Hello everyone, and welcome to
another episode of The Operations
Room, a podcast for CEOs.
I am Brandon Bensinger, joined by my
amazing costar Bethany Errors.
How are things going, Bethany?
I don't know.
So one thing is I don't
think Instagram is good for me.
I suspect Instagram isn't good for
anybody, but yet despite that,
I still am on it
and I'm still on it probably too
much.
And it really feeds my health
anxiety.
Health news and all the ways
that we are killing ourselves and
all of the rules that I'm not
following and all
of the reasons why when I die, it's
going to be my fault.
And even though I'm aware of it and
I have blocked as many health
news things as I
can, any time it
comes up, I can't help but watch.
And then the algorithms like, what
she cares about is health news.
And then it just comes back in.
So the most recent
one was actually not specifically
a health news
influencer account.
It was a data account
and it was about how women
are I don't know if it's dying of
cancer or just getting cancer
at a tremendously higher rate
than men.
And then you had comments from
random people trying to decide
why it is that women are getting
cancer at much higher rates than
men. And those comments have seeped
into my brain and now I'm
freaking out.
So it was that
women wear a lot
more cosmetics than men
and they're not properly tested and
a lot of them are made with
petroleum products.
And so we're just like smothering
oil all over our bodies.
And that causes issues.
Men tend to wear more
cotton than women, and women wear
more special fabrics, and all
of the special fabrics are made
out of plastic.
And as they degrade, you get
microplastics in your body,
sports bras directly
linked to breast cancer.
I mean, all of this is not real.
And these are people in the comment
section postulating
as to why women have higher rates of
cancer.
But my ability
to cheat death and do
all of the right things,
follow all the rules
and never die.
That's a lot of pressure on
somebody's shoulders.
At some point you will die,
Bethenny, I suspect.
No, no. If I follow all the rules,
I'll be fine forever.
So sometimes Instagram's not bad.
I was served a video
earlier this week That was Jane
Fonda talking about old age.
And the opening of the video was the
best because she said,
I am Jane Fonda.
You may know me from being Jane
Fonda for the last 86 years.
Exactly. And growing up, it's
literally impossible somehow to not
know who she is.
In the video, she it's like really.
Well, production is video.
And she's working with a scientist
in the scientist is talking about
the facts. And then Jane Fonda is
adding in her bits.
And one of the things she said like
trying to banish senior moments
as a thing.
And it's just like what we're
telling ourselves is that we're
losing our memory. Like when we
can't find our car keys when we're
17.
We're not saying, it's a senior
moment, we just can't find our car
keys. And to embrace
aging and not be so afraid of it
and also say that we all focus
on ending up in nursing homes
and freaking out about nursing
homes.
But actually only 3%
of the population will end up in
them for that.
True? 3%.
I mean, that's true according to
Instagram and Jane Fonda.
I have no idea if that's true.
We could go ahead and verify that.
Jane Fonda said it has got to be
true.
Jane Fonda and the scientist
said it. So, you know,
I choose to believe that that is
true, that 3% of us are going to end
up in nursing homes and the rest of
us are going to have some
combination of home care or just
dying doing okay.
So anyhow, that's the inner workings
of my brain. So how am I doing,
Brandon? I don't know.
All right. So we have got an amazing
topic for today, which is making AI
happen in 2025 for your
organization.
We have an amazing guest for this,
which is Charlie Cullen.
He is an AI strategist and
has singlehandedly developed a
product called Koala using
AI tools behind him in terms
of development tools to make the app
happen. Being a non techie, which is
phenomenal and quite an amazing
story.
So before we get to Charlie, the
first question I wanted to ask you
bit of a broad question, which is
what is the opportunity right now
for scale ups to go horror
on being AI first, as it were.
I made a face when you asked that
question because I was wondering if
you meant I first in the product
or I first within the company.
I mean, I think there's the bigger
existential question is, is
your product shit and do you need to
tear it up and just started again as
an AI product.
And if you're more on the startup
and scale up side, I would highly
encourage you to do that.
I'm just pushing that one out.
There is like
a little moment of of
compelling thinking or controversial
thoughts, although it's interesting
because everything is so new.
There's a lot of scope for improved
products. Like for me, the really
big gap is
a next generation Zapier
like something that is really easy
for non-technical users to you
to use to automate
the soul destroying work in
their lives.
And there are loads and loads of
companies trying to figure out
a tick, but they're still like
technical for technical people
rather than
no code.
Easy automation for
non techies.
So I'm very excited about that
space. And once that.
Unlocks.
Then everything in your business
should be your first.
It's a bit of a question of agents
which are going to be verticals
right now for very specific
functions as opposed to agents
working together in tandem to
actually have more of a net effect
for an organization.
And I think that's definitely out
there in the future. I think we're
going to get first is more siloed
agents for Realm A
versus Run B?
Yeah, but like a lot of those agents
are just siloed.
Vertical agents are not interesting
for me. My Nirvana.
And I think at some point this year
will be I
have all of the CVS to sort
through.
I don't want to sort through them.
I tell the agent, these
are the topics that I'm looking for
on the CVS.
This is what good looks like.
Go and read all of these and
bring out the ones
that I'm looking for rather than a
rules based.
And then you're like, No, no, you
didn't quite get the CVS, right?
Really? I want to have blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you
know, like actually doing
the boring work for you, but
you're prompting them in English.
But I would consider that to be a
vertical sized agent for
the people recruitment function as
an example.
I think that's definitely in sight
right now. I think what I was
thinking more in my head is more
around broader activities
where, you know, it's not just
simply a recruiter and CV thing that
they're doing, but in fact it's
maybe the entire people function.
Multiple agents need to work
together and cross-pollinate to
come up with better outcomes, I
suppose.
I think you're right in terms of
exists now. But the problem is, is
every single one of those things
exists as a $10 subscription
and I want to pay $130
subscription and do it all
where, you know, there's like one
tool that the people can use
to do their stuff and
accounts payable can use to do
accounts payable and sales
can use to automate their stuff.
And you have like a new
automation layer that the
entire business can
use.
I think from an operational
standpoint, for a company, it seems
like the low hanging fruit
that is out there is simply your
processes and policies.
Anything that's been documented in
that form, which is either
internally creating a subset of GB
TS that pass off different pieces
of policy sections or process
sections or functions or whatever.
Or what I've also seen is
using GB to your court or what have
you. But what I've also seen is
actual agents that
are set up to ingest your
policies or ingest your processes
and do something more advanced than
what you get with an internal chat
and GPT that you create yourself
basically.
So one example of this was
the internal knowledge base curator,
GPT.
So that product and it is a product,
you basically take your
documentation with your company,
ingest it into the CBT.
It's all set up to sort, categorize
and provide a more advanced
experience for the end user in terms
of being able to search for things
and so on with a taxonomy that's
created and so on.
And that seems very interesting to
me.
Yeah, I just don't want to have to
pay 10 pounds for every single one
of them or 20 pounds for every
single one of them.
I'm looking forward to the
consolidation and it just at
what level does that consolidation
happen?
So I was reading Charlie's
LinkedIn posts and he created one
post around hiring
for an AI first organization,
and his little description that he
put in there was to create a task
for a candidate where
they need to write a prompt or
create a. Claude Church project
that can accelerate a key task
in the role that they're being hired
for and to demonstrate
an example of how they would use it.
And thus that's really interesting
to me. Or maybe think at the very
least in the sense of like, okay, if
we want to hire people
that are on a I using
a, I have some level of competence
and skill and interest in A.I..
It seems like at the very least
asking an interview question in some
form, maybe not a task, but some
kind of questioning around this
seems to make tremendous sense.
I'm just curious what you think.
I agree. And I actually think being
a task would be totally legitimate.
And it shows interest.
It shows aptitude and it
shows curiosity.
I think there's still a level of
resistance to
a AI because it's seen
as cheating.
And so it's actually showing people
who have a AI first
mindset or forward mindset
where using A.I.
isn't cheating, it's the new normal
and it's the smart thing to do.
And so both you're testing
for people in who
are coming into your organization,
who are afterward, but
you're also massively demonstrating
expectations that in your
world, using
AI is smart, not cheating.
So when you think about rolling
out A.I.
within the organization right now in
2025 for a company, we
have our standard tools, if you want
to call it that, which is clod
chatbot, Gemini.
What makes sense here?
Would you encourage companies right
now to say to themselves, okay,
look, let's create a policy around
this. Let's license
some of these tools for different
functions within the company or
within the entire organization and
launch them into the company.
Upskill people in terms of how to
write prompts or create projects,
create some level of support
structure around it where people are
being supported to use it
effectively, and some kind of reward
mechanism to reward those who are
actually integrating it back into
their jobs.
Is that something that we should do
now?
All the technology is changing so
rapidly that I would
not commit to a single one.
I would go even if it's a bit more
expensive for rolling monthly
contracts and continue to
experiment.
It's too early
to sign up for an annual
commitment to anything right now.
I don't even know if you can, but if
you can, I would not suggest annual
commitments.
It's not worth it.
Things are moving fast.
Policies, Definitely.
Because it makes you think through
all of the gotchas and it makes it
really clear for the organization
just to push
Charlie's LinkedIn a little bit
more. He happened to have a LinkedIn
post this morning that was a seven
page, a AI policy
template to use that looked pretty
decent for what a lot of
the main thoughts if you want, if
you haven't put one in place yet or
you want to make sure that you're
covering the key areas, I suggest
having a look at it.
And then the reward mechanism or
for us at peak,
we have a few different ways that
we are focusing on the team
using and getting more experimental
and interested in generally because
we have pockets that are super
interested in pockets that aren't.
So in our weekly
we have like a company all hands
that's weekly.
There is a five minute
segment every single week where
somebody does a show and tell on
something they've done.
The second thing
that we've done is we
have a Slack channel that's a
Jenn-air channel. We actually used
to have two and have just merged it
into one because it was getting a
bit messy as to which is which.
And so all news, all
thoughts, all new technology,
all uses goes
into that channel and
it's a self-selecting channel.
But I think most of the businesses
in it.
And then the third thing that we are
rolling out this year is
for our technical teams,
a Jenn-air training course
we're running internally.
We've not found anything externally
that matches our needs and
that is an enablement course.
It'll be running for the first half
of the year and then we'll see what
the second half brings us.
So when it comes to budgeting
and providing different
functions that have different
aspirations and different needs
around some of these generic tools,
what are you doing from a budgeting
standpoint? You're you're creating
like a budget for each of the
functions or how does that work?
So we're doing a bit of of that
for experimentation and like what
are the right tools, what are the
best tools?
And then also for all
of our systems of records
or standard SAS tools
as they come up for renewal.
We are investigating
the market and looking for
eye first alternatives
and seeing whether or not they're
too early stage to move to.
But our general
assumption of hypothesis is
all of the SAS businesses
that have a bit of AI stuck
on the side are not going to
be as good as AI first businesses.
And so we're constantly
searching in the market for what
is the new system of record.
Like in this new world.
And for my vision, I think we have
one system of record with lots of
different elements to it.
Because what's a system?
A record, but a massive database.
And so and there's always
been that the reason why the systems
record are different is because of
the interface and the tooling
required.
But if the interface becomes
a chat box
for pretty much everybody,
do we need different systems of
record long term?
Short term we do.
Because I don't think anybody's
reached that long term goal.
But that's part of why we're not
committing to
long term contracts right now while
we watch the space.
And so for our existing systems of
record, when they're coming up for
renewal, we're not doing three year
renewals for anything.
We're doing one year renewals so
that we have this choice, even if
nothing's fit for purpose.
Yet our our guest is something will
be fit for purpose in a year.
So when it comes to the policy
that you now have and you also
mentioned Charlie on his LinkedIn
profile, putting together a
template, a policy.
He talked about a couple of
interesting things. One was in the
policy itself to provide
a list of encouraged uses for
each function that are endorsed by
the leaders.
And I think this is quite important
and useful in the sense that the
policy itself is not simply there
to tell people what to not do, but
in fact to do the opposite in this
case, because what we want with AI
is to truly embed in
people's thoughts that we want the
company to win.
And the way the company is going to
win of the future is using A.I.
tools. And we need you to try them.
We need you to experiment.
And by providing a list of
encouraged use cases and
it's not to say that it's going to be
exhaustive, but you need to put
something out there where people
like, okay, within my function of
sales, here's like the ten things
that the cells like right now has
tacitly endorsed, basically.
So maybe I should start doing
something about it, I guess.
What do you think of that first one?
So we have that, but not
in our policy.
We have it in our strategy document.
And so what we've done is
for each department, we
have like low hanging fruit,
you know, what are like the immediate
things that we can be doing.
What are areas where we want to
do more, investigate and experiment
with, and what is our long term
vision?
So what is our ideal in each of
those areas?
What we have also done that I forgot
to mention is we have an A.I.
evangelist in every team.
So that's the person
who self-selected
could be very different in each
team, but it's the person who just
like naturally is reading
everything, naturally experimenting.
They tend to be the person who's
in the all hands showing
information, but they're like the go
to person of Ah,
I've just realized that stars can
do whatever.
Or in the
second one that he suggested should
be in the policy is deciding
on a list of company approved A.I.
tools in a particular a streamlined
process to get tools and versions
approved, i.e.
somebody see something, they make a
request, they get an approval within
days as an SLA.
And the default is to say yes,
pretty much.
What do you make of that?
So we already have that in place,
but not specifically for genitals,
just in general for buying
for our security reasons.
So it has to go through a security
audit, which means that it's not
within a couple hours.
It just depends on how much
information we can get about these
companies and how they're treating
our data and whether or not they
have ISO 27,001,
whether or not they're GDPR
compliant, etc.
And sometimes that can take weeks.
But I think it's worth
it because there's so many new tiny
companies that
the chat you or
the Open Eyes and Gemini
like you can find out
all of their security really quickly
and make decisions and understand
whether or not your data is training
the models, etc..
Tiny company with 15
people, we end up contacting
them, getting their certifications,
understanding what their policies
all are. If they don't have certifications
yet, and talking through whether or
not we feel comfortable working with
them. Quite often they choose small
and haven't not mature enough and
don't have it yet, or maybe haven't
even been around enough for an
audit.
But we will have conversations with
them and ask them how they're
thinking about things and if
they seem to understand what they're
talking about and be quite forward
thinking and have policies in
place and a roadmap of where they're
going to get to, depending on the
sensitivity of the data that might
be going there will still say
yes.
But if we talk to somebody and it's
just like, okay, these people are
very immature, they have no idea.
We cannot trust them with any level
of data, we'll say no.
The other thing that occurs to me
for companies right now,
irrespective of any policy, are
actually rolling on AI at all
is just this obvious thing where
right now today, if you don't have
any AI policy, you've got a problem
a little bit because people in your
company are using personal accounts
to use chatbot to write their emails
or whatever that is happening.
So having a very simple statement to
the company, irrespective of
anything else, just saying, look, if
you're using a personal.
Howard, please, please, please
go into your settings and toggle
the data learning off essentially,
because if you don't, anything that
you do will be sucked into the
vortex of the the
large language models and we
cannot have that.
And also then write an AI policy.
The last bit I wanted to bring up
was best practices.
And you had a couple of nuggets here
that I thought were useful.
One was when it comes to
clod projects and
church EPD projects and projects
are essentially a framework to
allow you to have a consistent set
of context for whatever
it is that you're asking of the GPU
in this case to respond to around
the company or around your products
or around your policies or whatever,
whereby you don't have to enter
a prompt every single time to
put in that context.
And his best
practice was to ensure that
those projects and those statements
around the company were there
to allow any user within the company
to take that project, take that
context and apply it to their
their account very specifically
to ensure that all the context was
all pre set up.
When you think about one.
That is beyond what I've experienced
so far. So I just be like, if
Charlie says it's a good idea, it's
a good idea.
So what do we park it here and get
on to our conversation with Mr.
Charlie Cullen?
Why don't you talk a little bit
about Koala?
Not so much for a product that
people should go and buy, but the
journey of creating it.
So in August 2024,
this is when I was in pink.
My goodness. I'm going to set up a
i boutique consultancy.
And then suddenly, my
goodness. Like, who am I to go and
tell people how
they should be implementing and
integrating these technologies if
I've not done it myself?
That's just snake oil.
This was August.
I was on a ferry to a Greek
island with my family,
and the kids were sleeping
and my wife and I were reading
and I was reading a book called The
Jolt Effect.
And they did some research where
they looked at why enterprise
sales end up with the status
quo.
And the prevailing thought was that
people stayed with the status quo
because as a sales person,
you had not been able to sell
the difference from what they've
got today.
So I came back from this holiday and
I was thinking, okay, well, I'm
going to build an AI type solution
for this and it will solve my
problem of I've never built
anything with these tools and then
I'll be able to advise
people.
And even in September
of 2024, I
was WhatsApp paying friends.
Do you know anyone that is a
developer that could know how to
write this thing? Because I'm a
non-technical founder.
Does anyone know anyone that could
help me either as an agency
or whatever? But just over the
course of the summer, some amazing
new tools had been coming out
new versions of Code,
which is one of my favorite albums,
which is like a
a new tool called Cosa came
out, which is an AI development
environment.
A new tool called V Zero
came out, which is a UI
development tool.
And I just thought one weekend, you
know, I'll just see how
far I can get as a non
developer.
And so I started off with
Claude.
So if you use EPG, then you
know how to use Claude.
One of my favorite features of Tord
is that you can set up a project
and a project you can think of as a
wrapper around a specific subject
or topic.
So I set up a project
called Koala, which is the
name of the application that I
built, and I gave it some custom
instructions. You are my technical
co-founder and sure
I am. Got a clue what I'm doing.
I've got an idea for an app, but I
want you to be my co-founder
and to help me to architect it, to
help me structure the project,
to help me to understand what
tech stack I should use.
And I'm going to come back to you
with questions and you should
push back on me if what I'm
asking for is a stupid
idea. And our goal here
is just to get to an MVP
where we can get some paying
customers.
So there's more that goes into it
than that. But that was basically
the custom instruction.
And then as I started chatting
with Claude, I would build out
Google Docs. That might be the
project overview, it might be the
file structure, it might be the
licensing model, it might
be some of the go to market.
And all of this becomes
the context that is in this flawed
project.
And my goodness, I chat
to this thing all day long
at the weekends because this is a
weekend project from eight
in the morning I'm chatting to
Claude, say, Hey, Claude, you know
what you think about this. What do
you think about that?
And one of the great things
about having Claude as a technical
co-founder is you can ask
stupid questions.
You can ask the question that you
asked Claude yesterday, and, you
know, he doesn't complain.
And because you give him the
instructions, he'll push back and
say, I wouldn't do it like that.
Keep focused on the fact that you're
building an MVP.
So I wouldn't do that right now.
What about might be so Claude
was sort of the first, you know,
build out the architecture, build
out the project plan, build
out the user stories and so
on. Next step is going
over to this tool called V zero.
It's an AI powered generative
UI tool.
So here you set up a new project
into which I upload
the context which has come from
code.
So Claude's given me this whole page
product requirements document
that goes straight into V zero,
and now I can start, you know, can
you design the
homescreen for me?
I want these sections.
Here is my brand colors.
Here's I want a dark theme.
And without me having to write a
very long prompt because it's
already got the entire payload,
the outcomes, the sidebar
outcomes, the project, upload
document outcomes, the chat screen.
I'm not were even better
than that.
What you can put into V zero is
screenshots of other
apps that you like and say
I want that but in
my project context.
So why do I need to reinvent
the wheel? Code and chat
have got the kind of chat interface
fairly well nailed.
If my product did that, I'd be
happy. Screenshot.
Drop into V0.
Give me like that.
And so as a non developer
or non designer, I should say
at this point, you're now
designing screens that are rapid,
right?
And not only does it do the design,
but it then creates all of the
code, whether that's TypeScript
JavaScript in the back end.
So how much did you spend
on it to build
koala?
So when GPT
launched and they pulled a number
out of thin air of $20
a month and as Sam Altman
has said, we basically pulled a
number of out of thin air.
We're going to charge $20 a month.
Well, that's what everyone else has
had to follow. So clod is $20
a month. I pay $20 a month
for GPT.
And I use them both interchangeably
throughout the day.
Rappler, I think, was $120
for a year's license to call
V0 $20 a month.
Kazu I think I pay maybe 30
or $40 a month and
then I'm paying for the others
because I'm testing them out.
That loveable as well.
But they're all in this order.
A couple of things that are a little
bit interesting.
Just when people are thinking about
pricing models for these things, two
things that I've seen are quite
interesting v zero
and lovable.
You can set up a free account.
But when you have a free account,
your designs are public
and so you pay to go private.
And I remember when I was first
designing some of the UI screens
for Koala, I'm sure no one would
have been interested in what I was
doing. But for me, I was.
I felt compelled to make this thing
private.
I'm not seeing that before.
You could imagine that for
Salesforce or HubSpot, you can use
it for free, but your contact
records are public.
Do you want to go private?
So that was an interesting
dimension.
And so you did all of this from
September to Wednesday launch.
December.
December, yeah.
So it was 12 weeks from having
never written a line of code
to having a production app.
I would say that and this
was all done during the weekends and
a few evenings.
There were three weekends
when I literally broke
down in tears in front of my wife
and I was like, Who
am I kidding?
I don't know what I'm talking about.
I should stick to doing what I'm
good at.
You know, what was I thinking?
Like, there's a reason why
developers get paid a ton of money
is because I this is complicated
and I don't know what I'm doing.
And this is one of the problems
with AI development tools,
is that, yes, it gives you this
acceleration from not to
amateur, but when something
goes wrong, you don't know
what's gone wrong because you don't
actually understand at the start
what you're looking at.
And I was trying to deal with quite
complex user authentication
through a third party and I just
couldn't understand why when certain
people were logging in, they
couldn't see certain things.
And I literally broke down in tears
with my wife going, I don't know
what I'm doing. And she'd say, Go
for a walk or go for a run.
That always helps you listen to a
podcast.
And so I'd put on a Lenny Chatzky
podcast and I would come back
inspired and I got I'll
just try this one thing,
and that one thing always solved
it. And I was like, Yes, I'm back in
the game and then would carry on.
So I finished each weekend on
a high.
But Saturday afternoons were my
my low points.
There's some really interesting
conversations happening on
X or on LinkedIn
where you've got real
developers that actually
know what it takes to build a
production enterprise application
and backend infrastructure and
scaling versus
this whole new breed of
indie hackers or
non-technical founders that are now
spinning up these PCs
and the people that have been doing
this for a long time and actually
know what they're doing.
They're like, You think that's
development, That's not development,
You haven't got a clue.
And the same thing happened
when Canva came out
and real designers who are using
Photoshop or whatever are looking
at people using camera going, that's
not real design.
And I know this trend
will continue, but
the tools will improve.
Like I said, I listen to this Lenny
Rich Jet Ski podcast and
always out of my runs and there's
two episodes or two sort of sound
bites that really stuck with
me when I was going through this
process.
The first and I'll
have to remember his name, he was
the founder of Right, which
became Google Docs, and he's
telling Lenny about the process
of writing original Google
Docs.
And he said, We didn't know what we
were doing, but throughout my
entire career, I've just got to the
edge of what I know and fucked
around by getting to the edge
of what you know and fucking around.
You end up learning stuff.
If you stay within what you're
doing, then you don't learn.
So that was one thing on those
days when I was like, I don't know
what I'm doing, I don't know what
I'm doing. I had his phrase in my
mind like, No, but this is where
learning is happening.
And the second episode that really
stuck with me was a guy called
Nikita Baer, who as
well a number of B2C apps
that have gone viral and be bought
by Facebook matter.
I think 1 or 2 of them,
he said this phrase stuck with me is
like, you know, one of the things no
one ever tells you is the moment you
hit virality, you have to build
the whole thing again because
it isn't built for the scale you
need. And I took the positive
in that. I was like, So what you're
telling me is I don't need to build
an enterprise solution.
I just need to build something that
gets to the first 5 or 10
users and solves that problem.
And if I can get that far
and then prove the value in the use
case, then I can get proper
people that actually know what
they're doing and then build for the
next stage.
So that gave me this kind of license
to like, I'm not purporting to be
an enterprise developer that's going
to build a SOC two compliant,
scalable thing, but I don't need
to build that yet.
I just need to prove that I
can solve a problem for someone and
that they would come and log in.
And if I can prove that, then solve
the next stage later on.
So this is me pushing your LinkedIn
content, but there's probably
a piece of content
a week that you write that
I end up sharing internally.
And this week's piece of content was
around public versus
private data and information
with chat shaped.
So you want to talk about that?
One of the things that I'm
always having to remind myself
as someone that would now consider
myself to be in the AI bubble
is that the majority of people
are not in the AI bubble.
They're just, you know, going to
work doing the work the same way
they have. Maybe
they've asked a couple of questions,
you know, what is or how should I do
that?
But they've not really embedded it
in their work.
And to that extent,
a lot of the companies I speak to
either have not got an AI policy
or they've got quite a
pessimistic and restrictive
AI policy.
You know, you must not use GPT
on your company laptop.
You must now upload company data
to GBG.
And definitely because
I've come across almost no companies
that have this, they have not got a
team or enterprise account for
GPT or Clod.
So if you're asking people how are
you using it, I say either I've got
a free account or I pay for the pro
account on my own personal
card.
Now, this is where the data
privacy issues come in.
So if you're on a free
or a paid personal
account for GPT
by default chat
GPT open, I can
use what you upload in
terms of your content.
So that can either be what you write
in the chat or any files that you
upload that is defined as content.
They can use that to train the model
by default.
You can go into the settings
and that is a
I love the way they phrased it.
The setting does not say train our
models.
The setting is would you like to
help improve the model for everyone?
It's a really nice one.
I would like to help improve the
model. It doesn't say what that
actually means.
Your data then goes into
training the model by name.
You can turn that off.
But that is you have to opt out
of that and out of the people
that I speak to, No one does
that because I haven't thought about
it. Most people are low tech users
of it. They just start using it and
uploading things on the teams.
This is GPT specifically when
I say teams or enterprise, but the
same thing on code as well.
If you are on one of those accounts
and by default, your
content is not used
to train the model unless you
explicitly opt in as part of
their feedback model.
So where I find this is quite
amusing in a way that the
companies that are most risk averse
that say, you know, you must not use
AI and we're certainly not going to
pay for an account for you to have
actually push everything
under the radar and under the carpet
to people that are still doing the
work.
But they're using a personal account
which by default gets all of your
company data up into
these models.
And so this is no
time to be an ostrich with
your head in the sand.
La la la la la.
Nothing's happening like it's
happening. People are
using this and you
can choose to ignore it, in which
case you create a data risk
or you can choose to embrace it.
And actually the default
is that your data is not going to
be used to train the models.
So the question of that
and this idea that, hey,
I'm a CEO and I'm
coming into this organization,
venture capital, back to 250 people,
and I want to have a real I
push in this organization
holistically across the company.
So the question to you as a CIO,
is it? What is it that I should do
or what should I think about if I
really want to transform this
organization?
Some of the most common first
use cases when you talk
to companies about using AI.
It comes down to sort of
productivity efficiency.
And there are two ways that you
can approach that.
So if you imagine you've got a 5000
person company and you can say, if
we use AI, we could be way
more efficient.
And therefore, instead of having
5000 people, we could
have 2000 people.
And so that's quite a defensive
cost saving increase.
Our margins way of looking at it.
The other is to say we're 5000
people. But actually, if we used
AI, we can immediately act
like a company of 50,000
people by giving everyone that we've
already got just way
more capability.
Benioff was talking about there not
hiring any more software
engineers this year
because everyone has a sort of wry
smile. Benioff The great marketer,
by his point is we don't need
to hire any more engineers
because we can get the engineers.
We've got to be way more productive.
And you're seeing that across so
many companies.
So the first thing that I'd be
canceling any senior executive
is to say, right, just imagine
that you could supercharge the
people that you've got and
get them to be way more capable
to be able to work in different
countries in different domains, to
know what way more than they do
today.
How would you approach that?
And a lot of this comes back to
not trying to do anything overly
complex. So even a couple
of years ago, when you talk about
AI, people are, you know, we're
going to use AI to completely
disrupt our supply chain
or we're going to use AI
to completely rebuild our
forecasting of footfall in a retail
environment or something.
It's quite a complex thing.
Machine learning, data science.
The big win right now is just get
every single person that works
in h.R.
Is a financial analyst.
That is a marketer that works in
customer support.
They have work that they have to do
as a human being.
And i sort of split this down into
three buckets.
There's there's work that you
receive from other people, so
someone gives you some requirements.
A customer gives you a request for
proposal.
Someone gives you a quote
or a contract.
Maybe there's a new regulation or
new compliance rules.
There's something that someone else
has given you.
And as a human being, you have to
understand that, analyze it,
summarize it, work out, what
are the most important bits and the
risks.
That's work that's given to you.
You've then got the work that you
actually do as a person.
So, you know, I need to
research accounts.
I need to prepare a proposal.
I need to manage a direct report.
Those are the things that you have
to do yourself.
And then there's work that you pass
on to other people.
So I need to create a proposal.
I need to create some requirements.
I need to create a summarization
for my manager.
I need to create an investor
briefing, whatever that might be.
And so these are very human things
that you have to do.
And how can you bolt on
the skills where they are to be able
to accelerate that much
more capable at ingesting
information and new requirements,
much more effective at doing the job
that I've got to do and a much
higher quality of output and
speed of output that I'm delivering
to other people.
And in it, you talk
about the ten x developer or the ten
x engineer, you know, what is the
ten x h.r.
Admin. What's that?
Ten x customer support
representative.
There's people that are kind of
biochemically enhancing themselves
with these tools suddenly
way more capable than the person
that sat on the desk right next to
them.
So I think that's a great vision.
There are a lot of people where all
CEOs, we're like, Yeah, okay,
whatever vision, how do we do it?
And dropping it down a level, I can
explain some of the ways that I use
cloud or chat type of ended
up buying Claud instead.
Because of the ability to
mimic your writing, I find that
Claude creates my writing better
than chatbot, creates my writing out
of the box, so that's why I
subscribe to it.
I use it for things
when I have to be creative and I'm
not being very creative.
So I want an image
for a presentation that evokes
a certain feeling.
And in the old world,
I used to have an image and I
couldn't find it. And I talked to
our designer and he has the entire
Adobe back catalog and he
gets me some photo and it's done.
But now I can
either describe an image and have it
generated or I can just say
I don't really know what image I
want for
exceeding our target this quarter.
You know, like I can only come up
with like some really generic ones
and I'll say, give me ideas of
images that'll work and I'll come up
with loads of images. And I'm like,
No, I don't like that one.
I do like this one.
Okay, yeah, that sounds good.
Edit it this way.
And now create.
And then Claude doesn't I?
She creates images, but Chatty
Betty does.
Or Dolly does.
And so then I'll say. Write a prompt
for Dolly that will give me the
image. And then I'll put it in,
create the image, and then edit
between the two.
And so and and all of that can be
way faster than it used to take me
to trawl through images to try
and evoke the sensation
that I want to evoke for customers.
Or I need to write the weekly
report or the weekly customer
update. And there's bits of it that
are written for me in bits that are
end, and I have writer's
block. And I'll just say I
want to talk at the end of the year,
end of the week, I've actually
created a project for this.
It's the end of the week.
I need to make people feel this way.
These are some topics that I'd like
to talk about. Everything I'm
writing is really stupid.
Write me a paragraph.
That's not shit.
Obviously it's a better prompt than
that, although sometimes that is the
prompt and it'll at least give me
something I rarely cut and paste and
use that itself.
But it's a way of like
whenever I'm stuck with
the too hard project, that is me
having to think.
I turn to Claude to help me think.
And oftentimes it just releases
the writer's block in me
to produce something.
And that's not an efficiency thing.
That's actually like a thinking
thing. I mean, it is efficiency, but
it's not like summarizing my emails.
I'll give you a specific example,
which for SEO
is a really sort of tangible
way of using this.
Anyone that's in a sea level role
has got direct reports
managing or leading those direct
reports. Probably when you became a
leader, you had these great
aspirations of how you wanted to
be, you know, a great leader and
a coach and advisor.
And too often we get dragged down
to just being a manager,
a boss, and you're just going
through the day to day
exercise, take a code
project or
just launched projects just before
Christmas.
Create a project one for
each of your direct reports.
So I create a project for
Bethany As and
in that project I can upload
certain documents.
Now, I would add in
my regular 1 to 1 notes,
I would add in maybe the performance
review that came out of Workday last
year. I might add in some
chaos that have been set.
Maybe there was a desk review
assessment or something like that
and maybe just do my chat.
So my knowledge of working with you,
but I understand a little bit about
your sort of personal career
aspirations or maybe personal
goals around houses
or family or whatever that might be.
And having done that,
you can then start to ask
this project about
those kind of creative things.
You know, I'm preparing for my 1 to
1 with Beth.
Can you help me think through some
stretch goals that would support
what best career aspirations are?
And I need to provide Beth
as some challenging feedback around
the way that she handles a recent
project.
Can you help role play with me?
How I could deliver that feedback to
Beth? Understanding Desk and
the way that she is going to respond
to that.
Suddenly you've got ten
individual leadership co-chairs
for each of your direct reports,
and you know, that's useful for
managers, but it's about
thinking about what's the work that
someone is already doing.
They have to do it.
And how do we use AI
to support me and being better
at that specific role?
It might be managing someone.
You might have a project for a
customer that you're selling or
supporting into.
It might be a project for a country
that you're looking to open up.
It might be a project, in my
case, with a product that
I'm trying to build.
So it's thinking about breaking
down. What are the bits of work that
you're already doing and how do
we give enough context
around that to be able to give me
what I want?
Can you give us one example?
I need to ingest a wide swath
of information, either summarize
it or pull out some takeaways in
terms of something that I'm trying
to analyze or what have you.
I'm going to mention a tool called
Notebook Alarm, which
went pretty viral in the autumn of
2024. It comes from Google, so you
can just go to notebook alarm dot
Google.com.
And what they've done is take a very
sort of intuitive approach to using
AI. So you can upload
a source and a source
could be a document, it could be a
YouTube video, it could be
a website.
And what notebook will do
is ingest that source
and use that and only that
to drive a set of AI
outputs and responses.
So it's not accessing the wider
Internet.
And a couple of things that it
creates off the back of that
document is a briefing
document.
It creates some fake news
and the to resistance,
it creates a podcast
interview between two
AI generated hosts
and an example
that a provider may.
A little link to some of the
recording of this.
But is the the new EU
Air Act, which
starts to come into force in
February 2025.
So in just a month or so from now?
Now the EU Air Act is 144
page document, very dry
as you'd expect, and difficult for
most people, if not legal, to
quickly figure out.
Does this relate to me?
How must I consider it?
So what you're able to do in this
example is upload that
document and then suddenly
it generated for me a 31 minute
podcast interview with these two
hosts discussing it.
But even better than that, you
can join that podcast.
So as you listen to it, you can say,
Sorry, I don't understand that, or
just help me to understand that.
So suddenly you're having a
conversation about
this complex subject.
Right, Right. So it's it's right.
You can interrupt the podcast hosts
and basically ask a question
midstream. You're like, Hey, podcast
host, I have a question
100%.
And they go, Hey, what's up?
You know, what's your question?
And then you also you say, you know,
you talked about the
air coming in, but like, what's
the first deadline that
I have to be considering?
And they go, you know, well,
February the 2nd, 2025.
And so you're having this
conversation now.
This is about the Air
Act. But think about all of the
things that you have to consume.
Maybe it's the Mssa that's been sent
to you from a supplier.
Can I give you an example of what
we're looking to do?
So we're also it's
interesting that you've mentioned it
because my first experience
with it was yesterday when one
of our Gen I people pulled
together information
on ideas of what we're going
to do as a podcast.
Not only does it do it as a podcast,
but it can also play on your voice.
So it's his voice doing
the podcast.
And what we're going to experiment
is, do you remember years ago,
I can't remember which company it
was. It was a company that I worked
with that would give all of their
sales team CD's
to listen to for sales
enablement while they were on the
road. It was either Microsoft or
IBM, I don't remember.
And so what we're going to
experiment with is taking all
of our sales enablement content
and turning that into
an internal podcast for our sales
team so that while they're on
the road, not that people are
on the road as much as possible can
consume that content.
And we're looking at a couple of
tools to basically create
an internal playlist where you
can find all the content as a
podcast.
But I didn't realize about the
interactivity, so that's super cool.
So yeah, it's only just released
maybe a week or so ago that they put
the interactivity in.
It's amazing.
There's a maybe a two second
delay after your question
wallet reconfigures,
but it's amazing.
So my one question is
Gemini.
It was shit have heard that Gemini
two is not shit.
Have not played with it yet.
We're going to experiment.
Worth it or not.
So when I'm talking to clients,
I talk about three things.
I talk about Gemini chat
and Cod as being those two
providers that people should be
thinking about and definitely
want to be watching, especially if
you're a if you're a Google
workspace customer, then
that has to make sense.
I just say on that, it's one of
these things that is so different
to SAS five years ago.
If you're buying a CRM system or
you're buying an ERP system, you
go out to market, you pick which one
and you pick one.
That is not the way that it works
here. People are not going out to
market to pick one Al-Alam.
You will have this composable
architecture.
You will have multiple,
maybe some closed source, maybe some
open source, and you'll use
different ones even within the same
workflow.
You know, this is doing the research
and this is doing the writing.
And so from a CEO perspective,
from a CIO or CTO perspective,
I think about Lego blocks.
What you're building is a box of
Lego that people can build
what they want at the time.
This isn't like a traditional
procurement, so you would have
Gemini plus the others in
your box of Lego.
If our listeners can
only take away one thing from
today's conversation, what is
it?
It is to plant
the seed of
use and every
single one of your business
teams.
I say business to me.
This is not an IT project.
So for every one of your
teams, how can you give them just
one way of using
publicly available tools
called Gemini to improve
one aspect of their work?
Because it is those people
that are closest to the business
problem and the business process.
And if you can show them one
way of using this, that is where
you will suddenly find all of
these new ideas come from.
So figure out how to get this
groundswell going at the
core of your business and bring
that back up to the top rather than
going top down.
Lovely. Thank you, Charlie Cohen,
for joining us on the operations
room.
If you like what you hear, please
subscribe or leave us a comment.
And we will see you next week.