When Should Businesses Trust AI to Work Without Humans?

[00:00:00] Michael Greenberg: I've seen quite a bit myself of it, doing plenty without a human involved. [00:00:04] Bill Treloar: You don't want to be publishing AI slop on a website. You want human writing. [00:00:08] Richard Gearhart: I think human beings are still required here on this earth despite AI. [00:00:14] Elizabeth Gearhart: You have to have a human check it. You cannot leave it to AI. That's what Perplexity told me. [00:00:18] Dr. John La Puma: I think it's a smart tool that people who learn to use AI well are going to keep their jobs and create new ones. [00:00:27] Elizabeth Gearhart: This is Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable. Here's how real companies are using AI right now. Now it is time for Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable. And I know we've been talking about it's not great to be on screens all day, but we're all using AI. So Dr. John Lapuma doctorjohnlapuma.com what is one way or your favorite way or the most recent way that you've used AI? Just one for now and then we'll go around the table and do more. [00:00:55] Dr. John La Puma: I'm an enthusiastic user of tech. I use Cloud Cowork for all sorts of things, including preparing for our interview. What I like to do that's less traditional is put a lot of my farm inputs into Cloud Cowork. I have a separate project for the farm where I'm testing some of my observations on our trees and bugs and trying to think of ways to complement them and fight them with non synthetic artificial methods. So I use AI to help manage my farm. [00:01:28] Elizabeth Gearhart: Wow, that's great. So, Michael Greenberg with ThirdBrain co. We know that you live and breathe AI, but what's one way you're using it for yourself that you really like? [00:01:38] Michael Greenberg: Ooh. Well, I think for my personal life I like to use AI to plan out my weekends. And so I like to especially during the summer, I like to drive out to farms and go visit, buy produce or meat from various vendors out there. And the AI can plan not only where we're going to go and if we can hit two or three places in the day, but then tell me where to stop for lunch or breakfast while we're heading out. And so just that basic travel planning saves me a ton of time. [00:02:09] Elizabeth Gearhart: Excellent. So Bill Treylor with rankmagic.com, what's one way you're using AI? [00:02:15] Bill Treloar: I tend to use AI a lot for webpage and blog writing. I'll give it some parameters and it will tell me. Don't forget to mention this and talk about that. And here's a suggested structure. The trick though is you don't want to be publishing AI slop on a website. You want human writing. But it's a really excellent start in terms of brainstorming and giving you some ideas for how to write a page. [00:02:39] Elizabeth Gearhart: Excellent. Richard Gearhart with Gearhart Law. What's one way you're using AI? [00:02:43] Richard Gearhart: Well, most recently, I've been using it to kind of bounce as sort of a sounding board for bouncing legal ideas off of. I've been doing that for a while, but this last week it's been especially useful. There were times when I was getting maybe a little bit too passionate in my correspondence, and AI said, well, you know, maybe you need to throttle this back a little bit because you're making some assumptions that maybe are not correct. And I thought about it a little bit and I toned it down a little bit. So it's useful. It's good to talk with colleagues. But also having sort of a more objective perspective on things sometimes I think helps. I think we all have our opinions and our agendas, and I think AI does too. But it's probably not biased quite in the way that some of the. My other sounding boards would be so very helpful. [00:03:42] Michael Greenberg: Especially me. [00:03:43] Elizabeth Gearhart: And me as Elizabeth Gearhart with Gear Media Studios. So we're doing a software transition. We're upgrading. Last time we did it, there were a lot of issues because, you know, all comes down to the people. It's not the software as much as it's the people. We didn't have the right people in the right places. I described all of our issues to Claude and said, and we're not just Claude. I used Claude and I used Perplexity. Both of them said, give me plans to help this not happen again. And they both came up with some, I thought, some pretty good ideas that we're actually implementing with this upgrade to try to prevent, like, a big snapdoor, a disaster, an upgrade disaster, an upgrade disaster. And I brought it to Richard. And, you know, we're not doing everything because, of course, they tell you, like, a million things. Oh, and do you want to find out more about this? Oh, and what about this? Oh, go down this rabbit hole. Go down that one. But anyway, we got the gist of it. [00:04:36] Richard Gearhart: Yeah. I mean, my experience still is that AI is you really gotta ask the right questions because every once in a while you'll say, well, what about this? And it'll say, oh, yeah, well, now. And it'll change its output. [00:04:47] Dr. John La Puma: Right. [00:04:48] Richard Gearhart: I think human beings are still required here on this earth, despite AI. [00:04:53] Elizabeth Gearhart: So anybody else have anything fun they want to say about AI or some fears or anything. So the reason I'm doing this segment is to help people start using it if they haven't thought of great ways. So, Michael, you were going to say something? [00:05:06] Michael Greenberg: Yeah. One thing we try to train every new hire to do is to use it to teach them things. So asking it to set up like a curriculum on recommendations of different YouTube videos and different books and blog articles they can read on a subject and building a skills map. So, like the individual skills that lead to the bigger skill that you want to build or whatever goal you're trying for, and then use that as a sort of project to help learn a new discipline or improve yourself. [00:05:36] Richard Gearhart: So, Michael, do you think that AI is always going to be under the thumb of human beings, or do you think it's going to take over the universe someday? [00:05:43] Michael Greenberg: I'm not sure it's going to take over the universe, but I can tell you we have a lot of clients, and I've seen quite a bit myself of it doing plenty without a human involved. [00:05:54] Elizabeth Gearhart: Yeah. I described this process that we have at the law firm, and I said, can an AI agent do this? And it went through the whole thing. And I said, well, you need to check here, you need to check here, you need to check here. And I'm like, if we have humans do it and we just have those checks in place, what's really the difference? So I don't know in that particular case if it would have made things more productive or not. [00:06:16] Michael Greenberg: Yeah, I think it comes down to, you know, how damaging is an error inside of a process right now. A lot of times you can get to 98, 99%. If that 1% is still mission critical, that you can't have it, then you need the human to check it. But in another case, if you're okay with a 95% success rate, you can often pass the whole thing off to AI. [00:06:39] Elizabeth Gearhart: What's nice about this was it did say, this is one thing that you have to be absolutely sure of. It was like a date or something. So you have to have a human check it. You cannot leave it to AI. That's what Perplexity told me. It's really interesting. [00:06:53] Michael Greenberg: But that comes down to data again, you know, and I'm sure we'll get into this later, but if, say, you're sending out an invoice and you're having the AI generated invoice, you might not want it to write the entire invoice. You might want it to run some sort of code. That pulls the invoice information out of your QuickBooks or your other information and then just compiles it and writes a note and sends it and that it's not quite AI anymore at that point. It's more just normal code and automation that accomplishes the same function. [00:07:27] Elizabeth Gearhart: I want to talk about that when we get to your segment because I have strong opinions that. So, Dr. La Puma, are there other ways you're using it that are fun or that you like? [00:07:36] Dr. John La Puma: I use it pretty much before every podcast I do about the book Indoor Epidemic. I probably have done 30 podcasts, so I have 30 different note sections. I use it to think through helpful replies about the types of research that are emerging. Sometimes I use it as a research agent, particularly NotebookLM where I try to give it all the resources and references and that's gotten even better since you can include not just text but video and other kinds of assets. And I'm finding the Google AI agent for Gmail very useful in understanding they have a beta product called CC that looks at your email and reminds you of what there is to do and gives a daily update and sends you that. Sometimes I have to put four or five days into Claude and ask what it is that I missed. So it can be overwhelming. [00:08:34] Elizabeth Gearhart: Yeah. [00:08:35] Dr. John La Puma: But I do, I think it's a evolving, smart tool that people who learn to use AI well are going to keep their jobs and create new ones. Yeah. [00:08:45] Elizabeth Gearhart: What about you, Bill? Any other ways you're using it that you like? [00:08:49] Bill Treloar: One of the things that I've used it for is readability analysis on some client web pages. It can say things like your sentences are too long or your tone is off putting in this manner or that manner or you're using too many 11th grade words, that sort of thing. [00:09:06] Elizabeth Gearhart: Yeah, I can see how that can be really useful. Yeah, I did use it this morning. I was kind of mad about something and I told it I want. Here's a situation. I want to send this person an email, but I'm really mad right now. Can you please write the email for me? And it wrote a very fact based email which I felt comfortable sending. [00:09:28] Richard Gearhart: What about you? You know, I'm listening to all of this and I'm also thinking about the volume of email and communications that we get every day and then using AI to address those communications and send more communication. So I just wonder where all this is going to lead us to the point where, you know, we have our inboxes communicating with each other, but we don't even know what's being said, that's a real possibility. I think that time is close. [00:09:54] Elizabeth Gearhart: Yeah. Well, with that, we have to end this segment. Thank you very much. This has been Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable. [00:10:02] Richard Gearhart: You have been listening to Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable with hosts Elizabeth Gearhart, marketing expert and PhD researcher using AI every day, and Richard Gearhart, entrepreneur, business owner and intellectual property attorney specializing in innovation. We hope you found this valuable. Join us again for more stories. Because the future of business is driven by AI.