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'Brush Strokes Episode 88' | Hey everybody, this is Mark Potter, welcome to another episode of Brushstrokes, a podcast powered by Canvas Magazine. Guys, today's episode is brought to you by my friends at America's Prince Show. America's Prince Show, or APS, will once again partner with industry manufacturers, associations, industry influencers, educators, and printers to expand on the great success of the inaugural three-day event that was held in August 2022. America's Prince Show 2024 will once again be a partnership of industry segments. The show is positioned to be a collaboration of visioning and thought leadership intimacy. It's going to have nationally renowned speakers, experts. They've got some really, really great stuff going. And as I said before, these guys are focused on bringing back some humaneness to a print trade show. Certainly they want to show you the great exhibits and all the suppliers of our great industry, but they also want to make sure that there is some stimulating conversation, presentations, and some great engagement. So put it on your calendars because it's for May 8th and May 9th of 2024, and it's being held at the Huntington Convention Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Again, that is Wednesday May 8th and Thursday May 9th, 2024. Huntington Convention Center in Cleveland, Ohio, that's America's Prince Show. You can find out more at America's Prince Show dot com. Guys, I am super, super excited to bring you a conversation I had with a gentleman by the name of Derek Chiu. And Derek Chiu is a guy who much like we have here at Conduit built his business and had some challenges along the way and was better for it. He is the founder of Full Moon Digital and is a former early Yahoo employee. Full Moon Digital is one of the few 100% independent digital marketing agencies in the United States. The firm is cross functional with deep experience and media planning and buying digital consultancy, SEO, digital strategy, programmatic, analytics, performance marketing, paid media, you name it, they do it. They simply push the envelope of what is possible in terms of marketing and technology all while providing best-in-class digital marketing services to their pack of clients. It's funny I came across Derek because I'm so interested in understanding this whole concept of artificial intelligence and how it's going to impact our industry and quite honestly our world in general. Derek has been talking a lot about humanizing AI, essentially making marketing more relatable with AI. I think that bottom line is all of us have some fears about AI and what it could do to not only our job security, but possibly making things seem a little bit too robotic and eliminating what makes our industry so great. And that is the human fact and effect. And so certainly a lot of us have heard about chat GPT and it's been increasingly adopted for marketing tasks, but as Derek will share with you 66% of consumers want more human involvement in the design and delivery of their experiences. And in fact, 59% of business support that they see a reduction in revenue by using AI. So while AI is all the rage, here's a guy who's intimately involved in digital marketing and will tell you that it's all about his relationships with the marketplace. He's sitting here to say, hold the phone. Yes, it might be an interesting tool, but we need to humanize it. And I think we as an industry need to get our heads around this and start talking a little bit more about this. In fact, our sponsors America print show, America's print show will in fact have some part of their conference dedicated to AI. So you've got some people who are going to get our arms around this and see how it is not just going to elevate us, but take us to a new path of revenue for all of us. So I think it's pretty exciting stuff and maybe not something that we should fear so much. Anyways, without further ado, why don't you give my conversation with Derek to a listen and enjoy it. It's just so interesting for me to have an opportunity to talk to somebody who is, I mean, I assume you're kind of immersing yourself in this whole thing, right? Rather than go, only smokes AI is, is because let's face it. I mean, it's a scary gig for a lot of people right now. And so I get the sense that you're probably more like, well, no, no, we got to kind of get our arms around this and embrace this and understand it. But I liked kind of your message in general, or a sense that your message is this whole idea about each humanizing it. So what first, so when this AI thing has started to crop up and it's obviously reaching a kind of a bit of a crescendo here or a peak, what was your mindset in terms of your business and in your agency and and you know, why did you think I got to get my arms around this little thing? Yeah, well, it's interesting, right? So when it comes to marketing itself in the digital space, there's been a lot of tools and a lot of software over the years that tend to replace or displace marketers, right? So if I go back, you know, just a few short years ago, you had a lot of, you know, paper, click, automated software coming to market. So the big, big names like, you know, Ken Shue and Merrin were just, I'm anxious now, Sky, and at espresso and a lot of these automated tools that claim to do your job for you, get you better results, right? Get you supposedly real-time optimization. When those came into market, you have no idea how many PPC marketers that I spoke to were freaked out because, you know, they're saying, hey, look, the company just has to install this and everything will be automated and you'll get better results. Well, five years have passed, right? There's still hundreds of applicants for PPC jobs out there, thousands. So, you know, just putting things in context and especially for, you know, someone like myself who have been through so many years of evolution, of platforms and digital tools, the fear is a little probably less, it's more cushioned for me, than someone who, let's say, just started doing marketing six months or a year ago. Right. Right. So I've seen that evolution, there's not as much to fear as people make it out to be, because the way AI works is binary, right? If something is good, keep on doing good, keep on tweaking and learning the right path. If something is bad, stop it. Right. So it's very binary. So when we talk about humanizing AI, we're talking about, well, the AI knows if someone's going to buy something or not, right? But the AI doesn't know about my personal life. Right. So, you know, and to do that, and I've told this to many, many peers as we talk, like, AI will never interview me like you do. Right. We will never talk about what we like to do on the weekend, what we like to do with our families. I mean, all those, if you think about it, all those influence your purchase behavior. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I, you know, I wonder, it's interesting, because, you know, before we started doing this, you and I were talking offline about even the resilience, right, that you have in your business within your agency that came from the time that you started it. Right. So I'm just taking back to just what we were talking about this. In some respects, because changes come so fast in technology, maybe culturally, we're almost a little bit hard into it, right? I mean, like you said, I mean, when all these do it yourself, technologies, or do it for you technologies were coming on board. At first, it was scary. I wonder if there's a little bit of that. I do, I mean, I do sense some fear, right? Because there's a lot of publicity about AI eliminating all these jobs and having, but I wonder if maybe we're a little bit more resilient. Obviously, you are, but I wonder in general, if we are, and we can realize what I think your, your message is is that, look, we got to keep this, keep this real. We're this is going to, you keep this humanized, right? Yeah. Yeah. Look, out of, out of 1000 marketers, when AI comes into play, there will be some replacements and displacements that's guaranteed in any kind of technology evolution, right? But, you know, I probably get crucified for this, but the ones who are displaced were probably the ones that were not keeping up with technology the first place. Right. Right. So it takes, like you said, it takes perseverance. It takes a lot of, you know, the always game on mentality. No, right. To keep up with trends, to even, even if you're just dabble and know about it. Right. That's, that's probably 80% better than the next person. You know, I give you an example, we had, I was talking to a client a couple of months ago, and we're talking about content, and I was pitching the client and upsell on, on content marketing. And, and the client hit me with the question, well, there, you know, with this chat GPT stuff, like we could create content ourselves, we just have to know how to use the tool. And we can train our internal, mad at marketing person to use the tool. And, and I thought, okay, well, I see where this is going, right? And, and the client said, well, do you use GPT for your client's content? Right. So I felt, okay, I felt I could either say, well, we rely on that. I could, you know, I could go so many directions, but all I, but I initially said, I thought a client said, well, the reality is that we use GPT, but as a tool, right? Right. And it's not going to replace any of our team members because the one thing that you do not have is empathy and emotions. Right. Exactly. And I don't think that goes out of style, right? You'll never, right? Your business, from the day you build it to, to, to now is predicated on relationships. And I, you said earlier, I, it can't tell you about you. It doesn't know about you, your family, your feelings, all that kind of stuff. And I just don't see that ever going out of style. And, and, and, and, and so, but I don't want, but you don't want that to be defensive either. Like, hey, I'm, I'm shouting at the mountaintops what chat GPT can't do. You know, that's certainly the shortcomings, but, but you, what sounds like you're saying, you know, you want to wrap your arms around it. There are places, there's, there's got some utility, but it's never going to replace personality. It's never going to replace the depths of our connection. Am I right? Yes. So, so, you know, balance. It's really, and a, a critical mindset and component to this entire coexistence of AI and humans. Yeah. Right. Yeah. There, there are, there are, you know, advocates of AI to say, no, no, no, no, no, no, AI is going to just take over everything and it's going to do everything for you. And then you have on the other extreme, where it says, no, humans will never succumb to the, you know, the barrage of this AI, you know, in a war, but there, there's, there's, I, I'm very confident. There's a happy meat, like middle ground, where AI and humans can coexist in terms of augmenting each other's capabilities. Right. Right. I feel like AI is good as a speeding thing. So, so that the human side can actually make better and better decisions from the human side of things. Right. Yeah. I see that. You know, that's interesting, Derek, because now that you're saying that, I actually can see that in my life, where I've used chatGPT, for example, to do some organizational stuff, right. It can, it can script and outline some stuff. It's not, it's going to be a little antiseptic, but it's good. All right. So it can, it can get some stuff organized for you and structured for you and, and, and, and it's interesting that you say that because I do think it frees me up to do what, not only I love, but, but, but I think what people crave and that is this, right. Connect. Because this is where this is where growth comes from. You know, it's where learning comes from. It's, it's when you're talking about this from from a place of experience and then being able to share, you know, to share a story like that of a client, it makes it real. And, and I think we're still kind of craving that. And I, and I just feel like this has got to be a little bit of a crusade. And that's why I think it was so interesting to hear from you. What, what, so if you said for marketers in general right now, because let's, let's, let's face it, there's a lot of marketers that they, there are some that want to embrace this. And, and, and, but then there's others that are fearful of it. What's your advice to, to, to both groups? Well, the ones that fear it, you know, the, the, the majority of them are afraid of being off losing their jobs. Right. So, to, to that group, I'd say, you know, we'll buckle up, you know, and really kind of hone your skills and, and evolve with technology, right. So instead of being afraid of chat GPT on board, I mean, I think that right now there's probably already dozens and dozens of generative AI spinups. Right. Right. And only a few will survive. But instead of fearing it, really, studying and taking the time to understand how it can actually help you become a better marketer. Right. Right. Now, the ones who are wanting wants to go all in on that, I will remind you of Google goggles. I will remind you of, you know, the first ecompets.com time errors. Yeah, there's a lot of first adopters that go all in. And here's what gets after three months of chat GPT being announced and being available. We are seeing experts everywhere. Right. Right. I have been doing paid media digital marketing for over two decades. Right. I still am bashful calling myself an expert. Right. All right. And then still don't consider myself an expert, consume myself a continuous learner of digital marketing. Right. So, for those who go all in and claim that they're experts and they can figure things and automate everything for their clients or for their systems. I'd say, you know, a slice of humble pie is something that we don't mind serving you. Yeah. I love that. I really love that. And the reason is because it's one is so true, right. People just start to it like it's a race to market themselves as this expert. And you know, the challenge is something else could follow quickly behind it, right. And things change so quickly. And you're you're defining yourself by this tool. Whereas you are probably more defined by the people that you serve, right. And the understanding of the markets that you serve. And my guess is that great marketers have that mindset. And yes, the tools may come and go and certainly, but but those who have the better understanding of the client base are the ones who win. Is that fair? Yes. And I'm very biased because I have kind of built full moon as a people agency. Right. And it's an agency that is agnostic to tools, agnostic to software. It's about, hey, you know, client, Mr. Climes is flying. What is your objective? And how can we use the right tools to help you accomplish what you need? Regardless of what they are, right. If it's chat GPD, sure. By all means, let's do, right. But if it's if it's Excel, sure, let's use Excel. It's really those to to to to me to my team to everyone that I've spoken to, I'm always going to hold my ground that no matter how awesome a tool like here to be, it is merely a tool. And if you're putting garbage in garbage, regardless of what you do, right. And at the end of the day, and it's the understanding of the human side that will really help you succeed. Right. I really love that. And and I think that's the place to start with. Right. That's the place to start from is that the client, the marketplaces is everything. And but let's let's talk tactics. Let's talk. So that's that's where you start strategically. That's the mindset that's your that's that's how you built your agency. Your your familiarity with this AI and how you're using it today. How does that translate to because you talk a little bit about how you've got it, like you just said garbage in garbage out. All creativity. Can you speak to it tactically or even share some thoughts on or examples about how you've got to in use that human creativity along with it. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. So then you know, I'll share everything that there's new secrets in digital marketing. Everyone uses Google ads. Everyone uses Google. Everyone uses same platforms. Right. Right. So so when when when when Chad GPD came out, we're all I said, Hey, T just go play out. So go learn. Right. And working with me. Surprise. Everyone came back with their own opinions and how Chad GPD should work. Yeah. So I'm like, okay, well, first of all, we don't know everything. But it's a let's just put that on the table. Right. Yeah. Let's just pet fun with these marketing tools and really see what we can kind of, you know, create. Right. And as time went by, when you allow here stick, when you allow your team to autonomy to go test, to go play with tools, they come back with really interesting things. Right. When you don't put them in a box. Right. So over time, over months, ideas started coming from the team and say, Hey, Derek, like we can try using Chad, for a, b, scene, you know, items that want one of the things that really was intriguing to me. And it seems it's so basic. But I feel people jump over that because it's like, yeah, it's too basic, right. Um, is comparing Chad GPD ad copy. Right. With with the hero in ad copy. No. Right. And see which one resonates better. And there's no shaming losing to AI. Right. No big blue beat a lot of chess players. Um, so it was, it was, that was the interesting part. Right. Now with our clients, we can't say that, Oh, it works for client A, therefore, it must work for client B. Right. So we are actually in the process of meticulously testing one planet time campaigns at a time. It's slow. It's very slow. Now AI cannot speed up. Right. So a client only has X dollars to spend on whether it's $5,000 or $500,000. Right. Right. AI cannot create more budget for you. But AI can serve as a tool for YouTube test. Right. And we're doing that as a very technical approach. Um, you know, almost, almost at say super boosting A B testing. Right. Because if, if you have four humans create copy, there's a very high likelihood that they all think the same way with the clients. Right. Yeah. That's actually just a, that's a really good point. Um, and I, and I think that's, that's what it's supposed to be. I mean, I have, I am a client who literally told me this morning that that hey, they can't, they're banned from using chat GPT. The whole organization. And so, there are some people that are fearful that it does lose a little of that humanness, right? That it's, it's, it's not engaging enough. And I feel like, um, so that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I also think that if somebody's gonna adopt it, it's gonna get a little bit stale. And, and I'm not, and people can just start to tell like that. It wasn't written by anybody, right? And so, personality sometimes comes with our flaws. And, and, and, right? And, yeah. So that's why I think it's so important that your, your message is, hey, it's a, it's a tool. You can play with it. You can test with it. There are some places that it makes sense, but it's, it's never going to, um, it's never going to replace you. You know, well, it is, but, you know, here, as we talked about this, here's a scary thought for, um, and industry that potentially may not have, may not need as much human emotions and writing aspect of things, right? Technical assembly instructions, right? You go to, you know, whether you go to ITL or you order something from Amazon, and you have this manual of step one, to set 60, on, on things together, go, I can see 10GP need 100% right? And that's a lot of people in that, but writing space and do technical spec writing. That could be in, in general. And in some ways, it forces people to be, in some ways, it actually forces people to be more human if you think about it. Right? I mean, are we really supposed to be pounding out that kind of drivel? I mean, I, you know, that, that's fairly benign. And, and I think that the creative human spirit is something that we don't want to lose. Um, and maybe with this whole push of AI, there might even be a push back to human. You remember, do you, I don't know if you, you probably, uh, ever watched a sign felled, uh, episode, there was a guy, uh, so like the George Castanza, uh, and if you've ever watched that, there was a, there was an episode where he decides to do the opposite of everything that comes naturally to him. Because I think I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. I really have this out. Yeah. He basically orders a different sandwich. He goes up to a woman, he talks to her and ends up getting, he tells Steinbrenner everything, he, you know, what's wrong with the team and he ends up getting the job of the Yankees and it was hysterical, right? And it would, and the, and I thought the moral of the story was in some respects, don't necessarily follow the herd, you know, do, do the opposite and, and, and I feel like in a lot of ways, AI, there's going to be a lot of people go, oh, I guess this is the next thing. I'd better follow it. And yet aren't the most creative ones, the ones that say that's, that's fine. I'm not going to discount it, but I, I'm still about connecting more deeply on a more intimate level. Does that, does that fair? Yeah. Um, it, it does resonate a lot with what we do here, right? Um, and, and, and especially when we bring on new, new, new people, new team members, new tech members who have been working larger companies, um, there's always say, well, we did this there. Well, great. Keep it there. Right? Not, um, you know, we, we are here because we are different, intentionally different. Um, and so, uh, you know, one of the things, and so we, I always get into conversation with prospects, you know, who wants to work with us and say, hey, like, what's so different about full moon that we can't find other agencies? So I'm like, well, it's, it's not that difficult, guys. I say, well, we only take on seven new clients a year. Yeah. All right. So that is a total anti-agency approach because I've been an agency, we're all I've been in the house where you just have to just pow on, that's much as you can to build a top one. Mm-hmm. Right. Um, but I've also been on that and receiving an overburnt. Mm-hmm. So, you know, it's like, okay, well, everyone's doing that. Great. I have been that I know how to prevent burnout, which is the number one agency, chili, right? Right. 100%. I, that resonates with me because I think that it goes back to something you said earlier and, and, or certainly the message that you were sending, and that is, you're defined by the people that you serve. And in some respects, right? If you're, if you, if I said to you, all right, Derek, well, who do you guys serve? And you said, well, anybody who's got dollars to spend, right? Then at some point, you're, you don't really mean anything to anybody. But if you say, listen, and if somebody, it's the old elevator story, right? I get into the elevator and somebody says, it turns to you and says, Derek, what do you do? And it's like, you know, and you go through all the different things that you do from a tactical standpoint. That's when they go, all right, yeah, somebody else can do that too. But if it's different, if your answer is more about, well, I can't really explain everything I do is per se. I can tell you about the people that we serve and who I stand for. I mean, to me, that's powerful. And that's kind of what I got from you earlier. And, and I feel like that whole message is when, I don't, it doesn't really matter. AI might be the greatest tool. But if that is, is what matters to you is who you serve. And I define myself with it. That's powerful stuff. Sounds like you guys share that internally a lot. Yeah, 100% agree with you on that. Look, if AI is the only thing you fear now, let's buckle ourselves. X five years, 10 years, that's going to be something new that's going to come along. Right. Right. So there's really no time to appear. Everything that comes along that can potentially threaten your job or your existence. I, I rather lie team, like clients and anyone I talk to invest that time. We direct that time into how do we involve ourselves? Right. One of the philosophies of our team is, you know, so I've been in companies where they do a lot of personality testing, strengths, weakness gaps and all that stuff. Right. So the, the popular test is to find your weaknesses and be like, okay, well, how can we pay it's good and torture? Right. I poorly did not subscribe to that. I, I am off the line, I'll let's hide people who are any good at what they do. Instead of investing in trying to take someone from not good to good, if we find someone that's good, we can now use their time more effectively, taking that person from good to great. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I love that. I love that. And, you know, and that's, and you get a kind of dance to the beat of your own drummer in that respect. And again, we hear all those kind of monitors. That's a, I think that's a, that's a really, really good point in terms of, hey, let's, we're trying to get stuff done first and foremost. Right. So, and, and the leadership, you, is all about the, the, the customer. Let me, let's get this done. And then, when you're, and, and, and if everybody's pulling in that direction, the purpose of the organization will set the culture. And if they don't want to be part of that, then they, you know, they'll make the choice themselves. I suppose. Right. And, and that's okay. Right. Not everyone's cut out to being swat. Not everyone's cut out to be a firefighter. Right. You, not everyone's, you know, going to be an astronaut, but a lot aspire to, right. That might, no one, no one's willing to go through the training to get, you know, let me ask you a foil, let me ask you, what do you think, what, let me tactically, what do you think some of the industries or businesses that are really going to be adversely affected by this whole AI thing? Oh, that's, that's a big question. Yeah. I just wonder what businesses, I mean, you know, you talked, I mean, I mean, customer service. Yeah. Customer service will be affected. All right. You may not need 50 people in your call center anymore. If you're able to connect up a very good, self-serving system. And then that's where he started, right. If you look at all those web chat boxes that existed many years ago, right. That already took out a percentage of customer service. Right. And then now you have AI that can actually carry on in conversation. Now, I remember when I was in college at IU, I was actually learning how to program AI interactions on the Sun Microsystem computer. Wow. All right. The only problem back then was AI doesn't remember what you tell it. Right. So, but now which at GPT, the ability to retain what you told that AI system for the AI to continuously have a meaningful dialogue with you, I don't say conversation because that we have a conversation, right. AI's have dialogue. That could potentially definitely hurt or I guess, you know, kind of take a chunk out of customer service. Yeah. It kind of industry at the whole. Yeah. That makes sense. And, and obviously some of that stuff that you were talking about earlier, where you're doing some technology writing, that kind of stuff. But that's interesting. What about about campaigning, if you will, or putting together campaigns, you know, and personalization. One of the things that I saw is like you said earlier, garbage in, garbage out. I can't just say, hey, chat, GPT write me this letter or I can't, you know, or do that. I mean, it just doesn't do it. I found that if I've ever used it, I've literally gone to painstaking efforts to explain kind of when I'm looking right. I probably get a written it. I could have written it already, right. Yeah. Yeah. And then it spits it out. And so that's why I can't ask it to write. But I ask it to organize. And so, but that does, that is interesting, isn't it? Yeah. You are giving it a very specific set of guidelines and rules, right. Now, all right. So in the, in the assembly line for auto companies, manufacturers, right. All those robotic arms, they're AI. Yeah. They know when to stop, where to stop, precisely micro measurements. You don't just plug in that robotic arm as they go build a car. Right. You still get, you still spend thousands of hours building instructions into programming it into, you know, finetuning it and making it, you know, giving it the right instructions to do the job. So in your example, you kind of got a very good point there where, you know, AI exists in the formal chat GVTS we're talking about now, but you may be spending 30, 40 minutes, telling it what you need done, right. And during that time, you probably realized I had just came out with my own idea. Chat GPT just packaged it to look really nice. I think that's a really interesting point, right. Because you might actually be using it almost as, you know, you're bouncing it off chat GPT. It's like a sounding word in some respects, right. Yes. It can help you clarify some thoughts and, but it's funny because I've used it in kind of in that way. And I usually, you know, there's times when I've, you know, I might do a client update note and I'll say, hey, here's what I want everybody to know. Here, you know, their files are going to be due here, or we're blah, blah, blah, blah, right. And it'll spit this thing out. I'm okay, but I'll go back and I edit it. So it's almost, it is kind of almost like just a sounding born assistant. I mean, you can use it in that respect, right. Yeah. For sure. You're right. And I think different industries have the version of the sounding board with chat GPT. Yeah. Of course, if you're an architect, you might want to steer away from that. Yeah. But if you are in writing, you know, writers may actually, I'm going to say write a hardcore, like, you know, scholar level writers may shy away from chat GPT all together, right. But if you are just writing content or a blog or if you are writing a, you know, short articles somewhere, you might, you might kind of work with chat GPT for maybe syntax grammar and structure, right. And kind of as a subfeme bag, you know, if you have, it's like, nobody wants to talk to me, fine, chat GPT, you know, kind of, review my work. Right. Right. No, I think that's good. I mean, that's, that's exactly right. There's a lot of people, you know, my team, they sometimes they don't want to, they don't want to hear from me. So maybe chat GP chat GPT might be the only one that listens. I don't know. We'll see. But listen, I, this has been really, really cool. And I, I, I, um, where can, let's do a shameless plug here. Okay. Where can they find you and tell me, tell them a little bit about your organization. So terrible plug. And just the worst. Yeah. So, our website is fullmoondigital.com. That's got to work and learn more about what we do, who we serve. Kind of a little bit of story in my background, how full moon started about six years ago. And, you know, if anyone wants to reach out and have a conversation about anything digital, it'll bring to your email media. Derek D.E. R.E.K. at fullmoondigital.com. That's awesome. Why I can't thank you enough for doing this. I think it's super cool. And, and, um, we're gonna be, uh, we're gonna be talking again. I look forward to it. There's a lot to talk about. Yeah, absolutely. Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Derek Chu. I think you'll find that it was pretty refreshing to hear a guy who is certainly very knowledgeable about digital marketing and marketing in general. Talk about humanizing AI. I also love the fact that they're built his business based on relationship and continues to do that. He's not trying to automate everything to the point where it becomes antiseptic. He believes in running through a wall for his community. And I think that kind of embraces the mindset that we have in our industry. And so, while, again, we all may be a little bit nervous about AI. I think nothing that is focused on the customer, relationships in general will never go out of style. Right? Having the ability to build deep, meaningful connections, listening. That simply is the only sustainable advantage going forward. And so, I was super excited and, and, and it was really refreshing to hear Derek talk about that. Because look, AI does make me nervous, makes a lot of people nervous, and you wonder what we should do. And the bottom line is we need to wrap our arms around it and figure out if there's any play for it. But remember that still that human connection is critically important. So, my thanks to Derek for taking some time. I couldn't be more excited that he spent some time with us. And my thanks to America's print show for once again sponsoring our podcast. They are really aiming to do some wonderful things. I know I'm going to see you all there on Wednesday, May 8th and Thursday, May 9th, 2024 at the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland, Ohio. Go to America's printshow.com to learn more. These guys are putting together a really cool event. They had their first one under their belt in August 2022. And now they're moving it more towards this intimate setting. I do know that they have signed up some significant significant exhibitors. So, essentially, best in class. So, it's, this is not only is this going to be the best of the best in terms of exhibitors, suppliers. But they are going to be relentless in their pursuit of creating great conversations, great presentations, thought leadership, bringing conversations and presentations around AI to you. And so, I think you're going to be super excited. That'll be again May 8th and May 9th, 2024 at the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland, Ohio. Thank you, America's print show. Thank you, Derek Chu. Thank you for all of you listening. Can't tell you how much I appreciate the opportunity to bring thoughtful content to you, all of you, and continue reading Canvas. Obviously, in the meantime, be the Buffalo. Take care. |
'Brush Strokes Episode 89' | Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Brushstrokes, a podcast powered by Canvas magazine. Today's episode is brought to you by my friends at America's Prinshow 2024. They will once again partner with industry manufacturers, associations, industry influencers, printers, you name it. They're bringing in the who's who to Cleveland, Ohio, specifically on Wednesday, May 8th, and Thursday, May 9th, 2024 at the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland, Ohio. I have told you this before, America's Prinshow is dedicated to reinventing our industry's trade show. They are focused on creating a level of intimacy that has been missing and talking about the most compelling and emerging trends in our industry. Things like AI, right? How is that affecting our business? Along with the disruptive technologies on the production side. They've got some amazing vendors already signed up. The lineup of content is better than anything you've seen and it's going to be a lot of fun. I expect to see you there. I will be there. You need to visit America's Prinshow.com to learn more. Now, onto my guest today, who is actually going to be a part of America's Prinshow and his name is Travis Molokar. He is the president of Millcraft. If you know anything about Millcraft, you know that they are a fourth generation family own paper company and I think it's super compelling because they have stood the test of time. If you listen to Travis, you'll hear why. It really goes down to the core of what our industry is all about. He talks specifically about relationships. He talks specifically about doing the right thing. It's really refreshing to hear Travis speak. This company Millcraft was founded all the way back in 1920. They're actually headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. Like I said, a family owned merchant that they've served, paper, packaging, graphic arts industry. But they have a national customer base and they have been dedicated to the commercial printing and office papers business for a very long time. But what really makes them stand out is that mantra of family owned. It's kind of a lost art in this day and age. And like I said, I was super refreshed to talk to Travis. So I think you'll get a kick out of my conversation. He does talk a little bit about last year's moratoriums on the paper and how it's a complete opposite this year. I know you guys are going through some of that. But I think his guiding principles are also a lessons for us as we navigate the tumultuous waters of the world. So without further ado, why don't you give my conversation with Travis Mlocca, a quick review. What's the view from a paper distribution business today in 2023? How is it a little bit different than last year? Last year's view, how to be like my head spinning kind of, right? Last year's view was, you know, you went from a world where there just wasn't enough to satisfy the needs or the demands of customers. And it was interesting because at least from Bill Cracked, you know, as a family business, we kind of view that our job is to help our customers grow their business. And so when all of a sudden you're not able to throw an up fuel on the fire to keep them growing and you realize that they're losing out on opportunities because you don't have a supply base, you know, it's a difficult proposition. So you're scrambling to figure out how can you keep these businesses going and make sure that they can grow the way that they need and want to. And, you know, we come off of that. And I think there was a lot of panic buying and there was a lot of people scrambling to get tons because they thought it would guarantee them print jobs. And I know, well, all that's happening. I think what was really happening underneath and none of us saw was an economy that was, you know, slowing down interest rates or rising. A lot of uncertainty. People start pulling back and I think you saw demand now this year plummet. And so all of a sudden you got interest rates or printers are sitting on the mouths of inventory that, you know, they didn't have before they all of a sudden realized we don't want to pay interest on that stuff. And so, you know, it's crammed in every nook and cranny they're building or in third party warehouses that they're paying for. So ordering stops and demand plummet as people are working their way through their ballot sheet and it works down the chain. So the printers have cut back on what they're buying from a merchant, merchants overstocks so we stop buying. And, you know, the mills then and the manufacturers who left in a situation where they really ignore. And so they've gone many of them are down operating at 50% operating rates which are worse than when you've coped it. And, you know, some of the manufacturers have taken more downtime just this year so far than they have in years combined. Wow, I didn't know that. I know that. It's really a dire situation for the mills right now. They are a long, you know, a very, very difficult pace. And, you know, I think the concern that we have is, as you and I were talking kind of offline is, you know, as a merchant, you're sandwiched between everybody, right? We've got the manufacturers and we're trying to make sure that we're, you know, responsible for them and, you know, allowing them to have a certain market position and helping them connect with customers. And then you get customers and they're in a challenging environment where postage increases are going out. You know, there's lots of cost increases in print and so they're trying to figure out how do we bring the price of paper down? Many of the factories saying, well, we're taking all this downtime and if the price of paper falls, you know, it's an exponential hit for us. They won't make it. There will be some. It will just shut their doors and we'll see more machine closures or conversions. And long term, I don't think that's a good thing for our industry. I mean, a shrinking supply base is a big challenge. And we saw what happened last year when, you know, you don't have enough domestic supply and you've got to rely on imports. And so they're the balancing act that we've got to figure out as an industry. You know, where do we strike that balance so that, you know, everybody can survive and be a long term sustainable player. So it's an interesting era. It's just, yeah, I mean, it really is because, you know, having history in that world and looking back, I, you know, like you talk about moratorium and allocation, I remember way back in the day, you know, that didn't, that was a long time for that to come around. So last year was nuts, right? And, and, and prices skyrocketing and, and, and so you've got a lot of people that probably don't even have a lot of history dealing with all that stuff. I mean, there wasn't so called experts in that. So in, and printers, like you said, kind of stocking up and, and so are you having those conversations with the leaders of these manufacturers? Do you have conversations on both sides? I mean, is there a lot of powwow is about this to say, you know, because it's one thing to say we should, we should really talk and figure out what we're doing for as an industry collectively. And that's another thing to actually do it. Yeah, I mean, we certainly have the conversations. I think that, you know, what we've seen is lots of people have short memories. And so I think that the manufacturers last year had short memories of, you know, kind of how, how the business has been previously over the last decade. And, you know, they're desired to get additional tons. And, you know, we saw this massive pricing increase. And they thought that was never going to end. And we kept saying, you know, this too shall change. And on the customer side, you know, last year, you know, you had a lot of people scrambling for additional tons and they were excited to get it. Now this year, you've got some slack in the chain. You've got a lot less demand out there. Certainly a lot more supplied and we have demands of prices. In some cases, there are some upper fee for lower prices and you get people jumping for a little price. And at some point, you know, all of this is going to, I don't know, come to fruition or come to roost and we're going to have to wrestle with, you know, how do people take a long-term view and not just jump at the opportunity that today offers. But, you know, what's right over the next two and three and four years? I mean, that's a big question. That goes beyond the paper industry, right? I mean, I don't think that we have. I don't think we have leadership in general that is asking those questions. You know, I've used the analogy so many times. It's probably getting a little bit old. But if you remember the first Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum is the scientist and the old Colonel Sanders looking guy says to him, well, what do you think? He says, you know, you're so busy asking how we do this that you never step back and ask if you should, right? And so we get into this progress and so it's, that's a kin to these paper companies at some point going, wait a minute, right? You know, we need to be thinking and not just that. But collectively, are we thinking about this? I worry about our industry in general on multiple levels. One, it's so, our industry is amazing. And with the digital fatigue in the world, the constant digital technology, you can stand out digitally, right? You see, it's a blanket in the eye. You and I can delete a million emails in a few seconds. It really has, I was just done, we just before we started this cast, I was talking to somebody about the value of print, the ROI of print. But collective, we all need to kind of embrace that. And I wonder, so when you talk to all these other leaders, do they share in that, that concern that we're not doing enough to say, you know, our industry is unbelievably positive for anybody marketing. So we need to think about our long term sustainability. Do you have any of that going? I certainly think the industry, the industry's got a great story to tell from a sustainability perspective. I think we all recognize that. I think the question that we've got to get our hands around, it's the same question that everybody is. What's the right price, right? And the right price is not always the lowest price. This is a graphic communications comment. This is a, well, this is a global comment. What's the, we all want lower gas prices. Is that the right price, right? At what point do we have to accept the fact that there are decisions and choices that have costs? And those costs need to be factored into those decisions and choices. And you know, you get that, again, not to be pulling the goal, but you could talk about that in terms of the greenhouse gas discussion and what are we doing to the environment? But you can also do that on the sustainability of your partners. I mean, at what point do we all drive down either the value of print or drive up the cost of postage to the point that it's not sustainable? At what point do we drive down? How much will it pay for a printed piece to the point that a printer can no longer make money and make investments in new technology and the things coming out? And I think that that's the question that folks need to start society asking, what's the right price? What's the right value? Yeah, I like that. I like that. I like that. I've lost. Yeah. No, I agree with that. And I, because it is hard, right? Because then you become a little bit of Don Tio Di, fight windmills and, you know, you're right. Absolutely right. But we live in this world where, you know, few of us can sit there and go, what is the right price or what is the right way? What the cat's out of the bag? You're right. I mean, it's the small men that's going on and how do you do that? And I worry that there's a bigger issue in terms of just taking the human, humanness out of stuff. So if everything goes digital, if everything is going to the lowest common denominator, then we're literally taking away what makes us unique, right? And I mean, I don't mean it, I don't want to get too philosophical, but on some level, our industry does have just the haptic nature of print in general. It connects to the sense that we interpret the world the most through, which is feel. And to take away that is there's a bigger issue. So you're, you're, you guys, always owe all a paper company. You know, they're dealing with some major stuff in their questions, amplified or what the world are, should be talking about. Don't you think? So I mean, you raised, living the point that you raised, which is a great one, is that I go back to, you know, the value of print, right? And somebody said the other day, you know, a stamp is up to 66 sets, right? Okay. You know, that seems like a lot of money. Until you watch somebody sit down with the male and grab a piece of male that's handwritten, open it up and realize that it's a card from a worker or a friend or a family member. And it's a handwritten note. When you watch their body language change, you watch their emotion change. That communication is at a whole nother level and going through a hundred emails and saying, okay, okay, okay, delete. You know, it is the haptic piece. It's watching people go through their male and, you know, maybe they're tossing the trash and all of a sudden they grab a piece with soft touch, awkwardness coating and you watch them stop and feel it and flip it over. That's slowing our world down. It's us taking a moment to recognize what's going on and that's the true value that I think our industry brings to the table. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And, you know, we're not doing enough to, to trumpet that. There's multiple levels. We're not bringing enough people in that's been, that's been, we're going to talk about that for decades. We're not bringing enough young people in and everybody looks at this industry. And then when we, we talk about, anytime we talk about paper, for example, we talk about all sustainability of forests, it's a heart, it were harvesting, you know, the problem with that is it's defense. Sure. It's almost like the, it's like the got milk campaign, right? You, you, you sit there and you go, you're pushing milk, well, you were never going to compete with all these monster drinks and red bowls and all of them. And they're coming and that it is what it is. So why talk defense? Why talk about why defend the things that you're projecting onto the world? Oh, they think papers is bad, right? But bad conversation is wrong for our industry because no matter what, it's already from a defensive posture. When what you were talking about earlier is the ROI of print. And, and I still believe that people want to do business with people that they have a relationship with, that they feel some sort of connection with, that they make sync better, make them sync better. And, and I just, to me, it's frustrating because you look at this world that's going down this really antiseptic pond and whatever things go in digital and you're, and you're going, but I still want to buy from people I like. I want to be able to talk to them in our industry. That's kind of the cornerstone. And so I imagine your, your, your sales people are still, still take pride in the fact that they have real relationships, right? Oh, there's no question. I mean, you know, a lot of our folks they've been doing this, you know, 30, 40 years. We just retired. Celity has been doing it for 50 years. And they have worked with generations of my family. And I talked to one of his customers at his retirement and he called on three generations of his family at that cuff. And you know, so those relationships are still incredibly important. And, you know, I think we're, you talk about being defensive for an industry. Now, to me, you're right. We should be out singing phrases of our industry. And I don't know why we have it. I don't know if it's, you know, as the industry is changing, that we haven't been able to seek rule where the evolutionary curve is going. But you think about this industry. If I'm a young person coming into any industry, this is the industry I want. It's one of the largest manufacturing industries that's out there. It's graphic. You know, it's tangible. You look at it and you think about all the technology that printers are using today, whether it's, you know, digital, would you allow them to get it at database, or web-to-print solutions, or following up with QR codes and doing statistical research and analysis of how well different campaigns work and why and A and B testing on this substrator, that substrates this color profile versus that. The whole idea that you could be involved in communicating and building a brand and bringing that to life. It's not just on screen, but, you know, true physical, tangible form. I wouldn't want to be in that. If you're a gear head, you could press, you know, I mean, there's so many things to do in our industry. And it's still an industry that people matter in relationships matter. And that's that are an industry. Yeah, no, I'm with you. That needs to happen. And it can't be just two guys talking. There needs to be conversation around some initiative. And it's not some broad-based, you know, let's go to the masses. And the industry's kind of done some of that. It's got to be grassroots stuff. And it even has to go down to the conversations that your sellers, your marketers, your print sellers, print marketers, there has to be a deeper conversation about that. Maybe there's some stuff going on, but you can't go to the masses and broadcast that. I mean, you really got to start with the grassroots kind of stuff, which, you know, our industry's all about, let me switch gears on you and talk about, so talk about no crafts longevity. I mean, obviously, generations of, you know, there's beauty in that family structure. There really is. And it's a lost, unfortunately, it's a lost art in our world these days. But if you had to kind of say, how the hell of you guys kind of continue to thrive over the years, what kind of philosophies are at the core of that? No, it's a great question. And I think it's the one that everybody wonders, what is the magic sauce? I mean, we're fourth generation, 102 year old business. Now, how do you get there? And I think it goes to, you know, one simple thing. And it's, we take the long term approach, you know, it's not, we're not worried about what our, you know, performance looks like today or this quarter. We care about what's our performance look like over the course of a relationship? What's the lifetime value of a particular customer or supplier or partner? And I think staying focused on that aspect and really recognizing that, you know, lots of things change. I mean, our business today is much different than it was in 1975. And certainly, you know, different than it was in 1921 when we opened up as our wedding, you know, wedding invitation and stationary company. That's all we were. We're very different company today. But one thing that hasn't changed is valuing people relationships and taking the long term approach. And you do that and you don't cut quarters. You know, you can develop a solid foundation where people grow to rely on you. And I hope that that's kind of been our, you know, our magic sauce that's kept us around for as long as we've been here. Do you think that those that have, because there's been the merchant distribution business in certainly in the paper side is the number of players have shrunk over years. I mean, do you, do you feel those that are gone or who have struggled, have tried to cut those corners? The mistakes they made were completely opposite of what you guys have done. So I think that the mistakes you make are when the business evolves around you, are you evolving as well? And there's no question, you know, what I got involved in the business, you know, I've been here 21 years, but even before that as a kid, our value proposition was we represented certain paper belts and the mills that we represented were very different than some of our competitors who existed at the day. So your background, you were at Fox River. So we were a Fox River merchant and we might have brought Fox River to the table when another merchant had, you know, Gilbert or they had, you know, a different mill. And so on the printer, I had to work with many different merchants just to be able to understand what are all the competitive options that are available. Well, the number of paper mills has consolidated. What happens now with many merchants carry a significant portion of, you know, all the franchises and manufacturers that are available. And so now you don't really have to go to merchants to test pricing on different grades. One merchant can do that for you across, you know, not only North American made grades, but also those made or sees whether it's Europe, South America or Asia. At value proposition of bringing different, you know, different paper mills to the table, only different today. Now it's about how can I be more efficient? How can I recognize that you as a printer are probably struggling with employment and the number of people that you have in your organization and how do you make them as efficient and effective as possible? And so it's, we reduced data entry for you. How do we make it easier for your material handling process? How do we get involved in your lean workflows to make sure that we're out of the solution not part of the problem? And so I think it's developing a value proposition that's different today as a partner that it was 30 years ago and the value we brought were different supply options. Yeah. Well, that's the world, right? I mean, the whole, we've moved, I mean, the industrial age is long gone, right? It gave way to the information age and you could argue the information age is over. I mean, we're in something different and we're in the life cycle curves of these ages are all shorter. And so it's all about, you know, it used to be. Here's what I did, right? I built this. This is how I define myself. My product was X. And so that, like you said, no longer exists. And I remember thinking to myself, you've got these bigger organizations that are making all these decisions in the boardrooms and, you know, there's no one listening to the client. And there's not, right? And so, you know, family owned, intimate, there's something to be said for that. And even in 2023, you guys have the ability to, your relationships allow you to listen. And so now you are talking about, yeah, I can get you the supply. Let's not worry about that. We get to talk about so much, so much more. And it sounds like, I mean, it's interesting to hear paper merchant talking about, look, you know, I know my printer's deal with staffing issues and, and which they all were, right? And so it's really refreshing that you guys are taking that time to listen to them and say, look, we can, you know, we are, it sounds like what you're telling me is your purpose is, is them, right? It's, it's, and I think a lot of places have, have lost that. Yeah, my dad used to tell me that, you know, he said to me, he goes, just remember, you're not a distributor. A distributor takes something and pushes it into the market. So you're a merchant, go to the customers, find out what they need, then you go find it. And so the wonderful thing for us and our business is everyone worries like, what's the future going to look like? And how do we need to change our business to be a value? I said that the future is fantastic. And if you want to know what it looks like, who caught your customers? How are you changing your business? What does that look like? Where are you investing? Oh, you're getting an inkjet technology or you're getting into packaging or you're looking at, you know, disublimation and getting into a parallel decorating. Fantastic. How can we be part of that? What, where do you see challenges? Do I need to hire people on our staff who are structural engineers or who truly understand packaging design so that you have additional resources to help you as you evolve your print company? Or if you're getting into, you know, leveraging jet technology to get into, you know, whether it's an inkjet web and digital technology, how can we hope with that? Or if it's developing technological solutions, do we need more, you know, coders on staff and developers so that we can develop APIs to integrate our systems together? Or do I need people selling equipment that can help you choose where best to make your CAPX investments and making sure that you've got a partner that's, you know, able to support that with tech support and service and next day availability on what you need? And so that to me is, yeah, that is really, and so you've done that. So you, I mean, in terms of your offering, because I used to say that the warehouse doesn't have fairly discriminate, but you got to know, right? And you got to understand what they're needing. And so, well, they're so fun and refreshing to talk to you. But at the same time, we need more of this. We need to collectively get more of this. Let me finish up with and say, so let's crystal ball. What do you see, you know, you're listening to the clients, you've obviously adapted it. But any forecast you see with thinking of them and what you, from your perspective, what you see in the horizon for them and you. Yeah, so we believe that you have to become hyper focused on the customer. What are all the things that our customers need and want? And then how do we make sure that we can deliver those? And that, you know, that's from paper, whether it's offset or, you know, web sheets, whether it's digital, to packaging grades, to many of our printers are in fulfillment businesses. So what can we do? Not just on corrugated and tape and those types of things, but also material handling equipment. Do we need tech support staff to be able to support them in that area? Do we need to expand our warehouses to help them with overflow space to support their growth? So I think you've got to really look at your customers and completely reengineer your business around that. And then we believe that technology is going to be a huge differentiator in the future. As our skew, you know, have proliferated in terms of what we stock. And we sell 35,000 different skews right now in a business where 70% of our orders come in between two o'clock and five o'clock today and they need to be delivered tomorrow. How do you manage that? This AI explosion is exciting because I think that integrating that technology will allow us to serve us people better, particularly as we're dealing with a supply base that it's ever changing and, you know, decreasing domestic supply, increasing imports, how do you manage, you know, a six month supply chain coming in for next day availability. And so you're going to see, I think, huge investments in the IT infrastructure. For the partners that are going to be able to truly support businesses going forward. And, you know, how are we streamlining the entire channel? And I think that's my crystal ball of how we're going to redefine things where people are no longer going to be a customer or a supplier. You're going to be partners. And I'll tell you about it. You'll take this portion. But, you know, look, success only exists if you continue to grow your business. And you're the people that are doing that. Yeah. No, I think it's great. I mean, Travis, I really, it's refreshing. And because a lot of people look at AI and they're fearful. I'm actually headed to Cleveland next week to this marketing AI conference. And because I'm not just, you know, what's embrace it, right? We think about middle crafts. Think about the industry. And all the people decades ago, we're talking about, we're going to be in a paperless society. It's all digital. It's all social. And, and I don't know, we're keep going. And like you said, there's some real value in doing stuff in print. And, but you have to have this positive push forward mentality. And, and that's really refreshing. Let me ask you before I let you go. So do you guys still, I know, I know Terry. So I do, are you still doing stuff? And do you partner with printers beyond upstream? Are you still doing spec work? Are you still going up into the brand owners and the marketers and saying, you know, you really need to look at your marketing supply chain. And we can talk with, let's have a conversation. And are you doing that? And I have to be successful. Well, absolutely. I'm doing all the time. It's a different conversation. You know, today it's around ESG. It's around the environmental platform of the supplier, the urban footprints. It's around, you know, are there alternative substrates to go to that are a little lighter and that can reduce postage costs? You know, so that there's a lot of that. It's, it's doing due diligence on suppliers and talking about, you know, what is their energy platform look like? How can a brand owner incorporate the sustainability initiatives of a manufacturer into the ESG initiatives that they have at that brand level? And so I think they're deeper, better business conversations and some of the design work that it used to be. That's still part of it and still incredibly important. But today I think we have to bring brands to life in a much more thoughtful, deeper holistic approach than maybe we did in the past. Yeah, yeah, that's great to hear. I do some working in the in the higher education segment and, you know, talking with them, they're all looking at their vendors, right? And there are all these certainly ESG is there at the top, you know, but little DEI as well now and they're all looking back. They're all saying, look, we're aligned in this supply chain with people and so, which underscores what you were talking about earlier is that relationships are still important. Like you got to have those conversations and you can't make those adaptations unless you're having those conversations. So, you know, that's super cool. Well, let's say I just can't thank you enough. I'm thrilled that you spent some time with me and we need to do it again because I think your message, your whole mantra is a little infectious and we need that, you know, we need more of this industry, don't you think? Actually, well, Mark, look, love talking to you and been a big fan for a long time. So, I mean, I'm humbled to be here talking to you. So just thank you for making it. Well, I'm not far. I'm in Pittsburgh, so I'll come see you and at the same time, we'll be seeing each other certainly as the American is a print show. And you know, we'll get together with Jim and, you know, grab a beer with him and I'd love to, we need to steal away and just sit around some of these ideas. All right, cool. Sure. Excellent. Travis has been great, man. Well, guys, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Travis Malakar. I thought you would really get a kick out of it. It's refreshing, right? In this day and age to hear someone talk about relationships and doing the right thing and maybe a bigger picture of it all. It's also kind of fun to remind everybody the power of print and the fact that we collectively need to go tell the world that the ROI of print is enormous, that we suffer from digital fatigue, that if you really want to stand out, go design something and print it and embellish it and make yourself stand up. Tell the world through print that you actually care. I think that was super, super cool to talk to him and I, and my thanks to Travis, I just, I can't thank him enough and we'll look forward to seeing him in Cleveland on May 8th and May 9th, 2024, an America's print show. My reminder to you that this episode of Brushstrokes was brought to you by America's print show and they are once again going to parlay the success they had at August 2022 into this event in 2024. It is May 8th, May 9th, 2024 at the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland, Ohio. Go to America's print show dot com to learn more of my thanks to them. My thanks to all of you for once again listening. I really appreciate it. Canvas is always dedicated to bringing the most compelling content in the industry. We have been overwhelmed with people who have said over the last 15, 16 years that Canvas magazine is the best of the best that we write the stuff that matters and we've actually taken the opportunity to design a magazine that we hope lets you know that we care. So I'm really, really appreciative of it and sometimes pinch myself that it's, it's done so well. So again, my thanks to you. We look forward to the next episode of Brushstrokes and until then, be the Buffalo. Take care. |
'Brush Strokes Episode 90' | Hey guys, I'm Mark Potter. Welcome to a new episode of Brushstrokes, a podcast powered by Canvass Magazine. Guys, today's episode is brought to you by the Prince Smart Summit, which is set from May 7th, 2024 at the Huntington Convention Center in Cleveland, Ohio. I am jacked up about this guys. I think that this is going to be a pivotal event for the commercial printing industry. We're going to address the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on our industry. It's dedicated to demystifying AI and showcasing its potential for all of you to revolutionize not just operations, but sales and marketing strategies. I feel like there is a community of us that is a little bit nervous about AI. What's its impact going to be on our jobs and what our role is going forward? So why not bring in a bunch of speakers that can help us feel a little bit more confident, a little bit more comfortable, and learn how we can kind of embrace this whole thing. I am so thrilled at the lineup we put out. I'm actually kind of shocked that we could do it. We got people from Google, we got people from IBM, I get the CEO from Pandata, which we'll hear from in subsequent episodes. But our keynote speaker is our podcast today, and that's a gentleman by the name of Mike Kaput. Mike Kaput is the CCO of the Marketing AI Institute. He's a globally recognized marketing AI expert. He's an author and speaker. And as the chief content officer at Marketing AI, he's helped some of the world's top companies build competitive advantages with AI. He co-authored the book Marketing Artificial Intelligence. And he's the co-host of the Marketing AI show. I'm super super excited that he took a few minutes to kind of preview a little bit about what he's going to be talking about at the Prince Smart Summit on May 7th, 2024. He is uniquely qualified on multiple levels. He was a journalist, but he began his career in print. And so what is super super cool about him is that he's not just gotten into the AI thing in a major, major way, but he kind of comes from where we are. And so he's uniquely qualified to speak to us on May 7th. And I am super super excited that he took some time. I wanted to start off and talk to him a little bit about his background. And here's what he had to say. The funnily enough, I started my career way, way back when in print magazines and journalism. I used to be a journalist. I was freelance writer for a while. I also lived in Egypt for a few years. I was the editor at magazines there. So I started out in that whole world. I've always been a writer by trade, by my first love and during love. And you know, way back when I kind of made a transition into the world of marketing, working with Paul Ratesor, who is the current founder and CEO of marketing. I do where I work today. And I was hired by Paul probably about like 12 years ago, at this point to work at his marketing agency that he owed at the time. And it was a full service digital agency, but a big focus on inbound marketing and content marketing. They were actually hub spots first ever agency partners and kind of made this big back on marketing automation really, really on in that space. And just from kind of this background of being a strong writer, really loving storytelling, marketing copy in my freelance work. I tend to learned every in and out of the marketing industry in the agency world. So I was on the leadership team at a marketing agency. A small one for about a decade at that point. And as part of that journey, all was heavily investigating all the way back in probably 2011, Artificial Intelligence. So what was possible in marketing after I think the kind of culminating moment was seeing IBM Watson beat a human competitor on jeopardy. And so all at the time was starting to write his second book. He enlisted me to help him write the chapter on AI. That's how I started kind of going down the rabbit hole tie around, I'm gonna say like 2013ish. Sounds about right. And then from there, me and Paul were just on, yeah, I'm a huge science fiction fan personally. Let's grew up reading every of any science fiction book movie show you can find. So Paul and Paul's always been kind of forefront of technology. So we spent years researching theorize trying to figure out what was AI is anything going to do to the marketing industry to the agency business and also how could we actually use this stuff for our clients. And long story short, we got to this point where we felt like we had just started sharing what we were learning. We spun up a website called marketing institute in 2016. Just got to shit. It seems a lot longer ago now. Though it kind of started out as a website to share what we were learning big questions. We had very quickly kind of outgrew that and a grew into today media and education. What we do is we make AI approachable and actionable for marketers and business leaders in non-market. So our mandate is growing are larger than just marketing. So in my day to do a role, you know, again, starting out as a marketer when I first got started with AI was in the same spot every marketer who hasn't does know a lot about this stuff today. It's like I didn't know anything about AI. It was only through working with Paul that I learned how to start thinking about this stuff in my job in my work and how to actually use it to start transforming productivity performance in our business. And from there, it was kind of like never look back at the ground running. And over the years, you know, learned how to start applying a lot of these tools and technologies to our business or marketing today. I'm the chief content officer. So, you know, we're a small company. So I wear a lot of marketing and sales in April. But my primary kind of remit is to grow our traffic leads and ultimately sales with our digital marketing presence. I do that. And any given day using, you know, tons of different AI tools for a bunch of different use cases and constantly exploring how do we do more of what we do without having to, you know, go higher 200 people to do it. Instead, hopefully we can use AI to accomplish a lot of really interesting outcomes. So Mike is knee deep in AI. And the marketing AI institute started back in 2016 with a blog and a newsletter about marketing AI. It was really just an internal initiative at a marketing agency. And started by Paul Retzor who we've actually interviewed in the past. Paul and Mike have now expanded this to obviously doing a lot of consulting. They do a weekly podcast, which is a must listen next to brushstrokes, of course. And they've got this great event, which I actually attended called Mekon M-A-I-C-O-N. And that was an incredible lineup of speakers. And really was where we incubated the idea of doing print smart. In addition, Paul and Mike, as I mentioned, authored the book around marketing AI and have now started rubbing elbows with some of the biggest players. And so you really need to check out the marketing AI institute because they are again uniquely qualified to advise us all on our business. And with all the questions that are at the forefront of AI, I kind of wanted to flip it and ask Mike what he was actually bullish on for the future. I'm kind of trying to attack this maybe for me and E. Cancelick. I'm very, very cognizant in both, so our business is a small business. We wear a lot of different hats. Literally, we live and die by the correct mass of the decisions we make. It's very much start up. If we make the wrong decision or something, the focus on, we lose a day. And like, that's true of any organization, but others can recover from a little better than the company of our side. In my personal, I feel a similar urgency, not a huge amount of pressure on myself, but just trying to be really conscious and intentional of those limited times. We all have, you know, whether it's on this planet today, whatever, we all have 24 hours and how rich or poor you are. So this idea of time is really resonating a lot with me. And this is what gets me most excited about AI is I think we all just by virtue of our crazy life and business are we waste a lot of time. We do a lot of stuff. We don't need to be doing. We burn so many hours trying to figure stuff out. It takes way longer to figure out than it should. And I just see already in my own life, I still so early, these tools have just dramatically improved how I'm able to use my time like what kind of impact of it will be. It's not just product to be there. It's a big piece of it, but it's just approaching problems in totally new ways, getting ideas on demands like having intelligence on demand, extra brains that I can use to solve problems, which is really rewarding in general. But also, it's just like, you know, there's not like easy tricks is I'm not saying all your works take two seconds and go chill out on the beach. But being able to not spend so much time on stuff that's not rewarding stuff that doesn't interest me, stuff that is grueling mundane rigorous, but like has to be done, but I don't like doing that's extremely rewarding to someone like me and an organization like ours where it's like, Oh, okay, this is really beneficial. You can't at the time is the only thing we can always make more money, hopefully, can always find more perspectives, whatever, but times the thing. And so that's really to me why I'm so bullish. It's like previously traditional software been really helpful, like I have no knock, I'm like, what we've used last 20 years, it's been awesome. But this is just a whole new world. They're being able to do so much more in the time. The other variables that really, really keeps me up makes me excited and such a tangible benefit. It does a lot of do work, whatever it is. You know, when I went to the make on event last year, a gentleman by the name of Christopher Penn, who is fairly known throughout the AI world, went through about 120 different slides about AI and my head was spinning. And at the end of it, he actually said, I suppose engagement is going to be at a premium and things like direct mail and the haptic nature of print will probably come back into Vogue. I perked right up and thought, that's fantastic. And I wanted to ask Mike a little bit more about that. How AI actually would put a premium on our ability to engage and build relationships? Here's what he had to say. In my eating and recent experience, see us a lot in like sales, especially like my new workshops with sales people. This is no knock on them. It's like they're always interested in like, how do I personalize that scale for people? And like you can do that with some of these tools, which is interesting, but it's more about I'm like, no, no, no, no, let's actually talk about the 10 other things you have to waste a time and time on every day. What if we to free you up from those that you can? Is that about you just spending less hours a day? What if we just spent more hours on personalizing, on developing one-on-one relationship? What how much better would your results be? More valuable would your business be perceived by your customers? So that it's like reallocation. You might end up in some cases spending more hours on certain tests as a result of AI. It's really just which one. Right? You know, with the relentless nature of AI and technological innovation that has dominated our lives from the last decade, maybe two decades, there are clearly many of us who are a bit fearful, have a lot of questions about our relevancy. We have questions about morals, ethics, and we'll cover all of that at the Prince Mart Summit. But with everything spinning around us like this, I asked Mike simply, what's your advice? What's the first thing that you would do if you were us? Give it a listen. If that is a great question, I think your first step has to be in whatever way it makes sense to you getting started. By that I mean we'll talk extensively at the event and further and everything we talk about all the steps to take. But really there's no substitute for simply firing up. There's no excuse. If you can send a text message, if you could write email, you can use AI. That's what's so exciting about some of the tools out there. You can't use every single tool. You don't have it, you J.I. strategy. You might not have these cases. That's okay. We'll get to all of that. But literally just fire up chat to you and start playing around. This is not traditional software where you have a manual. Oopening I doesn't even have onboarding for any of the tools they create. They don't have any real instructs, which is crazy. There's no handbook, there's no rule book. You're not going to break anything. You're not going to hurt anyone by firing up today. Right now, chat to you. I'm starting to play around with it. Even if you are the least creative person in the world, ask it. What are some things you can do? That's what's cool about this. It's like there's literally no excuse. Just try it out. It doesn't mean you're going to get it all at once. It doesn't be hard to figure it all out at once. But really I get to see someone that plays around with it for an hour and doesn't have at least one aha moment. So I think that's really, really important, even though it sounds really simple. That having that quick getting quickly to an aha moment, I think it will help you a lot. Yeah. Okay. This is pretty interesting. I think it's clear you've got to come to the Prince Smart Summit May 7th, 2024 and hear Mike speak. I think the presentation is going to be fantastic. It'll probably change from now till then because that's how fast AI is changing. But he's a great resource as is his organization. So I asked him to do a little shameless plug and let us all know where to find them. So your first stop is marketing AI institute.com. That is our main website. You can find all of our available resources there. I would also direct you. If you're on that website, click on Education. I go to the link titled intro to AI. That is our free live class. We run every few weeks with our CEO, Paul Racer. That is exactly everything you need to know to get started with AI. About 30 or 40 minutes just build like a quick foundational knowledge. We add probably 20,000 people take it so far. So it's really, really valuable, even though it'll say, ensure that AI is from marketers. If you're not directly related to marketing, it guarantee you still get a lot of value out of it. So start there and then also take a look. I would say at our event, Maytime, M-A-I-N-O-N-D-A-I, and also take a look at our podcast, the Marketing AI Show. Which you can find very quickly hosted by Paul and myself, Mike Putt. Every week we cover what is going on in AI and what you need to know as business owner, leader, professional. I want to say thanks to Mike for joining us today and giving us a little teaser for the Prince Mart summit. I've said it multiple times. I think this is an event that's needed. Nobody else has done it. So we've been able to step up and put together an unbelievable lineup. Right? With Mike headlining the show, we've got a gentleman from Google, people from IBM, we've got our friends Dave Rosendahl from Mindfire. I got a CEO from Pandata. We've got some panel discussions. I've even got an attorney who's going to come to us and talk about the legal ramifications. Which, again, for the printing industry, in any marketing services industry, you need to understand that. This is not going to be an event for someone who is super technically sophisticated. This is for any business leader who is thinking to themselves, how am I going to compete? How am I going to move forward? Well, you got to start somewhere. So why not come to beautiful Cleveland on May 7th and listen to this amazing lineup? Rob Elbows with the type of peers that you want to be associated with. And have a wonderful time. I promise you, it's going to be electric. And I think it's going to be a competitive advantage for anybody that attends. My thanks again to all of you for listening. My thanks to Mike and I just can't wait to see you all the Prince Part Summit. Until then, be the Buffalo and all the best. |
'Brush Strokes Episode 91' | Hey guys, I'm Mark Potter. Welcome to another episode of Brushstrokes, a podcast powered by Canvas Magazine. Guys, today's episode is brought to us by the Prince Smart Summit 2024. Being held on May 7th at the Huntington Convention Center in Cleveland, Ohio, the Prince Smart Summit is a new event for thoughtful leaders in print. Dive deep into the world of getting smarter, explore the latest advancements in AI and its impact on all of us and network with the best in the industry. With renowned speakers from the AI Institute, Google, IBM, Mindfire, and more, this summit promises to be a transformative experience for all attendees. Visit americusprincho.com and register for the Prince Smart Summit today. And guys, one of those speakers that I'm super, super thrilled about is a gentleman by the name of Cal Al DuBabe, CEO of PanData. Now Cal was born in Saudi Arabia and was educated in Cleveland at Case Western. And after toiling with everything from neuroscience to mathematics, he came out of there as an expert in data science. PanData today manages and assesses risk within AI and technology for over 50 large organizations. Now Cal is also a speaker on the circuit, if you will, around AI. And I had the great privilege of hearing him before and was kind of taken with him. But I think after you hear my conversation today, you'll be equally excited because he is one that is alleviating some of our fears. He's gotten into the management of risk associated with AI and what he has come up with is that there's an opportunity to make it even more human. And that's what made me so excited. We actually started to talk a little bit about education at the beginning of our conversation. And I was curious if in fact someone going to college might end up being behind because AI is moving so fast. And are we going to be kind of outdated? And he shared some of his thoughts. Give it a listen. So there's an article in HBR that left an impression on me last year. And it talks about the half-life of a skill. And specifically for your average skills, the half-life is somewhere between five and seven years. And so half-life doesn't mean when it ends, but half of its usefulness is gone. And then it might have a long tail. But in tech, that number is two to three years for the average tech skill. And what we're seeing is by the time you've invested in learning a certain skill, most of its useful lifetime has passed. And so it's a challenge for teaching, challenges for absorbing, and re-skilling. And we're still building up new wisdom that what the day-to-day is going to look like for jobs that are primarily composed of those skills that have a fast fading light. And it could be a specific esoteric coding language, or it could be using a toolset like Power BI, or it could be prompt engineering, which was the hottest job last year. And now people are saying prompt engineering is dead. Right? There's a lot of confusion in the marketplace. Putting that all aside. There are skills that are ever green that need to be cultivated. So decision-making is one of them. I'm a big fan of Cassie Cazercoll if he talks about decision-making as a skill that one can train. Thinking about human responsibility with respect to automated decision-making systems, conventions around what is good data, how does bias enter into data sets. These are things that one can learn, and one needs to learn at some great level of depth to be affected by. So going back to my education, I took this very non-traditional path that seemed borderline insane to the point where in my seventh year when I call my dad to say, Dad, Dad, I know what my major is going to be. It's this new thing, and it's called data science, and it just announced the major, and I'm going to switch my major to be that. And you know, it's funny, because that's what launched my career, becoming the first data science graduate from case. But at the time, my dad said, Son, just dug your head and graduate, please. But what I was seeing at the time is, oh my gosh, this data thing is taking off. And actually, I'm learning I was at the time my major was neuroscience, and I had studied advanced mathematics, I had studied statistics, I had studied the application statistics to population health dynamics, so these were all things that existed in other majors, and all I did was a cosmetic change, and I said, ah, these are these many, many things I've studied actually amalgamated into data science. Okay, play that for today. You're not going to have an AI major. The chances are, you're already studying components of it, that at some point are going to be assembled in a slightly different configuration, and maybe we've sought the name on it, or maybe we don't. But that was my journey. So right off the bat, you can tell that not only has Cal spent a lot of his educational experience diving into AI and its impact, but he's now the leader of an organization that's doing it for organizations. And I wanted to find out a little bit more about what PanData did, and what the challenge is that they were facing, or that organizations that they were serving were facing. And here's what he had to say. Yeah, so I started PanData in 2016, and this was when I was wrapping up my education, and I kept hearing over and over again, we have data and don't know what to do with it. And that was the conversation. The conversations had spun up, had due clusters, it was the realm of big data, and everyone was excited about we have all their stuff. Now what? Yeah. And so at that time, data science was still a growing profession, relatively niche, but it was the discipline of making sense of data. And so I started PanData to address just that problem. I had been working with some health systems in the context of pilots for my first start-up, which was building machine learning models on patient data. And I discovered that they really didn't need a software solution to solve their problem. They really needed human navigators to help them understand what trends were in the data, what that meant for patient care, what that meant for operational decisions, and so that all kind of evolved into what became PanData. And so I started it to literally help organizations make better decisions with data and that evolved into machine learning, that evolved into AI. And over the years, we, after working with more than 25 blue chip companies, about 50 altogether by now, varying depths of engagements that found a specialty in the world of high risk environments meets machine learning. So what's a high risk environment? That's health care, finance, energy, defense, situations where the cost of an error is high. There's regulation or restriction on how you can use your interact with the data. That is basically your fuel for these machine learning solutions and AI-based solutions. And we built up a practice on helping organizations identify what's with building. How do you think about the potential risks, potential cost in the state, and then navigate a project from end to end? Idea all the way to building it and then managing it on an ongoing basis while creating value and also managing potential downsides. AI is dominating the air waves these days. But may in fact be dominating our minds even more. And so I wanted Cal to explain a little bit more about what AI truly is and what are some concerns for humans in general. Give it a listen. So let's take a step back and define AI because it's not new. Generative AI is probably the newest to the world conceptually. And we tend to use Gen AI and AI these days almost interchangeably. And I think that's a detriment to the field because there's conventional wisdom we've had around this for some time. AI is software that recognizes and reacts to patterns. That's it. It's looking at patterns that could be in spreadsheets, where documents or images, your video or audio, etc. And then you're doing something with that maybe it's accounting. How much of something is present or you're labeling and categorizing or you're selecting amongst a large set of probabilities or predicting a future state or you're generating new patterns. And that small little fraction that's captured headlines is the world of generative AI. But this definition is important because when we're recognizing patterns, we're guaranteed one thing. We're going to be wrong some of night at the time. And that was true of early ML systems. That's true of the generative AI systems that are on the market today. And so the art of using AI or machine learning these high risk environments is the art and the science of managing being wrong. Does that make sense? So I've been doing a couple of, I want to know, LinkedIn did die the last few days and a couple of headlines caught my attention. I started pontificating about them. But a couple of my favorites that I read was a study that was done on GPT4 used in resume evaluations. And wow, this was a fascinating deepbap shocker. After simulating 800 different resumes where the only differences were the names of the individuals that came from predominantly, they used predominantly Caucasian or predominantly Hispanic or African-American names except for this experiment. But the same exact resume. And they found that for certain job positions, GPT 3.5, which is the most commonly conceived model, would select or rank the African-American names as the lowest for certain roles relative to other roles. And the only thing that was changed was like the name. And the headline is GPT4 is biased. Well, I'm like, well, no, no, yeah, of course. We knew this. We had the same problem when Amazon attempted this solution in 2018 and uncovered that they simply could not remove bias from the data. And the models would key in on things like, you know, somebody's resume might say activities were women's chess club or men's soccer team. And even if you were removed all the gendered words, it started to key in on active and passive forms of writing. And so there's all of these signals in data that perpetuate patterns that may have historically been true, whether or not they're desirable. And then we amplify it because again, we're seeking these patterns and we're trying to do something. I read this this experiment. I'm like, well, duh, we knew that there would be bias in the model. And chances are, there will always be bias in some models. Now what do we do about it? That's where the thought will most come. That's where you need human evaluators coming up with, okay, what should we be looking for? And how do we measure it? How do we detect when it's there? What do we do about it? How do we want to assess ourselves? How do we raise a flag when a pattern significantly deviates from what our expectation of good looks like? How do we define and measure what good looks like? That's all the stuff where you still need people. With all of us a little bit nervous about what this means for the future, I wanted to take a little bit of time and share some advice. What should we be doing to get our arms around this? Clearly, I believe we should be going to the print smart summit, but seriously, what should we all be doing on a day-to-day basis? And then the second part that I wanted to talk to him about was this idea of good versus evil. Are we going to use AI for good or evil? Here's what he had to say. So I mean, here's the bed news. AI is not necessarily, it's not self-aware, it's not coming for your job. But people with bed intentions also have the same access to tools that we have access to, less scruples. So that's something to keep in mind. That being said, we're entering this interesting stage and tech where the biggest barrier of your five, 10 years ago was, do we even have the data? Do we even have access to data science resources to alpha-strain models? And keeping in mind that Gen AI and the use of tools like chat GPT and other official solutions, that's a small fraction of the big world of machine learning and AI. But it's the one most folks will be interacting with. You now no longer need a data science team to download chat GPT or to set up an application that calls on the OpenAI API or any of the other Ick Roblox out there. And we've moved past the whole, we don't have data, we don't have patterns to. Now we can build things. And one of the problems with AI, specifically, generative AI, is it's not so great at saying, I'm not going to do that. If you test it with something, it will do it. And it will fill in the blank whether or not that's a good idea. And so we're entering an era where the barrier to execution on these types of tools isn't technical. It's stopping to ask the question, should we be solving this with AI? Do we need to solve this with AI? How are humans approaching this today? And is there another alternative? Okay, AI is the right choice. How do we want to measure the success or potential consequences of this? So we haven't had that friction. And so we're seeing a lot of these poor implementations of AI, genying AI. And that's one of the things I've been spending a lot of time trying to educate folks on and share good healthy examples. That's part of what I'll be talking about at the conference. One of the things that I worry most about is if we're going to lose our voice, that we don't get the humanness in there, that we don't get our personality in the content that is going to be created and digested. I asked Cal Point Blank, are we simply at a point where bots are just going to be talking to bots? LinkedIn has become somewhat depressing these days where you can almost smell the AI-generated content. But I don't know. I think we're going to get to a new equilibrium. And we've all seen some version of this meme that basically it's some executive thinking they're smart. They take a few ideas. They throw it into chat GPT. It comes up with a whole email. And then on the other side, somebody has their AI summarizing it into to do. So we're going to get over the silliness and realize, oh, this is unnecessary. And it might force us to communicate more directly, psychously. Why do I need a bot to make this long for another bot to make it short when I can just say, hey, I needed this. Thank you. So I think it's going to force us to question how we communicate with one another. In the meantime, there's going to be a lot of noise. And my prediction is it's going to self-select for authenticity. We're going to start subscribing to sources of information where there is credible, trusted bot leadership. That's going to come at a premium when everyone's cost of creating goes to zero because that's what we're doing here. We're amplifying the amount of low quality content out there. Folks are going to funnel themselves into channels where they can more reliably access information that they trust and resonate with. That being said, I've started to question myself. Like if I, you know, an AI detectors aren't really good. And I wouldn't trust my judgment 100% of the time, but you can generally smell when something is AI produced. It's got a few characteristics that I don't know how to describe it. You're just like, ah, this is definitely, this smells like chat GPT. And then I asked myself the question, why am I triggered by that? And it's because my guard is up. And I know that the default output of these language models isn't much substance. It's very generic. And so that's not what I want to consume. But if there's high-valued information being formatted for me through one of these models, I'm okay with it. It's really not about whether or not it's AI generated or AI was used in the synthesis. It's about the value of the underlying content. So, you know, I think we're going to get used to AI producing content. But we're going to be more, you know, the value of what we're consuming is going to be the metric that matters to those. Again, there's a lot of concern in the world. And there's a lot of people who think that AI could go negative. Heck, Elon Musk has talked about his concerns for the world. But I wanted to hear from Kyle firsthand if he thinks that there are going to be positives that come from all of this. Here's what he had said. It starts back to something we talked about earlier. You know, I mentioned education. And we're triggered left and right by this AI. They can raise that. Maybe we shouldn't. And it stems from like, oh, you've taken the easy route. Well, what's wrong with the easy route? This reminds me a lot of the debates early on when I was in college about the use of scientific calculators. Are they allowed in finals? Are they, you know, do you have to actually prove them out by hand? Intiduity, that'd be silly. I can't believe at one point. I had to prove out certain formulas and that I had memorized that in my head because from the day I've been practicing data scientists. Till today, I've not really had to prove it out. I've had to know how to slot it into a puzzle, into a recipe. Lately, I use a lot of the judgments that I've gained from that to smell a problematic setup of an AI problem, say, ah, this is where we might run into some problematic bias issues. But I am not proving out math formulas. So, you know, we're now dealing with this on the content side of things. And I will never forget one of my most memorable classes was actually a journalism class. And I was so used to, you've got to write 12 pages on X. That was your midterm, that was your final, whenever we have like some kind of like non-stem related course. And you're like, gosh, you've got to mash out on the keyboard 12 pages about a topic. You're like, oh, I'm on page 10. All right, let me find like two more pages to type out. This class, we were graded on how short it was. You had to get your whole story in. And for the final, it had to be under a page and a half. Every half page beyond that, you lost a letter. It like, this professor was great. And it forced me to think about how do I say everything I need to say in less. And that was actually a harder setup than let me mash on my keyboard for two more pages. Okay, we now have these generative AI solutions that are bringing the cost of creation to zero. That I wouldn't be worried about. Well, students can write 10 pages of content now. I'd rather raise the bar, get the students to tell the story in a half page or less. Let's see them do that. What are they going to cut? How are they going to edit it? How do they scrutinize it? I think there's an opportunity to raise the bar on what we expect a learner to be able to do, given these new tools. People still matter, folks. And AI is just this latest wave of technology. They don't probably never stop. But the one thing in my mind that cannot go out of style is humanity. Being a human, engaging with people. And so I asked Cal if he could drill a little bit more down on the impact that this whole thing will have on people. And I was pleasantly surprised with what he had to say. The world has so many choices now. And cutting jobs as a knee-jerk reaction is maybe the poorest. But on the flip side, on the flip side, I was really, really impressed by Ali Miller's recent webinar. I have a whole bunch of things going on past few weeks. And this was one of those things where I'm like, I'm going to rearrange my date and make sure I get those. And in some of the tips she shared, she actually talks about how she screens her staff. And she says, all right, part of the interviewing process is, screen share with me. Show me how you use chat GPT to accomplish a task. And this is something unlike what we would have done with hiring data scientists a few years ago. We're going to appear a program together. We want to get a sense for how you think about problem solving. It's not like it sounds like a weird thing to somebody who's never gone through that. But we've done this for technical roles because we want to see how someone problem solves how they think. We're not necessarily looking for typos or whatnot. But we want to see if they have the skill. And if they have the capacity to learn a certain skill. So she does this with general folks who join her team. And it's one of their KPIs. Are you effectively using gen or did AI in your day-to-day work plus to be able to do more amplify your impact? So there's somewhere in between this is coming for all of our jobs. And we've we've got an imperative as organizations to help our communities figure out how to use this stuff to do more at higher quality while having greater fulfillment in their jobs. As we were wrapping up our conversation, I sensed that Cal had a real energy about him and seemed pretty eager to present at the Prince Smart Summit and share what he's learned. Well, don't take my word for it. Here's Cal. I'm really excited to share some experiences that I've learned and my team has learned over the past five years of building machine learning and AI solutions in these mission critical environments. How do you establish trust? How do you think about the potential unintended consequences? And how do you think about designing systems in a way that amplify the humans? That it affects and the humans that use it? And really to make AI work. AI shouldn't be the flashy shine object. It should be the work. It should be the results. It should be the outcome. And so I really want everybody to walk away being able to do two things. Ask better questions of AI. And then make AI boring. I hope you will agree that Cal Aldubaib, great name, by the way, is a really, really positive influence in this world. And I could not be more excited that he is going to present at the Prince Smart Summit in May. My thanks to Cal for sharing his time. And obviously, I'm even more grateful for the fact that he's going to come and speak at our event. Now, remember May 7th, 2024 at the Huntington Convention Center in Cleveland, Ohio, the Prince Smart Summit is a new event for leaders in print. If you're a thoughtful leader and you have aspirations of thriving going forward, then come spend some time with us. Get a little smarter, explore the latest advancements in AI and how it's going to impact us. Come network with the best in the industry. Come listen to a renowned list of speakers from the AI Institute, Google, IBM, Mindfire and Cal and take advantage of a transformative day that could compel you to do new things and elevate your business to new heights. Go to america'sprintshow.com to register today. It's the Prince Smart Summit 2024. Again, thanks to Cal. Thanks to all of you for listening. I can't wait to see you there. We'll continue to bring some of our speakers on this podcast. And I wish you all the best. Until I see you, be the buffalo. Take care. Hi. |
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