Will AI Kill Jobs or Create Better Ones? Business Owners Debate.

[00:00:00] Cliff Nonnenmacher: So human capital will outlive its usefulness in probably less than five years. [00:00:04] James Thornton: The employees that are using and leveraging AI in their workflows will be those that get the jobs and retain the jobs. [00:00:13] Eric Kanagy: The current language models turn language into math, and what they miss is emotion. So as we grow up and we learn words, there's emotion attached to words and meaning. The current language models can't get that. [00:00:25] Richard Gearhart: All of the prompts and all of the information that he had used in ChatGPT to create this program was considered discoverable information. [00:00:37] Elizabeth Gearhart: When it comes to fundamental core questions and the prompts that we do, I think we ask creative questions that AI would not think of. This is real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable with hosts Elizabeth Gearhart, podcast consultant, marketing expert and PhD researcher using AI every day. And Richard Gearhart, entrepreneur, seasoned business owner and intellectual property attorney specializing in innovation. Here's how real companies are using AI right now. Now it is time for our next segment, AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable. I know you guys are all like up to your eyeballs in AI, but I'm going to ask you each for your favorite use and then we'll talk about it a little. So, James Thornton with DAZ3D.com what is one of your favorite uses of AI? [00:01:29] James Thornton: I would say that in our business, our entire customer service and our quality assurance group is now powered by AI solutions. And it's pretty incredible how fast you can resolve customer concerns. We still often need to apply the human touch. I will tell you that I don't think in many cases AI gets you 100% of the way there. So there's a lot of value to human intuition and human touch. In that process. We become so, so much more efficient at quality testing and assurance and most importantly, outwardly facing how we are able to respond to customers and their needs. [00:02:06] Elizabeth Gearhart: If not a maker with feronacity.com, what's your favorite way you're using AI in your business right now? [00:02:11] Cliff Nonnenmacher: So I use it three different ways. I use it for decision support, right? So to support decisions I'm about to make. As I said before, I believe in leveraging collective intelligence. There's no greater intelligence to leverage than artificial intelligence. Right now we. Which is sad because we're all here on a podcast with human capital and this is about to be, it's about to be worthless. And T minus 5 years. Think about what I just said. Like everything we do, I'm a podcaster. It's like everything that we're doing. So human capital will outlive its usefulness in probably less than five years. No one's going to want to hear what we have to say, which is crazy. So I use it for decision, decision support it pressure test an idea like does this make sense? Like just test it and flesh it out and see do the economics make sense. There was an interesting thing that I came across the other day. If a business owner had a 10% net and they wanted to be competitive and cut their price by 5%, what impact would that have in their business? A 5% reduction in your product or service does not seem like a huge amount of money. But if you want to know the answer to that, it's actually mind blowing. So I'll repeat it. If you had a 10% net margin and you cut your price by 5%, you literally need to double the size of your company to just maintain break even double. So it's like that can't be true. I have to flesh that is that and it just keep going through the math. So decision support. I use it heavily. It's not my advisor. And mental health, like some people use it like they're using it for like a mental health support system. It's not my friend. I don't use it that way. Decisions. Content and distribution. We used to pay someone $5,000 a month to create content for social media. For $20 a month, we save 60 grand a year. Just one person. So you think about just content, how to distribute that content. What is our voice sound like? Is it the right voice to have in the marketplace? What social media provider platform wants to hear how long, how much, what's the message? What's the thumbnail split? Test the thumbnails. Like if you ever listen to Mr. Beast, they will split test 50 thumbnails before the thumbnail hits the market. That has made him just a juggernaut in social media. I mean the guy's a. If you don't know, I mean he is a beast. I mean no one has accomplished what he's accomplished as a social media influencer. And I use it as operational leverage, right? We're talking about workflows. I mean everything James said, my head was nodding. It's like I'm in complete agreement with how you could use different ideas, different modalities, if you will. Within this we just say AI and it's such a broad context, right? And then he's like, Well, I use AI for 3D caricatures or these avatars. That's brilliant. I could turn them into literally cartoon. I could turn them into what looks like human. It's brilliant. So CRM workflows, summarizing calls. [00:05:16] Elizabeth Gearhart: I disagree with you on that point because AI gets it wrong a lot and I play with it down in the weeds. So I'm not like hiring somebody else to do the AI stuff for me. I'm doing it myself all the time. And I'm going to talk about an issue that I just recently had with it, but I do think you need human eyes on it. I really do. [00:05:37] Cliff Nonnenmacher: If you're having issues with AI now that you will not have those same issues, literally probably less than 12 hours from now, the rate at which it's expanding, the rate at which it's evolving is just insane. We have not seen anything like this in a technological revolution ever, in the history of the planet, ever. Like, nothing is this significant. It's mind blowing. We haven't what's coming, not since the [00:06:00] Richard Gearhart: invention of the wheel. [00:06:01] Elizabeth Gearhart: Eric Carnegie with SimpleSense IO, what's your favorite way you're using AI right now? [00:06:06] Eric Kanagy: I work in a highly regulated space, so you can't just try things out in that space. So we work in critical infrastructure, security systems, fire alarm building, automation systems. So the interesting use case we're working on right now is you have all of this data. It's locked away in these, like arcane interfaces from these big vendors that have been around for decades. And so the end users, they want reports, they want to see that data in certain ways they can't get to it. And so they end up just exporting data into data files and moving it into Excel and trying to make it work. The use case is there's data visualization tools out there, but to build dashboards you need some technical know how. Well now with an AI prompt, if you know how to write that prompt, which you need to know how to write the prompt, you can generate those dashboards. So now there's much less friction for that user to say, yeah, I want this data, I want it in these columns, I want to see this in this kind of graph. And it just very quickly can iterate through for that user so they can see the data exactly as they want it and help them get to that data. There's a guy that we work with and he spends a week a month generating water usage data. This is across a massive facility. So he can now generate that report in seconds, something that used to take him a quarter of his time. So that kind of savings is what we're looking at. [00:07:28] Elizabeth Gearhart: So Richard Gearhart with Gearhart Law. What's your favorite way you've been using it lately? [00:07:33] Richard Gearhart: Lately, I've been using it to find vendors, using it as a search engine, and it tunes the search more specifically to what my needs are. Instead of just putting in a few keywords and then having a bunch of possibilities pop up, I can be specific about the characteristics that I want, and it'll find vendors for me that I would have never have considered before. And so it's a very straightforward, very simple way to use AI, but it is proving to be very valuable. We're looking for a new cfo, and it surfaced some talent agencies that I was unfamiliar with and made some really great recommendations that is speeding the process considerably. So even though there's humans involved, it is doing things that weren't available before. [00:08:27] Elizabeth Gearhart: Well, I'm Elizabeth Gearhart with Gear Media Studios, and I know you guys have probably all touched on this. So, I don't know. A few months ago, a year ago even, I would try generating images in ChatGPT, and they were really terrible. And so I'd go back to Canva, and then I found Manus, which is an agent, and it did better images. Well, then somebody said, oh, you should try ChatGPT again. And actually, you should try Claude, which I haven't gotten back to Claude that deep yet. I started using ChatGPT for image generation again. I teach this adult school class getting started in podcasting. And for the last class, everybody gets to make a little video in my studio. And so I took those videos and I did a screenshot of the people's faces when they're smiling. Like, I managed to catch every one of them. And then I put the screenshot of the person, the title of their podcast, and a little bit about it. Cause I didn't even do, like, a full podcast or anything into ChatGPT. I said, okay, generate a YouTube cover for this. I was blown away. You know what? It wasn't just that it could take the prompt and figure it out. It was the quality. I don't think I could go into Canva and generate something like that. [00:09:33] Richard Gearhart: That has changed so much over even the last three or four months. If you tried getting a thumbnail image out of AI three or four months ago, you just got this weird distorted thing. And now you've got a thumbnail that looks great. [00:09:49] Elizabeth Gearhart: But you know what else it can do now that it couldn't do before? Before, it would do a thumbnail, and you would say, okay, keep everything the same and change this one thing. And it would change the whole thumbnail now, it can change one word, it can change one color. As Cliff said, the speed at which these things are going is like a steamroller. So I want to open the floor up. I do have another AI thing I want to talk about while we're here, but I want to see what other people want to say about AI in general. [00:10:16] Richard Gearhart: The attorney in me is going to come out and say there's been recent court cases where people have used AI for strategy purposes, and the prompts and the reports that were generated from the AI have been considered to be discoverable and have actually ended up in written opinions of the court. So there was one case in Delaware not too long ago where a senior manager decided that they wanted to break a contract with a company that they owned. He went to his legal team. The legal team says, no, you can't do it. He went to ChatGPT and started strategizing with ChatGPT about how to break the contract. And then he followed chatgpt's advice, ousted the management team of the company that was the target, and then got sued for breach of contract. And all of the prompts and all of the information that he had used in ChatGPT to create this program was considered discoverable information. [00:11:21] Elizabeth Gearhart: It could be used against you in [00:11:22] Richard Gearhart: a court of law against you. And the court even cited some of the information in her opinion. So you have to be careful when you're using this stuff. If you're concerned about an employee, for example, and you're brainstorming with ChatGPT about that employee, that could conceivably come up later in a dispute. Now, most prompts only have a limited lifespan in ChatGPT, but it depends on the engine that you're using. And if you copy the output and you store it someplace, then it's considered fair game, Especially if the LLM is a public LLM, you may have some different arguments if you have an enterprise version and you can retain the confidentiality of the subject matter. But if you're using a, you know, a public LLM, it's pretty much considered talking to the public about it. So I just think that was it. [00:12:21] Elizabeth Gearhart: I think if you're using a public LLM, it's like you're running down the street naked. Everybody can see everything you put on there if they want. [00:12:27] Richard Gearhart: You have to assume that it could come back and be part of any later legal issue. [00:12:33] James Thornton: Yes. I was listening to both Cliff and Eric in their comments, and they both said things that I think are really interesting, especially in this context. I think if you were to survey 500 executives, large companies, people that are leading AI for some big businesses, I'm finding it's almost split down the middle whether those leaders think AI will create jobs or they'll eliminate jobs. Cliff was talking about the loss of human capital. What I think they would unanimously agree on though is that the employees that are using and leveraging AI in their workflows will be those that get the jobs and retain the jobs. So you just can't put your, your head in the sand. And then Eric talked about this report that somebody would take a month building and they can do it in seconds. What I'm experiencing, and this might tip the direction of what I think, whether it creates job or eliminates jobs, is I do still believe that right now and even in the foreseeable future, there does need to be a combination of AI with human intelligence and human intuition. And so when I think about being able to generate reports that took months to build, you can generate those in seconds. Now what that allows that person generating their board is to spend less, less time building it and more time analyzing it and leveraging it and doing their job better with it. And so to me, and again, being a very AI centric business, I find my employees feel more efficient, they feel more satisfied, but they still feel like they, they have a role in, in the process. You mentioned the hallucination that LLM models still do. There's a viral clip out in the market today where the guy asks AI how many e's in the word 17. And AI comes back and says three. And the guy says no, there's two. And he's like, oh, you're absolutely right, there's two. And he'S like, no, again there's 20. And AI said, I can see why you would arrive at that conclusion, but I've recounted them and now I can tell you to definitively, there's five. [00:14:55] Elizabeth Gearhart: James, to your earlier point, I think where humans are necessary is, and I'm a scientist, I have a scientific background, we think of the questions. I mean, it gives you a lot of follow up questions. But when it comes to fundamental core questions and the prompts that we do, I think we ask creative questions that AI would not think of. AI to me is very linear in its thinking, but I think it's creating jobs. [00:15:25] Richard Gearhart: So I would like to hear Cliff's response to your comment. [00:15:29] Cliff Nonnenmacher: I must be the contrarian that AI [00:15:31] Richard Gearhart: is going to take over everything in five years. [00:15:33] Cliff Nonnenmacher: I think that, I think you're living in peak inflation right now. I think AI, robotics, humanoids, quantum computing are deflationary. I think the thousand dollar iPhone in everyone's pocket will be 200 bucks. It's not going to cost peanuts to make it. I think there will be hundreds of millions of jobs eliminated across the entire planet and I think you will see universal income be introduced to many countries because of it. I don't think people comprehend where this is going and I don't think people comprehend quantum computing and what it's about to do. Quantum. Just the discussion of quantum computing has affected the Bitcoin blockchain conversation evaluation. If you start to extrapolate, like right now we're talking about hallucinating. This thing is like six months old in the scheme of where it's headed. It's like being mad at a baby because it can't pronounce a word right and it hallucinates. It doesn't ask the right question, it doesn't prompt what this thing is going to do. It's going to replace all of us. It's like insanity where we're headed with this. If this thing is not regulated at a government level, which it won't be because the bad actors are not going to regulate it the same way. You know, the state of Florida wanted to tell everyone you have to have a carry permit for a weapon until the state of Florida figured out that everyone in Florida that's a criminal doesn't follow the law. And then the governor's like, you know what, why don't everyone carry? So it's like these types of things. United States wants to regulate AI. Go ahead and regulate it. Regulate it, Regulate AI, Regulate crypto. Because China's not going to do it, other countries won't do it, Russia won't do it. So now you're at a disadvantage. So it's not going to be regulated. This genie is out of the bottle. You're not unringing this bell. And it is going to have mass implications across countless industries. Not to mention the next time I'm on the show, you will have a humanoid probably James will not be James on the next time I'm on this show. I'm going to have to ask James and Eric. No, I'm going to have to ask James and Eric. Are you actually James and Eric and Eric is saying no. I'm in Seattle right now in a board meeting. This is my avatar filling in for me that knows more about any question you could ask, including the pronunciation of my last name. Like everything. It's crazy. Peak inflation, deflationary, all values Come down. All the complaining about I can't buy a house goes away. The complaining that the average age of a homeowner In America is 40, that goes away. Why these kids can't have babies that will ultimately go away because they're not going to want them anyway. There's a lot to unpack here. [00:18:06] James Thornton: Except, Cliff, according to what you're saying, maybe houses are cheaper, but they still can't afford them. Because they don't have a job. [00:18:12] Cliff Nonnenmacher: Because they don't have a job until you're on universal income. [00:18:15] Elizabeth Gearhart: Okay, Eric, you were pretty neutral. What do you think? [00:18:19] Eric Kanagy: I'm going to try to be a little more practical maybe than what Cliff is saying. But I think what's interesting about AI is it does call into question, well, what does make us human and what does a human interaction? What is the value of that and what do we get out of that? So if we just have avatars everywhere acting for us, then who care? Why do we even need them? Right? So what is the point of this interaction right now? What are we getting out of it? For a listener understanding that all of us are real, it's going to bring that into question. I think there's also an interesting reaction post Covid of people wanting to get together in person again. We were all remote, you know, and isolated. And so now we want that human connection. And there's more and more. You can see it in marketing content. I'm getting people like sending me AI generated sales emails and kind of tell. And it's not a good look when somebody says something like that to you. I had one the other day where this really long email. And when I first looked, I usually don't read these. Somehow I caught my eye and I was reading it and I had to put it into like an AI detector because I couldn't believe that this guy had actually written this specifically for me. But it turns out he had, and so I called him up and we actually had a conversation because he had actually taken the time and written this thing out. And so that did catch my attention. Don't. Maybe eventually you can't tell anymore, and then we have to figure out what that means. There's an opportunity here to rediscover our humanity. [00:19:43] Elizabeth Gearhart: I'm doing a presentation and that it's kind of a basic AI one. But I wanted, during my presentation, I wanted to bring up AI Slop. You guys all know AI Slop, right? Yeah. [00:19:53] Eric Kanagy: Yeah. [00:19:54] Elizabeth Gearhart: Have you guys heard that term, AI Slop? [00:19:56] James Thornton: Yeah. [00:19:56] Elizabeth Gearhart: Yeah. That's when somebody just takes it, puts A question query into AI and takes whatever it spits out and posts it. And it was really funny because AI knows what AI slop is now because I asked it, what is AI slop? And it uses certain words and it uses like three things in a row and it has a certain length to its paragraphs and its lines, like so to your points, though, now that it knows what AI slop looks like, it's probably not going to do it anymore, right? And so it's going to try to make it more and more human instead of less sloppy. [00:20:30] James Thornton: There still is such an interesting tug and pull with what Eric said. And again, I'm not trying to challenge Cliff, but I'll give you a very simple example of AI slop. If my AI agent writes my a LinkedIn post for me, it tells me that based on the way I've trained that agent, it can get to 99.9% of my actual voice. Now what? I write a post myself. When I actually write the post, I get 4x the engagement. So how is that AI agent representing 99.9% of my voice? And I get 25% or 20% of the impressions or the engagement I get when I write it myself. And the answer is, guess what? AI is trained off of human data. That's what it's trained off of. Now, not to get too technical, because I know we're not supposed to, but what Cliff is describing is what I would call artificial general intelligence, where the model actually doesn't need training data, but can reason on its own, is not a linear thinker like you've talked about, Elizabeth, but can really think like the human brain. And I think that's a long way off no matter what you're hearing. And what I know about providing training data to train AI models to get to that general kind of intelligence where AI is its own brain and doesn't need the inputs, doesn't need the training data. We're a bit off from that. [00:22:07] Eric Kanagy: I would agree to that. So where I am on the cliffside is what's coming is going to keep advancing and it's going to go quickly. The current language models, they turn language into math and what they miss is emotion. So as we grow up and we learn words, there's emotion attached to words and meaning. And AI can't. The current language models can't get that because they're using math to map words to each other. And so there's just like a depth of meaning that when you read something in AI, it feels flat. And that's why? Because it's missing that richness of language that we understand. Learning a language, growing up, it will keep evolving and changing. There's something better than the current generation that's coming. [00:22:44] Elizabeth Gearhart: I've heard a little bit about it, but what I'm going to challenge you guys. I would like to get this group back together in six months or a year and talk about AI again and see where we all are on the AI spectrum. I guess in six months or I was going to say a year, but like, it is changing so fast. Maybe in six months. You guys want to get together as a panel again in six months. [00:23:06] Cliff Nonnenmacher: I'm glad to come back because I'm going to be right. [00:23:08] James Thornton: Yeah, Cliff, if you're right in six months, then my avatar will humbly apologize. [00:23:14] Elizabeth Gearhart: Either you or your avatars will be back in six months. Okay, I'm going to make a note of the state. In six months, we'll get you guys maybe a year. [00:23:21] Richard Gearhart: I'm going to wager here. [00:23:22] Elizabeth Gearhart: You want to wager? [00:23:23] Richard Gearhart: We need a wager of some sort. [00:23:29] Eric Kanagy: I think AGI will be here, but it's going to be like a weird transition and there's not going to be a day when we. We wake up and all of a sudden it's here. It's going to be this, like things get taken over and we just kind of. It's get baits. Gets baked into what's normal and we just don't really notice it. I have a robot vacuum that goes around and vacuums my floor. I don't vacuum my floors anymore. It's not great at it, but it vacuums every day. I don't really think about sweeping the floors anymore. And so that just happens. Right. That thing was like. [00:23:57] Elizabeth Gearhart: So you think we're the frogs getting slowly boiled, right? You put the frog in cold water and gradually turn up the temperature. Yeah, yeah. [00:24:05] Eric Kanagy: I mean, it's our technology, so we should be in control of it. It shouldn't control us. That's the opportunity as an entrepreneur. [00:24:13] Elizabeth Gearhart: That's why I said at the beginning I have to constantly tell it that old smart blonde ladies have a brain too, because it doesn't think that we do because we're not the ones programming it generally. This has been Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable. [00:24:29] Richard Gearhart: You have been listening to Real AI [00:24:31] Eric Kanagy: Use Business Owners Roundtable. We hope you found this valuable. Join us again for more stor because [00:24:37] Richard Gearhart: the future of business is driven by AI. This podcast was recorded at the Iheart [00:24:41] Eric Kanagy: studios in Manhattan as part of the Passage to profit radio show.