
Loading summary
A
This is the Everyday AI show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business and everyday life.
B
I think sometimes when we think about implementing AI into our day to day workflows, we over complicate things, right? We think sometimes we have to be very technical or it's a big endeavor to get started and that's definitely not the the case. And today on Everyday AI I'm excited for today's show because we're going to be going over five simple AI strategies to supercharge your workflow with Google. So I'm excited. I hope you are too. Let's get into it. Welcome to Everyday AI. If you're new here, Everyday AI it's an unedited, unscripted live stream podcast helping everyday business leaders like you and me not just keep up with everything that's happening in the world of AI, but because it is hard to do. But this show helps us make sense of it and grab the information that we actually need to grow our companies and our careers. If that's what you're trying to do, awesome starts here. But if you want to take it to the next level, make sure you go to our website. Your everyday AI.com Sign up for the free daily newsletter. We're going to be recapping the five simple strategies we're going to be going over today as well as keeping you up to date with everything else happening in the world of AI. So make sure you do that. But without further chit chat from me, let's bring on an expert from Google to help walk us through this. So I'm excited and livestream audience if you could please help me. Welcome to the show. We have Richard Seroter who is the senior director and Chief evangelist at Google Cloud. Richard, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI Show.
C
Yeah, really happy to be here Jordan.
B
All right, so tell us like what the heck do you do at Google Cloud? Because it sounds like you do a lot but walk us through your day to day.
C
Yeah, I definitely can't even explain it to my parents right now. It's a problem. But look, I lead teams like Developer Relations, our Technical docs team, our open source program office, just anybody who's about how do we inspire and activate builders on Google Cloud? How do you give people the confidence? Right? There's a lot of information out there but how do you give them the confidence they can do it too? So they can use cool open source stuff, cloud services, AI stuff. I Spend most of my day talking to customers, working with my team, going hands on. I still code a decent amount, I'm not good at it, but enough to use the products. I don't think we should be talking about products we don't know how to use.
B
And you know, I'm curious, so throughout your years at Google, right, And obviously on the AI side, Google's been there for a very long time before the large language model surge from a couple of years ago. But I'm curious, the people that you're talking to specifically about AI, is it more. Yes. The technical dev type people, are you talking to the everyday business leader and is it changing as a I especially generative AI becomes more and more accessible.
C
Yeah, I mean I've been in this field now too long, don't guess my age. But this is the, I mean I think this, we're at Internet level in terms of people who care about this outside of it. No one outside of it cared about kubernetes, serverless, arguably cloud computing, maybe mobile. But we're back to like Internet level conversation of like the people I talk to are sometimes in marketing, sometimes in hr, sometimes in CIO roles. It's not just builders, of course for tech folks it's awesome. But the difference is this isn't just about how do I improve my day to day work with tech stuff. Some of it's like how do I change my business mix and products I offer? How do I change how my team works? I don't think this is just about what you can do, I think it's about how you do it. And we haven't had a change like that industry wide in a long time.
B
Yeah, that's a good point. And I think people, when making comparisons about generative AI and what it can accomplish, they're not always going back to cloud or mobile. They're saying electricity. Right? Like so much bigger than that. You know, I'm curious even for you before we get into our five strategies like how, how big or how much of an impact has Gemini and just Google AI in general had on how you work personally?
C
Yeah, I mean look on one hand I don't want to be one of these wacky AI influencer types who says everything's unbelievable, everything changes with AI. Like look, it's still hopefully good people using good tools. You still need human thought, you still need human creativity. Some of these things don't work as they advertise. Some things are better, some things are worse. It's all great. These are tools, these are ways we do better work now. They're transformative tools for some teams. And so for myself, and we'll talk through some of these strategy things, how I research, how I learn, how I build, how I do some of my day to day things. Absolutely. And look, there's other areas where I am purposely staying low tech. I write a daily newsletter and I write every word. I don't want AI to do it for me. I learned by writing, I learned by doing that work. And so I think all of us want to make sure we hold closely to those things we actually love doing and make sure that we're building depth, not just sort of shallow knowledge, because we've outsourced all our thinking to the AI. So use this as a tool to augment yourself, not replace yourself.
B
Y' all like what Richard just said there, like, take, take that away. That's so important. Don't just, you know, kick everything over to AI. You still have to practice those skills, the human side, if you really want to augment to level that you can.
C
Right.
B
So real quick, I'm going to give everyone the five different strategies and then we'll unpack them. Have Richard unpack them one by one. So number one, Gemini Deep Research for analysis. Number two, Notebook LM for exploration. Number three, Gemini CLI and Codesys to build. Number four, jewels for background work. And five, AI just kind of rolling out everywhere. So let's get into them. Let's start at the top. A tool that I love and use all the time. Gemini Deep Research. Richard, can you explain it for us? And how can people. What's a good strategy to put this into your daily workflow?
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, with all of these and the ones you called out there, these aren't just about using new tools. To me, these are about forming new habits. And that's the hard part. That's the change management piece. Right. Like, you could one off use any of these and then never use it again. So what we're all trying to do is almost reprogram ourselves and be like, when I get a hard question, what do I do first? To me, that's what AI first means. AI first does not mean I use AI for everything. It means that when a situation comes up, I ask myself, is there any help AI can do here? No. Fine, do your thing. Yes, do it. So Gemini Deep Research is part of the Gemini app, and we've added a ton of stuff to that over this year. Whether that's helping you vibe code an app or build a storybook for your kids. Which is crazy. All sorts of cool things. But Deep Research is awesome. And there's other deep researchy things out there. But I'll focus on this one, the idea. And I just used it last week. I had a complex problem. I was trying to actually bias it and say, like, look, we're at Google. We're only focused on this part of the application delivery right now. Is the rest of it kind of boring? Should I ignore it? And so what Deep Research did it was it went to. Because it's connected to Google Search, which is awesome. It went and looked at, I think I count it was over 150 sites synthesized. It all gave me a report that repudiated me constantly saying I was missing the boat, which was amazing. Tables, charts, all this stuff in about six minutes. So this was work legitimately. That would have taken me two to three days. I would have gone to a Google search. I would have typed in words, I would have clicked blue links. Keep doing that. We need that ad money like it is. Gotta keep the lights on. But if I'm doing a research project, why in the world would I do that today? Instead, I'm going to Deep Research. I'm getting a really good synthesis. And now you can upload your own files, you can redirect that research. The results of that research I can turn into different forms and export to a document. And so I think we change how we do research. No one should say, I need weeks and weeks from normal projects that we might be doing personally. Planning a vacation, understanding competitors, doing analysis of a market, figuring out a business scheme, figuring out a technical architecture. Instead of just kind of going in and doing all that yourself, how about you kickstart it? To me, AI is the best thing for blank pages. It's the easiest way to now go from I don't know where to start to here's something I could start with and throw it away, keep 5% of it. But none of us just want to stare at a blank page going, what do I do next? So deep Research is an amazing way to go. I have a question. Might be involve a lot of different angles. Can you give me a look at that and get it back in minutes and go, that's not it at all. Or shoot, I'm even asking the wrong question. I don't want to find that out three days later, a month later, after my giant research project, I want to know now. And so the ability to learn faster might be the only remaining professional competitive advantage out there. And so how do we all just learn faster? That's how you stand out.
B
So much to unpack there, Richard. We might have to just cancel the other four because I want to talk to you just about that for multiple hours, but I won't. But a couple things that I heard there that I really want to zoom in on is this really talking about change management. So even for me personally, this is how I use like Deep Research. If I wake up and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna go grab a coffee and sit down, I sit down first, have Google Deep Research, start on something, get my coffee and come back. So this is like making those little changes, but something else you said intentionally have it like not challenge your thinking, but sometimes go against a preconceived notion.
C
Right.
B
But doing it with Google Deep Research, what's maybe a strategy that you can leave people with on how they can use deep research for maybe either challenging their thinking or when you are just, you know, having to take on a big project instead of staring at a blank page.
C
What's.
B
What's maybe a piece of advice you have people.
C
Yeah, I would say stop thinking of AI is a great way to get answers. Think of it as a way to get great questions. And we don't use it that way. But if you go to Deep Research and even, or frankly Google AI mode, go to google.com AI go to any of our AI tools and say, I have this issue. What question should I be asking? What should I be thinking about? I've done this with. I use some tools sometimes if I get a really technical doc from a team, I know they're just trying to show me up. I can pass that doc and go, what are really smart questions to ask about this doc in my review? Now do I take them all? I don't know, but you might have sparked something with me. Go. That's a good angle. I should think about that. So generative AI is pretty good at that. And so sometimes you just don't know what to ask. And so it's great to sometimes give adversarial questions to a Deep research thing going, this is what I think, but tell me why this is wrong or tell me what I'm missing or look for counter views. Because honestly, I think we do our best strategic work when we take these 360 views of an issue and don't just get myopic about the preconceived solution we thought.
B
And you know, I don't think we'll have time to go feature by feature and update by update. But one thing that I Think is important for our audience to know. A new update in Gemini Deep Research that I am loving is now the ability for it to, you know, go through your calendar, to go through, you know, if you choose to connect it.
C
Right.
B
If you enable that to go through your email. Because that's one thing I struggle with so much. And then to combine it with normal kind of deep research across the web, you know, help us understand what that can unlock for people. Because even for me personally that unlocks so much.
C
I mean that's the contextualization of losses. LLMs are amazing and we'll all keep shipping amazing things and that's awesome. But this world of more agent stuff and agent stuff really just how do you give kind of overlay these models with things like tools which access other real time data or your personal data. How do you have long running conversations, not just stateful one offs with an LLM. And so things like deep research are agents and being able to pass in data that might be your inbox or your whole set of style guides that you want to feed in and ask it for ideas on a look and feel. The model doesn't know that by itself. And so being able to give this thing context, that's why you hear this term context engineering. I just don't want to write a clever prompt that's cool and that's a skill, but it's insufficient when I want to give it a bunch of things like hey, here's a bunch of SOP documents, help me figure out new standards for my team. You can't figure it out by itself, but once you give it that context, you get something pretty awesome back. So thinking about your context, what do I need to tell this thing so it can properly give me what I need and not just assume it's a magic robot who knows all this stuff? Give it a little help. This is again where you stay in control. I think that's what we've learned. Even the last 12 months there was a lot of fear of this thing's just going to do all our work. These things don't know as much as we do. Regardless of what some influencer types say, like I need context. They need certain things. You have that. You're the orchestrator, you're the engineer. Every individual is now becoming a manager because you are managing the work of these things. You gotta change your mindset to think about that.
B
Yeah, it's a great call out. And even just the concept of providing more and more context is going to make kind of the agentic work From Gemini Deep Research. Much more fruitful in the long run, the more context you share. Right. Speaking of sharing context, I mean Notebook LM for exploration. Like I can't. And anyone that's listened to the show, I've talked for literally countless hours about how much now I just rely on NotebookLM and how it's completely changed. Not just how I work, but how I think and how I organize myself. Right, Richard. Maybe for those who haven't heard me talk for hours about NotebookLM, explain a little bit what it is, what it does, and then let's maybe dive in a little bit deeper after that.
C
Yeah. I didn't understand what it was when we first announced the Google I O whenever it was like, that's neat. What the heck is the use case for that thing? Uh, and then I finally kind of, I had some light bulb moments. But how do you have a bunch of data that you collect and your terms could be your own data, could be links, could be YouTube videos, could be now it connects to drive and pull in your own stuff. And then how do you then turn this into a form that you can learn however you want? That's the big takeaway is at this point, 20, 25, you can learn what you want, how you want to. And I don't think, I don't think you and I are Gen Z. Let's pretend we're not. You and I learned from teachers teaching us in class, one way to 30 kids. We read books, maybe had some CDs, watched, maybe an online training that wasn't personalized, that was whatever the heck would be delivered to the masses. And if you fell behind, you fell behind. If you had a dumb question, you'd either ask or keep it to yourself. This is the first time where you and I can learn how we want to. I can use NoteBookLM to turn piles of information into a 15 minute podcast. Listen to it on the way to work while I'm walking the dog. I can turn that into a video podcast. Maybe I'm a visual learner. Flashcards. Because I'm about to get tested on it. Sounds good. Have a chat with the data going, I don't understand this or make sense of this. There's no company that should have the same onboarding process they have today in two years because they're all terrible. All the onboarding is just here's a pile of information, study it and get to work. Why are we doing that? You should be giving every new hire a link to your notebook. Lm instance going, here's our Business. What do you want to know about it? Oh, you want to understand vacation? We'll give you all the details. Just chat with it. You want to figure out, you know, how the org is set up. It'll figure out the org chart for you, tell you how like all of a sudden learn it on your terms. And so it's free. We've made it available to students. It's amazing. Student tool, personal tool. But again, this is, we talked first about changing how you research. This is changing how you learn. And it's a, it's again, it's a new habit, it's a new muscle. But all of a sudden we're all learning the hard way until we use things like this once.
B
Maybe, you know, even going back to your initial reaction when you heard about it at I O and you're like, okay, what's the use case right now? Fast forward that. It's been out for, you know, a year and a half, two years. You know, maybe what's an important takeaway that you've maybe experienced or your team has experienced using NotebookLM that you think would be helpful for our audience. Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on Gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website will help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on Gen AI.
C
Yeah, look, I saw, I think it's a couple of the events Google ran over the summer where the result of it was a notebook LM. Because no one pays attention to the 200 announcements we just made or all the videos or the 15 blog posts or whatever. And so even as you're doing big complex things, guess what? No one's paying attention. It doesn't matter if it's Google's event, Amazon's event, your crazy awesome launch, no one cares about it as much as you do. Awesome. Give them a way to synthesize it then. So first off, for every big, complex thing even you or your business does, give an easy way for people to digest it all on their terms and learn about it. And then the other way is, I think all of these tools are amazing at taking really complex things and helping us finally understand what they mean. Whether that's AI in Chrome or whether you use Notebook LM or Gemini app, whatever it is, give it the terms and conditions to your credit card, which no one in ever the history of time has ever read, or your employment agreement, where you're like this, maybe this is fine, but this is 15 pages. Give that to the AI and go, what's a weird thing in here that I should be aware of? Awesome. Where else can you do that? So look for those applications to either make the complex very simple or to take a very big distributed set of announcements and turn that into something that anybody can figure out. Yeah.
B
And it probably would have been helpful for me to set the stage a little bit and just, you know, for people that aren't familiar with NotebookLM, but the concept of grounding.
C
Right.
B
Because I think sometimes people are like, well, okay, NotebookLM is powered by Gemini. Why wouldn't I just use Gemini for these things? So, Richard, could you just kind of explain kind of the concept of how NotebookLM just grounds answers in the information that you give it?
C
Yeah, it's like we said, Look, a lot of these things are all gonna be based on the same, let's even say the same Gemini model or whatever your favorite model is. It's about the experiences on top. That's where the magic's happening now. And so can I solve similar problems with different tools in different ways? Maybe. But NotebookLM is purpose built to say, let me take a bunch of your information, your preferences, your links grounded on your truth data, and turn it into a form that you can consume. And that's just what it's good at. Do I. Would I use that to look up the latest baseball scores? I don't think so. And maybe you could even do it, but that would be a weird use of it. I would jump to the Gemini app or whatever. So just knowing what these things are good for. And even Google Cloud customers have it all baked into Gemini Enterprise so it can be private just for you. Google doesn't train on it, all that sort of stuff. So you have enterprise versions of Notebook lm, the Gemini Deep Research Experience, all in Gemini Enterprise for corporate customers. So a lot of this is just about what's the interface you need to solve a given problem. And NotebookLM is amazing. If you just say, I want to learn from a lot of material that I've curated and that could be my curriculum for this class this semester, that could be about my business, but it saves it. And then it's something where I can just keep growing it or removing it or pairing it, learning about it different ways. Such a unique experience. And it's free to use. Everybody can use it on their phone, web app. Party on.
B
Yeah. And it's the fact, number one, that it's free. But number two, the fact that this technology exists and is this easy is still bonkers to me. Right. Like thinking back, like two years ago, like before NotebookLM and then seeing what we can do with it now, I'm just sometimes like, how is this so easy and how is it available for everyone?
C
Right. Absolutely. No, I mean, you're going to look back even in a year and go, we've just all been doing it the hard way. And that's okay. Sometimes you got to learn it the hard way back to like, skills and things. And so it's good to know the hard way to do research. Like, we shouldn't just have the easy way. Maybe people don't go to libraries anymore and no kid under 30 knows what the Dewey Decimal system is. But, like, that was a big part of how you and I probably had to do real research. And it's good to know that because you got to hunt and you got to figure stuff out. But let's do it easier now.
B
All right, so we just unveiled two of our first five, maybe for more non technical people, our next two, maybe, if you want to get a little technical, we're going to get there. But before we do, just a real quick break for a word from our sponsors. All right, so let's get into it. Richard, number three on our list, talking about Gemini, Cli and Codesys. So explain, what is it, how does it work and who should be paying attention? Because I'm even experimenting with this a little bit, even though I'm not a developer or code.
C
We're all developers now, Jordan. I mean, I think that's the most exciting thing is we're all builders. You don't have to wait for an engineer to build the thing for you to at least see it in action. Now would you build that in production? No, but everybody's a builder now. And I can use the Gemini app to vibe code a web app and see what it looks like and all that stuff. But for these things, you know, we talked about learning differently, we talked about researching differently. It was about building different. And say, how do I use tools that help me as a developer, write software, learn my system? So the CLI or the command line interface is something that sits in the terminal, you know, think a loss prompt or whatever. Being able to come in there and have access to the Gemini model, being able to reference a bunch of extensions so I can reach into third party systems. And maybe I would use that to do something like, hey, I'm trying to take this really old app and make it new, okay. And then I think pass that into Gemini, update it, iterate back and forth. It's really powerful or could be as simple as. Because it's Internet connected. Hey, I'm trying to build a chart of today's stock rankings. Put it into a table though, and factor this in and it can reach out to the Internet, synthesize it all, put it back into language. So Internet connected, I can use it to build. They can use it to connect to third party systems. But for some people, it's a really good hardcore programming way and system administrative way to manage things without a point and click gui. Right? Plenty of people I just faster with the keyboard, easier to build. Full power of. Gemini giant free tier that anybody can mess with. Just give us an email address and that's it. And party on and use corporate versions if you want to too. But then sometimes if you're a coder, use things like an integrated development environment or idea. I want to see my code, I want to write it, I want to do things. And things like Gemini Code Assist can help you complete a line of code or say, hey, I just need a function that reverses, you know, or adds two numbers together and it'll write the function for you. That sounds good. Or I got this giant code from somebody they just retired. I don't understand any of this. What does this application even do? And get back an answer in a second versus four days. And so how do I understand code? Write code, change code. Again, you're seeing at this point, I think 90% of devs are using some of these tools at this point. But so can everybody to some extent. I could use the Gemini CLI as a business analyst or a financial analyst to maybe, hey, can you look at this spreadsheet and make some updates to this? I might jump into Gemini Code Assist and Go. I have this kind of cool idea for an app. I'm not a programmer, but here's what I want, and that's for builders nowadays. I think the biggest takeaway is we've moved away from you having to know everything to do anything. So you have to know your intent. We all know our intent. What am I trying to do now? Again, don't take those things that you don't understand and then push it all the way to production. You'll get hacked or something will be screwy. But to prove your ideas faster, there's a motto in my product area right now I'm in a product area in engineering that focuses on all these dev tools. And one of our leaders, Ryan and Scott, they both kind of coined demos over memos. Build stuff. Stop writing so many freaking docs. Build your idea out, prove if it makes sense. And then when it does, write the document. But stop wasting months pixel pushing a doc and tables and perfect prose when your idea is not right. Build it. Build demos, prove your ideas. Everybody can do that. And then once you have a solid idea, you jump into real building and real scaling. But get that first experiment and learn stage done faster before the next one. That's a culture change like that transforms a business from being paralyzed by these giant release stages to like, let's all be builders. Let's all prove ideas and move the blockers.
B
Richard, I think what you said there is really important. Just responding with like, Jordan, no, we're all builders, right? It reminds me when a story when I had Paige Bailey from Google on the show and I do suggest people go listen to that episode 619 she talked about. Now at hackathons, it's non technical people that are winning AI Hackathons, right? And I love what you said there. Demos over memos and just encouraging people to build it. Do you think it's going to become, whether it's using Gemini CLI and Code Assist or other kind of vibe coding tools, is it going to become common or is it already common? And maybe, I don't know because I don't live in California where everyone's just building their own solutions like, oh, this piece of software stinks. Or I'm spending hours, you know, a week just for this one figure. I should just build something. Is that going to become almost the de facto way to work?
C
We'll probably swing the pendulum that far and we're all just going to be building everything. And you might build personal software. You might be like, I'm just trying to track my recipes. Better because I keep forgetting what I make and let me just build an app for myself. We're going to all do. I think we're going to see an explosion of software now. There's an explosion of software that replaces production grade software. I'm not sure, like there's going to be times where could you write your own customer relationship management system? My goodness, you could. It's not feeling like that's going to be a competitive differentiator for you or something you want to maintain. So I think we're going to swing the pendulum too far for a while where we all just build everything because we can. It's super easy. And then we'll find, as usual, that middle ground of still buy, you know, buy commodity and build differentiators. Like, be careful, don't accidentally build everything. And then realize you took your eye off the ball of your business because you were geeking out on something that actually doesn't matter to your success.
B
All right, so let's, let's move from the terminal to the autonomous AI coding agent. Google jewels. So explain, you know, explain the real big use case here, Richard. And specifically the concept of, you know, having a background teammate.
C
Yeah, I mean, this is the world. Look, if you're a builder now, there are things that you do. Think of it as a. When I talk about the cli, that's really almost like working with a junior engineer. Oh, you're collaborating, you're hanging out at the same time, you're both working the same shift. Amazing. When you work with things like Juuls, you're actually working around the sun. Or you're working with an outsourced agent or a partner and saying, let me write a quality spec. You'll hear the term spec driven development. Let's write a specification that's machine readable, still natural language, but maybe organized really effectively. Let me iterate on a spec with this background agent and then hand it off and I might go to lunch, I might go home, might have your cup of coffee. And when it's done, it gives me a pull request or gives me the changes going, here's what I did. Check it out. You can go. I like that. No, not doing that. Let's iterate that again. But it's almost like having work that you can truly offload again. You're still in control, you're still the engineer, you're still the orchestrator, you're still the coordinator. But the idea of having a bunch of background work, this is the next cultural change, I think the future for a lot of builder teams is that you're going to have multiple of these going at the same time. If you're a software developer, here's an agent. Can you go write the docs? I'll check back with you. Can you add some tests to this code? Got it. Can you add this new feature? Because I'm wondering about this and you're just coordinating responses and things and maybe it won't be that extreme for everyone, but this idea of multiple independent agents doing work that you've directed, which then you pull back together when it's done, that's part of the future one way or the other. And so how do you get ready for that? Look, the most important programming language for the next few years is English or whatever your spoken language. How do you communicate intent to these agents? Because if you write terrible specs, you will get packed terrible responses from these agents. So how do I convey my intent effectively? How do I think about communicating guardrails? Hey, hey, don't do this. You should only be scoped here. Or hey, don't, don't, you know, do things that are insecure? Like, how do I know enough. This is where we still need expertise. So if I give incomplete instructions, I'm going to get incomplete results. So we gotta keep building our expertise so that we can properly narrate this. And then we're just doing work all over the place at a faster speed and higher quality. But there are prereqs to getting that right.
B
So that's number four. Let's go straight to number five. So just AI rolling out everywhere. And it's like, I kid you not, I have a working notebook LM document of just everything Google Gemini rolls out. Because it's hard every day. Every day something's coming out. But tell us, Richard, what does this ultimately mean? Because even, right, like Google AI mode is, you know, coming out with, with Canvas and all these other.
C
Right.
B
It's, it's all these features that I'm using from different products are seemingly being rolled into even just Google Search, but just Gemini AI everywhere. What does this look like?
C
Part of me hopes that we stop worrying that it's AI pretty soon. And it's just, we have smarter things. I mean, I can go to google.com AI and I just get a more interesting way to search. Or I can use Google Sheets and have an AI function that can help me build a table real quick. It's cool, it's awesome. Or I could use our public cloud and Google Cloud and go to BigQuery and just explain what I want to do and have it turn my natural language into a proper SQL statement, which I forget how to write now. That's amazing. I don't even care that it's AI personally. I just care that it's smarter. And again, I don't have to know everything to do anything. And so as you look across all these tools, I think you're just going to see these interfaces have changed. It's the new interface of technology. It's not just UIs or APIs or it's AI. AI is a new interface. And so how does this just make a smarter way where I can express my intent to some of these systems and build a pivot table, write a resume, understand a document, perform a search, and then when you get into people who build agents, how can we change customer support? How can we change onboarding and knowledge management? So I think what the future is just going to look like is a smarter way to interface with these technology systems without being locked out by our lack of knowledge about the nuance of every programming language and syntax and tool. And how do I call this? I don't care. I just want to go on vacation, block it in that system. I don't even care what system it is. And so I hope we just keep returning more autonomy to the human by offloading a lot of this different mucking around between systems to the agents and the AI that can do it.
B
All right, so, Richard, we've covered a ridiculous amount of great information on today's show. So everything from talking about cultural change to shifting our mindset of being. We're all builders, demos over memos. I mean, I think we're literally going to put up like 50 of your quotes in today's newsletter. But, you know, as we wrap up, you know, after going over these five simple AI strategies, maybe what's the one most important takeaway? Because, you know, you and your team are really helping build the future of work. So maybe what is your one strategy or one most important takeaway for people to be able to take advantage of all these things that we've talked about today?
C
Yeah, I don't. I mean, I think to some extent either AI is going to happen to you or you're going to happen to AI. And I think you have to decide if you're going to lean in or not, because this is all coming in some way, shape or form. If you want to be ahead of it and then be in control of it, be smart about it, understand the best ways to use it, make it work for you. I don't want to work for AI. I want it to work for me. But that requires me to lean into it then and understand how to use it well and stay up to date and listen to podcasts like this and lean in because you know what? Plenty of people won't. And I think that you want to be on the side that's shaping how this industry is going to look and how work is going to look, not just be subjected to what's going to happen to you. So take some command of the of the scenario by being smart, going, hands on. I think everything we talked about today has free tiers of service. Try stuff. You know, to me, the most important two traits every single human should have right now in professional world is curiosity and humility. Be endlessly curious. Keep learning. Don't ever calcify your knowledge because it's changing every week. And yeah, be super humble because all these opinions you have today are probably wrong next week and it's okay. So if you have those two things, you are set up for success.
B
My gosh, what an inspiring and invigorating 31 minutes from Richard. Richard, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to join the Everyday AI show. We really appreciate it.
C
Hey, thank you so much for having me.
B
All right, y'.
C
All.
B
And if you miss anything, don't worry, we're going to be recapping it all in our newsletter, so if you haven't, go to your everydayai.com. thanks for tuning in. Hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks, y'.
C
All.
A
And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.
Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast
Episode: 5 Practical AI Workflows That Actually Matter
Date: January 2, 2026
Host: Jordan Wilson
Guest: Richard Seroter, Senior Director & Chief Evangelist, Google Cloud
This episode dives into five practical AI workflows, highlighting the impact of Google’s AI tools—including Gemini, NotebookLM, and more—on modern work. Guest expert Richard Seroter shares actionable strategies and candid advice for adopting AI meaningfully, with conversation focusing on how individuals and organizations can build new habits, unlock smarter workflows, and embrace the changing tech landscape with curiosity and humility.
[02:34–04:14]
[06:01–12:53]
[12:53–20:18]
[21:21–25:49]
[26:40–29:07]
[29:07–31:22]
On Humility and Curiosity
On Shifting Mindset
On Building as a New Default
Learning Faster as Competitive Advantage
Listen to the episode or subscribe to the Everyday AI Podcast for more actionable insights.