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- [00:00]
Priscilla Rice
Episode number 886, the ABCs of AI.
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Kian
You're listening to the official BI podcast.
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Dr. Ivan Meisner
With BI founder and chief visionary officer Dr. Ivan Meisner.
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Kian
Stay tuned for networking and referral marketing tips from the man who's been called the father of modern networking, along with.
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Dr. Ivan Meisner
Suggestions and insights into getting the most from your membership in the world's largest networking organization, bni.
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Priscilla Rice
Hello everybody and welcome back to the official BNI Podcast. I'm Priscilla Rice and I'm coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, California. And I'm joined on the phone today by the founder and the Chief visionary officer of BNI, Dr. Ivan Meisner. Hello Ivan, how are you and where are you?
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Dr. Ivan Meisner
I am at the B and I International Convention this week in Hawaii. It's been a long time since I've been in Hawaii and you know, I love B conventions because it's like, it's like having a United nations meeting where all the countries love each other. So just I really enjoy. And we're going to be celebrating our 40th anniversary. We're going to do it a couple months early, but our 40th anniversary in BNI. So I'm excited to be here.
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Priscilla Rice
Oh, that sounds great. And who do you have today?
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Dr. Ivan Meisner
I have a great guest with us today. He's a, I consider him a personal friend. He's a fellow member of the Transformational Leadership Council. Keon is an AI researcher, best selling author and he's the CEO of geolab. He's a former executive director of the XPRIZE foundation. And when we first met he was talking about the xprize. It was really interesting. And, and he was also with the Singularity University. Kean has coached the leadership teams of dozens of Fortune 500 companies on innovation, AI and the future of work. And I have a lot of B and I members asking me about what's the future of AI So I can't couldn't think of anyone better to invite than, than him. He's the co author of the globally bestselling book Competing in the New World of Work and his latest AI research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Financial Times and npr. He's a graduate of Harvard Business School and he helped me with AI and a marketing, one of my books, which was a great experience. Yeah. Welcome to BNI Podcast, Ivan.
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Kian
It's so wonderful to be back with you here again. Always a pleasure.
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Dr. Ivan Meisner
It's a pleasure to have you. So you got a number of topics that I think are really valuable for our members One is that AI is not just a search engine. Talk about that.
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Kian
Yeah. So we wanted to begin with this idea, we believe with this hypothesis that AI can help us be more creative in the workplace and can help us come up with better solutions to problems we face at work. And so we had this natural hypothesis that AI is going to make us more creative. And we wanted to experiment and find out how much more creative can it make us be. 2 times, 5 times? 10 times? 100 times? If I had to ask you, Ivan, how much as a percentage do you think AI can help you more creative in your problem solving at work? What number do you think?
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Dr. Ivan Meisner
Oh, geez, I don't know. But I can tell you that it saved my work on doing a survey from three or four months down to three or four days.
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Kian
Amazing. Incredible productivity gains. So we ran this experiment last year with real teams at real companies all around the world who had real problems. And we gave half of them access to AI and the other half did not have access to AI. And what we found was that the teams who had access to AI actually only had modest gains in creativity at best. And this totally blew our mind. And as we dug into it, we found it's because we, as humans are biased to settle for the first acceptable answer that we get. And AI is really good at giving us an acceptable answer. It's like the world's greatest golden retriever that it just wants to make you happy, so it'll give you an answer, but that doesn't mean it's the best answer. And this was a notion that won a Nobel Prize last century by a researcher called Herbert Simon. It's called satisficing. We satisfy ourselves that an acceptable answer is the best one. But what we found was that there were some teams who were really, really creative when they were using AI, and they were totally different than all the other teams who had access to AI. So we wanted to find out why. And what we discovered is that these teams change their workflow and their. Their behavior of how they interacted with AI. So instead of it being a search engine, when you ask a question like you do on Google or Bing, these teams who were really created with AI actually had a back and forth conversation with AI just like you and I are having. And that led them to deeper creative solutions to the problems that they were facing. And this was the big aha that blew our mind, which made us realize that if you really want to use AI to be creative in your problem solving, you have to learn to use it as a as a thought partner, as a conversation partner and learn how to interact with it differently than we have been doing for the last 20 plus years of the Internet era.
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Dr. Ivan Meisner
So you and I did that at a TLC event and I've written 30 books and so I know how to market a book. But if you recall, we kept asking it, well, what, what else might you do to market the book? What else might you do? And it came up with an idea that I had never thought of, which was do a virtual book tour. And I did that with my last book and it was a big success. Yeah, it went over really well. And it was through this dialogue that you're talking about right now, which is interesting because what, what do you think is the best way to interact with AI?
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Kian
Yeah. So you know, we are, are used to sitting behind a laptop or a computer and going Google or whichever search engine. And there's this box and we think about formulating the perfect question to put in the box to get the exact answer that we think the search engine is going to give us. And the user interface for AI, whether it's ChatGPT or Cloud or any of the other platforms, they kind of look the same, they kind of look like, you know, Google. It's like that box and we, we have this, you know, we're stuck in the tyranny of the search box. And so we go into AI and we start like trying to out the exact prompt to then be able to get the right kind of answer. And the truth is it almost doesn't matter. And what I would love for your listeners to think about is to have a conversation using their voice with AI rather than typing it into the app. And so avoid this tyranny of the search box and have a conversation like you and I are having ramble be unstructured just like any kind of normal conversation. And AI has the capabilities to be able to understand that extremely well. And the way you do that is download either the app on your phone or a desktop app. And there's a button at the very bottom right hand corner that might look like a headphone, might look like a speaker depending on which app you have. And that starts the conversational AI feature of it. And when you start having conversation back and forth, you start having significant more insights and it'll give you some answers and you might like some of the answers. And what I would suggest is to talk back to AI just like a teenager would talk back to a parent. It gives you some ideas, tell it maybe some of the things you like about those ideas, maybe some of the things you don't like about those ideas, and then ask the AI to regenerate or come up with a whole new set of ideas. Just kind of like you and I did when we were having that conversation about your book launch. And that's how we get to, you know, significantly better, more creative ideas.
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Dr. Ivan Meisner
And we did. On that particular day, you kept prompting it and it kept responding. It literally was a dialogue. It was like there was a third person in the room and answering the questions. It was really quite amazing.
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Kian
Yeah. And I think one of the things that's really important for your listeners to get fluent in the fundamentals of AI we call the ABCs of AI. Sort of like anytime you learn a new language, you learn the Alphabet. And here we have AI as a new co pilot in the way we will always be working forever on end. So we got to learn some of the basics, the fundamentals, the ABCs. One of the most important lessons I can share is that it's critical when you're having a conversation with AI to give it context for whatever dilemma you're trying to solve for. And you might say, I don't know what kind of context to give. And so the context, the example that you and I had was you're launching a new book, you're trying to figure out unique marketing channels and experiences that might help disseminate the knowledge. And so that's context. Maybe you might say, I don't know what context to give. Maybe you just draw a blank. So let's hack the behavior of how we interact with AI and ask AI to interview you for the context it needs to get you the right kind of answer. So you might say, hey, AI, ask me five questions about this situation or topic before you give me any answers. And that gives an opportunity for AI to ask you questions, interview you for enough context that it needs to then begin a conversation. And then you can go back and forth, you can push, you can challenge, you can ask it to move in a different direction, assess some of your assumptions. And just like you and I are having a conversation right now, or you would with a friend in person, that's how I want you to engage with AI, to get to significantly better answers. And the beauty of this is that we all have this capability of speaking, and for the most part, and it comes natural to us as humans, and it helps demystify how we interact with AI, rather than thinking that we have to be technical experts or have capabilities or have the exact perfect prompt. Because the truth is this is all about how humans and AI interact in the future, rather than us thinking about this as a technical solution.
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Dr. Ivan Meisner
Again, this is such an important topic, and we could, I think, go another 10 minutes pretty easily. Are you willing to come back again next week and continue this conversation? Because I think this is really valuable for members.
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Kian
Of course. I'd be more than happy to come back and share some more lessons on the ABCs of AI.
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Dr. Ivan Meisner
All right, well, we're going to have you back next week. And for those of you who listen to BNI podcast often, Ken was on podcast number 750, competing in the new world back in March of 2022. He's here on session one of the ABCs of AI and I'm going to have him back again next week to talk further and maybe go even a little bit deeper on this topic, because I think it is absolutely the wave of the future. Kian, thank you so much for being here today. Priscilla, over to you.
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Priscilla Rice
Okay, great. Well, that's it for this week. This podcast is sponsored by MeisnerAudioPrograms.com these audio programs will provide you with the tools and the inspiration to powerfully enhance your BNI experience. So check out the great material that's available to you@meisneraudioprograms.com and then use the promo code IVAN5O for 50% off of everything. All of the proceeds go to the B and I Foundation. Thanks so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we look forward to having you join us again next week for another exciting episode of the official BNI podcast.