EP 1: How Generative AI is a Pioneer’s Productivity Tool

Transcript for this Episode:

Introduction Voiceover:
This is Tech UNMUTED. The podcast of modern collaboration – where we tell the stories of how collaboration tools enable businesses to be more efficient and connected. With your hosts, George Schoenstein and Santi Cuellar. Welcome to Tech UNMUTED.

GEORGE:
Welcome to the first episode of Tech UNMUTED. I'm George Schoenstein, your host.

SANTI:
And I'm Santi Cuellar, your cohost.

GEORGE:
Our focus is on how modern collaboration tools enable businesses to be more efficient and connected with an extra special focus on the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

SANTI:
And actually, speaking of which, didn't you just put out a Forbes article talking about how people are leveraging AI in general and how that affects collaboration and the user adoption? I just saw that, can we speak about that?

GEORGE:
We can, so that article published a couple days ago and the focus was on really looking at how are people using AI tools today to enhance productivity and we see sort of a breakdown into three buckets. There’re pioneers, who are really out there aggressively using the tools and getting effectively a productivity hack out of it. There're followers who are going sit around and when it sort of directly presents itself to them, they're gonna…

SANTI:
Right, right.

GEORGE:
They're gonna use the tools and they'll get some value out of it. And then there're a Luddites. And I know we've talked about this offline quite a bit. They're the folks, if you think about the term Luddites, it started in the early 1800s. It was textile workers in the UK who damaged machines because they didn't like the automation that was going into place. But we see that as in the article I wrote about it, it's about 10% of the business population and is in that bucket and there's - although you need balance in how you use AI - there's some potential destruction that happens as a result of people being in that Luddite category.

SANTI:
Yeah. You know, there's a lot of buzz, obviously, it's hard not to open up a news browser tab in your browser and not hear about the pushback and the fear of AI. And by the way, I'd like to think of us as in that pioneer bucket, right. I absolutely see us, and I'm talking about specifically you and I we're pretty open to diving in and using this stuff. But man, there is so much out there right now about, hey, we should probably pump the brakes. We should probably start regulating we should probably, it's going to take over our jobs. There is just so much noise around AI in the last 60 days, I've never heard of this much buzz before.

GEORGE:
Yeah, and there's fear of job destruction and those kind of things. But if you look back over history, every industrial revolution that took place, there's been multiple ones, right? The introduction of the Internet all the way back to the mechanization that took place in the what was originally coined as the Industrial Revolution over 100 years ago, people feared that jobs would be lost. But over time, jobs were not lost. Right. Jobs changed. People's roles changed.

SANTI:
That's right.

GEORGE:
But it was a matter of adapting to the new technology.

SANTI:
Yeah, it's not even before the internet, I'm thinking way back when the concept of a personal computer came out and how something as simple as a Windows operating system…

GEORGE:
Yep.

SANTI:
You know, that was, that was revolutionary. That was something that changed how we, I mean we are able to do what we do today because somebody had the foresight to say I'm gonna create this operating system make things easy and make them more productive. I see this as, you know, just another launchpad for that next evolution of productivity level type technologies like the Windows operating system, like the personal computer, like the internet. You know, I've been thinking a lot about this lately because there is so much noise. I personally, I don't like the concept of regulating something like this and what I mean by regulation, I think we can all understand typically of the garment steps in and starts regulating stuff a lot of times it doesn't turn out well, right. But I am in agreement that there has to be some kind of guide rails. The question is who sets those guide rails, right?

GEORGE:
And I think in our case, right as a business in that it as a team we've used a lot of the tools that are available over the last six months or so from ChatGPT to support content development, not necessarily develop the content piece in total, but to speed the process up. Midjourney to do graphic development. We've done a lot of it right. You've recently built a couple tools with…

SANTI:
That's right. Correct.

GEORGE:
…the ability to go out and do research for us and automate research feedback. We're working on some tools that will potentially go through threads of emails and pull out emails that are more important than others. So those are the kind of things that we've made a decision at as a team, we've put certain guide rails in place so that it's not a fully automated process. There's human intervention all the way along the way. The critical thing though, and in this goes beyond just sort of the goggles and regulation is…

SANTI:
Right. Yep.

GEORGE:
…to be successful, you have to be a really good operator, so this is like a programmer, right?

SANTI:
That's the point. That's the key point. Yep.

GEORGE:
We've both looked at some of, we have someone on our team who does graphic development work using Midjourney and the prompts that they enter to get a repeatable outcome and a usable outcome...

SANTI:
Detailed. Yep.

GEORGE:
…It's massive right. But the ability to innovate so quickly and come up with multiple concepts and multiple ideas makes our final decision making better, but it also makes it so much rapidly quicker it's sort of astounding where we were versus six months ago.

SANTI:
So that's a great example. Here is an individual who's on our team, right? Who, if he would have thought like a Luddite, he’d be thinking I better start polishing my resume and finding something else to do because they no longer need my services, but instead he reinvented himself and said, hold on, how do I use this technology to my advantage? And he figured out for a lack of a better term, the detailed script that you really need to put together to get the output that you desire. You know I can relate to a little bit because as you mentioned, we've been working with the AI builder functionality within Microsoft Teams…

GEORGE:
Yep.

SANTI:
…And it is a little bit of trial and error like it's not something I don't just push a button and all of a sudden, this thing happens as you know, right, we know because we get a gazillion notifications at once and wait what just happened there is something blew up and it's because you have to tweak things. You need to now become that operator that is the key. If you're going to survive in this new world of technology and artificial intelligence instead of concerning yourself with…

SANTI:
…You know, AI taking over. You need to figure out how do I get ahead of this thing

GEORGE:
Yep.

SANTI:
>…and better myself? How do I leverage the technology to make myself more marketable, more productive, more effective? And I think that's the right approach.

GEORGE:
And I hear a lot of times I hear from people right, you hear, the negative that we talked about.

SANTI:
Yeah.

SANTI:
Yeah.

GEORGE:
You know, we need to regulate it. We need to do something, but I also hear “Ohh I tried that ChatGPT thing and it was busy, you know. Never works well”. Well, ok. Pay for the service…

SANTI:
Yeah.

GEORGE:
…and you'll get guaranteed access. But I've gotta say over the last probably 30 days or so I haven’t gone in once and not been able to access it.

SANTI:
Same here. It's been good.

GEORGE:
Yeah. And the second thing is use it for an actual purpose that you needed to don't you know the first couple of things we did were like ohh, let's have it write a joke or write a little story or whatever.

SANTI:
Yeah.

GEORGE:
And that was funny, but we then got to very practical things. Even the description of this podcast we refined by creating the original draft…

SANTI:
That is true.

GEORGE:
…dropping it into ChatGPT, getting a couple of iterations and then refining it again to get the output. I've even taken elements of things I have on LinkedIn and started with an initial set of copy that I created, but then did iterations using ChatGPT and then did another iteration at the end to do a cleanup on it. I couldn't have done it that quickly or that creatively without the tool.

GEORGE:
You know, and even the graphics design stuff, I haven't learned as much in with Midjourney. I used a couple of other tools early on to create some funny images…

SANTI:
Sure.

GEORGE:
…but not, you know not an image for a business purpose, but we've even gone through we post teams backgrounds on our website, the latest iteration of the spring version that we did was completely developed by ChatGPT or sorry by Midjourney, right?

SANTI:
Midjourney, yeah.

GEORGE:
Very unique outcomes, very unique kind of images to use and people seem to be engaging really well with those.

SANTI:
Yeah. You know, some of the things that I've seen lately and Microsoft Teams, again, you gotta be the operator. But you know, we created a bot. Remember this, we created a bot.

GEORGE:
Yep.

SANTI:
So you know, we when we have a, let's say like a go to market plan or something, we get asked the same question by different people over and over again. So instead of, you know, getting pulled into these rabbit holes of replying, we create a bot. And it works! Like the bot is actually able to take those questions specific to our projects and point people in the right direction that has actually reduced the amount of, well actually has completely eliminated to be honest with you at this point, it's completely eliminated those types of inquiries…

GEORGE:
Yep.

SANTI:
…to me about stuff that you know it's the same question as repetitive and the bot has taken care of it.

GEORGE:
Yep.

SANTI:
That's built right into Microsoft Teams. I mean, it's just crazy.

GEORGE:
Yeah.

GEORGE:
And that's, and again, in future episodes, we're going to explore a lot of these

SANTI:
Yeah.

GEORGE:
…new elements that are in Teams, some of which have been there for quite a while, right.

GEORGE:
…And we weren't aware of them six months ago. Some of them not three months ago, some of them not a week ago, right. We find new elements every day.

GEORGE:
But the breadth that exists within the tool within the platform around 365 is amazing, right?

SANTI:
Yeah.

GEORGE:
It's more substantial than people realize, and it's just people don't take advantage, right? There are other elements that are, you know, they're not AI driven, but we use. We've been using Planner for over two years on our team.

SANTI:
Oh yeah.

GEORGE:
All of our interactions are in there, right? We take things that would have been an email or a series of emails and people added into the email and reading the chains, and we've done them within chats within a Team so that there's a permanent record of what we were talking about, but you can also plug somebody in after the fact…

SANTI:
And it's one place.

GEORGE:
Exactly.

GEORGE:
And it's been a huge gain for our team from a productivity standpoint because it's eliminated email after email after mail, right?

SANTI:
Absolutely.

GEORGE:
…And we'll dig into those. And the recent thing and I think that the next episode will probably take a look at this is there's some avatar functionality and some other functionality within Teams that's pretty unique, right? And it creates a different paradigm from a business standpoint for how do you use this platform to get….

SANTI:
Yeah.

GEORGE:
…increased business productivity.

SANTI:
Yeah, I can't wait to talk about the use cases for that, you know, here. Uh, I'll give you a closing thought. Just thinking out loud here. Here's where I see this going. And I'm not going to say it's five years out today, it's so much sooner. It's so what I'm about to say, I believe it's gonna happen relatively soon. But you know what? We're gonna be in a meeting like this, right? We'll have a group meeting and let's say there's four people. There's gonna be a fifth member of your team….

GEORGE:
Yep.

SANTI:
…who is not a physical person. There's gonna be a team member that has specific functions and a specific role within your team that's going to be an artificial intelligent true member, meaning that they're going to be a participator in your meetings, they're going to actually contribute to the collaboration…

GEORGE:
Yep.

SANTI:
…to the output, to the design, to the meeting itself. And I can see that happening. And I think, you know, when that happens then we will realize how much we really need AI in our lives

GEORGE:
Yeah.

SANTI:
…because that virtual person will be there to help us and make us more, much more productive. That's my that's my crystal ball prediction for today. But anyway, folks, if you enjoyed this first episode, this is only one of many. We got many more to come. If you want to review the notes for today's episodes, you can find those at fusionconnect.com/TechUNMUTED. But until next time, stay connected. See you next time.

GEORGE:
Thanks.

CLOSING VOICEOVER:
Visit www.fusionconnect.com/techUNMUTED for show notes and more episodes. Thanks for listening!

Episode Credits:

Produced by: Fusion Connect