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Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools
Can Artificial Intelligence Give You More Capacity with Adriana Torres
00:27:30
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- [00:00]
A
Can artificial intelligence give you more capacity? Let's find out with today's special guest, Adriana Torres. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast where we make AI simple, practical and accessible for small business owners and leaders. Forget the complicated tech talk or expensive consultants. This is where you'll learn how to implement AI strategies that are easy to understand and can make a big impact for your business. The Artificial Intelligence Podcast is brought to you by Fraction aio, the trusted partner for AI Digital Transformation. At Fraction aio, we help small and medium sized businesses boost boost revenue by eliminating time wasting non revenue generating tasks that frustrate your team. With our custom AI bots, tools and automations, we make it easy to shift your team's focus to the tasks that matter most, driving growth and results. We guide you through a smooth, seamless transition to AI, ensuring you avoid costly mistakes and invest in the tools that truly deliver value. Don't get left behind. Let fraction AIO help you stay ahead in today's AI driven world. Learn more and get started. Fraction aio.com Adrian, I'm so glad you're here because capacity is this really interesting term that for some reason a lot of companies think that they need to get capacity externally. But capacity is an internal word. Most times use it. A battery's capacity is how much capacity is inside the battery. Never think this battery needs more capacity. Let's do something from the outside, let's drill into it or make it bigger. So let's start from there. What's a definition or what does it really mean when we think about capacity in our careers or capacity at work or capacity in our companies?
- [01:39]
B
Yes, that's a great question because there are a lot of things that are happening right now that really are making us look a little bit more in depth into that concept. And to me, capacity is the ability to optimize and better use you your resources. Right? They could be your time, for example. Their personal resources could be your time, your energy, your money, the use of your talent and also your material, your products, your systems, your processes. Right, the process revention, my coaching business is about the processes and you can actually build more capacity into your processes. So I think that's, that's at least the concept for me. I find that capacity touches up a lot of processes in our lives. It's not only about business, it's not only about work, is also personally and also creating that capacity for ourselves to go pursue our passions, to live our purpose, to feel like a more enjoyable kind of life, to be more fulfilled in the life that in the experience of life that we choose. So it touches up a lot of things. And I think that it's good to focus on that much more now than ever because a lot of times we don't realize that we can build incapacity from within, from our processes, from our systems.
- [02:58]
A
So there's something I find really interesting, which is like when people focus on efficiency, they spend so much time getting efficient that nothing gets done. They develop, they have a bullet journal and they have this and everything's super organized. And I sometimes follow that process. And I see this happening right now a lot with artificial intelligence, which is that we grab a tool because we think it's going to solve all of our problems and we ignore that There is a learning curve and different tools have different learning curves. I use several different image generators. For example, one of them, I got a great image on the first try. The other one took like months to get a good, to get good at it. It's much more powerful, more complicated. And there's a trade off, like complexity for power means longer learning curve. So we see entrepreneurs all the way through larger corporations adopting tools and expecting to get the result. Increase capacity on day one, when actually you have a while you're figuring out the tool and you're working out the kinks and figuring out, wait, this is not. This works for us, this doesn't. And then eventually you get the increased capacity. But there's that initial dip. And I see especially when companies or teams grab like a bunch of tools at once, there's such a dip. They go, the AI is the worst. It's making everything worse. How, what's. What I want to get into, which I love that you brought it first, is actually processes. This is something so critical. When I deal with clients and they want something done, they say, what's your current process? We'll accelerate it. They go, we don't have a process that's much different. You have to build a process and then accelerate. You have to build a car before you build a faster car. Yeah, very different. And that's something that's really critical, which is systems and processes. Let's dive into that and why they're so important. Why it's so important to be systematic about the way you do things and how to develop more efficient or processes that give you more capacity.
- [04:43]
B
Yeah, that's such an important question to answer. Right. And I'm sure that different people are going to answer it differently. I think that maybe 20 years ago I will have answered that question completely differently than Now. And the reason is because now I know the tools that really are going deeper into the process and deciding what really in this process is adding value, right? What is serving the purpose of what we are doing? And a lot of people just have this situation that they are working for a process that not necessarily is serving them well, right? And that's the thing that I want to do. I want to turn those tables to the other side. So we definitely need to look into our processes. And if we don't have a process, as you said, we have to create one and build up from there. We cannot think that I just want to wait until I know that I'm ready to create the most perfect process ever. That's never going to happen. And when we create the processes, there are a few things that we have to answer first. Why are we doing this? Are we creating this process? What is the purpose of what we're trying to do? How do we get to the end result? Because what I have learned through the experience of working with lean continuous improvement tools and methodology and also with people when they are applying this into their operations, is that if you don't pay attention first to what you want to do, how you want to do it, and why you want to do it, I think that the process is going to become something that is going to cause friction for you and for your operations and for your employees and ultimately for your customer. So, again, that's why I really dive so much deeper into the process. Because if you don't understand what you have today, which is what we call the current state, you're going to. You're not going to be able to be aware of the gap, how you get to the future desired state. And it all starts with the process. Is the process really serving you? Is there a better way to optimize it? And what is the purpose of this process? What purpose does it serve? What is the value that you want to get out of it? Those are important questions that you need to answer first.
- [06:47]
A
The first phase, or like the first challenge with process is a lot of people, they build a business on their own, they're a solopreneur, early entrepreneur, and they don't realize how important process is until you make that first hire. And they say, here's what I want you to do. And they go, okay, what's the steps? And you go, this. I just do it. And you. When you don't develop the skill of designing a process or dividing an sop, then you don't have the ability to pass it on. Very well. You start to realize that when you explain it, steps are missing. And it's so important to actually develop the skill of going, okay, what did I do? What are the steps I followed? And this took me a long time to figure out because you, you see this when you hire your first gain, you go, great, manage my social media. And you don't know what the steps are and they don't know what the metrics of success are. So what's a good job? What's a bad job? This many followers is good. This many followers is bad. This is a growth directory. So if you don't have like the goal, then a person can't self assess. So they don't know what to do and they don't know if they've hit it and you end up. That's why everyone almost always hires their first fires, their first VA or the first assistant, because they actually failed as the hire, not the person. They didn't give them those metrics, those tools. And I find that when you start to record yourself doing something, you see so many inefficiencies. So if I record myself doing a process, I have to delete so many little steps. And that's when you, that's the first step of optimizing when you actually watch what you do. This is why athletes record themselves. You go, this is what I do. How can I make this faster? What are the things that are slower? And there's so many little things that I've developed. Like I have a folder on my computer that if I put an image in, it adds a blue border. And I was like, cause I do that all the time. I was, I manually done it thousands of times. Right? When you're putting an image on your blog, I go, why am I doing this manually? Or optimizing an image, like compressing an image or converting it from PNG to jpg, things that I do over and over again. I was like, I need a better process or naming files. It starts with self observation. And that can be very challenging because you go how you have this. It's like it used to be before we had automation with cars. One person will build the whole car from scratch. And then when you started thinking, no, we want to do a conveyor belt and have different people at different stages. We have to be very systemized. We have to put the car, the wheels on in the same order every time. You can't do things in a different order or be emotionally driven. And that's really a challenge for someone who's going, oh, My gosh, I need to develop processes. What's the best way to be self reflective, to go, okay, what do I actually do? How can I see what my process is before I can even optimize it?
- [09:17]
B
Yes, that's a great question too. And I would like to touch up a little bit on this capacity and processes with AI as well. But to answer your question is you have to define what you're trying to do and you have to define what is the purpose of what you're trying to do, what's the value that you want to give. Right. First of all, because again, the process is going to, hopefully is going to be designed to help you do that and keep on doing that, helping you keep on doing that at a more improved way, in a more improved way. You realize, you notice that I have done this a thousand of times manually. Why do I have to do it like this? I create a template and I automate this and these different things. Like I, I produce my own videos, I have a video app. And what I realized is for this particular things that I'm doing on repetitive, I just create a template, I can add some leaded elements, but let's make it granular, let's make it modular. And when you start thinking in a modular way, I think that helps you also to create processes in a way that is easier. Right? Because you want to go through the flow. There is a tool in continuous improvement that is called the value stream mapping. And it's really telling you what are you trying to do, what are you doing from the start, from the raw material all the way to the end product, what are the things that you're noticing in there that maybe need to be shifted a little bit. And it's not about a huge overhaul. People think that, oh my God, making improvement to a process is, let's start from scratch. Not so much you can start from a scratch if you never did it, but once you do it, there is certain methodology, there's certain standard way that you do it that can be built into it. And by the way, those ways can also be improved. So it's a beautiful thing that with little things that you're doing along the way, you're detecting, as you said, the areas where there's slowness, the areas where you can go faster, the areas where you can do little tweaks. And I think that if you are trying to look at specialized people, sometimes that is a drawback because that's a single point of failure. You want to be able to train people in different things. You want to be able to get certain level of specialty, but at the same time, within those processes, people should be pretty familiar cross training through the processes. There is so much nuance to a process if you really look into it. But the stuff that you get on the other side is so much more benefit to do all that work beforehand.
- [11:52]
A
One of the things that I've learned over my career is that I have to separate certain types of tasks. So like research, planning and creativity, I have to do them in separate batches. One of the most common mistakes I see people make early on in a process is going, I do my research, then I plan the project, then I do the project all in one go. For example, now when I'm planning, doing blog posts or my LinkedIn articles, I do research and I have 30 to 50 ideas. I do them all at once because I'm in a research mode. A separate time, I'm outlining all the articles or doing the research or creating with artificial intelligence tools and putting them together. And I do that in a batch where I just create that, but I don't read them and making rough drafts. Then when I do my reading and editing, I do all that in one batch. So I can do 10 or 20 articles at once. And by doing it that way, even though it seems different because I'm doing them in separate batches, I do them when I'm in that particular mindset. And it's way less time than if I did one from start to finish at each one. Back to back will be so much slower during beginning to end. And I think that's the kind of first opportunity. So when I look at them, a process, this is something I see a lot when people ask about AI is they think AI could take over an entire process. It's like AI can just speed up one step somewhere where you bottleneck. And it could be a step that is slow or just the step you hate and so you avoid doing it. Sometimes there's something you just don't like to do, so you always skip that step. Or that's where the problem is and that's where those opportunities lie. But it does come exactly from figuring out, I love that you brought up value, which is, what do I want to achieve here? Because I see a lot. I get a lot of tasks where they. If the person doesn't know the goal or they can't really articulate the goal, I go, this is not going to be good. I always get my clients and projects to write down exactly the result they want. They say, give Me an example of a perfect result. So if you want an AI to write a script for a movie, give me a script that you've written that's perfect. So I have A, I can compare A and B without that. So much guesswork. And that's really that critical component of, like, what is the result you want here? I. I see people often, really, this happens a lot with social media or videos. They go, I want to put out a bunch of videos. I say, what if no one watches them? Oh, actually, what if you watch them? Okay, what if people watch them but no one ever clicks, no one ever subscribes, no one ever buys anything, Right? And the goal keeps moving. So sometimes you have to do a little interrogation, a little investigation to find the real goal. And it's really. That's that critical part because it's. There's very diff. It's a huge difference. If I make a video trying to get likes versus trying to get subscribers versus trying to get them to buy something you can't get people to do three actions. I see this mistake in podcasts more than anything. At the end of a podcast, I'm like, thanks. You can leave a review on Apple and on Spotify and on YouTube and make sure to subscribe to our channel. And also we have this, and also we have that, and also this. No one, nobody has ever liked a podcast episode so much. They've done seven things like, yeah, people will do maximum of one. So focus on that. If you need reviews, just ask for a view. If you want subscribers, just ask for service. Don't ask for both. Nobody will do both. And that's like this, the mistake, right, of having too many goals. So how can someone, oh my gosh, I've been doing stuff, but I don't even know why I'm doing it. How can you take that step and look at what are the most important steps and what are the steps that I need to do versus the steps that I can put into process or have other people do? So there's always something that, like, it's your secret sauce, your magic part, but usually 80% of the process, you can automate or have someone else working for you do that. What's your little process or what's your strategy for approaching that?
- [15:26]
B
Yes, we spoke a little bit about it. You know, what is the purpose and the value that you want to give? And people, a lot of times, they concentrate on the. What we're going to do to get to the end result, but they really don't pay attention to the how and the why. And those two are so important. I always tell people because that this coaching that I do also connect with training. How do you train your people in order to get the most out of them from the get go and also to narrow that learning curve that you talked about. And it's important to tell people what they're going to do, but it's so much more important to tell them how they're doing it and why they're doing it that way, at least at the beginning. That doesn't mean that they're going to be doing this forever. Right. But they definitely need to know the why. So my process is basically you defined what is the purpose of what you want to do, what is the experience that you want on the customer side. From there you're going to build that. It's almost like a little bit of a reverse engineering because people, a lot of people make assumptions of this is the value that I want to give to people and this is what they're going to receive without knowing it's really the value that they want to receive is really their want and their need. Right there is this concept that is called the voice of the customer that you really have to get to that first before you start getting too far along in your process. Because you're going to spend all these valuable resources, time, energy, money, use of your talent and probably the talent of your team around you in doing something that you're not sure if it's what the value that the customer wants to receive. So you'd really have to do a lot of previous research before you even decide. This is the process that I'm going to have. And I think that is, is very good that you're batching those efforts that you're doing there. Because when you're on the flow, take advantage of that. Sometimes when we feel overwhelmed or stressed out or tired or whatever it is, our productivity level is going to go down. If you're really focusing one thing, you are going to get so much more because the focus is there. You are not trying to multitask. A lot of people think that multitasking is going to get them more at the end. That's not the case. Right. So there's certain nuances and certain things, certain little tools that you can use to enhance the experience of building the process. But definitely you have to determine what people need first, what people find valuable and how can you then deliver that. Make sense?
- [17:55]
A
Yeah, I think that's really good. Sometimes businesses are so busy doing what they want, they Forget that the customers get to vote. And this is what happens when you. Whether you're publishing a video or publishing a book or posting on social media. I've. Sometimes the stuff that you think is the best is the stuff nobody likes. My favorite book that I've written, my audience hates. I have two other books that have done. They have two books they love the most are not the books I expect people love the most. And it's like, it's a democracy, they get to vote. And the beauty is that people will tell you what their problem is and then pay you to solve it. So they will give you that feedback if you look for it. I think that's really critical because. Because sometimes we optimize a process that's broken or a process you're just going to crash faster into that wall. It's just going to. You'll find out that you're going the wrong direction faster. But it's so important to really look at what's working, what's not working, what does your customer want, or who is your ideal customer. And these are one of the things that has really changed in business the last 30 years is that used to have a business plan. Like the standard way to start a business in the 70s, 60s was you'd write out a really detailed business plan and then you would go to the bank and get a loan and you would implement it. Now start a business, there's no. Because you don't need to borrow money anymore. You can start online, start on your own. You go, I'm going to do this or I'm going to do that, and there's no plan. And I've seen this, it's very common with social media. I've seen people have a followings of hundreds of thousands or millions of people and they've never made a dollar from that audience because they had no plan, no business plan. They just go, this is my plan. Once I get the audience, I'll figure out how to make money. And I was like, oh, I wouldn't. I'd rather build an audience that's strategic first. So I think that's really important. And I'd love to talk about some of the ways. Now that we've talked about processes and what to look at in systems that you found that AI can help people to design their processes and then accelerate the process. Like, how do you approach that?
- [19:54]
B
Yeah, I remember AI has changed. The concept of AI has changed so much throughout the years because in the early 90s, when I was at university, one of our teachers his course was automation and robotics. Right. So they were trying to investigate and research AI in order to make that automation on the, on a robot not only dependable on a programming, but also to have a little bit of autonomy there. So look where we are right now. I mean, the world has changed so much in the last 30 years. And maybe ChatGPT and all these other AIs, generative AIs, they have been more developed because this is the era of information, right? It's about management and manipulation of information mostly. I don't know if we're going to have an AI terminator anytime soon. People don't go into that kind of research. But it's so powerful. It's a very powerful tool. It's a very robust tool. But I think that also AI is coming to us and there is a lot of, I will say, conflict and a lot of debate about what AI can do or not. Right? Because a lot of times we don't know what it is. We don't have a lot of awareness of the possibilities there for the potential. And I can. Another tool, if used in a very good way, is very beneficial, but also it can be used not only for the good of the humanity, can be used for nefarious and egocentric purposes. Right? So we have to really determine what kind of integrity we're going to have, what kind of relationship we're going to have with AI. And AI, besides the fact that it's going to save us a lot of time, a lot of energy, it's going to save us all those valuable resources. There are different things that it can do as well. It can determine or help us determine what is the process that we're going to, we're going to implement, maybe feeding it the value that we see in the customer. We do that research first and we feed that and we can get that result or at least a starting point. I don't think that we should be 100% dependable on AI, on everything. Because even processes that are automated, they definitely need to have some checkup points. We can. It's not just like a plug and play and forget it, it's plug up and always verify that it's doing ultimately what you want. Because people glitch, technology glitches. And AI is going to glitch too, Right? And that's one aspect of this from the business standpoint. For example, people can use it for developing their brand, brand developing a marketing research, developing the customer experience. So this is something that can help them integrate into the tools they already have and it makes things faster, it makes things smarter. However, as you say, Jonathan, garbage in, garbage out. You really have to be very clear on what is the value and the purpose that you want. And you have to be always checking, is this information that AI is feeding me something that serves the purpose, something that serves the vision and the mission? You have to have those things that you reference points that you are going to have to be comparing what anything gives you to what you want to get. Right. So AI is not different than any other tools that you can do that with. AI can also be applicable to a lot of solving a lot of real life problems. Like for example, in the medical industry you can actually do a diagnosis of cancer or some other chronic disease faster. So you can save lives, you can have people adapt certain treatments faster because the process itself is shortened. There's so many applications to AI. But I want to touch up a little bit on what you say about we use AI a lot to be efficient, but efficient for what? What is the purpose of that efficiency? Because one thing that I have became aware, that I have become aware is we can be efficient, very efficient at being inefficient, if that makes sense. And that's the thing that I love to tell people. So you can be efficient, but are you really adding value or generating value or giving people what they want? So again, as you said in your example, people have thousands and even millions of followers, but nobody buys from them. The message to get subscriber and people who really understand your value and connect with that and resonate with them is different than just entertaining people. You have to do a little bit of education, entertainment, and also understand how people think. Again, is understanding what is on the other side, what is the experience on the other side? So AI can do a lot of things, but you want AI to be efficient and effective?
- [24:31]
A
Yeah, and this is why I always talk about you have to know the problem you want to solve or the process you want to accelerate before you bring in AI. Because I see most examples, most use cases, I see where people dubbing stuff with AI are just clever. And I see a lot of startups right now we're seeing a huge number of startups in the AI space fail because they do things that are cool but not useful. And that's really an important paradigm which is usefulness. And the measure of uselessness is does this help me in a meaningful way? And that's something that seems to get missing because I see so many things like, yeah, that's really cool, but I'll Never use it. There's no scenario where I can figure out where AI music generation will help me in any way. It's cool and it makes a lot of sense for people in the music industry or artists. There's so many people that it is useful for, but that's why I haven't subscribed to one of those tools. So it's like using that little bit of a paradigm. I think this is a really powerful place for people to think about, which is that before we do AI, we want to plan and I love how you've shared everything with us today, Adrian. It's been really amazing. For people that want to learn more about what you do, help them design their processes, where's the best place to find you online and learn more about the amazing things you're doing this year?
- [25:41]
B
I can be connected online. I'm actually building my website but it's not ready yet. But I can be connected online@the mailingide gmail.com I also I think I send you a a link to a 30 minute free consultation or conversation to see how I can help you to really leverage your processes in ways that with AI and with many other tools you can get to higher and higher levels of, of what you do and more joyful experience. Definitely. I just wanted to to tell you about and our the, the workshop that is coming that is about capacity and I'm very excited about it. So if you go and check what I do and what I publish on LinkedIn at the process Invention, Adriana C. Torres or I also I am on Facebook and Instagram. That stuff is going to come out very soon, hopefully by the midst of May. I hope that it adds value to you because that's the focus that of what I do to add value to people and for them to come out with something that they can start applying and doing right from there. So thank you so much for your invitation, Jonathan. This has been a wonderful conversation.
- [26:49]
A
Thank you so much for being here today for another amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Monday with more tips and strategies on how to leverage AI to grow your business and achieve better results results. In the meantime, if you're curious about how AI can boost your business's revenue, head over to artificialintelligencepod.com forward/calculator. Use our AI revenue calculator to discover the potential impact AI can have on your bottom line. It's quick, easy, and might just change the way you think about your business. While you're there, catch up on past episodes, leave a review and check out our socials.