← Using AI at Work: AI in the Workplace & Generative AI for Business Leaders
Using AI at Work: AI in the Workplace & Generative AI for Business Leaders
69: Using AI at Work with Peter Swimm: From SaaS to Conversational Workflows
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This episode is brought to you by.
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Chiefaiofficer.Com Most companies know AI can slash costs and free up teams, but they get stuck on the first step. Chiefaiofficer.com can identify your highest value, use cases, train your people and build the workflows that do the work for you. Book your free private 15 minute executive briefing by going to chiefaiofficer.com and scheduling a call. You'll leave with a clear no jargon roadmap for your goals. Now enjoy the show and a quick.
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Note before we start this episode. Starting August 29th through October 29th, we're actually taking our AI executive immersion on the road. This is a free half day in person no fluff workshop for executives of lower middle market and above sized companies. You'll leave with a 90 day plan, a simple AI policy and guardrails, and a personal AI stack that gives you hours back every week. If you'd like to bring your executive team at no cost, go to chiefaiofficer.com roadshow to see the dates and locations where we'll be seats are limited to keep it hands on. Hopefully this is an opportunity for us to meet in person and for you to learn exactly how we're teaching busy executives to take advantage of AI in their role and across their companies. Now let's start the episode welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Hi everybody and welcome to a new episode of Using AI Work. My name is Chris Daigle, I'm the host of the podcast and today we have as a guest Peter Swim. And we'll be talking about Peter and his company Toilville and very interesting topics that we just discussed in the conversation. So Peter, before we get started, if you don't mind, kind of share a little bit of background about what the journey's been like to get you here today.
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Sure. I've been in tech for 25 years and that's very circuitous path. Like I've worked in data centers, I work customer service, I work for Fortune 500 companies and Fortune 5 companies and total 5 companies, people companies and the one connected thread in all that is really this concept of conversational AI. I'm constantly in my career I've been looking at ways to use computers to work smarter, not harder and avoid anti grind set kind of like tech traps and making smart Choices. And, and so it's very interesting time to be who I am, where I am now. You know, I worked at Copilot Microsoft on their Copilot products, helping design tooling for people used to like talking to chat bots and building applications, and LMS are like a whole new different animal. And I slowly start to realize that people don't have access to my experience organizationally, let alone in the industry. And so that's why I started a consultancy called Toyote. And what we do at Toyville is we help people on board, especially medium small businesses who don't have the huge army they need to be successful as their dreams. And. And they're leveraging these technologies to work smarter and faster and harder and also keeping that level quality up and not like, you know, calling victims all the headlines about, you know, yeah, filing legal briefs with Garfield in it or whatever, you know, so.
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Yes. So, Peter, you mentioned conversational AI for the audience who may not be familiar with that term. How would you describe that?
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Well, when I describe it, people are always start to make a face because it's like when I call the bank and it doesn't want to push buttons. It wants me to explain my problems. And I think for a long time it's been very bad, right, because it's like they tested in studios with people who speak California English. And, you know, it doesn't handle people from other. You know, it doesn't help you when you're on your cell phone on the subway. And. But in the last four or five years, because of companies like OpenAI and Google and other unicorns out of the valley, the AI technology has gotten sophisticated enough that it's almost good. And being almost good after being awfully bad for so long is such a huge, like, disruptive thing in the industry that people are making all kinds wild pivots. And people who rely on these products to do their work are kind of stuck in a quandary where they're like, well, I was just focusing on work and now there's like a chatbot in Word and how do I use it and how can I leverage this? And they want me to pay 30 bucks extra per person for it. You know, why should I do that? So.
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So I agree with you on the conversational side. It's an area of AI, like, like voice interaction with human and AI. That's something that, once that becomes very good, I think it's going to be a big unlock for a lot of businesses in the support side, certainly, but definitely on the sales side. So when you say it's, it's not good, how far out do you think we are before conversational AI is indiscernible from a human interaction?
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Well, I mean, you see what people are tricked into believing are real online every day. So I hesitate to say, like, Turing test kind of things. For me, very good is something I would like let my daughter, who's 11 years old, talk to. And so I don't, I don't let her talk to any of these things, any, you know, technologies online, because you need to develop a social sense to guide and shape them because it's very reality disrupting in a way that is like, harmful, especially to growing people. I think what is more likely to happen is what our sense of what good is will shift to be more aligned with what they're good at. Right. And so like last week I did an experiment. I did nothing but voice chat for a week, my whole business. And it was wild and painful and scary until I realized a certain way to do it. And then I shifted. I downshifted my expectations and it was more like, you know, I'm hanging out with a friend and I'm like, co working with them, and I just say, hey, can you make this part better? And it's like, try that. And it was just kind of like a revelation to me because I think people will say, like, write me the grapes of wrath, you know, or they, you know, they like, give. They want to give these prompts and, you know, California is going crazy over investing in companies that claim to do that. But I think the value is, is. Read this paragraph and tell me if it makes this point effectively, right? Or like, does this code operate? The job is supposed to do as effectively as it can, knowing that the real work happens in these other parts of code so you don't have to work that hard. And like these kind of like, you know, as a person who's been a product leader, like to be able to kind of like just walk through scenarios before doing them and saving that time to kind of like, you know, the whole like, methodical pace of how alums have to work well is, you know, is planning and plotting. And, you know, anyone who's like, you know, told a loved one to do a chore, you know, like telling your kid to clean his room or whatever, and if you don't, you know, they'll lawyer their way out of things and these LLMs will lawyer their way out of things just because they don't know logic or anything. You know, they're just Like a pachinko machine based on, like, cleaning room goes down these four steps. And yeah, if you're. If your delivery requires those four steps, you're in business. And if not, you're in pain. Right? So once I had that kind of, like, conception locked in, I came up with a startup idea in like, two days. And I have an entire API mapped out and I have my research plan, and now I have all these things that, like, were all my ideas, you know, but they were, like, structured in a way very, very quickly that I can see the whole of it and, like, see, like, is this a good idea or a bad idea? And I think that's what is the takeaway for AI is not going to make, like, it's not going to do your work for you. You know, it's not going to do your homework for you. It's going to, like, allow you to do things like whiteboarding and like, plotting out your novel and, you know, like, lose those £15 and, you know, like, and do it in a way that is agnostic of the tools, right? Because everyone wants a life hack, right? And you're like, okay, my email's in Word. And this is now unlocks a possibility where you're like, hey, if I wanted to have one website that had my email and my text Messages and my LinkedIn post and you only showed me the ones that were good, and this is what it means to be good. And it's like, okay, apps are dead, right? Like, because the whole concept of application is building a better mousetrap, but everyone wants their mousetrap. And having that kind of, like, ability on your desktop, I think is going to be extremely disruptive for a lot of companies whose job is, like, experience for a little bit. And then they're going to figure out, oh, I can now make a playbook, you know, like, you know, just like watching those shows where they flip houses, you get ideas to do stuff. So people who are smart system thinkers are now going to be thought leaders and maybe selling the prompt template and all those other fun things. And the people who are good at, you know, doing the research and putting together the bits and pieces are going to be able to, like, find parts of their process that are repeatable and make it modular and just, you know, build it like we did last time, except for this chunk, which is the new requirement. And then, you know, you can do five projects at once now because you don't have to, like, yeah, you don't have to, like, figure out, like, the how and the why of the how and the why, you know, and I think that it, you know, as a culture we're still kind of wrapping our heads around that.
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So yeah, there's definitely this kind of like stretch between the old way of thinking and then doing what we call think in AI where you kind of Ethan Moloch concept of cyborg, right? Like where it's, it's not like, oh, I'm going to go, do I do AI later. It's like it's just something that happens. So this experiment that you did, I'm particularly interested in that because one of the things we do is we train and certify non technical business professionals to be an AI expert or company. Right. And part of that is it's a capstone project. It's a deep dive into a particular use case that they can apply in their business. And yes, they learn stuff from, you know, putting together the final product. But the, the when I interview people for their certification, the real aha for everybody was I spent three days in one thread, right? Like they went really down. They weren't like skipping around adding and chat GPT. They were going so deep in it that it was opening, it was pushing their l, their, their cognitive capabilities because they had to think of new questions. Right. And that experiment that you did with only using voice AI for a week is very similar. Like you want to get good at using AI, use AI. You want to get good at conversational AI with what you use chat GPT.
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I used everyone and I landed and I landed on Claude code.
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Okay. And this was for ideation or no.
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I am building product and platform. And, and the reason I'm building product and platforms because I had to, because there's no off the shelf thing to do the way I work. And, and I think that's like, maybe that's because I'm like, you know, I am a product person and a tech person. So I'm at the intersection of two Venn diagrams of distinctions. But like the thing that really clicked for me that where it stopped being frustrating was being able to see a little console on the side, how it was reasoning. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And be able to hit escape. And like no, no, no, no, you, when this happens, you do that, right? And then at the end of the conversation I had to review the conversations like what did we learn, children? And became a list of what we learned. And we're like, oh, I got confused when this happened, this one. And I didn't know the environment. So like, okay, now I have to build state. And so I go back because I built chatbots for, you know, for 20 years. I'm like, okay, I know how to build a state engine. I know it's a website. So now, the first two days, I was building a secretary to take the minutes of my conversation with the pot. And every time we had a new idea that was used more than once, it went into a big hopper and then became a script. And so, like, now I have a concept of, like, I call them rubrics and ruses. Right? A rubric is our process, how we do it. Our ruse is what we do because the rubric sucks for this scenario and I have to duct tape something together.
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Like an edge case or variation.
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Yeah, but every edge case tells us something about the inflexibility of our rubric, right? So at the end of the project, I can look at all the ruses and say, oh, these three ruses wouldn't have happened if this one feature was prioritized on my roadmap. And I think that was like the. My work has now become my research vertical, right? Because every, every day, you know, I think like, especially people in tech like you get used to, oh, I snooze a notification every time it's this guy, right? Or I snooze when I'm in a meeting and this happens and I don't come back to it because my brain is constantly being inundated by stuff. But now I control the flow of information and I have a schedule. And every time I get the end of the task, I can say, what's next? And I'll tell me what the next most important thing is. But also, it has checked all my email, it has checked my voicemail, it has make sure my wife's not trying to get a hold of me. Things that, like, okay, this is George Jetson boss level stuff. And like, okay, I need to drop what I'm doing and do that. And now I don't have to doom scroll right now. I don't have to like, check my phone every five minutes because I know the system is watching and I know I'm going to take my lunch at 11 and I know I'm going to take my walk at 1 o' clock because the system is instructed to shut down unless there's a fire, right? Like, and so like, all of a sudden, like, all the metrics of what makes successful things is completely upended, right? Because now I'm in control, you know, I'm in control of my notifications and my lifestyle and I'M not like pulled eight ways from Sunday. And which is essential because as a small business owner, my ability to pivot on a dime is my competitive advantage against 500 pound gorillas.
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Yeah, absolutely. So after that experience and just for clarity for myself and for the listeners, you built this simply by speaking back and forth to AI for a week? There wasn't. Okay, tell me.
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Yeah, I did not, I did not push, I did not type. I typed yes. Yeah, I typed and I typed like so, you know, I basically ended up typing a spec. But like all my specs were very Socratic, right? Like, I was just like, what if we did this? Would this make this easier for you to do? What are the. I gave you a list of requirements. Please analyze them and see if I made it too complicated. Right. Or if I introduce extra steps and there's other ways to solve it, like use a NPM library. Right. Or you know what I mean? And the first like three days, the thing made 3,000 scripts. Wow. And, and that was until I invented my, my sifting thing where, you know, where like it will codify a script as a tool if it's useful. Right. And so of those 3,000 scripts, there was 200 unique ones. Right. And now it's 12 tools that have five functions. Right. And so like now my little bot has like a little like toolbox that when I say good morning, it knows to check the mail and put on the coffee and you know, pull in all my notifications and pull the list of things I didn't do yesterday and then analyze it and see if that list is still relevant today. And it's like, and it's completely agnostic except for using Claude API code. And, and you, and you can do this with the $100 a month account?
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Yeah. It's incredible, the price of the access.
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Well, I, so I did this, I did this study of. So they have the consumer API and the market rate API, right? And so I put on market rate API and I did $150 in one day.
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You were cooking.
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Yeah, so. So that hundred dollar thing is a trick and a lie, right? Yeah. Someone's paying the bill and it's not, it's probably your data and all that. So like that's why next week we're going to start playing with local models because they've been selling US copilot PCs and Apple Intelligence machines and guess what? They can run models locally now and that are getting pretty good. Right. Apple's going to announce Apple Intelligence APIs that you can use in Xcode. So you can use the M4 processor with 32 gigs of RAM, which is not expensive.
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Yeah.
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That'S what I'm talking to you right now. I bought it yesterday and I did the benchmarks and it's acceptable for probably 99% of the population to do work today. And you know, the only people that are going to probably like scoff at this are like, you know, like you said, data scientists or multimedia people or people trying to like, you know, prompt, generate, Casablanca or whatever, you know. So.
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Yeah, so what model do you think you'll be running locally?
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You know, I am benchmarking. I, you know, it's like this whole like the first five days were totally like reactive research. Right? Like just like this thing is just like ChatGPT is a horrible writer. A horrible writer. Like I can't, you know, I can't stand it. Even using the API, it was bad. That's why I stuck with Anthropic because it was the most. It was, I was able to say, okay, so the thing I used before was notion, right?
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Yeah.
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And I was able to put Claude at notion and to analyze my writing style and tone and make a template that runs every time it goes to write something and then use all the same idiosyncrasies that I write. So when I write the draft there's less for me to fix. And I think that the relevation for me was oh, this is why Microsoft Copilot and Apple Siri are having such a hard time because they're trying to make, take a general model and put a general thing on it that works for 99% of the population completely impossible unless you give it every single bit of your life. Right. And I think like that's a non starter for a lot of people. Right. Like I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna upload my digital ID to, to the Microsoft and the Googles of the world because they don't have a great track record. Right? Yeah. And, and I think then, you know, the, that it comes down to is like, oh, okay, so we're just gonna carry supercomputers in our pocket and we're going to need a firewall type system to decide. Okay, to answer this question, TurboTax agent, you're going to need 36 bits of information and you're not going to get a single bit more. Son of a bitch. You know, and it's just like cool. So. And there is no VC in the world that's going to fund that company. Right. Because, because we're talking about like a social contract talking, you know we're talking, we're talking, we're talking about like imagine if cookies were made for people, right? Yeah. And so, and not for Madison Valley, you know, Madison Avenue and all that. So, so I'm building that, that's what I'm building on my computer. So you know, you'll run it on.
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This lab, you'll be able to do.
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Your custom LLM on this laptop. And, and because the dirty secret about most apps like in the app store and all the everything is just the same thing underneath, right? Because they're all just websites or Slack is just a web browser and Teams is just a web browser and it's just like there's all these things that they did to make the user story possible that I have access to too, right. I can go to Twilio and I could get a phone line and a video stream and the only thing is like I'm not a enterprise level systems engineer. So I write my story. I had it generate the code of the hello world and then I take the code and I run it through research phase and I go through the same things I did in corporate world where hey, I'm going to have a legal review, I'm going to have a security review, I'm going to have a technology stack review, I'm going to have an ethics review and I just run it through all these filters and when I get to the point where it makes sense to me, you know, then I will release it, you know.
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A
So well, this will be something that you plan on introducing commercially to others.
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Yeah, I think the future is open sharing. Right? Because the Internet was built on open data, it was built on open source libraries. And so, and the value is not being the pioneer that planted a flag on the beach, right? The, the value is being a systems thinker that can understand what a person's trying to do. So like I started on customer service tech support when I was 16 years old. Bill Gates gave the Chicago Public Library a couple million dollars and they hired a bunch of teens to teach people how to use the Internet. And I learned then that people didn't want to use the Internet, they wanted to look up baseball scores, right? They wanted to find out what's going on in their hometown. And so the desire to do a thing is not like, and I think tech people have completely forgotten this, is that people use tech not because they like tech, it's because they want to solve a problem quicker. Right? And if we come to a point where the reason you went to Google for the first time can make an app for you, you know, like, and I found myself asking questions that were like, you know, search foo, but with my end state in mind. So now I, I don't have to do search view for prompting. I can just write like, I really need to find a plumber to fix my car. Here's what's going on, right? And then I tell the story and I tell them where I am and I tell them, you know, so like all the things you, you would spend an hour looking around on Google, you can just plan out your list of requirements and have it scour, right? And that's so much, that's so much better than clicking through a bunch of pop ups and finding things. And I think that is like the, it's probably the end of apps, right? You know, it's probably like, because no longer. And now when I say the end apps I mean like, right? Like Slack versus Teams and you know, an Xbox versus PlayStation and like the is immaterial, right. What if I could take the video quality from teams and stick it into the GUI from Slack and then attach it to my Salesforce in a way that had all the features I needed and none of the things I wanted. Right. And I think that is probably more aligned with the future. So we're not going to build Salesforce type management platforms. We're going to build a single tool that can talk to services and vendors and my data, which I own and never give out unless it's a suitable business reason. And, and we're gonna have to figure out some way to monetize that so people have a living and be able to keep doing it and stuff.
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So, yeah. So you're suggesting that what the future of apps looks like is, oh, I hate doing this. Hey, wait a minute. Hey, Claude, can you build something that does XYZ and then blah, blah, blah, and it might ask for an API key or something like that, but once you do that, it's like, sure, here you go. And now I've got an app that I just built for me. Maybe somebody else in the office, but maybe nobody else uses it.
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Well, like, like, have you looked? Do you know what all the buttons in Excel do?
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No.
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Right. Like, there are all these things that Excel can do. That's like someone. Someone spent six months building that button. Yeah, right. Like so, you know, someone spent a good part of their life building that button, and there's probably millions of people who use that button every day, but I could.
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I don't.
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I couldn't tell you. Yeah, yeah. And like, so, like, so then, like what? Wouldn't it be great if I could talk to Excel copilot and like, I could just tell. Remove all your buttons and only add them when we need them.
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Wow. Yeah.
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You know, and I think, like, that's where, like, the critical error that Microsoft and all those people are making is they don't understand how now the one, the customization and lowering the hundred thousand option problem, all that makes the LLM smarter, right? Because now the LLM is making five decisions at a turn or two decisions at a turn versus like, picking from a toolbox and doing all this stuff. And I think you have to completely rebuild all these products from the beginning to do what you want. So I work with. Like I mentioned, we use Notion because I have a great PMO who does Notion, and she is the ninja at Notion. And I have engineers who work in GitHub. Right?
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Yeah.
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And then small manager, I'm like, well, now I got to buy everyone a seat in Notion and GitHub, and now I don't, because I have a transformation layer on my desktop and people just work where they work. And so when my PMO creates a project, it puts a project in my planning file, and then it creates the GitHub repo and assigns the tickets to the person. And then people just work how they work, right? However they want to work. And that was kind of the realization to me. I started making schemas, like, for people. So, like, so my employees have like, a little profile of, like, when you log into machine and put on the repo, it'll set up the repo. How you like it, right? Because now it doesn't matter that they like to do certain things and whatever because when I commit it, I run another script to formalize it or in the output style. And this is kind of like how people should work. Like, I can hire someone who speaks a language I don't even speak. Yeah, I could, I can hire people who, you know, like, I have a lot of friends and family that are like in economic dire straits and they're the smartest people I ever met. And the future is going to be rewarding people who are better being street smart than book smart because in the system having that kind of like intuitiveness and reactivity, it. I. The like the first three days were bad of my experiment. The next three days was like playing SimCity. Right. And. And then, you know, the fourth or fifth day I was doing my business again. Like I was actually like where I, I wasn't aware of the thing and I was able to like, you know, it's like, oh, I've been, you know, once I like hooked in the ability to like keep an eye on the prize system and the ability to not make 3,000 scripts. I was like, okay. And like there's no way, you know, I've been working with Office Tool for years and I've been working for. I'm an Apple person and nothing in the last like six years of tech has made me as excited about it as I am now because you know, I have a four month plan where I can realistically fire all my SaaS subscriptions. Yeah. Just get API access and services and I can pay go what I use and not what I use because the service quality is still there. But you know, like there's all kinds of features in these products that I have no use for. Right. You know, like, like there's so many people regardless. Yeah. Well, you know, I've worked, I've worked for companies that have both teams and Slack and they have like, you know, Zoom and this and it's like why are we, you know, why are we adding Zoom meetings to team calendar invites and. Yeah, and it's just like because. And it's because the person who's in charge of buying the video thing like that better. And it was just like, you know, and it's too expensive to build a just for us system. And so like everyone's come up with solutions to do that. Right. Like Salesforce has the Everything platform and you know, if this or that, you know, has like little connectors and all that, it's just like it's so trivial now to create connectors to do things. Like, I built the notion to my desktop to Slack synchronization tool in four hours. Yeah. So now, like, when my PMO changes the name of the project because of rebranding, it flickers through the system, right? And then every time I write code, there is like a mission statement of the project in there. So, like, I don't make 3,000 scripts, right? And it knows what tools it has and all that. And it's just like, okay, cool, this is like a viable business. And I'm no longer getting throttled by Claude code every two hours because I'm able to like, slowly prompt less and less and have it just run a script and wait for things to happen, right? So, and so I think, like, there's a really strong possibility that a person could download an app and pay Claude $100 a month for like five or six months and then switch back to API access or whatever and just use it as. It's like installing solar panels in your house. It's just like a thing that smart people do instantly get roi and it's flexible to the point where their values make them do it, right? So, like, you don't work at Microsoft because you think they stink. You don't have to work with Microsoft, right? You can now build the buffer layer between you and your ethics of thinking Google's gone evil, or Sam Altman and doesn't know what he's talking about or whatever. Cool. You pay Sam Altman for six months, you never have to talk to him again. And eventually people are going to give Playbooks to start off with zero API lms, you know, like that you don't need to write code for everything, right? Like, there's like, you know, I just want to journal, you know, or I just want to do this or that with my life. And like, okay, well, we'll just structure as much as that stuff you need. And, you know, you go buy a computer and it'll come with most of everything you need and we'll like, just wrap on top of it, right? We'll just use Apple Mail and Apple Calendar and give you the interface on that you want. Because email is a solved problem, right? Like, it's like. Except the only thing that isn't solved is the ability for someone to ruin my day with bad email. And I think once we figure out that kind of really personal, intimate engagement of technology problem, you won't have to buy a computer ever again either, right? Because it just works, right? You don't have to upgrade because. Unless there's a good reason for you to upgrade because your tooling works, you know, so. Yeah.
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A
Well, Peter, let's shift gears a little bit about your experience. Louisville, when your founder is your role. When did you start the business?
- [33:25]
C
We're still wet behind the years. We started last November. It's funny because I left Microsoft, and the day I left Microsoft, Satya Nadella gave himself a $40 million raise. And I was just like, okay, that's how it's going to be. It was just kind of like, okay, I. I need to help people. Right? Because it's, like, good for you. I don't. I don't think. I don't think tech is gonna help people through to the end of this journey like they should. And, you know, I'm seeing a lot of. A lot of opportunity where people were, like, being misled or making, you know, bets that they shouldn't have to make, you know, and. And people who know their business, right? You know, their, you know, there's all kinds of people, you know, plumbers and doctors and lawyers, and there are people who are like, they want to have a savvy business, they don't want to make unicorn money, and they. They just have to do lice and stuff. And I think there's really lost connection with those kinds of people for the people who make these tools.
- [34:23]
A
So, you know, that's interesting because there's certainly concerns at all strata of the business about how is AI going to impact my workforce. Like, if I got this agent that can do this, do I really need five people in that department? Do I need one person? Do I need anybody in that department?
- [34:39]
C
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
- [34:41]
A
So that's a different perspective, and I like it. Let me ask how your experience, you've mentioned your team. Is your team much leaner than it would be without AI? Obvious question.
- [34:56]
C
Yes. You know, like, I. I have a. My senior developer and I have a pmo, and I have. Me and I have a designer who helps design the images on your website. But all these people are contractual. Like, I've not. I would love to give them, like, money to, like, mess around and play with me all day.
- [35:17]
A
Yeah.
- [35:17]
C
And we're not. We're not there yet, right? Yeah. And. And I think the thing is, though, I can take their 8 hours a week or 12 hours a week that they give me, and I can make it stretch. I can, like, you know, get engagements going. And now we're able to take on, like, multiple contracts a month, so it changes the game. Right. You're not looking for, like, the big fish, you know, you're, you're, you're more like, you know, a realtor, you know, or you're more like a barber, you know, like where, you know, you build up your clientele and maybe you serve them multiple times and you create content you can reuse and, like, do in different ways. And it's just like, it just feels more natural of a business for me than anything I've done in tech. Right? Because, you know, I've been through what, four tech meltdowns and three recessions and, you know, and it's just like, you know, my entire adult life, the wolf has been at the door. And now I can just like, okay, I have a meeting today in an hour. So I'm just gonna talk and play and do things and like, hang out with my daughter and, you know, like, all these things become like a whole different lifestyle. And, you know, we're reading about, you know, the six six nines of the world, people. And, you know, and you gotta be a 10x engineer and. Yeah. And if you can't get, if you can't get this work done in 40 hours a week, you're. What are you doing? Right? Because I think, yeah, it's like exposing a lot of these lies about, like, crunch and planning and all that. Because now, like, every day I'm doing research. You know, all the work I do is research now so I don't have to like, plan the research, study around my work. I can, like, capture insights about my work and change things every single day. And, you know, and if people don't like it at my company, they can stay on the old version of the work, right? Because my tool now, my. Now my tooling will just like, auto convert on the fly. So, like, you know, I'm going to work with people who love Outlook, I'm going to work with people who love this or that or. And that is fine now, right? Because I'm hiring them not for, like, the style of clothes they wear, the way they cut their hair. You know, I like the, I like the meat between the ears, right? And. And I think that changes a lot of, like, the way you do things. Like, you know, you know, I, I talked to my contractor and he's like, okay, well, I only have two hours left this week. I'm like, you did the work I need you to do this week. So either you can play with this stuff or you can go home. Like, yeah, you know, like, I'm not, you know, I don't want to pay people by the hour. Right. I don't want to, like, I want to pay people enough time to like, do all the work I need done in the month. And if you do it at three in the morning or you do it in Singapore or whatever, like, who cares, right? Because it's like, I like the work that comes out of you and, and all that. And I think that is like an amazing shift in paradigm where, you know, like, you're not, you know, everyone has work life and personal life and all that. And now it really can be like cake. You need it too, Right. You know, and, and I think a lot of people are super uncomfortable with that, especially like a C level up. Right.
- [38:23]
A
Because they don't understand it doesn't equate.
- [38:26]
C
And they, they've had, you know, AI agents for years. It's called the smartest 25 people on the planet working under you.
- [38:34]
A
Yeah.
- [38:36]
C
And if you gave, there's probably millions of Americans that if you gave them the intelligence and data that Sindor from Google has every morning or Mark Zuckerbergs have every morning, they'll be 10 times more successful than those people. Right. Because the intuitiveness to put two pennies together is not rare.
- [39:00]
A
Yeah.
- [39:01]
C
And heavy access and machinery is so. And you know, I think this is a really, like, I've, you know, I was very skeptical AI for many years and you know, I've kind of like aha moment flicked in my brain since I started the consultancy where it's just like, okay, you know, all technology, you know, and you can say this, you know, about ethics and stuff, you know, like, guns don't kill people, people kill people. But it's kind of true. It's a force multiplier of the human experience. Right. And you know, if you build your, your life, you know, I, you know, while you wasted time watching movies, I studied the blade. Right. And, and you know, if you live righteously and do things right, you can give yourself access to the tools and you can have your cake and eat it too, and not have to like put on a tie and go to downtown Seattle every day, you know, so.
- [39:58]
A
So tell me about the types of clients, like, what's the customer profile that you're servicing?
- [40:04]
C
I've been working a lot with, you know, every vertical really. You know, like health care, small businesses. A lot of companies, especially since COVID have switched to remote models and that changes that has changed their whole approach to like teamwork and team building. And it's made tools like teams and slack super important. But Also, they, they don't, you know, they don't know half the buttons do, and they don't know how to do the things they want to do. And like, right now I'm working with IT company, IT team inside a large healthcare company, and their executives come every day. It's like, hey, I need this data in this report in this format. And they pay $30 a month for Copilot. And they can do that, but they don't know how to start because Microsoft doesn't, you know, they won't. They'll bring the horse to the water, but they don't necessarily tell them all the tricks and the tips and all that. And so I'm just going through their program, I'm telling them like, oh, yeah, you don't need to pay for these four different products. You're just doing this product and do the thing you want to do with a prompt, right? And it's just kind of like, oh, like Occam's Razor. Sometimes I talk people out of using AI at all, right? Because I'm not selling Azure anymore. I'm not selling Google Cloud. And it's just like, yeah, man, use the AI to learn what the script is. And then once the script is in place, fire the AI. Because the thing that AI can't do is the thing that everyone's having problems with. And that's why it hasn't done what it did. Because if you spend $10 billion on a model, you need to own people's entire life to make that ROI payoff. Right. The thing is, without the data of the users, those models are useless.
- [41:51]
A
Yeah.
- [41:52]
C
So, like, I think consumers have that upper hand in these things. Right? Because all they need to do is wait these people out and figure out that, like, oh, yeah, technology is getting cheaper and everyone got so hyped up on Bitcoin and all that stuff. Now the computers can run models that can run your business. Instead of all these kids who grew up, like, souping up their computers for Xbox type game centers, they know how to make an AI computer now. And eventually someone's going to make it where it just comes with the os. And when you boot up the os, it's just a chat window and nice. When you talk to it, you're like, hello. You know, like, you know, you get to just say, what do you like to do? It's like, well, I need to send emails. And so I built emails, you know, like from there. Like, you know, and I think, like, and then once you have this profile, which you own, you Take your key, you go to a new hotel and it has a computer and you put the key in and it's everything. Like it was at home and it'll convert. Like, oh, I got to find the thermostat. You know, I got to find where they do laundry. It's like, oh, yeah, it's everything you like to do. And I think, you know, being able to, like, you know, just like, like I have an iPhone, right. And then, you know, I should just be able to go anywhere and just put it down and start working. Right? Like, and I shouldn't have to have six devices and cloud services and all that. And I think we're kind of like at this point, but you're going to have to step one step away from the people building these tools because their investors want them to bring everyone along for the ride. And they keep telling us like, oh, yeah, we're going to have to fire people or there's going to be less people. It's like, no, there's going to be less CEOs, there's going to be less middle management. Right. Because we won't need to work with everything machines anymore because we just use what we need and we don't use what we don't need.
- [43:46]
A
So for the listeners that are interested, because we don't normally, the people that we're bringing on the show typically are non tech. I'd say 80% of the people are non technical. Right. And some of the things that you've described to me I totally understand. But because I'm not, I don't have a tech background, I would have never thought to like to leverage the capabilities in the manner in which you've done that. And there's some people that are listening that are particularly interested in this. Oh yeah, we don't need all the buttons. Can you help us, you know, get the version we need or whatever. So for those who wanted to find out more about what you're doing at Toilville, what's the best way for them to get in touch?
- [44:28]
C
Yeah, you can reach us on the web. We have, we just registered a new domain called People Make It Better because we think they do, like all the tooling that we recommend. At the last mile, there's a person who clicks yes or no. Right. And so we are on summer of a break, but we start doing office hours again in the fall. And that's just like kids stream on Twitch, I stream on LinkedIn, answer questions about things and my calendar is on the website. So if you want to or you have a question, feel free to send it in. Also, like when you're playing with ChatGPT, instead of asking your question, ask it what you're trying to do and what tools it would use to do it. And that was like, that was a half the thing that got me through it because it's like I started explaining to the chat like what I did and they're like, well, you know, you can do this with this way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You only need A and D of that chain. And if he did this, I was like, oh, okay. So like, you know, I think people kind of like, they get in these holes like, oh man, I have a slack and I have a one note and I need to get him to talk together to review the figma and he's just like, start searching for, you know, how would I do the thing I want to do without brand loyalty? And you'll find yourself making these same kind of, you know, connections and tooling and get down from three, get down from 3,000 apps to 12 apps.
- [45:56]
A
You know, I'm actually going to try that. Well, Peter, thank you so much. Good luck. I'm a fellow founder and I can tell you that until it starts working, it sucks. Not the whole time, but you, you earn your seat at the table, let's.
- [46:10]
C
Say, you know, thank you.
- [46:13]
A
So you've got a lot of exciting times ahead of you. And with what you're doing, I have no doubt that. And with, with the velocity at which you can iterate because of your past, you know, the 25 years you spent at the new tools, I think we're gonna be seeing some pretty cool stuff coming from you. So awesome. And your, your LinkedIn profile, I'm actually gonna start catching some of those lot.
- [46:35]
C
Oh yeah, yeah.
- [46:36]
A
It's gonna be in the, the show notes. We're gonna include that. So anybody listening, you can tell you I've interviewed a lot of people, you know, talk to people every day about this stuff. The stuff that I heard today with the way that, that Peter's thinking about this is doing something we call thinking AI. There's no question where it's like every, every decision is being made. How could the models help me? How can the models make this better, faster? But his unique skill set, like his background certainly qualifies him to bring solutions that your typical quote unquote AI consultant. I just don't know that they would be able to think in the way that he's doing. With the experience, he's got to be able to apply those solutions so let's pay attention to Peter and as he grows toyleville. So awesome buddy. Thank you so much for your time. Peter. Take care.
- [47:23]
C
Thanks for having me on episode.
- [47:25]
A
Bye. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work and a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI Readiness Assessment and AI Strategy Guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefai officer.com. so thanks to our producer Evan Desolier for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle using AIAWORK and visit www.usingaiatwork.com for free resources to help you harness and AI in your role.