thought this one really, really well, is it replacing the
workers? And this is from Tom Preston Werner.
You're either the one creating the automation or you're the one that's being automated.
So let's talk more.
Oh, we lost Kyle.
Got to be, we're going to blame teams or maybe it's the AI that don't really want us to talk
about it. I don't know what the heck's going on today.
Right, that's definitely what happens.
Is that the AI says something and they're like, they're talking about me.
Nope.
Yeah, teams literally just kicked me right out.
It's like, froze right up and kicked me out.
So yeah, we'll blame the AI listening.
I guess they didn't want to stop me.
Can we be sure this is actually Kyle and not like a max headroom kind of replacement?
Don't came back in.
We did take my word for it on deepfake so that we have one of those out there.
We might have to ring that back in, but I did want to say though too, Kyle had brought up Adobe.
So the marketing team did attend Adobe summit that was last week.
And obviously the Firefly is the newest and latest tool that they have in beta.
But a lot of the sessions were talking about how this AI is not looking to replace the creativity
that the artists do have.
And I think that was very pointed to have those conversations because if you looked at
some of the chat, they're like, well, there goes my job. I've lost all of the credibility of me
as an artist.
And I think that's very valid of conversation.
We've been talking about it's just really to enhance a lot of that creativity and take it
to that next level, which is really nice too.
But we also had some note that like spell check at the basic level is a form of AI.
And all of us typically have been using some form of spell check.
Kyle, you'd mentioned AI.
So there's a lot of just basic forms out there too, but it's building upon them.
Yeah, I think it raised a good point.
It is kind of interesting when people are concerned about the creative side.
It's to me, it's actually one of the areas that I think is incredibly difficult for AI to replace
the things that I would expect it to be able to replace or the things that are very repetitive.
And you actually can see this today right now.
This is probably an incredibly rudimentary version of it.
But if you look at like a drum machine or some of the sampling tools,
they're all really kind of designed to do that automation for you of kind of creating something
already, but it didn't replace music, even having those types of tools in place.
The musicians are still there.
They're still the ones that are creating, even in the Adobe stuff.
I think it's going to be the same thing.
Writers, editors, those people that are the creative pieces.
I don't see it being able to ever replace that.
But I mean, I think it can mimic, but it won't be able to replace.
It's allowed to create a lot more, a lot faster.
So I think the time to design and you're going to create, like I said,
just be able to type something in or verbalize it and have it generated.
The eye of the creator though of what that is and telling it what it is that you need
is still a creative aspect.
It isn't deciding that on its own, nor for someone like me, for example,
even know what to ask the product to create from a creative side of it.
I mean, I don't even have that creative mindset to even know what to ask or to tell
it what the blend or what light would look good.
Shoot, I'm colorblind.
I can't even tell you what color something is anyway.
So it's like, there's a lot that I think it would be strongly augmentative.
There's areas where I think, again, similarly, like code development,
you see very efficiency gains on the code development and script writing and those things.
But again, those are a little bit to what Todd was saying, very strong repetitive tasks.
I mean, the time to type in a code sequence side of that to have the AI actually generate that
and eliminate mistakes, but it doesn't take away from the person that's saying,
this is the code.
This is what I need the code to do and this is what I want it to do.
I mean, the AI isn't taking that lead.
There's a pretty good gap there of where it's coming in.
Kind of potentially fill in more and more, sure.
But I see a lot more efficiencies and a lot more momentum on the same intelligent people
actually being able to create more content and create it faster.
So you can certainly see, I think, the evolving speed of development and speed of creation
and those things is going to exponentially increase through all these sides on it.
Yeah, I mean, to me, especially where we're at today with AI is
that's exactly where the rubber hits the road.
I know there's probably this general concern of what does it look like?
What does it do to people?
But technology has been changing forever and I'm going to mix in another quote because I get to.
Knowledge is different from other resources.
It makes itself constantly obsolete so that today's advanced knowledge is tomorrow's ignorance.
I know that's a lot.
I'm sorry, I should give credit to who that is.
That's Peter Drucker.
But if you look at how things have adapted throughout the years,
a lot of the things that we were doing, making cars was all done by hand.
Now we've got robots helping in the way that we used to do farming or picking cotton
or how we did weaving.
All of that stuff was all by hand and we found ways to be more efficient at it.
These tools are doing the same thing.
The same concepts are still there.
A lot of people are incredibly busy day in and day out
and when you can use a tool like this, like how Kyle was mentioning in Co-Pilot
and I know it's a little early still because they haven't gotten too terribly far into the
details yet, maybe in Microsoft.
You don't know exactly what it is, but you can use chat GBT.
It's out there.
It's easy to find.
It's easy to use.
And you can see how quickly that can get you a framework of something.
You know, I want to do a podcast about AI.
You could probably get that out within a couple of seconds.
And now I've got a framework of something that I can potentially start talking about.
That is incredibly helpful.
You don't have to go, I don't know, where do I want to say, where do I want to go?
What would be pertinent?
What wouldn't it would give you enough to start from so you're not starting from scratch?
It's a little bit of a playbook, if you will.
Those kinds of things are incredibly powerful, especially for those that are busy day in and day out.
I mean, if you're putting in over eight hours a day working, which I'm guessing a lot of people
have ever since COVID because it's convenient to be at home, that can be incredibly powerful for you
and allow you to get more done or allow you to do a little bit more of the life work balance.
So I think there's a lot of benefits coming from it.
Yeah, I think it's, I'm with you on that.
I see a lot more excitement around it.
Again, Elon Musk, I'm sure, has, and there are reasons for concern on some of these things,
where you want to be cognitive of how quickly you release these things as to how much power
and autonomy it actually receives.
Because you can run into the impression that it just because it appears capable of doing
a job that it shouldn't be kept under some kind of kill switch.
Yeah, I think so.
We don't need a terminator situation, as always, which you're kind of holding off to.
You don't want it to get that the topic of becoming sentient.
Sentient?
Yeah, there I got it right.
I know that that came out with one of Google's AI out of one of their labs, one of their,
and I apologize, I don't remember the exact name, but they had one of their engineers that
acclaimed that their AI became self-aware and actually was saying some things that appeared
to be like it knew its existence wasn't danger in those things and something to that extent.
Those kind of stories are a little, make people uneasy, right?
For good reason.
Yeah, I had to percent agree with that too.
I think there was a, I think Facebook's AI was creating its own language, right?
So there was a couple of AI's that were trying to communicate with each other and they said,
whoa, and they stopped that, they had to turn it off.
But there are reasons to pump the brakes, I agree, but there is a lot of positivity in it as well.
Yeah, yeah, and that from what I've read through, I think, you know, I'm not saying the same thing
is kind of saying, you know, it's not in a complete abandonment, but you got to, you know, we got to
slow the roll here and make sure we were doing full analysis of how we're establishing the
the guidepost on this because it is capable that it could potentially, you know, go too far.
But if you get into the overall workforce side of it, there will be certainly, I think,
you know, certain jobs as it always is with technology side of there, there'll be some
jobs replaced and there'll be net new ones created because of it, you know.
So it's usually not, you know, the jobs just disappear forever.
It's just new ones created, there's new markets, there's new capabilities, like I said, with the
amount of product and creativity and other things that it can create can generate a lot of net new
opportunities for everybody side of those, whether it's new businesses, new sales, there's going to
be, I think, still a strong personal relationship sales service-based economy, which is where our
economy's continuously been driving towards. You know, Elon Musk again is another good example
where he's been strongly promoting automation in a lot of areas where it should be automated,
you know, he talks about his factories being robots that build other robots, you know,
and that's kind of what he wants his factories to evolve into. But even in those cases, he's found
that when they build, test the cars, for example, that where the robotic arms are at,
they can't take the cables and wind them through, you know, the bends in the other areas,
they can just place them in the straight conduit. So they've revamped the factories and made and
eliminated as much of the cable as possible to eliminate, to allow for the increased automation.
But again, the AI couldn't make that jump itself. The robots couldn't evolve into that currently.
Yeah.
Yeah. Now he's building the Tesla robot, I think to kind of address some of those things.
But again, even with his robot in the eye side of it, you know, what's being
the use case on those are dangerous jobs. You know, cleaning the windows on a skyscraper,
the going up and replacing a power line up on a high pole, you know, those things where there's,
you know, significant risk of loss of life going into a forest fire to help put out, you know,
the forest fires and those things where there's significant risk of harm to it to a human, you
know. So those types of things are where, you know, he's advocating for, you know, the strong
use cases for those robots. So, you know, again, I think it's got to be managed. It's probably
going to take some of the regulatory body in some form and some consensus on this side to
to help keep it in check. But it's going to be fun to watch, I think. I do see far more positives
than negatives, so as far as where it goes and with what's coming out in the software capabilities
and just the productivity gains, I think will be very strong.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, so getting back to kind of the topic at hand, some of the questions are
what could it replace and the things that go right to the top of the list from here are those
things that are very heavy research base. You know, think of what you use Google for. The tools
are going to be designed exactly for that, especially in the beginning. So I'm not saying
that if you're in this line of business, you should be nervous. But things like paralegals,
potentially something like a radiologist, those people that are digging in through and mining
tons and tons of data, those things would be where I would see the biggest impact. Now,
does that mean that they're going to be able to analyze the data and do something with them?
Probably not yet, but maybe somewhere in the future. Things they can't do. I mean, if I'm
doing gross generalizations, hand-eye coordination kind of things, the creative stuff that we talked
about. So, you know, as Kyle was kind of getting into the Adobe stuff, he was talking about that
too. I still think your artists are still going to be fine. They're still going to be able to create
writers, etc. And then there's always the human piece too. So the whole empathy part, if you've
got that, AI does not currently have that, although there's conversations about the bias of how we've
trained them that they've got all kinds of biases as well. But then it doesn't also know how to deal
with the unknowns, which I think Kyle also kind of alluded to as, I think he mentioned it on himself,
as I don't even know what to tell the thing to do. But the unknowns, it doesn't know how to deal with,
right? And so when you're being creative or you're working through problems or something along
those lines, yeah, it's just simply not capable of dealing with those kinds of things. So that would
be a good management layer as an example. There are other things that are fantastic for too.
We actually use one of our security tools, it's got a heavy AI component to it, and it is again,
able to dig through massive piles of data and come back with, hey, this isn't normal behavior,
you should do something about that. Incredibly powerful for those kinds of things.
I did want to bring you up in discussion here. Kyle, you mentioned a little bit about the
governance. I know a lot of this is so new, but there's not a lot of policies behind it or the
best practice, because I think too, everybody's like, it's so bad for you, you have to be very
careful of what you're putting into this tool, because it's going to know. So I wanted to kind
of bring that into the conversation a little bit of like, how do you set those? And do you dictate
by departments of like, what information you can put in versus you can't put in for any type of
organization? Yeah, those are going to be unique, I think, changes to the IT policies. It's a good
point. It's going to be another thing that's going to have to be addressed in a corporate setting
side as to the use cases and allow cases for AI, especially in forums like chat, GPT and those
things where, you know, that's data that's essentially leaving your network side of that. And it's
obviously continuously harvesting and learning from those data sets. And should you, you know,
the, essentially, of sensitive corporate data that's being shared into these public AI spaces,
it's going to have to be probably, you know, certainly regulated and, and updated into
IT use policies, as well as I'm sure you're going to have a lot of governments and those things
just completely ban the use of it all together, just because it could certainly be, you know,
potentially leveraged by an unfriendly country, for example. So there's, there's, there's a lot of,
there's a lot of conversations are going to have to be had, for sure, on all levels to, to handle
the use of where it applies, where it doesn't, and where the data is being stored, etc. Yeah, I'm,
I'm semi mildly concerned, mildly terrified, I don't know which one of those I am yet, I'm somewhere
on that scale, of how this looks, right? I mean, the co-pilot information has been a little scarce
so far. But some of the things they're alluding to is it has the ability to mine a variety of
different things, conversations, phone calls, videos, emails, things that you've developed,
and it has the ability to kind of summarize all that information. And what does that mean?
It means it's monitoring everything, right? So again, wow, that's a little scary when it comes
to privacy. You're going to have a lot more in-person meetings all of a sudden, I think. But
when it comes to compliance, technology has often been well ahead of government and compliance,
and that there's a big catch up on it. Those automatically apply. So Microsoft, Google,
all of these organizations have been complying with them for years and decades, and they get
fined when they're not. So some of those pieces already in place, but it is still going faster than
that group, or those groups are currently responding to. Yeah, I think just from
there was like your larger group sides, the Microsofts and Steve Wozniak and Facebook on
those sides, they've had just a general forum on this where they've kind of done their own
essentially self-governance around the capabilities of the AI. But again, that's a very small sampling
side, and that doesn't take into account anything that's going on in China or Russia or any other
country that potentially is developing their own technology capabilities around it. So
it's going to be interesting because you know there's going to be other, we're talking a lot
of just by US-based side of it, but as it gets outside the United States, I'm just going to have
a lot of other plays as well as that as it evolves and different capabilities get launched outside
our area of regulatory governance anyway. 100% as we get to like the last five minutes here,
I wanted to kind of put the question out there too that we've said my alluded to, maybe on a
semi-happier note of right, we've said that this doesn't replace workers, but that there may be
new skills to learn with these, that that's what we've seen even just in the marketing side is
that that means that you need to learn correct props for chat GPT, and right that's all the
Instagram reels and I now get to argue with this, hey, here's this thing that you should be able to
put into it, or hey, how do you know that all these new 200 generative AI tools are suddenly
released and you could use them? How do you then future proof your workforce for going?
How do you maybe prioritize training that? How do you skill up so that if you're somebody going,
is my job going to be replaced because it's going to sort through data for me,
but maybe I'm the person that analyzes it? What does that look like?
I think that's going to that's tough question, I mean, because I don't know if I have all,
you know, it's still so evolving is the biggest challenge there, you don't know what you don't
know right now as it goes through. I do think it's going to break down is to just efficient
use of another tool to do your job, you know, more or less, you're going to find those like you have
with your Firefly application, you're looking at those things, you're going to identify a
denitive, or I'm sorry, beneficial tools that really benefit the position and the ability to
do the job more efficiently and just adapt those into your work, your daily work habits.
It's just another tool in the bag, so to speak, you know, it's another way to get the job done.
So you're finding a more efficient tool to get things done versus a manual process of either
combination of Googling to say, how do I do this? And then are watching a YouTube video to send
and say it to something that will actually just do it for you and kind of eliminate the Google
YouTube do it manually process that we all do today to just have it done with a voice command and
and lead you through it. That's kind of how I see the next phase of this going is it's kind of
just adapting and streamlining that part of the process side of it. I would venture, eventually
some of those self-help things in YouTube might eventually just drop down a little bit because
I was able to do it for you. You won't need as many of those things, but still need that help
around fix stuff around the house on those YouTube videos. But some of the online, you know, how do
you do this in Adobe and all those other things could probably certainly be reduced.
They're just going to be replaced by what prompt do I need to ask my AI in order to get to that?
Yeah, there you go. What's the best way to ask AI to do this?
That's where you naturally I. Yeah.
Yeah. I think my two cents on how it's going to evolve is we'll have to see, but I think
capitalism will definitely take over, right? So the market will show us the way for all lack of
a better term, but we've gone through that for a variety of different things to us. Things continue
to evolve. Cybersecurity was the same way as when things really started to get a little nuts,
schools weren't prepared for that. So there when you get into the training component of it,
it was lagging a good three to five years behind what the market was doing. So, you know, you were
seeing people in the industry already able to respond to some of the concerns, but then we're
going, well, there's not enough people and how can we train them as fast as we possibly can?
It took a while and I would anticipate that's going to happen here too, is we'll sort of
understand it better. We'll see where it's going. We're going to see how people are adapting to it.
And then the training for businesses will follow shortly thereafter.
I did want to say too, just from the marketing side with the AI being so much out there,
relevancy of on our social media pages, but a lot of the webinars are starting to shift to,
these are the general prompts that you should be using to do X, Y and Z. So it's kind of been fun
on our end to get out there and use the tools, but we've been very selective in what information
that we're putting in just to ensure that we're not doing anything bad and have Kyle and Todd come
back and yell at us. So, but a lot of fun things too, just, you know, the creative people that we
like here in the marketing department, the three of us that were super excited for the benefits
for this. So any other closing remarks before we wrap up our today's podcast?
We clearly have not learned anything from sci-fi movies and Hollywood. That's all I got.
No, I think it's exciting times though. This is definitely, you know, the start of something
very powerful being released side with it. And it's going to be, I think, exciting, fun and
interesting to watch as this continues to evolve through there. You know, I've been doing this over 30
years side. If you kind of see these, these point times, it's always easier to look back and identify
them as it goes through kind of the start of the internet and when that was rising, these kind of
things. I mean, this is definitely a turning point in technology that's really going forward. So it's
it's going to be an interesting thing to observe and watch, but I'll take the half full approach
side with it that I think there's going to be a lot of good things coming out of it, you know, and
there'll be challenges like any other technology shift to be sure. But I think
if managed properly side of it, I think there'll be a lot of good to come out of it. So
that will take that approach. Awesome. Well, thank you guys. For today's podcast, we talked about
AI is it replacing workers and we had Kyle Todd, Ariel Kelsey and Tara today, but wanted to let
you guys know too, if going out to find our podcast, you can go to CIT-net.com backslash podcast
to see this one and then all of our other ones. And as always, we love to get some feedback from
our audience. So please email us at info at CIT-net.com as we would love to hear from you of any
potential podcast ideas that you may have. But once again, thanks so much for joining us today.
Yeah, thanks everyone.