← 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
85: Using AI at Work to Reduce Tool Overload and Drive Real Productivity with Tim Cakir
01:01:52
Loading summary
Transcript116 lines
- [00:00]
Tim Shakir
Don't compete with AI, you lose. Collaborate with it, you know, become best friends, become partners and then you'll have a great time.
- [00:06]
Chris Daigle
AI expert isn't their role. What would you tell them to make sure that they're getting the most leverage out of their efforts to chase the tools? Let's say.
- [00:13]
Tim Shakir
Well, first of all, I said don't try. Just do it or don't do it, don't try. Right. You will feel very left out or delayed late into the, into the game, you know, because a lot of things happen all the time. You look at, you know, my channel and I do some crazy stuff and you're like, oh my God, I'm not there at all. Am I missing out? Yeah, don't feel like that. Because this is what we do day in, day out.
- [00:31]
Chris Daigle
When you're doing these trainings, what happens in 12 weeks? Like, how do you get started?
- [00:34]
Tim Shakir
We focus on behavioral change, redesigning how we work, redesigning how we show up, redesigning how we talk. Because we're speaking to the machines now we're talking to the machines.
- [00:44]
Chris Daigle
Interesting. Tim Shakir went from DJing and sound engineering to helping global companies unlock AI's full potential. As founder of AI Operator, he's on a mission to make everyone more creative, curious and future ready. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host Chris Staigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs and ambitious professors professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Right now, every business leader is asking the same question. What are we going to do about AI? If this is you, chiefaiofficer.com has the answer. We give you a simple path forward where we provide executive and team training so your people know exactly how to safely use generative AI in their day to day. We also manage the deployment and implementation to make sure tools actually get adopted and deliver results. And we'll also guide company wide transformation so AI becomes part of your operating system, not just another shiny object. The companies that act now will increase productivity, cut costs and grow faster than their competitors. Those that wait will get left behind. So if you want to make AI work in your business, visit chiefaiofficer.com and see how we're helping companies of all sizes finally get results from AI. Hey everybody. Welcome to the next episode of Using AI at Work. My name is Chris Daigle. I'm the host of the show and today I'm very excited about our guest Tim Shakur who is the founder of AI operator with a very profound mission that we'll discuss today. With his efforts in AI, I first discovered him way before we ever got on this podcast because of the content that he was producing on YouTube. As an executive who's focused on the AI space and what that means for business growth, Tim's content was one of those resources that helped me really stay up to date at trying to chase the tools and the developments that are occurring in the marketplace isn't an easy thing to do, even for some somebody who focuses on this 100% of their time and much less for somebody who tries to squeeze in a podcast here and there to stay up to date. So today I want to make sure that you guys walk away with understanding how Tim is doing this because he's doing a fantastic job at it. So, Tim, thank you for being here and welcome to the show.
- [02:49]
Tim Shakir
Well, thank you very much for having me and thank you for the kind words. And, you know, I'm glad that my content gives value to some, especially if it's to you. I'm. I'm even more excited now. Thank you.
- [02:59]
Chris Daigle
No, it's. So, Tim, you've had, as we just talked before we started on the mic here, you have had a pretty global and broad career, if you don't mind, maybe just kind of run us through what that looked like and kind of what your historically you've been doing for companies and with companies and how you ended up as an AI thought leader who is basically in the laboratory all day long pushing the buttons, figuring out what's working, what's not.
- [03:28]
Tim Shakir
Yeah, I think, you know, the funny thing is that finally I found what I love to do and it excites me every day and every evening, even if I sleep less than usual. It's just like, it's so exciting, you know. So I'm so happy that finally, you know, it took a few years to get here. I'm actually a sound engineer and a music producer, like, so I'm a sound engineer, but I study by trade. I love electronic music, you know, techno. So I was always into some type of technological thing, but I didn't know what it was. I remember my parents got me a guitar. They said, no, you have to have a music, like an instrument. And I didn't like the lessons, but I had to do it because they never understood that producing music or things like that was. Could be a job. So one of my first jobs was selling carpets in California, actually in Los Angeles. I was selling carpets door to door throughout the whole US And Stuff. So I discovered marketing. I was like, oh, okay, you can show things to people all around the globe. You know, this was early days of Facebook, you know, when it just came out, invite only and things like that. I said, oh, okay, you can find people around the globe that could want your products. I was like, oh, this is marketing. That was super exciting. So, so I really got into marketing. And that's when I was. Then I moved to London. London, uk. And that's where I was able to actually kind of get my marketing into my sound engineering and music. I opened the studio, had a label, had radio shows. We had a radio station, like an underground radio station, and so on. That was really fun days. And I realized that I'm a sound engineer, music producer. But mostly what I do is marketing. Marketing the studio, marketing the shows and so on. So I got into a media publishing company that was publishing magazines, like old school, you know, like paper magazines.
- [05:13]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [05:13]
Tim Shakir
And. And I helped them digitalize their offering. And I was like, oh, okay, I really like this. And from there on, I suddenly was marketing for tech stuff. So not just media and sound and magazines anymore, but really got into the tech world. And I had the opportunity to move to Barcelona for some deep tech companies. And I was in computer vision for real estate. So image recognition. Like, I don't know how many years ago when nobody even knew what AI was. Nobody cared what AI was. I was doing head of marketing. And yeah, I remember back then, my CEO and I was curious and he said, would you like me to kind of explain you what are neural networks and so on and machine learning? I was like, oh, yeah, please do give me like a masterclass. So I learned a lot about it, but I still continued my path throughout business. Right. So I got into then growth hacking. Growth hacking was cool, right? Growth hacking was a trend, if you remember. You know, I was like, oh, I'll jump on that boat, you know, so. So I jumped on that train, on that boat, whatever. And I did ride that wa. I surfed that wave of. Of growth hacking. And, you know, I went. It was Growth Tribe in Amsterdam. They had a great course. I became a certified growth hacker. And then we're doing these growth hacks and scraping databases and all that kind of stuff. Then I realized that that was not very sustainable. And then I really fell in love with operations. I was like, oh, okay, you know, this. It brings sales, it brings marketing, it brings, you know, growth. It brings all this stuff because growth is not just in marketing and sales. But then I realized growth is in the processes growth is in systems. A tool addict, people. I had a neighbor in Covid. He called me Tool Time Tim. If you remember the show Home Improvement, he was my neighbor, really. We had a separation in our garden, and he'd come to me and say, hey, Tool Time Tim, you know what's the coolest CRM right now? And we talk about that. And he started calling me Tool Time today. It was hilarious. So at some point, I had the newsletter Tool Time Tim, and everything was branded Tool Time Tim. I was obsessed about tools. People called me about tools. And then, yeah, I became a coo. So then I really got into this operational things. It was a B2B.SAS company. And also throughout Covid. I had the opportunity to teach at two universities in Barcelona because I did a couple of master classes after work before COVID And then Covid happened. They said, can you continue to teach? I was teaching, and I was good with technology. I had zoom, I had my lights. I had this thing. I had a stream deck with some shortcuts and stuff. And people are like, oh, he's a good teacher. It was interactive, and other teachers couldn't do that. So the schools kind of asked me, can you do more classes? I was like, okay, sure. You know, I'd love to help you. So I did a lot of teaching, and I didn't realize that I. I loved teaching. It's just maybe the topics that I wasn't sure.
- [08:02]
Chris Daigle
Technology or. What were you teaching?
- [08:04]
Tim Shakir
Yeah, I was teaching digital marketing strategies and technologies. I was teaching technology in business organizations, business intelligence, E commerce. Because, you know, I was in different industries. So I created all these curriculums. You sure? They were interactive online. And so it was really fun. And then I had this opportunity that I was the growth consultant for a sales outsourcing company of 110 people. Then I became the CGO and the CEO of that company. And I accepted the CEO role because of the title and, you know, money. And I was like, oh, you know, I've done it. I gotta. You know, I'm getting quite far quite quickly. Just accept it, go with it, even if you have no clue what to do with it, you know? Yeah, you know, just. Just hustle. Luckily, throughout that first year and a half with that business or the. To the. Towards the second year, ChatGPT came alive. Right. That was about three years ago. Yeah, November 2022. And I was like, oh, this is exciting. And I kept playing with it every night. You know, I always say this, and my wife thought maybe I had a mistress, you know, she's come and check. Like, who am I talking to? I was like, don't worry. Is this technology, is this. Is this large language model thing that we can use now? It's terrible. That's at everything. It's terrible at humor, terrible at poems, terrible. Like it was, it was awful. But it could. But you could see that there was something like that was gonna happen. Like, I don't know. But I saw. I was like, oh, okay. So I kind of pushed the limits. I tried new things with it. I was like, oh, okay. It's not really good, the output, but if the output gets better, we will have a very interesting technology in our hands, you know. Then everybody was like, you know, it's just a predictor of words and kind of stuff. And I was like, maybe, but you know, there's so much more to it. And I really put my full time that while I was the CEO there. And then my business partners were like, you look bored from this. You don't want to do this anymore. I was like, well, how did you get it? You know? And they're like, you're so into this chat GPT thing, aren't you? And I was like, yeah, absolutely. I'm. I'm very into it. I trained the whole team. And you know, I was like, I talking a chat GPT. Chat GPT every day. And you know, it was still GPT 3.5 maybe, you know, something like that. So it wasn't good at all. And luckily my. My business partner was again, my business partner in this business, by the way. He kind of said. He said, all right, what do you want to. I said, I think I want to train humans, you know, I want to train people on AI on this thing, you know. And he's like, well, let's start a business. And luckily we had this client in the other business that, that I helped train their team on AI and they were like, oh, okay. So I suddenly had a product. Like, it's just because somebody asked, you know, I had a product I service which was a training program. I did it once and I was like, oh, this is really cool, right? So created the company Arperator and. And suddenly we were training Google on Gemini, you know. So the Google team in Munich came to us to train them on Gemini. I was like, is this a career joke or something like that? You know? Yeah, and apparently not. And. And then I realized that I was quite good at training, you know, because I had that teaching experience. I hated school when I was a kid, so. So I completely teach in very different ways. Like if you ask me something back then, I said, did you Google it first? And if they said no, I said, then I don't answer it. You know, go Google it. And then we can talk. And then now it's like, did you chatgpt it you similar thing?
- [11:24]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [11:25]
Tim Shakir
So I always took that approach and then suddenly I find myself here. You know, we've, we've, we've trained about 25 plus companies, thousand plus employees, team members across these companies, and the demand is huge. And, you know, and, and I really did find what I love. And because of that, you know, as we were discussing, you know, I love every night, you know.
- [11:47]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [11:48]
Tim Shakir
Because, because I'm in Turkey, what happens is that I get the new features at 10:11pm Just as I'm about to go to bed, which, because then I'm like, oh, I'm not sleeping again tonight, 3:00am I'm like, no, you're gonna sleep because you're gonna show up for the kids.
- [12:02]
Chris Daigle
A lot of people.
- [12:05]
Tim Shakir
Yeah, but when you're in the US at least you get it in the morning or in the afternoon, so you got time, you know. But yeah, that's that, that's how we got here. And I think that luckily people enjoy the content that I'm putting out there. I love putting the content out there because it makes me practice and I like to show the transparency of me testing things and telling you if it's good or not and why it'. Not. And this is why I guess I'm in this great podcast of yours, Chris. Yeah.
- [12:33]
Chris Daigle
Well, thank you so much now. That's fantastic. It's, it's that quote. I think it's attributed to Steve Jobs, but it's easy to look backwards and see how all the dots connect. Right. The COVID experience with, oh, I'll teach. Oh, this is actually kind of fun to where you are now to where you're teaching. You know, tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands globally with your, your channel. You know, one of the things that when we're working with, let's say, you know, companies, executives, they're not necessarily. Their introduction into AI isn't at a strategic level about how this is going to transform my company. It's, they've seen some AI magic somewhere, right? They push the button and the video got made or the, the image, oh, look at me, I'm on Mars, whatever. And it, it's even at that level where they shouldn't be distracted by the shiny object. There is this impetus to chase the tools, right. With all of the advancements, and you and I, we've. We've had a couple messages back and forth like, as things have happened with new releases and that sort of thing, how do you stay on top of it? And how would you recommend. And again, this is what you do. How would you recommend somebody who is trying to stay abreast of things, that this isn't their role, AI expert isn't their role. What would you tell them to make sure that they're. They're staying on top of things, but they're not necessarily. That they're getting the most leverage out of their efforts to chase the tools? Let's say.
- [13:55]
Tim Shakir
Yeah, well, first of all, I'd say don't try. You know, that's the first answer. Don't try. Just do it or don't do it. Don't try. Right. I think is my, you know, my business partner here and he also, my business partner had told me once, he said, saying trying is that you're accepting the failure, right? That there's a big chance that you're not going to be able to achieve it. Is that if your wife's at the airport and she say, oh, I'm coming at 11pm you don't say, I'm going to try to come and get you. I'm coming to get you. If you say you've put already a big percentage, I might not come, right? So that made a lot of sense to me. And I'm trying to get that. I'm trying, you see, to get that word out of my dictionary of trying things. And sometimes my wife says, I'll try that. I'm like, no, just go get it done. So I took that approach of just getting it done. But to people out there, you will feel very, very left out or delayed late into the. Into the game, you know, because a lot of things happen all the time. You look at, you know, my channel and I do some crazy stuff and you're like, oh, my God, I'm not there at all. Am I missing out? Yeah, you know, don't feel like that because, you know, as you said, Chris, this is what we do day in, day out, you know, so I gotta, you know, one of my responsibilities is to be up to date so that, you know, people around me, clients, partners, even people in my family, you know, when they hear something or something happens, they ask me, you know, they don't go and they don't dig. They say, tim, you know, how's that image model? Is that ready for, you know, Production. And I'm like, no, just wait. You know, this is, you know, last year, okay, it was image year. The year before was text year. This year was voice year. Next year is video year. You know, I kind of also try to predict some stuff. You know, most of the predictions been good apart the Google prediction of like I thought Google Gemini would have been awesome by the mid of this, this year, which is, you know, 2025, because I'm guessing we're going to have this in 2026. So all predictions are correct. But if you look out in news and you try to follow the news, you are going to feel like you're behind of all this, you know, and you're going to feel frustrated and you're going to feel sad and you're going to feel like you're losing, right? And if you feel like that, you're not going to achieve great things. So I would suggest, you know, maybe choose one or two, you know, thought leaders, you know, content creators. And be careful with content creators. I would say, yeah, but be careful with content creators. I know a lot of content creators on LinkedIn with hundreds of thousands of followers and then they put something and then it's wrong. And I'm like, that's wrong. You know, that's not how you do that. And they're like, yeah, on the comments and then I've seen a lot of this and I kind of, I don't do it to make them look bad, but I want people to realize that it's false information, right. You know, so, so I get involved in these things, you know, so if somebody, their primary goal is to create content about AI and to make money from creating content, they'll just do anything, right? But if they have a business, you know, and they're selling automation, they're selling training, they're selling something, right? Or they have a community that they're selling some community membership or so on, right? They are going to make more real content, like genuine content that actually help because their job is not to create these hooks, just to get people read something that is not true and grow in numbers and then get advertisement. You know, lots of these posts on LinkedIn, you know, and LinkedIn, it doesn't say ads, right? Sponsored, you know, like in Instagram a lot of people will say sponsored or things like that, you know, or on YouTube. But on LinkedIn, no. So a lot of the posts that you see is companies spending thousands of dollars per post just to put their, their application out there. So I'd say, you know, choose One or two great thought leader like yourself, like, hopefully, hopefully me. You know, follow us, you know, do we have newsletters, do we have a community? You know, and get involved, but put yourself as well, a limit, you know, hey, every day, 30 minutes, an hour, I'm gonna, I'm gonna check this out and maybe put yourself also an hour of testing things though, right? Because you watching me do things on YouTube, it's great. But you taking that and trying it yourself is gonna take you that to the 10x right away, right? You can be like, oh, he did it. Let me try that. Oh, and then you get an idea on how you can run this for your process, for your day to day, for whatever you do it. So I really recommend, you know, taking some time not to just consume, but to create. Right. And I think that this is why we're doing good because, you know, we create a lot and then I consume a little bit so I can create more. Right. But if you. I think this is what's going to happen right. In the AI era as well, while we're at it is consumers are not going to achieve great things, but creators will because, you know, we can vibe code now. We can do things. So you can keep, you can keep creating incredible stuff. So we're going to have the consumers, right? And the creators, right? So which side do you want to be on? Right? And when I say creator doesn't mean you have to create a whole new company. You could create a process for your reporting that you have on Fridays.
- [18:50]
Chris Daigle
Yep, yep.
- [18:52]
Tim Shakir
You're still a creator.
- [18:53]
Chris Daigle
You know, that's a great distinction. You know, you learn by doing, right? Not necessarily exclusively by watching. And for anybody listening to this, if you're not sure how do I test, go watch some of Tim's videos. Watch how he's testing, mimic what he's doing. Mimic the, the thought processes that he's, you know, exhibiting as he's pushing this button, trying this process. So Tim, you mentioned kind of some eras. Text, then there was image.
- [19:22]
Tim Shakir
Text.
- [19:25]
Chris Daigle
Video. Most of our audience is business application. Let's talk about the text. We got it. Image, certainly on the marketing side and creating ad creative and things.
- [19:39]
Tim Shakir
Yes, especially with Nano Banana Pro now.
- [19:42]
Chris Daigle
Yeah, beautiful, right. But voice is an area that I've been very interested in because of its application and sales. If I could have outbound bots that did not sound synthetic, that were able to, even if it was just a handoff to a live person, right. That would be fantastic. Do you think that tech is here?
- [20:00]
Tim Shakir
I absolutely think the tech is here. I don't think the humans are ready for an outbound call done by an AI, But I think that we are ready for a kind of. When I say an inbound call, doesn't make sense. But if I fill up a form on your website, and then the second after, if I receive a call that is going to help me book something or be quick at it because of. Because AI is calling me, I think we're starting to be a bit more comfortable with that. But if from the out of the blue, if something calls me and there's an AI, and I understand that it's like, oh, yeah, this is cringy, right? Because we don't even, you know, I'm sorry, but, you know, I don't even check. If I don't know a number, there's a 99% chance that I'm not going to check. And I'm going to say, message me, who are you? You know?
- [20:42]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [20:42]
Tim Shakir
And that's happening more and more, right, for everybody. So I think that the outbound route, humanly, we're not ready for it yet. And I don't know what's going to happen there. And at some point, it's going to be bots calling bots, I reckon. Right? But the bots are going to answer, so that's coming. So I think that the voice of technology, we are there. You know, the latency is there. You know, I think that the qual of the sound is there. I think that that's all there now. But there are some great use cases, like, you know, the one that, you know, you fill up a form, boom, you get a call, you get a qualification call, you know, you request a call, you do something. And, you know, we're just closing a client right now. They have a really great thing. And then apparently from when they fill up the form, a lead fills up the form. It takes about 48 hours on average to get back to the lead.
- [21:28]
Chris Daigle
As a human.
- [21:30]
Tim Shakir
As a human, the human gets back in 48 hours and they call back. And then sometimes the people don't remember, you know, what they filled up as a form, you know, and they're like, yeah, not. Not anymore. I already booked. I already did. So you've lost that 48 hours. But what if an AI could call you right away and say, hey, thank you so much for filling up. I have some clarification questions. Okay, great. Yeah, I'll get this clarification. Okay, great. And then because of those questions, you could potentially even send a proposal, or you can send them to the next step and not wait 48 hours for a human.
- [21:58]
Chris Daigle
Speed to lead. Yeah, yeah.
- [21:59]
Tim Shakir
Speed to lead. So whatever we can do to speed to lead from an inbound perspective, I think voice is incredible at that right now, but not enough. Well, any favorites? I mean, at the end of the 11 labs sounds awesome because I have my voice there, you know, but you can, with the API, you can put in anything. But I hear everybody using Vapi, Vapi for all the voice stuff. Stuff, you know, So I think that technology wise, that's there. So a combination of knowing how to create a great voice on 11 labs and the API and something like Vapi, you know, I think that you have more than enough and if you learn a little bit of NA10 as well, somehow to connect everything and have some kind of integrations into your different platforms and so on, I think you're good to go to build's Voice. And I hear a lot of the last especially few months, everybody's like, oh, you know, I'm building something around voice, you know, what do you think about voice? So I think that yes, it was the Voice year, but I think that towards the end of the Voice year we're realizing that there's a lot of great use cases. But if I may add something, I think for voice, the thing I'm excited about, it's not even inbound or outbound calls. It's my assistant on my AirPods, right. It's somebody that I can, somebody that I can speak to, my chief of staff, which is an AI and then I can speak to. And I'm walking, you know, I'm walking in this beautiful beach town that I live in and I go for a 30 minute walk and I'm like, hey, you know, whatever. I don't want to call it Siri because Siri is awful. But, you know, so, you know, whatever, chat, GPT, right. You know, what are the emails that you can't answer to? And it says, oh yeah, well, I've answered eight out of ten. You know, I was sure about those. These two. I'm not sure. What are you not sure about? You know, I'm not sure about this and that. I'm like, okay, yeah, well, price them a bit different. All right. Did you send that? Yeah. Great. Can you learn that next time so that, you know, you can Tackle the old 10 out of 10? Yeah, of course. I put that in the memory. Great. Well, how's my calendar today? That's great. Yeah, it's like, well, did they put an agenda for that? Meeting. No, they didn't. Can you send them a message and ask him for an agenda before that? Because if not, it would be a waste of our time. Yeah, I've done that. Message sends. You know what else? You know? Oh, we have to send an agreement. Well, can you send it? Oh, yeah, but I'm unsure about this. Do you want, you know, this pricing and these terms? Yep. Done. All right. Put in 30 minutes. I've achieved so much work that potentially that took me half of my day in my desk. And in your desk, actually, as humans, we are not meant to be working on a desk like this the whole day. Right.
- [24:34]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [24:35]
Tim Shakir
And how did I understand this in between calls? I started because I have this plows necklace. I don't know if, you know, plods plowed. Yeah, it's a not necklace on the.
- [24:44]
Chris Daigle
Back of my phone. Yeah.
- [24:45]
Tim Shakir
Yes, I. I have that one. And then I got the necklace because it was really cool. Yeah, exactly. So that's a perfect tool. So I got the necklace and what I did is like, I'd get very inspired from the call or I have an idea and I would just go for a walk.
- [24:59]
Chris Daigle
Yes.
- [24:59]
Tim Shakir
And I. And I just click on my necklace and I'd be the crazy guy in the streets. You know, it's a beach, not many people, luckily. But I'm talking to myself. You know, he's crazy. He's completely lost there. So I'm talking to myself. Boom. I come back to my desk. It's on my computer. I put it on touchpad on a project of strategies or whatever like that. Boom. It kind of creates a step by step thing for me, you know, and then I even know, because of the project's custom instructions or whatever, it knows who I'm going to delegate this to. I put it on Slack or I even say, you know, create tasks now on notion for this because I have the mcp, it creates all that.
- [25:34]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [25:35]
Tim Shakir
Wow. And before that, I would have been like, oh, I have this idea. Let me open up a thing.
- [25:40]
Chris Daigle
It just wasn't hours in the day.
- [25:42]
Tim Shakir
There was not enough hours. And also I think that this. I mean, even if I have beautiful windows, seeing the beach, you know, it's not the same as me going actually for a walk on that beach. And for a walk on that beach, I was very like. I think my best times lately has been when I'm outside my office.
- [26:02]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [26:03]
Tim Shakir
So I think voice is there for that. That.
- [26:05]
Chris Daigle
Yeah. You know, for any listener, if you've got a commute into or back home to. And from the office. Maybe you don't have the, the beautiful scenery that Tim's blessed with, however, that, that 30 minutes. Maybe you listen to podcasts, maybe you listen to the news, maybe you just listen in silence and get some chill time. But if you were able to go, hey, I got this idea and AI was able to say, okay, let's go for it. Tell me, me, what do you got? Right? And before you even get into the office, what does my day look like? Exactly what Tim's saying, well, you got this, this and this. Okay, for that, do this. Hey, for this, tell them to show up instead of me. Like the amount of time. Because, you know, as a business owner, it's not the doing that's so important. Really the highest leverage activity is the thinking part of it, not necessarily the doing. Because now we've got AI, we've got a team or whatever that can do the delegation. But if you're spending that time doing or preparing to do, huge missed opportunities. So I'm glad to hear that. Let's talk about 2026. And you're saying video, obviously the, the creative elements of it, easy to understand. Let's say, let's say that video gets to the point to where audio is now, like AI enabled audio. What are some business applications for people listening to maybe go, oh, I didn't think about that. That would be, you know, that'd be huge.
- [27:28]
Tim Shakir
Yeah, there are many. And if I may answer this, but before that, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give another quick tip because I realized on, on the, on the voice stuff that I was going to drop my daughter to school. 20 minute rides. And on the way back, I was on my own in the car listening to music. I have a great Spotify playlist and stuff. But I was like, I wanted to be productive. So what, what we did is we did an automation that would catch me up on 15 different newsletters, but with a custom podcast. Right? With a custom podcast just for us at 9am to my Slack and on the way back I just click that. Also my CarPlay and I listen to this 10 minute podcast that takes 15, 50, about 50 that I love. And I don't spend two hours reading newsletters anymore. Every morning I get this 10 minute podcast and then I'm on top of the news, like you were asking in the beginning. Right. So I think that there's so many other use cases for this type of voice stuff.
- [28:20]
Chris Daigle
Before we go into video, I want to get geeky and talk about what that stack looks like.
- [28:24]
Tim Shakir
Yeah.
- [28:24]
Chris Daigle
So and if you're a listener and you're like, well, you know, I'm interested in AI, but I don't need to read 15 newsletters. No, but your industry information, your professional information can certainly just, just plug in a different widget here. So what does that, what does that stack look like to be able to achieve this?
- [28:40]
Tim Shakir
Yeah, it's very simple. We actually use one of our Gmail addresses to subscribe to all these newsletters. We have a label in Gmail automatically labeling these newsletters. And then we have make.com, which is a automation platform and integration platform like NA10 or Zapier. There are many others that you can the same thing on make.com we, we check for that label and then we take all that information, we clean up all the content of promotional content and you know, sponsor things inside these newsletters. We concatenate all of it, make sure that all the information is the information that we want to know. Because 15 newsletters, there's going to be a lot of duplicates as well, about the same news, about the same thing and a lot of things that we don't care about that's going to happen. Like if it's negative news about AI stuff I usually don't check. I'm on the positive side. I really want to focus on that. So we have a very nice, a couple of prompts that will filter out all these things and then it creates a script and then the script goes to 11 labs and then 11 labs creates the voice, the podcast itself. Then it brings it back to make.com and then we deliver it to Slack. In the meantime we store it in our Google Drive, we give it a podcast number just so that we can have all this information for ourselves. But then on at 9am on Slack is like, hey, Arpa team, today's news is this, this, this, this, this, right? And my whole team, we're a very small team, we all listen to this and we're. And we're aware of the latest news.
- [30:08]
Chris Daigle
No, Interesting. So you know, you mentioned your ops background and that you got like a much more operator than I am. The visionary, right? So I see the elephant. Elephant. A bite at a time, right? It's very easy. And that's what you just described. For those of you listening, if that sounds hard, talk to whoever handles operations or whoever's more process minded in your business and say, how could we do this if that's not you, don't worry about it. Doesn't mean that you can't play this game. It Just means get somebody who's thinking that way.
- [30:35]
Tim Shakir
Ask AI. I mean, if right now, like I always say, my training, automating the automation. We are in the phase that we're almost automating the automation.
- [30:43]
Chris Daigle
Yes.
- [30:43]
Tim Shakir
Today you go to make. Make has a copilot, you tell it. Or Zapier has a copilot, you say what you want to build, build it builds it for you. And not 80 to 90 of it works, you know, and then the 10 to 20 doesn't work. But this is across everything, you know, to, to our trading program. They're like, oh, I got to 89. I'm like, don't worry, the 10, 20, it's not going to work. Right. But it's fine, you know, it's okay that you pushed it to that. Right? So, so I think that you can ask AI and you know, people ask me like, what should I do? Or I'm like, did you ask AI? Like, you know, I didn't say what you do. Yeah, yeah. Ask me, ask me 10 question about my job, about what I'm going to do today, and then help me automate it. And you'll be very surprised, you know, so I think that's, that's very important. And anybody can build anything almost. Now, you know, if you go to Google AI Studio and you tell the app idea you have, you have a full working app with AI features ready for you, it's like, what, you know, what are we living? Yeah.
- [31:37]
Chris Daigle
So, hey, for those of you listening, like, you're going to want to, we're going to have a list of all the tools that we mentioned. Go through all of these, the ones that Tim's are mentioning. Two things. One, you can learn how to use them pretty quickly, at least. You know, baseline level, usage, there's not a huge learning curve. And two, natural language is all you need. You don't need to be, you know, as an educator, like, like you on, on AI stuff. That's my number one tip to people. Well, what about go to the models? Well, how do I, I go to the models? That's like my mantra as well when we get questions in our certifications and things like that. Can I answer the question? Sure. However, by me getting you to essentially, you know, the equivalent of did you Google that? Right. I'm helping that individual develop that new reflex of, oh, I'm stuck. Oh, wait a minute. No, I'm not. Hey, Chat GPT. Hey, Gemini. Hey, Clock. Like, go to the models. If you get stuck, make the. That your. Your new reflex does it get you 100% of the way maybe. Does it get you further than you were when you had the question? Absolutely. So that's great advice.
- [32:41]
Tim Shakir
100%. It'll get you, you know, more than zero percent. Right. If you don't do anything about it and you wait for an expert, you wait for somebody and you want to book something, you know, you're already late, but come to an expert, come to us with done your research, tested things and you failed. Because if you do that, then I'm going, oh, you failed at this, that's fine. Right? So you kind of have done that 80% again, right. And why are you going to pay less and you know, and you're going to learn a ton, right? And I think it was yesterday in a new training program they, there was a question and the question was like, you know, what's going to happen with AI taking the cognitive, the cognitive, you know, behavior of humans and so on. And I was like, I was like, well, if you don't read the reasoning, if you don't read what it's doing, like how it's thinking, right?
- [33:26]
Chris Daigle
Yes.
- [33:27]
Tim Shakir
Then, yes, if you just look at the output and you roll with it, you're in trouble. Right? But if you read the reasoning, it made me much more intelligent, right? Because I see how it thinks things and some frameworks I never heard and then you go into a rabbit hole, you understand those frameworks, then you put a notebook lm and then you suddenly create a notebook for yourself and you learn that whole area. If you're curious, this is the best time to be alive. And I'm very curious. So this is why I think I'm very excited about this is so what I, what, what I also want to say is that, you know, you said it yourself, you know, chatgpt, Gemini clothes. There's so much, there's so much free stuff. You know, you can go today to, you can go to chat today and say, hey, give me a four week plan on understanding what are large language models. Yep, I'll give you a four week plan, right? You can even go to Gemini and say, find me for this four week plan. All the YouTube videos I should watch. It's going to find all those, right? So, so, so, so it's unlimited, you know, like it's unlimited, you know, the only blocker is ourselves. We are the limitation.
- [34:28]
Chris Daigle
Let's, let's talk about that because we, we, we kind of became aware of this process that occurs. We call it thinking in AI. It's a moment where maybe you're showing somebody they're doing something and something clicks and they go, oh, wait a minute. That means I could take it to chat GPT and ask it to create the four week. Oh, and then I could. And then I could. And then I could. How do you facilitate that? I mean, I'm sure you've witnessed a similar aha moment where it clicks, the matrix unfolds. How do you help facilitate that for people?
- [34:57]
Tim Shakir
People? Yeah. I think the aha and the wa moments are the moments that I. This is why we have our business, you know, in our training programs. And I see everybody. There's, you know, 75 people on the screen in little, little, little squares. And. And then I see in their eyes, I show something. They go, yes. And then I see, I'm like, oh, you know, Chris got the aha moment. Oh, yeah, I was thinking. And then I'm like, you know, unmute yourself, tell us, you know, and then says it across everybody. And then everybody's gonna go, try that. Right? Things like that. So, so how we facilitate it really is, you know, we learn like how we do our training program is that we survey everybody. So we know every process, we know everything that everybody does. Not everything, but most of the important processes and systems and tools they use in their jobs. And our program is fully custom to the company, custom to the team, custom to what they do. So then I do that task, right? And I do it. I'm not an expert in that industry or that task, but I'm an expert in AI, right? So I open up an AI and a feature could be a deep research, could be whatever it is. And I do that and I see people go, and they're like, what? You know, it's like, that took me five hours the other day. He did it in 15 minutes, right? So if I get that reaction from people, then after that they message me, you know, they're like, Tim, you know, how did you do? Like, well, I showed you, you know, test it next week, come and tell me, how did that go? So we're always focused on their job and what they do, right? And re kind of showing them how could they do that task, that job, that system, how can they do it today with the technologies that we have in our hands? You know, and the second I show, I really get very big adoption very quickly in our training programs.
- [36:35]
Chris Daigle
Makes sense.
- [36:36]
Tim Shakir
When that happens, that's it, you know, then it's a beautiful journey because, you know, you get that in week four, we do 12 week programs. So in about week two, three we've got most of the people, the skeptics. Week four, five, latest, week six, everybody's on board, right? If there is one or two people not on board, they have a fixed mindset. They're not even the right people for your business.
- [37:00]
Chris Daigle
That's a good point. Hey, so I want to talk about that a little bit because you're doing a couple of distinctions. One, as you were saying that as you're looking for that training, right, what you just mentioned was you have context on who's going to be on the other side of the zoom window, right, because you've done some surveys and you understand. And I think that for those of you that are wanting your teams to get trained up and that sort of thing, very important distinction, rather than going into broad conversation about the subject matter, apply it contextually and I think that that will accelerate that aha moment. If I see that somebody made a music video with AI, oh, that's cool, that's amazing. But if they're doing something specific to my role, it's very easy for me. So that's a really good takeaway for me. Second thing, what percentage or, or what category of individuals are you seeing that. That aren't getting it necessarily, or are hesitant because change management is a concern and you, if as you're rolling this out in your company or you're wanting to be the champion internally and lead the conversation, how do you address those people that see it as either they don't get it, they see it as a threat, the fixed mindset. I mean, the point of they're not a fit. Maybe they were a fit before AI entered your business, but as your business is transforming into what is necessary for economic viability in the future, you need to reconsider those people. Like, are you seeing any, any patterns that maybe we should look for as far as individuals who might be friction in that enablement or literacy effort?
- [38:28]
Tim Shakir
Yeah. This is a bit more the sadder part, isn't it? They were, they were a great fit because they did nine to five and they just did these processes. They didn't have to think, you know, and they just step by step and they just did their job. And at five o' clock, they, they clocked out and they're like, oh, I've done my job for the day. You know, you were, they were great. And sadly, these are the people who are going to lose their jobs. You know, in this 100 million people losing jobs, 20, 30, if that's happening, these are the type of people that are going to Lose their jobs, right? And I think in that is from, from that category is the ones who have a growth mindset and they like to learn even if it's, even if it's not a work, right? So, so maybe, maybe they're doing that nine to five and you know, and they've been their job because they earn money and they have kids, but, you know, they go home, they have a record collection, you know, on Sundays they buy records, they go to parties, they play piano, they play tennis or whatever. They have hobbies, they have things they want to do. But work never was a place to be proactive because there was money and that was it, right? So those people still have a very big chance in AI, right? In this new economy because they can learn and they can experiment. And again, they'll realize that aha, wow moment maybe when they're planning their, their, you know, their next art exhibition and they use chat GPT to help them plan where they're gonna put certain art. And they're like, oh, I never thought about that, right? So they got that aha wow moment. And now the only thing that is missing is how do they connect it to work, right? And potentially they're gonna get a new job or whatever. So those people are okay. But I think that the people that are not gonna do really well is really the fixed mindset people, right? They're very fixed mindset. They don't want to learn anything new. They complain about a lot of things in life. Life. They watch a lot of news, right? And they're like, oh, everything's dark and gloomy all the time, right? And if they stay like that, then AI is dark and gloomy.
- [40:25]
Chris Daigle
So, Tim, you've mentioned the training that you're doing, and I find it makes a lot of sense to survey in advance, understand the context and not just have a one size fits all. When you're doing these trainings, what does. What happens in 12 weeks? Like, what are you covering? How do you get started? Where do you end up with 12 weeks?
- [40:41]
Tim Shakir
Weeks, yeah. So our 12 week is really. We focus on behavioral change, as you were saying, right? It's not. These are not hard skills. These are soft skills. These are behavioral change. This is a habit changing. This is really redesigning how we work, redesigning how we show up, redesigning how we talk. Because we're speaking to the machines now. We're talking to the machines, right? So that's the program, and we break it down into three phases is. So first of all, we do a survey, we do a Survey throughout. Everybody, everybody fills up a survey, right? And that survey gets read by me very quickly in certain places.
- [41:20]
Chris Daigle
What are you looking for in the survey? Are you looking for like already, Are you already using the tools or are you asking more tactical, like what is your job? And that sort of thing?
- [41:29]
Tim Shakir
So it's a combination is the first is what is your job, what do you do daily? And then it starts going to, you know, what is painful in your job? You know. What sucks, actually? What sucks? You know, it sucks that I have to do reports on Fridays and, you know, I have to create these presentations for the board or whatever. That sucks, right? That, that does suck, right? If you had the magic wands, you know, what would AI do for you? Yeah, things like that, you know, so we, we go from very. What you're doing to very inspirational of what AI could do. Why you worried of AI or do you love it? Can you tell us a little bit more? They're all open text. Most, it's about 10 questions. They're all open text, you know, long text formats. And we tell them, spend 10 minutes, you know, you know, you can dictate to it, you can send a voice note if you want. You know, you can, you can write if you want. I don't care. Just put what's in your mind into these, into these questions, right? Answer these questions. We take all this, we have multiple agents now that do the job, of course, and they analyze everybody, right? But they analyze this comfort level, pain points, you know, wish list, you know, and if they've tried anything and if, you know, if they have any question about, you know, security, privacy, things like that. So anything that we need to flag and so on. So we do that across hundred people in a company. And then from there on, I get a kind of survey analysis where I have the top pain points in the company. But first of all, I understand what does the company do, right? And what does each do and how can it contribute to each other? And it contributes to the big picture. And then I get these pain points, the top five pain points, right? These are great because that's. If we start training with that and we reduce those pain points. You already love us.
- [43:07]
Chris Daigle
Context.
- [43:08]
Tim Shakir
Yeah. And you're like, I love these guys, you know, and you tell your CEO you love us. The CEO says, yes, chick. You know, like return investment is already starting, right? Because what happens a lot is that as we all know, there's a lot of fear out there, right, that AI is going to replace us. But when a company hires us and Spends money on us and we're not cheap. Right. And I say it in a nice way because I know the return on investment is huge and, you know, the value is there, there. You know, I'm saying that because a lot of people will come and they're like, oh, that's expensive. Yes, it's expensive. But, you know, when I show you 750 return on investment in the next 12 weeks. Yeah, yeah, it's. It's fine. Right. And. And also, you know, one thing is your team's happiness. Your teams are all fearing.
- [43:50]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [43:50]
Tim Shakir
And they're like, oh, you know, I'm gonna get removed. I'm gonna. Yeah. If somebody books a meeting, like a manager books a meeting with one of your team members and like, okay, that's it. It's my. They're letting me go. You know, AI has replaced me. Right? So there is this fear going on, and then suddenly you get everybody and you say, there's this company air operator, they're going to do an introduction session for us next week at this time. Right? And then you see me and you're like, oh, it is fun. Right? And I tell you, look, AI is not smarter than you. You have the context. AI just has a lot of data, but it doesn't know what to do with it. It. You're the one who knows what to do with it. Right? So if you, as the context machine and the context engineer now has all this technology behind it with features, but with also all these data around the globe. Right? And if you get together, you are unstoppable.
- [44:44]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [44:44]
Tim Shakir
The. The human versus the AI bench. You know, there's so many benchmarks, and all benchmarks are human versus AI. There's no benchmark which is human plus AI. Right?
- [44:53]
Chris Daigle
Plus AI.
- [44:54]
Tim Shakir
Yeah. No, there's none. Because it would crash. All benchmarks. Benchmarks, right. And so nobody wants to do. So nobody wants to do that benchmark, Right? Yeah. And also negative news and sells, right? So. So it's negative news amplifies positive news. You know, when do you open a news channel and it's like happy news. It's very rare, right. It's always very dark and sad news because that's how we get brainwashed, right? So that's how, how you can brainwash humans, right? And then. And then get them to consume and fear and so on. Right? So I always, you know, I, I have to do it here as well. I have this love not fear. We have this love not fear approach to everything, you know, is every decision you make in life is out of love or out of fear. Right. So. So I'm pushing, not pushing, but in a way, from our first session, we're showing people that, you know, if they love this technology, they're going to have a great time. If they fear it, they're going to alienate themselves and then it's going to be the human AI. But if they love it, it's going to be me and AI together better. Right. And I'm even trying to learn myself now to remove the word use AI because I keep saying use AI. No, AI is not something to use. AI is something that we work with. Right. Because there is the thing. If you use AI, like, hey, go do that job. It does. Okay. But if you say, hey, we're going.
- [46:10]
Chris Daigle
To do this job, do that job.
- [46:12]
Tim Shakir
Yeah. Can you ask me 10 questions about it?
- [46:14]
Chris Daigle
Yeah. Yeah.
- [46:15]
Tim Shakir
And it's like, wow, the results are already like 10x right?
- [46:18]
Chris Daigle
So, yeah.
- [46:19]
Tim Shakir
So that's really how, you know, what we do. And we get. People get excited and then, then, you know, I show some magic tricks right away. You know, I'll show some kind of notebook podcast about the company or about something like that. So they go, yeah. Oh, what is that? Right?
- [46:35]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [46:35]
Tim Shakir
And then it's like, okay, great. They ask you right away and they're like, okay, this is this. Go, go play with it till our next session. And then you've got people on board in the next session. You know, they're like, I'm ready. Yes. You know, and team happiness has gone up. So performance is going up. They don't look at the news and fear that their job is going to go and so on. They're like, oh, I'm going to. I'm going to work with this technology. I'm going to love this technology. Because you know what I never like to do reporting. I never like to. To fill up spreadsheets. Can this do it? I can do. I. Oh, wow. I love you, AI. You know, you're helping me do the things that I don't want to do. Right. And I can do more of the things that I really want to do. And potentially I can do better the things that I want to do because I have you on my side. So that mindset shift is. Is what I think I obsessed with the first few weeks.
- [47:22]
Chris Daigle
Right.
- [47:23]
Tim Shakir
The second, the second I get that switch, it's done. Right. Then we have a great training program.
- [47:30]
Chris Daigle
Yeah. So this is interesting because I'm. I'm not the music guy. I'm not the creative person. I'm the I don't know. The soldier, I guess. Right. Like, get it done. The grinder, the hustler. But when I work with a company, I'm looking to like, very data driven. Like, oh, this, this happened. These people push these buttons this much faster. Whatever the thing might, might be your approach though, they get that result, the company gets that result. But not because of necessarily specific tactical training, but because of behavioral change and positioning about how do I look at AI? Oh, this is fun. This isn't necessarily a work tool that I use. This is a fun thing that I get to work with. I love it. I think that that's a fantastic. And because the individuals themselves will self select the ones who are already good at their job and love the company and love their peers and that sort of thing, they will take this and they will be even more of an A player. And even the B players will. Will because of this approach. I mean, I like what I do. I'm just not like, I don't have the tactical or technical skills. Oh. But with this thing, if I work with AI, my job's even better. I think that's fantastic. I love that approach.
- [48:44]
Tim Shakir
If I could add something to that. Chris is, you know, so I get leads sometimes come to me and they're like, well, we'll pay whatever, you know, even more. But we want the program in a day or delivered in two days.
- [48:57]
Chris Daigle
Yep.
- [48:58]
Tim Shakir
And I'm like, no, sorry, you know, go somewhere else.
- [49:01]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [49:01]
Tim Shakir
And they're like, they're like, well, I'm gonna pay you. And it's the same program. I'm like, yeah, well, I'm not gonna get the same results when I put it out to 12 weeks. Because I am changing behavior here. I'm not just.
- [49:13]
Chris Daigle
Yep.
- [49:13]
Tim Shakir
Teaching them how to use a feature. Right.
- [49:16]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [49:17]
Tim Shakir
So that takes time. So I am not going to do the program in nine hours. Intense in our office altogether. And then everybody's like, oh, my God, another trading done. Yeah, some features and then done. When I do the trading, when we do it, they are the training. It's in a way that, like a client that just finished three months ago, the training. I see one of their team members on LinkedIn, he became an AI expert. He's posting about it, he's testing things and so on. And I'm like, wow. Like, when I trained him, he had no clue about it. And now he's an expert in his company. He's a champion. He's an AI champion inside. And he's learning more now because I gave him that curiosity on AI and kind of showed him that you don't have to fear this, you know, you have to love it. You have to experiment, you have to try. And if it, if it doesn't work out, that's fine because it might work out in a month. You know, the technology is not there, but you know, now where the limits are and the strengths and the weaknesses, you know, how to be human in the loop and what to look, look out for. So when you know that and I remove myself from the company, they're already, they're continuing to learn.
- [50:14]
Chris Daigle
Yeah, it's.
- [50:15]
Tim Shakir
Yeah, it's because it's a permanent world. Yes. And. But they love it. Learning. And then next year, if something comes out, you know, you have the right team members now. Right. Even if you don't have us, which is a bit weird because, you know, you do want to be stickier. But no, I want our clients that when we finish the program, that they don't need us. They have their team members and their team members are incredible because they know the job day in, day out. No consultant that comes, comes from outside that gives you 50 page guides would know the job better than that. The people that are on the trenches, the warriors, the ones that are doing the soldiers.
- [50:48]
Chris Daigle
Yeah, absolutely. This is, this has been a big breakthrough for me because. And for listeners, this applies to you as well. If you're looking at AI as strictly a, well, how do we measure the roi? And you know, we need to be able to track xyz. Great stuff. And yes, you do. The board's going to ask or, you know, you need to be to know that, okay, this was a good investment because it is supporting our bottom line or whatever. We're producing more widgets. But your approach of changing the behavior is much more sustainable. Not just sustainable, it cultural shift that occurs in the business. If I teach you a fact about AI, you can use it. Oh, but you have to remember to use it. But if I can change your behavior to where your default is, is AI first, then you'll figure it out because again, the tools aren't that hard. You already know your job. And if you've got this accelerant or this multiplier, this co pilot that can work with you, then the right employees will figure out the application of it. So I think that that's a fantastic approach and that more companies should be asking questions. As you're vetting vendors, maybe you work with AI operator to do this with your company, but as you're vetting vendors, investors don't just look at what are we going to like what tactical things are we going to learn what, you know, use are we going to learn? But how are you going to shift the behaviors? Because without that cultural shift and that behavioral shift, your company will stay static at the tactical things that they learned 90 days ago. But if you shift that behavior, your company will, like, your teams will adapt and they don't have to necessarily be on this tool chase and this like whole sort of thing. They'll see it and they'll instantly go, oh, I can use that here. That's exactly, Tim.
- [52:39]
Tim Shakir
It's great.
- [52:40]
Chris Daigle
So tell me more about. For the listeners that are interested in that approach or working with AI operator. Do you have bandwidth? How far out are you pushing this? What should they expect as far as. Because a, there's no question you've established through the YouTube and this conversation today, you get it right? And with your business experience that you shared early on, like, you're not just a guy who learned the tools. You're looking at it through the lens of somebody who's been a CEO, who's been a marketer, who's been an operations person, who ran a sales floor, like all of those things. So what is working with AI operator look like?
- [53:20]
Tim Shakir
Yeah, I think, you know, working with us, I can give it from a quick story, our first ever client, that client that I said that I did the training program when I first started. They're still with us, right?
- [53:32]
Chris Daigle
Wow.
- [53:32]
Tim Shakir
They're still, they're still with us. They did the training program and they were like, what's next? I was like, well, what do you need next? What do you need next? Because I was just creating the services thanks to them, you know, and. And I'm sure they'll be listening because. Because they're really great friends as well now, the founders. And thanks to them, I kind of keep innovating services. And then we kind of finished, not finished. But we have these three service that work really well thanks to them as well as we train companies, companies, every team member now knows how to speak AI and how to speak together with humans about AI and about their jobs and very, very tactical as well. Right. But also they're super excited. They're happy about this technology, they're happy about the future. You know, they don't think if somebody says, oh, you know, AI is going to kill us, and they're like, well, no, there's such a more positive aspect that we have to, you know, go for, you know, and if we start thinking like that, yes, that can happen. But so they also are amplifying their communities and they're helping that positive message. Message. So after the training, what happens is that your teams are all like, oh, I did a custom GPT and it does that. I've shared it across the whole sales floor. You know, everybody's having a great time and so on, and they'll be like, oh, okay. But now this custom GPT, we want to connect it to our automation so that it sends that out automatically, those agreements. It's like, we tried a little bit zapier, we got stuck because, you know, one of the APIs is not as solid or whatever, right? And at least you're like, what? You are not a technical person. They're saying, right?
- [54:57]
Chris Daigle
Yeah.
- [54:58]
Tim Shakir
So then they say, they say this is what we need and they can map it out and then they can go, all right, well, we need an expert. And that was AR predo on top of it again, right? And then with this client, the example, and then we sit with them at leadership, they bring us their problems and sometimes they even have an idea for a solution. We talk about it. Sometimes they say, oh yeah, we can get this done. I'm like, great, do it. You know, and sometimes they're like, okay, well we can get this, that 80% and then we need that 20% so they will take on that bill. Build. Right? So we build automations and so on. So what we do is train, advise and then build. Right? And we have now an AI transformation partner package, which is a whole year package for next year. Right. Is, is to make sure that you get everything you get, you know, you get the training, you get the leadership, advisory consulting, being there for your teams, office hours, pain points, things like that. And then you also get some build hours, right? So you get some build projects that are delivered for you and especially on the most painful processes of, you know, I love this one. It's, you know, recognizing invoices and putting in the system because everybody sends different emails with invoices and it sounds simple and there is a lot of tools that does it, but it never does it to exactly the way that you would do it manually. But you know, it's a very quick actually automation that can be done now, you know, that saves a ton of time. And then suddenly people in accounting and finance are happier. So these are the examples. So working with AI operators that suddenly, suddenly you have this partner at the moment that is me and my team, very small team, but I do the kind of service delivery side of things at the moment. I don't know how long I'll be able to. And I'm starting to be the bottleneck. As you were asking if we have bandwidth. We have tiny bit more bandwidth at the moment, but with the deals that I have in the pipeline, I think I'm not going to have bandwidth. But, but we're going to have to start train the trainer program. We're going to have to start training some consultants and things like that. But I somehow do want to be very involved because I love what I do and I think that I can bring a lot to the table. So being with us is that, you know, it's 14 months. With this first client that we had, it's been 14 months. We're still together. I'm invited to all their retreats, their company retreats, even if it's for fun, they invite me because they want me to be with the team, because they see us as their AI department. Right. So we act as their AI department, basically. So if you come with us, it's, it's behavioral change to advisory and then to building. Right. And that's a whole year.
- [57:28]
Chris Daigle
And plus, yeah, dude, I think there's, you know, another episode that we could do right now. I've really enjoyed the conversation, Tim. And again, we're going to put every tool that was mentioned in here, we're going to put that in the show notes because I would encourage everything that Tim's mentioned. I'm like, yep, great choice, great choice. But, but again, a couple of takeaways for me that, that last one about you're not teaching them, okay, then push this button and then you save it here. You're teaching them how to what we call think and AI. And once that transition happens, like, that's much more important for the, the, the, the future of your company than, oh, they know how to use tools. Yep, huge takeaway. So anybody listening? If you're, you know, if you, you got on this or you're, you're trying to just learn the tools, tools certainly definitely do that. But that's not the hard part. The hard part is getting that cultural shift to anchor in. And if you approach it the way that Tim's talking about here, I think that, like, the hard part's going to get done by the teams, not by the consultant, not by you. Because you're creating this as my, my buddy at Ingrain says, AI fluency rather than just literacy. Right?
- [58:46]
Tim Shakir
Yes, fluency, absolutely. Yeah. I just added one more thing because you said it's fluency for sure. But also we're creating A new job, right? Chief AI officer is a new job. And we're creating AI operator, right. I want people to become AI operators, right? They have 10, 15, 20, maybe more agents and tools, but they're the orchestrate. They're the operator. They're in the middle and they're like, go, get that done. They check. They're the taste maker and that's where we're going. Right? So. So that's what we're aiming for. We want to make everybody AI operators.
- [59:20]
Chris Daigle
So it's interesting with that concept of AI Operator, I got one more point when I would go and get a job. Okay. I was expected to know how to use maybe Excel and I would know how, you know, expect to be used. Do you check your email? Do not write any. Like, I had business tools that I used and that were just. That everybody used. Sheila in accounting did it. Bill on the factory floor did it. You just kind of referenced this to where, like the, the business tools that I'll be using are going to be the custom GPT or the agents and things like that, but it's not necessarily going to come from Microsoft. It might be something that the person sitting next to me in my department built. Yep, very interesting shift here. Yeah, we've got, we've got more conversations to have. Tim, anything. Any bit of advice, maybe like final nugget? I mean, there's been plenty in this episode.
- [60:11]
Tim Shakir
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, just to repeat maybe or make it clearer, it's, you know, don't compete with AI. You lose, you know, don't compete with it. You know, collaborate with it, you know, become best friends, become partners, you know, and then you'll have a great time in work and also outside work in life as well. It helps a ton. You know, see it as a, as a blessing. I know that, yes, there are bad things that can happen out of it, but same with any technology and any, anything that happened in the world. But if we look from the positive side, from the fuller side the glass, we have incredible things to do as humans and we have this incredible new technology that is our assistant. So, you know, don't compete. You know, collaborate.
- [60:54]
Chris Daigle
It's a great way to look at it. Hey, thank you so much for being on this. Everybody will be out with the next episode next week. Definitely check the show notes. There were a lot of cool tools and things that we talked about on here that I highly endorse and would suggest you start playing with. And great advice. Tim. Thank you so much for being on the show and we'll see everybody next week.
- [61:12]
Tim Shakir
Thank you so much. Chris.
- [61:13]
Chris Daigle
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.chchiefaiofficer.com. follow us on Twitter at the handle usingaiatwork and visit www.usingaiatwork.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your.