AI Spans Multiple Industries – Techstrong AI Podcast – EP2

Hello, and welcome to our second episode of Techstrong AI podcast. I'm excited to be here today with Mike Ard, and I am Amanda Ani. Mike, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great, Amanda. How are you? Doing well.

So we have a lot to discuss today in the AI world, and let's start with the anxiety amongst employees about implementing ai. So what are your thoughts on this? ai that we covered, and it was kind of interesting because it shows that employees are starting to figure out that, well, the cheese is gonna be moved, and a lot of them are getting a little anxious about the job functions and roles they have.

And it's understandable. I, but I wonder if they are more anxiety than they realize is necessary, because I'm still not buying into the notion that, uh, gen AI is gonna magically eliminate millions and millions of jobs. I think there's gonna be fundamental changes in those jobs and roles will adjust and people will, uh, need to figure out how to, you know, do things differently.

But I would also say it's fair to say that managers kinda suck at this change management thing, you know, at this level of scale. I don't think a lot of them have thought through what the implications are and how the organization will proactively respond. So I got a feeling a lot of people are thinking about AI now as something that's about to happen to them rather than something that happens for them.

And we need, as leaders, do a better job by having a conversation with folks about how their jobs might evolve and how to make things more interesting and be more productive and drive more value to the business. We just can't ignore it. But I think a lot of folks, even the managers themselves, are probably worried about what does AI mean for their job functions and roles.

And it's a little hard to get past your own fears sometimes to, uh, consider everybody else's, uh, concerns. But it seems to me we're at some sort of pivotal moment from a society level. I don't know.

What's your take? Definitely, I mean, all the business leaders are trying to harness AI to, for better efficiency, better, um, financial situations and better customer service. So of course there's a lot of change management going on right now across multiple industries, and there's definitely a reason for some employees to be, um, hesitant.

I do understand this is new technology for some of them, and, um, they're, they're, they hear the word AI and they have these notions of like all the crazy movies out there where AI takes over the world. So they already think it's kind of like some kind of evil technology and it's just, uh, a lot about misunderstanding, um, the technology. And it requires education, um, and companies offering skill up opportunities to better understand how these tools, um, are helpful and how the human element is still very important.

So it's not taking away very many jobs. It may shift some jobs, um, and open up some new jobs, uh, but, you know, everyone's gonna have a job AI's not coming in to take away their job. And, uh, I think it just requires better communication across all the different sectors.

Yeah, my advice would be, you know, create a list of the five or six things you ate most about your job and then figure out how to use AI to get rid of those things, because that's where the toil is, and it takes the joy outta whatever it is you're happen to be doing. Um, there may be things you love doing that AI might do better or help you do better one way or the other, but, um, there's always things that we meant to get to that we never get to because we're spending too much time on this low level toil that is the thing that fatigues us and makes you tired at the end of the day. And I noticed that on the site.

We talked to a bunch of different folks from vertical industries in the last week, and I want to get through some of them. And as examples of how AI might be changing things for the better. Are you in a chat with how AI is being applied to advertising technology?

I mean, wouldn't you walk away with from that? Yeah, absolutely. So, um, AI is allowing, um, a lot better, um, understanding of data in, in real time.

And it's also allowing, um, for customer service in real time via smart chat bots. Um, and there's a lot of companies that are implementing, um, smart chat box in a variety of ways, and I've seen a lot of them as I am interacting on websites. Um, everything from banking to healthcare, um, just making this process more streamlined for customers and the staff alike, um, as far as sharing of data and just really, um, being more on top of things, better efficiency.

You mentioned customer service and I had an interview with a outfit that is applying AI in the travel industry with that very issue in mind. And I think part of the problem has been, let's be honest, the bots that people are using on their various websites in lieu of a customer service person kind of, they stink. Let's be fair.

I mean, it is just not a great experience. And the problem is, is that the responses are all canned, and I think as we get further along here, we're gonna see gen AI be able to have more context in terms of what the question is being asked. And, um, you'll be able to iterate on the questions you're asking to get to the answer that you're looking for.

I, I think that whole experience is gonna improve dramatically. And I wonder, you know, if we're gonna see that across every vertical industry that has any kind of customer facing application is it seems to be a common theme. I do think we will, and I know, like I said, more and more sectors are embracing it, and sometimes I have to wait like 20 minutes to get, um, a real person to help me when I'm struggling on a, on a site.

So if we can get more advanced, um, AI to help right away, and there's no wait time and um, you know, we're able to train it to be, you know, to sound more human-like, and to really be helpful, that'll be great for the customer. And I noticed you also had an interview with somebody in the finance industry talking about some similar issues involving customer service, but what else are they doing with ai? Yes, absolutely.

So I did recently speak with someone from PKF O'Connor Davies, who was talking about how they're harnessing AI in the financial, um, and banking industries. And there's a lot of uses for it, um, as far as data analytics and, um, better management of their data, um, document, um, handling between departments and, um, as well as, um, improving the customer efficiency, um, when it comes to questions that their clients have. So there's a lot of solutions that they're looking into and implementing across the banking and financial sectors.

Yeah, I gotta tell you, there's a lot of regulations, even as a customer, you see this stuff in your i's crossed and I'm just hoping that a small little capability, like, Hey, give me a summarization of what it is you're trying to tell me in this 30 page report that the some regulatory body made you send me. But I can't really understand what's happening in here until somebody creates some level of a summary that tells me this is my action item of the day, and everybody's action item is slightly different. So I don't think you can get that in the current level of reports, and I'm hoping that, um, you know, a lot of the work for creating the reports in the first place is automated, but b, there's things in there that matter to people, they just get buried.

So I'm hoping that AI will surface that stuff. Um, Absolutely, it certainly speeds up the process when, you know, they don't have to read through hundreds of pages and can just get a, a good summary and move forward with the decision making process. All right.

Speaking of reading hundreds of pages of things, there's teachers out there that are reading essays and all kinds of stuff and checking quizzes and whatnot, and it looks like we can apply AI to help those teachers out because not everybody can get their own personal teaching assistant like they do in some of the higher end colleges. And so the next thing you know, professors and even grade school teachers are overwhelmed. So AI might be helping them out as well in a way that, and maybe it changes the role of the ta, but frankly we don't have enough of those anyway.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I know back in the beginning a lot of, um, teachers and, and maybe still there are a lot of teachers, um, they were on the fence with, uh, utilizing AI and, um, whether or not, um, you know, on both sides of it, whether or not they want their students, um, using ai, uh, was a big issue at first with teachers. Uh, and now I see more of them are harnessing, um, the tool and, and realizing it's actually helping the students learn better and more quickly.

And then now the teachers now that they've gotten past that issue are looking at how can we harness this for ourselves, um, to speed up, yeah. Grading, um, tests, you know, the tests, um, being able to grade tests more quickly, being able to read and, um, edit, uh, essays and, um, just genuine, genuinely helping with processes in general for, you know, different software that they can use. And the more, um, static the data is, the easier it is for AI to work with it.

Mm-Hmm. And I'm bringing this up because there are issues with ai, right? Especially around hallucinations and it's imperfect.

So we need to have humans kind of review all this stuff before we present it to somebody as act absolute gospel that you should go act on immediately. But, um, we have seen it get misused in some court cases here and there already in ways that embarrass people and wound up getting them, uh, sanctioned by various judges. I think the important thing here is to check, right?

I mean, it's, it's a tool. It's not something that I can just kinda lean back and, and part of our human nature is we get too comfortable sometimes with the machines doing something and we don't check it. And the next thing, you know, some teachers reading about how, uh, Napoleon wrote, um, prime and Punishment or something and it gets all kind of messed up and then they, you know, throw everything out.

So, um, I feel like, you know, going back to the beginning of our conversation around worker angst, they're not really fully appreciating that AI needs to be supervised. It's not gonna be just left on its own. Somebody has to kind of get in there and look at this result and say, Hey, does this thing make sense?

And is this the actual result we were looking for? Um, what do you think? Are we all gonna be turned into AI supervisors?

Well, there definitely is that human element and, and I think we're a long way from ai, um, uh, being as smart as humans and being able to just let it run and, uh, trust everything. So definitely the humans are gonna need to be there. There's gonna be a lot of positions open up, I feel like, um, just on the training side and, um, verifying that everything is accurate.

Um, and that's gonna be a process that lasts for quite a while as I think we're a long way from, uh, just letting it run by itself. Right. And then lastly, we have seen some advances in terms of how AI will be used to manage it.

We are seeing couch bases come up with a tool that, uh, will help you write some code that can be used to manage the entire database process. And this is happening all through it. Mainly you're seeing initially a lot of companies are taking their, uh, product literature and the service and support stuff and throwing it in the chat GPC to provide those summarizations we talked about before because well, if you've ever sat down and read some of the documentation that they provide it too will make your eyes cross.

Um, and I feel like, you know, we're all worried about AI and IT jobs specifically, but again, I'm not seeing AI actually do the job. It kind of helps me figure out how to do the job faster and presents me with a script, but somebody still has to check the script again and then implement the automation framework that actually makes something happen. So I don't know, I think working in it might become a better job than it has been historically because, you know, as cool as it is, let's be honest, there's a lot of scut work in it that nobody really wants to do, and they spend an inordinate amount of time doing manual stuff that, um, there's no joy.

So, I mean, do you think we can get to the point where, I mean, not everybody loves their job, but I'm hoping AI might get us to a point where we hate our jobs, Les, how's that? Yeah, I agree. And, and I'm, and you know, just because of everything you said, I'm seeing a lot of people going back to school, um, in their later years.

They're going back to school to learn how to use AI in different um, ways, and they're going back into it fields too, or, you know, getting, um, furthering their education with, um, any of those sectors because that is the, I think that's the way of the future and there are a lot of job openings in the, at that area. All right. I'm gonna shift the gear a little bit here because while there is something I hate to do that I'm hoping AI will help out with, it's called shopping.

Yes. I know some of you like shopping and you use the phrase retail therapy and everything else, but, um, there's large swaths of us, probably more males than females who do not care for shopping. And so there's two cool things in the world.

Amazon's talking about a personal shopper that's built on AI and MasterCard has something similar in mind as well. Um, I think this could be great. I mean, I don't mind Christmas shopping, but as far as shopping for myself goes, I'm pretty much, you know, this is the last thing on my list to do.

And therefore, you know, I will admit that I'm probably wearing stuff that my wife would wish I would throw away, but then I'd have to go shopping to find something to replace it. So my closet is full of all kinds of stuff from, all from fashion eras that I occasionally pull out from time to time, much to her chagrin. But what's your sense of these shopping tools that we're starting to see?

I think it's, it's helpful. And while I would say while it's helpful for the customer, um, it's especially helpful for the company putting this out because, um, they're upselling. I mean, at, at the end of the day, they're getting a great return on investment because this technology is helping to upsell.

It's, it's making the shopping so easy that the customers are probably going to buy more than they initially might have if they didn't receive the help. Um, and not to mention, you know, they leave some stuff in the cart, they forget, then they're reminded about it, um, given some, you know, advice on things to add in with it. Um, and now that they're getting all the, the real time chat assistant help with, um, everything from like colors or, um, whatever support that they need, I think that companies are gonna see a lot more sales, a big sales jump.

All right folks. Well, each of you, um, naturally have your own opinion about AI and it will affect people positively and negatively. And there are lots of things out there that we should definitely not be using AI to accomplish, including, uh, some perhaps negotiation issues and whatnot and things that are a little more complex that will always require a human.

But I would say to quote FDR, Hey, got nothing to fear, but fear itself, man, then take us home. Alright, well, I wanna thank our audience today and stay tuned. We're gonna be putting out this episode once a week and we have lots to talk about in the AI world as this technology advances rapidly.