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A
Let me ask you something. When your team needs AI guidance, do they come to you? When leadership asks about AI strategy, is your opinion the one that matters? If you hesitated on either one of these questions, you're not alone. The AI revolution is creating a new hierarchy in marketing. Those who master AI are becoming indispensable. Those who don't are becoming replaceable. AI Business World Business positions you on the right side of this divide. Two focus days in Anaheim, California, April 29th and 30th, designed to transform you from, quote, the person learning AI unquote into, quote, the AI expert everyone depends on, unquote. Melanie Miller told us the AI teaching was mind blowing. You'll master workflows that deliver measurable roi, learn from practitioners already providing results, and and build a network of 1000 AI focused professionals. This is more than just learning new tools. It's about professional security, career advancement, becoming the person your organization can't afford to lose. Learn more@AI businessworld.live. get your tickets at a businessworld.live. welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping
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you put AI to work.
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A
And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. This is the podcast for marketers, creators, and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. People say that all you need is the right AI tool to become more successful, but is that really true? In today's episode of the AI Explored podcast, we're going to look at how to gain AI superpowers that will enhance your work. My special guest is an AI strategist who helps businesses, teams and agencies embrace AI adoption. He's the founder of AI Operator. And AI Operator is a behavior change and transformation company that helps businesses operationalize AI. Tim Caker, welcome to the show. How you doing today? I probably said your last name wrong. I apologize.
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B
No, that's perfectly fine, Mike. Thank you so much. It's absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you.
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A
So how did you get into AI? Share a little bit of the story because everybody came from somewhere else, you know.
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B
Yeah, how did I not get into AI Would be better question. But no. So I think about 10 years ago. It was 10 years ago, I was a head of marketing for a deep tech company and we were doing computer vision for real estate. And I was like, I didn't even know what I AI was back then. And, you know, we didn't even call it AI. It was called computer vision. It was called neural networks and deep learning and image recognition. It was very technical and I was just ahead of marketing. And we had an 18 month sales cycle. I remember it was very long because nobody wanted AI back then. And I think 80% of my company was quite geeky, you know, and very smart people. And I felt like I was the dumbest, you know, I was just doing marketing. And I remember then my CEO, who is now the CTO of the company, had called me and he said, do you want to learn about neural networks? Do you want to learn about deep learning? And I was like, I'd love to. And he gave me a couple of hours of his time. I still remember that. Back then I didn't understand much. I just understood that there was these kind of neurons, these network of neurons and they would loop back and they would learn from each other and stuff. I was like, wow, this is cool. And then about eight years later, seven and a half years later, ChatGPT comes to life, right, with GPT 3.5. And I was like, oh, okay, this is gonna be interesting times. And I remember I was, I made a joke for my wife, she's a content writer. I was like, oh, you know, I made a joke that AI was gonna take over the copywriting job, but the joke was terrible. She didn't laugh. She. She didn't like it at all. And after that, that was history. And then since then, I've been in AI.
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A
Well, bring us up to speed on what you're doing right now, by the way. I can relate to the copywriting thing. I used to be a copywriter. I guess I technically still am. And all my copywriting friends have freaked out. But what are you doing now to today?
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B
Yeah, what I do now is I run ARPEG and AR Operator. What we do is we help humans understand this technology, adopt this technology for them to reduce the boring and maybe even remove some of the boring work, the low cognitive work, so that we can focus on the high cognitive. I have ADHD hyperactivity. If it's not obvious yet, it'll be obvious, I guess throughout the podcast and when I realized that I could reduce this boring work and I could focus on high cognitive, it really, it started stimulating my mind so much that I really fell in love with it. And I said, you know, I'm going to help whoever I can and whatever business I can, I'm going to help them understand this technology, work with this technology, and do better with this technology. So that's what I do day to day. I wake up every morning and I'm like, how can I help teams operationalize AI? How can I help them love what they do and remove the friction, you know, which we all don't like, but we have. You know, every job has a big kind of part of the job is friction. It's admin, it's reporting is all this kind of stuff that we don't want to do. So I want people to do everything that they want and I want them not to do what they don't want to do. So that's kind of my goal. With, with AI, you talk to a
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A
lot of people and you probably hear a lot of what I'll call misconceptions when it comes to AI. What's some of the biggest ones that you seem to hear over and over again?
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B
There's a lot of fear and everybody's fearing and it's going to take over the jobs. I think that's, that's one of the biggest problems that we have. Is it a misconception? I think that it's two phase, right? I look at always at the fuller side of the glass, right? I want to look at the positive side of the glass and not on the empty side of the glass. So everybody says, you know, it's going to take over your job and so on. And it might take a lot of jobs. But then I wonder if those jobs should have been for humans who has this brain capability and has this high cognitive skill set, which is problem solving, thinking outside the box. AI, at the end of the day, it's a box. So I think that people are kind of fearful. This is really reducing the adoption. It's creating this barrier, it's creating this fear, as I mentioned. And everybody thinks, okay, well, let's just get some tools. Let's get subscription to ChatGPT Teams or Enterprise if you're more than 150 team members and they're like, okay, that's it, we got AI and we're going to work with AI. Yeah, well, that's not how it works. You know, we're gonna have to redesign how we work and I'm sure we're gonna talk a lot about this, but I think everybody's thinking, well, we got the tools, that's it, let's go. Right? And I think that's a misconception. And, and you know, I think that there's a lot of fear out there, but of course we have a better way to look at it.
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A
You know, it's funny because I think about any little hobby that I've ever gotten into. I remember getting one of these little cameras that you could attach to, like, a bike, you know what I mean? To do the outdoor action kind of stuff. And I had to buy all the little accessories and stuff, right? And I, like, needed the waterproof case, and I bought all the tools, and guess what? I never used the actual camera itself, right? So having all the tools doesn't mean anything if you don't actually have a plan, is that right?
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B
Or learn the skill. I think that's so funny because. So I just started boxing about six sessions ago, so I think that was about three or four weeks ago. And I bought some decathlon gloves, and they're like the cheapest end, you know, And I like tools, right? So I had one of my team members in Paris. Luckily, he brought over some of the best boxing gloves. And then now I have the best tools, you know, but it's. It's the practice. Yeah. And now it's like, you know, my pt, who's teaching me, who's coaching me in boxing, he's like, wow, great gloves, but let's practice, you know, and then. And then you start using these gloves. You're practicing like, oh, it's just. It's not just the gloves, right? I need to practice, I need to sweat, I need to learn, you know, the footwork. I need to learn all the combinations. I need to learn so much. And. And it's a whole change of how. How you move, right? So in boxing is you have to change how you move and how you. How you react to things and so on. So I think that this is the same thing. So it's not just the tool itself. It's good to have the best tools, for sure.
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A
I love that analogy. So when people properly train themselves and properly embrace AI, what is waiting for them on the other side? What is the upside? What's the benefits?
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B
I think there's so many upsides. I think that one of the upsides is, you know, especially if you're remote working, you know, since we got remote after Covid, you know, it was one of the best things that happened, but also one of the worst things that happened because don't have a team anymore in an office, you know, you don't have that. That thing. And what I'm going to say now is going to sound a bit weird for some people, but I do feel that AI is a colleague, is a friend. I'm not alone. You know, I have this intelligence next to me 24 7. Anytime I open my computer. And I want to do something. I have this intelligence and I can, you know, talk to it. Even with voice, I can get answers. So I think that it makes me feel much more with a colleague and doing something. So I think that the second thing that I love about, you know, being able to work with AI and I think the one of the biggest upsides is there are no tasks that I'm like, oh, I don't know how to do this, or, you know, I'm dreading this task. There are none of them. Because even if you don't know how to do data analysis, well, you have a data scientist, data analyst in your toolset. If you don't know how to do literally anything, you can just ask it. And this is where I think people struggle. They're like, well, where do I start? Well, ask it. Where do you start? You know, and it'll ask you a few questions and you'll just have a conversation. They'll be like, oh, okay, now I know how to do it. X, Y, Z. Right? And so I think that what's waiting for people on the upside is really you can do anything you want. We had, you know, the YouTube era, we had books, we had all this. But now you have this intelligence that can, you know, tell you how to do things, but it can also, most of the time, you can do most of it itself. You could say, okay, great, well, can you do that for me? And it'll do it, but just people are not asking those questions, so just go ahead and ask. I don't know where to stop. You know, can you help me and it'll help you.
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A
I love it. And I echo everything that you just said. AI has been a really big unlock for me. I have a creative bent that I do not get to exercise every day because I am a CEO and I've got a bunch of employees and I've got a lot of responsibilities, including doing this show. And it doesn't leave me a lot of creative time. But I love that I can go and I can because I've. I've practiced. Like you said, I put the gloves on and I've been boxing with AI for a while now, and I know how to effectively very quickly get it and me working together. And in the past I would have had to call up an employee and they weren't around, you know, now I can like creatively box with the AI and we're able to co create things together that I just simply could not do on my own. And it is a superpower. So There is a process that we're going to talk about today. And what I'd like to do is effectively ask you to answer this question. Where do we start? Because so many people that are listening right now are frankly just using the tool, you know what I mean? And maybe not even using it well. But there's a good structure and system that you've developed. So I'd love to ask you, where do we begin in our trek, if you will, to become really super enhanced with AI?
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B
Well, I just want to echo what you said. First of all, I think these are superpowers. You get superpowers. We have, we all, all can get these superpowers. And I think also I love what you said. This is co creat creation. This is human plus AI. This is not just AI. This is not just a human. And you said it yourself, you can do things greater than what you could do on your own. Right? So I think that's very important. And how I recommend and how we've been doing it, it's to first of all, align. This is, this is definitely a mindset alignment. This is you, your team. This is really, you know, which models are you using, which apps do you have access to make sure that you're, you're aligning, that you have a vision, you have a why, why are you going to use work with AI? Why are you going to adopt a ChatGPT or Claude or whatever tool? And how are you going to do that? I think the discovery and assessment, even assess yourself. What do you like? How do you like to work? Because if you do know these things, you can align with AI, you can align with the large language model that you're going to be working with and everybody might have a separate or a different type of LLM or a different LLM that they might prefer. And I think this comes from alignment, you know, discovering these tools, these large language models and aligning with them and also with your teams, as I mentioned, with all the humans that you're working with as well.
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A
For people that maybe don't know their why because maybe they're being told that they've got to embrace it. What are some tips that you can help people, maybe questions they should ask themselves in order to get to the core of the why.
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B
This is a tough one. We all can find our why, and we've all got into some jobs because of sometimes reasons of taking care of our kids and, you know, and paying bills. And maybe it's not our why, you know, maybe we're not working on on the thing that we want to. But there's a very big chance that there is a percentage of that job that, that you love. Right. And I think that this is it. You know, how can you do more of that? I think AI can help you do more of that and less of the other things that you don't like about that job. And then suddenly you can love your job. Right. So I think that there is a very big chance there. And I think for people is really to understand, to write down, you know, what they're doing day to day, weekly, and see even in their calendar. You know, that classic thing is like marking your calendars. The green areas where you enjoy to do and the reds where you don't enjoy to do. I'm sure there's going to be some. Even if you have an admin focused job role, there's a chance that you like to read the letters from the clients. Or let's say this is a crazy example that I'm just coming with. But you don't like the rest of the work. It's like, okay, well, how can I now work with AI to remove that and really read more of those letters or whatever that is. Right. I know you love copywriting and there's a very big chance you're not going to let AI do the copywriting, but it's going to potentially help you research because you don't like to research, maybe. Right. So I think understanding these things and then being able to, I think going to the next step, it's going to be how do you develop, how do you train, how do you upskill? And that's what we're going to talk about, I'm guessing, because that's how we do things.
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A
Yeah. Before we go there, I just want to say a couple things. First of all, as someone who is a writer, my why is to become a better writer. Even though I have written a book on writing and I used to have a career where I was very well known in the writing world, I've actually used AI to allow me to develop my craft in such a way that I'm even more persuasive in the messages that I create. That's allowed me to go from what I thought was a really good writer to answer excellent writer. And now what I'm doing is I'm using AI to do the painful part, which is actually taking my words and structuring them in the right way, where I come up with the idea and then AI helps me structure it in a way that is highly persuasive. And then I become the editor of that work, which for me is no less time consuming, but results in a much better output. Now the other thing you talked about, beyond the why, and I do believe that a strong why would be to do more of what you love and do what you don't love faster. I also think the vision piece that you mentioned is really important. Vision requires us to think into the future and ask ourselves, where do I want to be? For those of you that are self employed or own businesses or are the CEO or whatever, where do you want your business to be? For those of you that lead divisions, where do you want them to be? Without vision, you're just going to be chasing small incremental changes, right? But if you have vision and then you have a why, you can work towards that vision. And I think that vision is one of those really, really strong things. And with AI at my company, the vision is to have all of my employees embrace AI to basically better perform at their job. That's the vision, right? We want everyone to get better at their job, which is going to help the objective of the company. That's the vision, right. And I think that having that is important. What's your thoughts on that?
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B
Absolutely. I'd like to add something to that because I think that most of the time when we have the vision is we're looking at what's going to change, right. And I think you're going to have a tough time because things are changing all the time and we don't really know like it's changing so much. But I found a new way of looking at things and vision and like looking at the future is like, what's not going to change? Like what are the things that are going to stay the same or quite similar. Right. In real life experiences, I think that we all going to still, you know, look for human connection. We're still going to go to restaurants, we're still going to go to hotels. We're still going to want. In real life experiences, if you start looking at even in your job, what's not going to change, I think it's easier to think about that and then have a vision than thinking about, oh, what's going to change? Because everything can change. I think that there's, there's going to be perma change is perma change now is 80, 90% is going to change. There's going to be very little that it might not change. And maybe if you focus on that, you're going to have a better time and you Said it, it's like, how can I make my job better? How can I make my career better, how can I make my business better? You know, how can I just be better as a person as well? I think that AI is really helping a lot, not just on business tasks, but is helping a lot on personal tasks as well.
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A
Perfect. So when we start with this concept of aligning the use of AI with some sort of a personal or business objective and maybe reinforcing some sort of vision that you already have for yourself or your business, that's going to be a powerful fuel to encourage you through this next step. So you already mentioned the word develop, so go ahead and like, let's elaborate on that a little bit. What do you mean by develop?
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B
I do believe that as we have this vision, right, of maybe what's not going to change and where we want to go and how do we want to get better, there's going to be a development plan, right? You should have a development plan. You want to change or you want to optimize or improve or learn new capabilities. This is where the superpowers comes in, right. So I think capability development is crucial here. Upskilling, relearning, how to work. We are redesigning how we work. So there's going to be a lot on the development side. So I think that curiosity is a very important one here. If you're curious, you're going to have a great time. And I have a little exercise that I think I had mentioned before. I forget it. It's a prompt, It's a human prompt, by the way. It's not a AI prompt. It sucks that, right? It sucks that. And then answer like it sucks that. What, what sucks in your job? What sucks in your. And then if you start understanding what sucks, that's the kind of thing that you're going to want to learn and develop, to automate or learn to do faster. As you were saying. I think I really love what you said because it doesn't mean that you're going to be able to reduce or remove, but you might be able to do it faster. That five hour reporting might become 30 minutes of reporting. So I think as you do the exercise, it sucks that. And you know, get a pen and a paper because I think that it's a great exercise with a pen and paper and think it sucks. And you'll see that there's a lot of things that sucks about what we do, right? And as you write those things down, you'll be like, oh, and you might even, you know, if you, if you work with the AI a little bit and you write this down, you'll be like, oh, wow, this sucks. Why am I doing that? Because you already know that. You know one of the tools that you have that has an integration to that platform and you don't even have to log in anymore and go and find that information because you can ask the AI to go and fetch that information for you. And you're like, oh, I never thought about this one. Right? So you will have these wow moments and aha moments yourselves. And I think that, you know, I could do all the training, I could do all the behavior change, but I think that the best is when people figure these aha moments and these wow moments themselves.
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A
You know, it's, it's fascinating because like, just to give some people some examples, it sucks that I write and spend a lot of time on like a post for LinkedIn and nobody sees it. Right? That's a great example. And you know what? I trained AI on how to help me dial in those hooks because I'm not very good at hooks, you know what I mean? So now I can actually write the whole darn thing and then have AI critically analyze the first 250 characters, which is the part that's seen first before the more here, right? And now I don't have to say that as much anymore because now I can work with the AI and like really tweak in those first couple of words, right? Or it sucks that I forget to add testimonials to emails is another example, right? Well, guess what? I trained AI to do that for me, right? So now AI looks at it and finds the best testimonial from the hundreds of testimonials that we've got. So I would imagine you've got some of your excite that you could share as well. Like, but this is examples of how this stuff can help you, right?
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Absolutely. I think you've given great personal examples. I'd like to give a business example, if I may.
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Yeah, let's hear it.
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I think that this was a great challenge that I had especially that was the early days of my company. It feels like it's been a long time, but it was 16 months ago or so and we had about, we had a client with about 70 people, but they had about 35 people, sales teams. And none of the salespeople actually liked the report. And they were taking about 15 hours a month to report because they were, they were an agency, they work with clients. So they had, and they have multiple clients and they have to report, they have to create slide decks and spreadsheets and all that kind of stuff. And. And if they didn't do the exercise of it sucks that they would have just continued. But when they realized that, they're like, you know what? I love to sell, but I think it sucks that I have to do this reporting. I don't like it. And we're like, oh, okay, this is a great exercise. Right? Okay, how can we reduce that? Right? So we're able to reduce that from 15 hours to an hour just by having integrations to a Salesforce platform with back then, just the ChatGPT custom GPT that had custom actions would bring those numbers and would fill up spreadsheets, you know, and actually not spreadsheets, but it would give you the CSV. Because back then it couldn't even do that proper, like spreadsheet stuff. But it could just gather, right SQL, gather the data. And that was taking a long time. You know, just going to Salesforce, doing all those queries, finding all that information, exporting that, putting it together and so on. And they were able to do this in 14 hours less a month. And when you calculate that 35 times 14, that's huge time savings. And that could just be time savings. And then you don't use that time wisely. But when you have salespeople that love to sell, they might be like, like, oh, I have more time to call more clients, to show up to more doors and to send more emails and you can sell more. Suddenly it's not just the time savings, but now it's also a potential on higher revenue generation, you know, So I think that this was also. This is a very old example. I, I love to always give this example because I think it was quite a good example. But now the capabilities of the tools that we have in our hands are even better than this, where you could say every Friday or every end of the month, go fill up this PowerPoint, this presentation with the data from Salesforce and with the data from our project management platform. And it can do this automatically. And everybody's gonna be like, how do I know? I trust it. And it's like, well, first of all, run it 10 times and make sure that those 10 times you're on top of it. And then you're checking everything. And when you see that it's really good, you won't have to check it again because it's not the LLM, the large language model, the AI that needs to do all the job. Large language models are non Deterministic. They can make mistakes, which is hallucinations, but they can write perfect code, right? They're great at code writing now, so they can write incredible Python scripts to do those calculations, to create those reports. And that's a fully deterministic. So the second you understand that deterministic side that is created by the non deterministic model and you can polish like, you can tweak that until it becomes that well oiled machine that keeps repeating good output, then here you go. You potentially have removed completely that reporting. So I think that's very important for us to think about the capabilities that we have in our hands today.
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A
Every year the gap widens. The marketers who understand AI are pulling ahead, creating better content faster, automating strategic work and delivering results their competitors Simply can't match. 2026 could be your best year ever because you finally embraced AI. Now you're listening to this podcast, but why not join us for two days of systematic mastery at AI Business World, April 29th and 30th in Anaheim, California. Here's what Melanie Miller told us. Quote, the AI teaching was mind blowing. I'm so far ahead of so many people that claim to do what I do because Michael Stelzner only brings the best class to teach, unquote. Here's what sets apart this from random tutorials and scattered learning, which I know we all use. You're going to get complete workflows, not isolated tips, strategic frameworks that connect everything, implementation plans you can execute immediately and 20 sessions dedicated to build comprehensive AI mastery. These are the best of the best that I have recruited. By the end of the event, you'll have all the AI skills that took others years of random implementation to figure out literally at your fingertips. The gap is widening. Which side are you going to be on? Learn more at AI BusinessWorld Live. Grab your tickets today at AIBusinessWorld Live. Excellent. Okay, so just to help people understand where we're at, we are opening up a framework that will allow either you or someone you know, or someone you manage, or groups of people you manage to ultimately become super enhanced with AI. It starts with, with alignment, which involves understanding your vision and your why and the models and apps that you have access to. And then we went into develop and develop involves training yourself or training people. And in particular, the key question to ask yourself or anyone else to understand. Kind of where you want to go with this is it sucks that when you ask this question then you come up with all sorts of potential, for lack of better words, use cases or Applications where AI can come to assist. Right. Am I missing anything before we move on to the next part?
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No, I think you said. I think that's the first. And the alignment is all about that, but it's about mindset. It's about making sure. Because this is definitely a mindset change. This is a big shift, you know, and it's going to be huge shift. It's already started to be a massive shift. It's going to get, you know, tougher for a lot of people. So we got to make sure that our mindset is ready to also shift. You said that in line. And develop is definitely, you know, I'll put it under capability development. And that could be not just training, but that could be also, you know, gathering certain tools or gathering certain technologies and building custom GPTs or whatever. Right. Because I think that's also development. Right. Not just the human part, but the AI part might need some development and some capability development as well.
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A
Ah, okay. That's an important distinction. So the word under development, we could develop solutions for lack of better words to this. It sucks that thing. Right. So if it sucks that then you can ask AI to help you solve for that. Right. Which might involve using the existing tools or bringing in third party tools and ultimately doing some of that work, which we've talked about extensively with other podcast episodes. And we're more in framework mode right now. So we've got yet the next step, which what is next, by the way? I'd love to hear from you on that.
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B
Yeah. So we've done align, develop and we're going to operationalize. We're going to operationalize those skills, we're going to operationalize those agents or those workflows. Because developing things, proof of concepts and pilots, I think every company does. And what was it, 95 of all pilots fail or something like that. That was a McKinsey, I think report from last year.
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A
Was that specifically AI pilots or just pilots in general?
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B
I think pilots in general, but I think the statistics was from AI pilots because I think those are the things I only check these days. So it was AI. 95% of all AI pilots pilot purgatory. Right. They all fail. So only 5% works. And I think that's because we don't operationalize them. You know, we don't integrate them, we don't deploy them with a plan. I think even the training comes back. It's like, you know, you're going to deploy it, but you got to make sure that those people knows how to work with that technology. That they have access to it. They know if it's features, they know how the work has been redesigned and how to show up again today, because today is a new day. Yesterday was an old day. Because in AI, every week or every day almost, things can change. We get models sometimes, sometimes just 15 minutes ahead of each other, you know, we get a model, we're like, oh, that's the best model. And then 15 minutes later we have another best model, you know, so. So that, that is important. And I think that's mainly it's implementation. Operationalize is implementation, integrate, deploy, implement, make sure it's working.
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A
Well, let's talk about this. Like, how do we go about doing this? Because there's a lot here, obviously we can unpack.
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I think there, there are so many easy ways, right? I think, you know, if I would say Claude code, but maybe we can come back to that after Cowork. Claude. Claude is by Anthropic, is a competitor of OpenAI. And I believe that in work today, Claude is potentially the best.
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I double down. I mean, I'm with you. I actually am extremely impressed with Claude.
- [30:26]
B
Yeah, I think when we talk about SOPs, standard operating procedures systems, when we talk about work, real business work and real work, I think that Claude is the best option. So Claude is a chat. You can chat. It's like ChatGPT, right? But they have cloud cowork. Cloud Cowork, as the name says, is to work with, right? To collaborate and to work together. And that comes from cloud code and cloth code. I think, as we were saying when we first met, is that cloud code can be a bit daunting and scary for a lot because there is the word code in it. And I think that was the worst thing that Anthropic did. They called it cloud code and everybody thought, oh, it's just for coders. And when I tell people I'm not like, use cloud code, you know, work with cloud code, try it. And then I. I'm not a coder. I'm like, I wasn't either, actually, I wasn't. I think I am now. But cloud code made me actually much more technical because it taught me, you know, actually happy birthday, cloud code. Because it's the first year anniversary of Claude, I think today, today or yesterday. So I'd say I'd want to say happy birthday to cloud code if. If he, she or whatever it is listening. It really made me a better CEO. It made me a better developer that I wasn't. So Claude's cowork, the name is Better Cowork. It's actually cloud code, the same capabilities, which is very powerful. Like, I think that when I first kind of started to work with Cloth codes, it was okay, but I think three, four months later I said, if there was AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, and we all talk about AGI, if AGI was coming, this is the first glimpse of it, I think that is so proactive. It thinks and asks you things and prompts you to do something that you didn't even think about. And you're like, does this feel like AGI, Artificial General Intelligence? I think it did.
- [32:13]
A
Let's talk about Claude Cowork, because Claude Cowork is relatively new and I have had a fair number of people talk about cloud code, and a couple people mentioned Cloud Cowork, but I personally have not tried it yet. So if you've tried it, what has been the experience?
- [32:32]
B
Yeah, I mean, I tried now and then, but I am obsessed about Cloth Code and Cloth Cowork. It's a UI version. It's a version of Cloth Code with some user interface. It doesn't have the exact powers of it, but it has more than enough power for 90% of daily work, of knowledge work. And Cowork is, you know, I think it's going to be incredible. By the way, Cowork was fully built in a couple weeks by Cloth Code. Right. So Cloth Code actually wrote the whole 100% code for cowork. Mind blowing. Like when you, you know, when you think about this and early days, it was a bit. I don't know, it was still a bit buggy. But today I think I tried it again and it does really good work.
- [33:13]
A
Like, what can it do? Help people understand how it works, just so they can visualize it.
- [33:17]
B
Yeah, I think that's the great thing about Cowork is that you can decide on which folder you want it to work. Which with crude code, it could be scary because when you work on the terminal, it's on your computer, it can do crazy stuff, Right? But it's when it's in Cowork, it's sandboxed. So you choose which folder you want to work in. You have a marketing folder, you click on your marketing folder, it takes the context, and then you say, all right, well, I want to work on my next newsletter. And in that folder, in that marketing folder, you might have already some articles that you wrote from last week that you want to promote in this week's newsletter, and you might hopefully have a writing guideline in that folder. Right. In that same folder. And then you say, let's write next week's newsletter. And with cowork, you can also have these things called skills, right? So actually they're underneath this thing called plugins. There's commands, skills and connectors. I think we'll get too technical, but let me just say connectors are integrations to different platforms, right? To your Slack, to whatever, to your email and so on. Skills are processes, their SOPs, their standard operating procedures. They're step by step, they're documents. They're by the way, they're text documents. They're markdown. Markdown. It's a text document. They're step one, go do this. Step two, good, go do that. So you can design these and you can have commands on how to launch these. You know, it could be weekly marketing commands, it could be monthly marketing commands, and according to the command, it could be pulling in skills and connectors. And now it knows like, okay, I did forward slash newsletter, right? Commands are with forward slash. And in cowork you say, all right, well, I want to call in actually this skill by putting this command, the skill comes in and the skill says, all right, well, I'm going to write the newsletter with you. And potentially in that skill you have 10 questions. Hey, what was the things that you wrote? I found in the folder that you wrote two articles in the past week. Would you like me to promote these in the newsletter? You're like, yeah, great, but tell them about this. That was a difficult article. I hope everybody likes whatever you add your own takes. And it says, okay, well I have the connector to go check your platform, your newest favorite website, right? To go and check about the news according to your industry for the past week. So it can scan and it has something called clothing Chrome. So Chrome, Google Chrome is your browser. Hopefully it's your favorite browser to work because I think it's, it's the top browser for work. And what it can do, you can say, all right, well, I'm going to open up that site, I'm going to go in, I'm going to scrape, I'm going to read. And it does it like a human. It actually opens a tab, it goes through that and then brings that information and says, hey, Tim, you know, I got that information for this week's newsletter according to my skills. And these are the news I think we should put on the newsletter, right? So you're co working together because it went and research, it brought it to you, it asks you and then you put a bit of your feedback. You're like, oh, Great. Yeah, I do love that news. I saw it myself. And so on. And you have a bit of chat and then you go to the next step. Right. So maybe a newsletter will take you five hours now. It's going to take you about 15, 20 minutes because you already designed that skill, you already designed that process. And you have these capabilities of having these connectors, having clothing, Chrome and so on. And inside this chat, it's still a chat. You know, Claude has a chat, but has clothed co work, still has a chat, but it has these extra powers that we mentioned, the commands, the skills and the connectors. And you're able to complete that task by co working with this technology. And behind this platform, behind this tool, there are these incredible large language models like Opus 4.6 or Sonet 4.6 today. Wow.
- [36:51]
A
So is it safe to assume that if you work in the cloud, because most of us have all of our stuff in the cloud, like for example, if we're using Google Docs or Microsoft, whatever their cloud services are, that you can give Cowork access to those things so it can go out and do all that stuff. Is that fair to assume?
- [37:08]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, connectors are great, but Claude in chrome can do 90% of what a human can do on a Chrome browser.
- [37:17]
A
Wow. So it could open up my Asana projects and document them and everything. Wow. Okay. A lot of people are like, wow. Like, I'm actually thinking about my director of editorial who uses Claude, but probably doesn't use Cowork. They can go out there and collect all the news for her and write the whole part of our newsletter.
- [37:34]
B
Wow. Dang.
- [37:36]
A
This is crazy.
- [37:37]
B
Absolutely. Clothing Chrome has a Chrome extension and you can open up clothes on your browser and still do the same thing, but when you do it from Cowork, you're inside this chat in Cowork, and it goes does that job and comes back while you're potentially writing something else, doing something else. Right. But not funny enough. Today my team members here and I showed them that his, like, I don't think many people knows this. I was like, I know. You know, many more people should know Claude in Chrome.
- [38:05]
A
Yeah, that's crazy.
- [38:06]
B
Please go check it out.
- [38:07]
A
Okay, so under operationalize, which is what we've talked about, really, you could use powerful tools like Claude code if you're super technical, or Claude Cowork if you're not, to effectively get the AI to not just do one little thing like craft or edit a post for me, but to actually get it to kind of work. An entire workflow is really what I'm hearing you say. Is that correct?
- [38:31]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And this is why we in this, I think it's important before we move to the next step, we have an innovation competition. And you can run an innovation competition inside your company, inside your teams. And an innovation competition could mean to find a very cool way to work with cowork. Right. To be able to use clothing Chrome and reduce that five hours of a newsletter to 30 minutes could win an innovation competition. And innovation competitions creates this friendly competition between teams and individuals and they come up with some incredible stuff. You know, like when I think about the things that people come up with, it's just like you might have never thought about those things.
- [39:11]
A
Love everything you've been saying, Tim. So what's next?
- [39:14]
B
Well, we've done align, develop. We've operationalized everything. Now we're gonna practice. We have to form the habit. We have to make sure that we remember where things are and how to do things. And we got to keep practicing it. So habit formation, validation, you know, making sure that as we do it, it gets better as well. And then we validate the, the quality of it is very important. And then also starting to understand where is the value lying in and like making sure that we do some value capture. And we're like, oh, okay, this works really well. Let me keep practicing this way of doing this and making sure that other team members knows as well. Right. I think why we're practicing is not just individually. If you're especially a little bit of a bigger team, you want to share these things across as well to make sure that everybody knows, oh, you know, Mike did it this way. It was really cool. I never imagined that doing it this way. Let me practice that myself. Oh, next week I come in. Mike, that's how you were doing that newsletter. That's awesome. You know, that helped me do so much. Our clients emails and learning from each other I think is very important in practicing as well.
- [40:15]
A
Well, love it. What's next?
- [40:17]
B
Yeah, right away. I think that's this is it. Like we're coming towards the end and this is transform. So we've aligned, we develop, we operationalize, we're practice and now we're transforming. So how do we sustain this, this whole thing that we just went through? Right. Sustained transformation, you know, the sustainability and how to scale. Maybe a small team of 10 people did this, but how can a team of 100 do it? And I think that this is where governance comes in. This is where, where the rules comes in and you know, governance is basically just a set of rules and so on and how you're gonna work with these tools. What information can you put in where what you can't put. You know, make sure it's your company workspace, not your personal because this happens all the time. People like don't realize they're in their personal workspace and they put client information, but their company workspace is enterprise and has certain great privacy and security settings but their personal ones doesn't. So I think that we're bringing everything to make sure that the whole transformation is coming in and it's becoming now packaged and it has a way of being sustained and being able to scale because the technology is going to change, it's going to improve, new things are going to come in. So you definitely want to have a plan to keep going because this is not. You can't just run. Adopt, adopt once. You're going to keep, keep iterating on this and you're going to keep massaging it.
- [41:38]
A
Love it. I'm going to go back to the practice part a little bit.
- [41:42]
B
Yeah.
- [41:42]
A
You have developed some really cool little tips and shortcuts that you have applied to your own self. I'd love you to share some of the, some of the voice, especially the voice related stuff that you've been doing
- [41:52]
B
because I love that stuff. Yeah, this is the crazy because today I was showing it to somebody and I use Aqua Voice, which is a dictation tool and you can use I think Whisper flow. A lot of people use whisper flow and now it's called flow. Maybe you have super Whisper. You have so many of these and I realized that I'm much faster but also I'm much more natural. Like when we talk, you know, I mean you're a writer so I'm sure you write great. But when I write I make so many errors and then I have to go back and delete and come back and you know, and your thoughts are gone and you're like, I think it limits your thoughts. But when you speak to the machine, like literally talk to it, I have a shortcut, you know, it's, it's the function key. If I single tap and hold it, I can, can talk to it and I don't see the transcription, but if I tap twice on function, it gets locked and I can leave it and I can just talk. And I see my transcript and I'm talking, I'm like, oh, I'm telling about, you know, our Q2 strategy and what we're going to do and what we did this month and what we're going to do next month. And. And I'm like, as I speak, I get more excited, and there's so much coming in my brain, on my brain, and I'm like, wow, putting it into words and. And talking to this thing, and suddenly it's like. Like, potentially, that took me 30 minutes to write all of that, but it took me eight to 10 minutes to talk about those things. And AI is great at then making sense of your ramblings. You know, I ramble a lot, but AI is great at fixing that and be like, oh, I get what you want to do in Q2. I understand what you did this month and what you want to do next month and what you want to do in Q2. Let me put in a plan for you. And like, in minutes, you get a plan like, oh, that's my ramblings, you know, and it's so clear in front of you suddenly. So I think that them also. I don't think we were meant to work on a desk with this keyboard. You know, I'm showing my keyboard here. I have a standing desk, luckily. Yeah.
- [43:42]
A
You think about the fact that we're communicating through our fingers. Like, that is not the way it used to be before there were computers, right?
- [43:48]
B
Yeah, exactly. And. And they were just designed this way. But now with. With AI and. And dictation, we're going in a different place. I've heard about offices where they have these tiny mics and everybody just talking to the mics, and they're talking to their AIs, and their AIs are doing a lot of tasks. And I do this all the time. I do it on my computer, but I do it on my phone. I just dictate something. It goes into an AI, does something and says, oh, I've done that thing for you. I'm like, oh, great. I was just getting into bed and I just had suddenly an idea. Instead of opening, you know, a desktop or anything like that, I just send the voice note. And I know that in the morning that's going to be fully strategized. For me, I think this is very important. Aquavoice is my favorite, but there's more. Many, you know, there's many out there. I think that's very important. And learn shortcuts, you know, be very good at shortcuts. Where is your clothes? Where's your cloth cowork? Where is your aqua voice? Where is your raycast? It's another tool. I don't want to bombard people with tools. But you know, when you learn these shortcuts on your keyboard, if you are on your keyboard you can call these things so rapidly and then you potentially have these key the shortcuts on your iPhone, on your, on your mobile devices. But I think the dictation, the voice thing as you mentioned, okay.
- [44:55]
A
People are like, ask them about Raycast. Just give us the quick skinny on what the heck Raycast is.
- [45:00]
B
Yeah. So yeah, Raycast is a great tool. I think that it helped me be a much faster searcher of whatever's in my computer and whatever is in the Internet because I switch my Spotlight. Spotlight is the Mac search. Right. So when we do command space we have this Apple Spotlight and you can find files I think they just updated. It's a little bit better. You can look at shortcuts now or whatever automation workflows, whatever it's called called. But Raycast is data balanced steroids. It can call in all your large language models into that little search bar. So you can send it to any of your large language models. Yeah, you can let it go and search something online and bring you 10 results from 10 different pages on your Spotlight in your search. You could do so much. I even use it, I do at Spotify, play cool jazz and then I don't even have to go to Spotify, find the jazz album and then, and then play the, the jazz playlist. This, it just does itself, you know, and that saves me maybe what, three, four minutes, five minutes. But it saves you so much space in your head that four or five minutes and the jazz starts playing much faster. And I don't lose my vibe, you know. You know, I amplify my vibe with that jazz playlist at my fingertips, you know, and this is just an example. It has many other. I can send you a WhatsApp message from there without opening WhatsApp or Telegram or emails or Google Calendar. I can say hey, hey, find the time with Mike tomorrow for 30 minutes. And it goes, it opens my Google Calendar. It potentially can send you an email if we're not in the same Google workspace. And it's going to do all this stuff and it's going to find the time. So it's like lots of agentic things is also inside this, this Spotlight. I switched it two years ago, my Apple Spotlight and I've never looked back.
- [46:43]
A
Tim Kakir, thank you first of all so much for going down some rabbit trails with me. And it was absolutely fascinating. Some of the stuff we talked about, if folks want to connect with you on the socials, where is the best way and if they potentially want to work with you, where do you want to send them?
- [46:59]
B
Yeah, I think that our website first of all arpada.com but also find me on LinkedIn, find me on YouTube. I share everything that I know, that I test, that I fail at all my learnings and failures and all that is on YouTube as well. I have a free newsletter you can find on my LinkedIn as well and check out my company if you have team members that you want to help with this transformation.
- [47:20]
A
Awesome. AI Tim, thank you again for sharing your insights with us today.
- [47:24]
B
Thank you so much for having me. It was an awesome chat.
- [47:26]
A
If you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@social mediaexaminer.com a99 Be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcast app and if you've been a listener for a little while, we would love a review. Let your friends know about this show and do check out my other show, the Social Media Marketing Podcast. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored podcast. I'm your host Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful. The AI Explored Podcast is a production
- [47:58]
B
of Social Media Examiner.
- [48:03]
A
What if you could get year round AI training? That's exactly what's waiting for you with our AI Business Society. To learn more, visit socialmediaexaminer.com AI.