Real News, Companies will Die, and Everything's Changing

Welcome to wake up with AI, the podcast where human powered meets AI assisted. Join your hosts, Chris Carillon, Niko Lofakas, and George b Thomas as we dive deep into the world of artificial intelligence. From the latest AI news to cutting edge tools and skill sets, we are here to help business owners, marketers, and everyday individuals unlock their full potential with the power of AI. Let's get started.

Good morning. Happy Thursday, November 21st 2024. It is time to wake up with AI here with Nico and George. How are you fellas doing today?

Doing good. Doing good today. Have, have some really cool, exciting news, at least on my end. And, yeah. Some awesome some awesome, I don't I don't know.

It's not gratification, but, like, what do you call them?

Validation.

Confirmation. Yeah. Validation, confirmation of a, of a theory that I had, so excited to share that.

Nice. I like that. I like that. I'm feeling good. Feeling very, resilient today is the word I'll use.

So that's that's always a good thing. Chris, how are you doing?

I'm doing good. Doing good. Just trying to keep up, trying to share knowledge every day, and, you know, come over to our thread and maybe the the, the most interesting 60 second lead into a video I've ever seen on YouTube talking about the future of AI. So, yeah, man. Nico, let's let's let's dive in.

I'm sure it's gonna be meaty meaty to talk about today.

Yeah. Yeah. It is. So the video that, that Chris is talking about is from the Future Investment Initiative. This is put together by, well, I shouldn't say put together, but it's hosted by, Peter, Diamandis, and he is he's talking to, like, not just a panel but like the panel basically.

I was actually talking about this with my team internally yesterday that you get this you get such a huge advantage from listening to and watching the show every day because you are secondhand hearing from somebody who, a, I don't play telephone. I will tell you literally verbatim what somebody else said. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it and I'm not gonna blow it out of proportion because I don't have to. Like the statements that these guys make to Chris' point because it's enough on their own. And 2, I'm I'm listening to, following and watching the people who are making the technology.

Not the people who are reviewing it, not the people who are, you know, talking about the applications of it, not the people who used to work at those companies 10 years ago. The people who are working on it day in and day out, those are the people that I'm following because those are the people who know the most, right, and then I kind of back up from there to go to other experts who, you know, are like either computer scientists or AI engineers or what have you. And so this panel is just full of sort of everybody, there was a little bit of missing link with, you know, not really having too many people that were at the forefront but there are definitely a couple people at the forefront who were there including, Elon Musk. And so the talks band, a lot of everything. It talked about, you know, where AI is now, where it's gonna go, where it might be in, like, a few years.

And so one one of the things that I thought was, like, super interesting was, the way in which they discussed, like, okay, how does AI affect what we do on a daily basis, like, legitimately? Like, on a on a, from a, enterprise standpoint. And so there's 2 pieces of info. One of them is this Future Investments Initiative Group. The second one was a report that was just released.

So I'm I'm gonna give the stat, and then I'll I'll find the study. There's a study that showed enterprise adoption of AI is has has driven ROI 370% this year. Not, like, definitely not misspeaking, definitely not misquoting. It's it's pretty ridiculous. The again, 1 the top two use cases are sales and marketing.

3rd, you know, 3rd actually, one of the more towards the top towards the bottom of the top ton is

services. But the most interesting stat that they found is that when it comes to the to ROI,

it's a study from, IDC, and what they found out was that for every dollar that a company spends on AI, they see $3.7 by way of ROI. Okay. And so, I wanted to start off with this clip from Ben Horowitz and he's talking about the he's talking about how important it is to get 1st to market, but he's also talking about, a company that they invested in, which I'm sure some of you have used already. Sir, and, how quickly that company both evolved and what the revenue stream was like. So, yeah, here's here's Ben Horowitz about about that.

So as a new company, you have to ask the question, a new application, can I, you know, can I get a to market faster than the big company can get a good product? And that's the race. And I'd say, look, in some cases, it's the biggest private equity opportunity of all time. In other cases, we made it just to give you an idea of how fast you can build a good product and take the market, we made an investment in a dev tool company, which is like the slowest growing stuff ever because you're selling to engineers, and engineers hate buying stuff because they can build it, of course. And this thing has grown from 0 to 40,000,000 in revenue in 3 months.

That's the that's the rate of speed of investment. Right? 0 to 40,000,000 in 3 months. K. So that's that's outside of some of the stats that that were given in terms of like what what what people see this doing in the future, and that was kind of covered in the first 60 seconds, so I kinda I just wanna play that real quick as well.

Of course, sharing system audio is a separate button. Thank you so much, Riverside. You make it so very easy to present things to people.

How should companies and countries think about AI to drive growth and prosperity?

The mantra of AI or die is real, and certainly companies and countries that do not engage will die.

We made an investment in a dev tool company, and this thing has grown from 0 to 40,000,000 in revenue in 3 months.

We have restaurants that are operating with no people or one person just overseeing the machine. We're quickly getting into that interstellar moment where you're just interacting in a very human way.

My family is using TikTok. How do you think about making sure that you've got measures in place for the responsible use of AI?

It's a particularly, important problem for us to get on top of. It's reasonable to expect that within 6 to 8 years, it will be possible to have a single system that is 80 or 90% of the ability of a of the expert in every field.

What do you consider the most dangerous outcome around AGI or artificial superintelligence?

We as humans are not ready for the arrival of this. We're just not ready for it.

That was Eric Schmidt, that gave that last comment. And if if you've been following him at all in the last 2 months, you know that he's not lying. The not just the the statements, but just a lot of the under the hood things that he's been willing to talk about in the last few months. Definitely will will send some shivers up

your

spine. What I and I swear to God this is the last one and I will let you guys talk because I know George probably is percolating. This last one is perfect. Tail does off of, the comment that was just made in terms of the way in which, Eric sees interaction over the last, or over the next 6 months. And also, sort of confirm something.

Last week, we were talking about CRM and CRM interaction and what future of that look like, and I had mentioned that from my perspective, CRM interaction in the future looked like just initial step would be generative involvement where you're just generatively using an AI to interact with your CRM. And then the second step, which I think is about a year from now, maybe less, is where you're literally just talking to an agent. You're like you basically have, you know, CRM in your pocket, and you're just talking to an agent verbally and telling them what it is you need done, what's what's going on. Maybe they're even with you at a at a meeting. There's a couple, Plod.

It's like a note taking device hardware device you could have on your phone. So maybe you have that connected to it and it's listening to your meeting and it does all of the meeting related follow-up sales stuff after that without you even having to say anything. That was my idea, and I'm really sure that that was gonna end up coming to fruition. And then yesterday, Satya Nadella from Microsoft came out and introduced Microsoft's new agent platform, and it goes a little something like this.

Now just last month, we introduced 10 plus autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 that do everything from optimizing supply chains, to helping customer service teams resolve issues. For example, take a look at a sales qualification agent. Autonomously researches all the leads that are there in your system, and flags the best prospects for you and then drafts a personalized email that you can, of course, edit and send. And we're already seeing customers use the capabilities like this. In fact, McKinsey, has built an autonomous agent that reduces client onboarding time by as much as 90%.

Dow has built agents to optimize, their shipping process or freight shipping process and projecting 1,000,000 of dollars of savings even in just the 1st year. And, of course, you know, when we talk about extensibility, that includes changing how you interact with your bespoke business applications too. Right? That's kind of fundamentally, like, the idea that I have to go to one business application at a time just goes away in this world of agents. And so we are very excited to share many of our partners have built their own agents and connectors in Microsoft 365 Copilot that that includes Adobe and, obviously, LinkedIn, SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, and even companies like Cohere.

They are building AI first agents are also integrating right into Copilot. And now to show you all of this in action, I wanted to introduce my colleague, Kelly, on stage, to take you through the entire Copilot ecosystem. Kelly, over to you.

So Satya throws it over to Kelly and she, shows some examples of, like, what it is that the Copilot agent does and can do, and it is it's entirely what you think where she's walking through the aspect of not having to so, like, this is I I think this there was one aspect of it where she's talking about how she interacts with the like, in what way she interacts with the CRM. Right? And so, traditionally, of course, you interact with the CRM by going through files and going into Hub DB and looking for stuff and, you know, trying to find content and all that.

Solution in the enterprise for knowledge and business process. This site is where we keep all of the latest product specs, road map, and training materials. Now, every SharePoint site has an agent. So there's all this rich information is immediately accessible and useful. I can find just what I need in seconds by simply asking the agent.

Now let's jump back to biz chat. From here, I can interact with the same SharePoint agent by simply at mentioning it. I can ask it to give me an overview of the relevant products, availability, and pitch decks. Because the agent is grounded in this SharePoint site, it pulls from the right source of truth and gives me just what I'm looking for.

I'll I'll, I'll stop there. Boys, what'd you think?

Keywords in that last statement that you made pulls from the right source of truth. SharePoint, like a lot of other things, We talk about Salesforce. All the systems, especially Dynamics that just messes. Right? So it'll be interesting to see.

Like, the use cases I wanna see is when those agents can clean up my shit. Like, because right now, most companies, like Eric Schmidt said, are not ready for this. And if they try to do it without asking for that help to clean up, you're gonna get some bad some bad outcomes. Garbage in, garbage out. I'm sure you can use the AI to clean it up very quickly, but you might need to ask it to do that for you first.

And will everybody do that before jumping into, oh, I can email everybody. Oh, I can get more people. I can do more, more, more. Right? That's that's my thoughts.

I know George has some thoughts. So

first of all, let's go back to

the first clip. It is a very grandiose statement, although I believe probably a true state. Countries and companies will die. Like, if you just stop to think about the impact that that statement has and and the trickle down of what it would mean for other countries, for other companies, for economical, like, systems. So, like, you you just kinda blew past that.

Then then, Nico, as you continue to share, I continue to get frustrated because we're talking about platforms. We're talking about optimizing platforms. We're we're talking about optimizing processes. Nowhere in any of these clips am I seeing something about optimizing the people. And and and so then I start to think, well, okay.

Okay. Maybe. Maybe we're heading into a world where because all of these nerds are doing such a great job on optimizing the platforms and the processes that maybe people will have the time to optimize themselves, to upgrade themselves. And I start to think, like, as I'm watching these, I'm like, I wonder if people understand what they should be doing right now. And I go back to a conversation that we had earlier in the week where we're like, education trumps entertainment.

If you're sitting here listening to things about countries and companies dying because something is getting super smart, then as a human, what do you think you should be doing? How about getting smarter? How about educating your ass off on the thing that you wanna be, like, the the expert on? Oh, I'm gonna just stop right there.

I know. It's a lot.

Well, that's the thing. Like, Eric It's

a lot to take in.

Like, the one time humans were mentioned where it was Eric saying they're not ready for it. And Right. That's where Right. Like, companies and countries dying, if I'm in any town USA, I don't know what that means to me. Like, that that doesn't like, that's not my friends dying.

That's not necessarily my paycheck dying, but that's the dots that we're trying to connect. In some cases, it is if you do not move and you do not wake up and you do not get smarter, your paycheck is dying. In a lot of cases. Right? And and that my super excited thing, that 0 to 40,000,000 in 3 months.

Right? Obviously, it was as I I believe it was a spot where it was probably the most vulnerable or most ripe opportunity with, you know, opportunity with, you know, software development that we've talked about getting hit, like, super hard. But that speed that speed to market is available as as like, with almost any digital application, right now. And it it brings to mind this conversation that keeps coming up of, like, how do you get people to focus on things differently because they don't have to go through the same motions that they used to go. And this idea of that on that kind of speed only happens when you take projects that used to have to go a, b, c, d, e and you do all of them at once because you don't have to go from problem fit to product fit to platform fit.

You can just go right to platform because you can do all these things at the same time with the same number of people because you got AI tools to help you do it. Now can you allow yourself to to break from like, everybody tells me maybe this is why I'm so excited because this is how you boil the ocean now. Like, you literally have the tools to do that. You don't have to, like focus in the same traditional ways. I'm not saying you don't have to focus.

It's just different now. And if you can allow yourself to break from some of these traditional norms, that's the only way you're getting from 0 to 40 that quickly.

There there's you said something, Chris, right there where it it's all different. It it's all different. I've I've had some crazy conversations with a couple different people over the last couple weeks around my thoughts around my business, around my thoughts of the future of my business, marketing, agency, different things around that. I've even had crazy conversations around, like, educating and content creation. I'm I'm gonna give you a very specific thing because, again, this podcast is wake up with AI.

You mentioned it's it's changing. Everything's changed. We're in a process right now for a thing that we're building where we're creating in a very eloquent way, some of the most 90% done rough draft articles that you've ever seen in your life.

Mhmm.

To which I'm having somebody take the process that I built and continue to create these articles to which they're putting them on a website and letting me know when they're on the website. Because when they're on the website, that's when I actually grab the URL, put it in my natural reader, and I listen to the article to learn about the thing that we're presenting based on a framework and a mindset and a methodology that are is already the foundation so that I can then understand what I want to augment to it, what I wanna amplify to it, so then we can go back and we can actually optimize and humanize it even more to the 100 or 120%. But see, this this is the thing. I'm willing to learn from it as I amplify and teach. Like, the processes that you used to do forever don't have to I I mentioned in the Beyond Your Default podcast yesterday when we were recording, the the need to be a pivot, understand the the power of the pivot, to to become a transition specialist.

By the way, that's not today's AI skills that pays the bills. But but if you're listening this and you listen to the clips that Niko played and and you're even somewhat aligned with the fact of, like, o m g. Everything is changing around you, so how about you change? Get get out of your rut. Quit being stuck.

Take the next step. Move in the right direction. Realize this isn't going away. I'll shut up.

No. It's it's like that, you know, we keep talking about it. We keep talking about it. We keep telling people and that's there's a reason for that, you know. 3 months ago, like 2 years ago, I I said like people aren't they they just don't see this coming and I said people are not prepared.

I posted about it on Linkedin and at the time when I posted about it and I said this is a dangerous thing, like, you should watch out because people can, you know, use this for misinformation, this, that, and the other thing. Everybody was like full speed ahead. Love it. Love using it. Full speed ahead.

Don't care. Let's go. A year later after, this was before Sora came out, just when like GPT 4 had launched and like more tools and more, image creation software had gotten better, all of a sudden there was a little bit of pullback. And people were like, ah there's too much AI written content, too much AI generated content, you know, this is it's getting terrible, it's all over the place. It's like wow, because tomorrow I told you guys this was coming.

Meanwhile, while everybody is obsessed with the content, I see this like river of slime like in Ghostbusters 2 just starting to like flow underneath the city that is the US and as the year progressed and as we got closer and like further into 24, I was like, man this thing is picking up a lot of steam and there's a lot of slime underneath the city. Like, what is going on? And meanwhile, I'm looking above and I'm watching all the dark, you know, windows and the apartment buildings and the the lofts and and everybody's just sleeping. Everybody's just quietly asleep while the slime just races and rages underneath them. Right?

That is why Eric Schmidt said what he did. Because there are way too many people, if I had to guesstimate, I would say 90% of the US does not realize what is possible currently with AI, and that's being nice.

Yeah. Which is which is why I think it's so important that we as humans become resilient. And by the way, that is today's AI skill that pays the bill is resilience. Let's face it. AI is exciting, but it's not always smooth sailing.

And trust me when I tell you that you're gonna hit roadblocks. I've been on this journey for a while and to get where we are now, It's been a journey, but maybe, just maybe, your shiny new AI tool doesn't work the way that you thought it would or maybe an automation you set throws everything out of sync. Frustrating? Absolutely. But, that's where resilience comes in.

It's about staying persistent, bouncing back, and figuring out how to move freaking forward in this world of AI. Think of resilience like a muscle. The more you flex it, the stronger it gets. And in the world of AI, this skill is your secret weapon. Hang on.

Let's back up for a second. It might be your secret weapon in the real world as well. Because, let's be honest, things will go wrong, tools will glitch, predictions will miss the mark, and sometimes you'll feel like you're taking 2 steps back. But instead of giving up, resilience says, alright. What can I learn from this?

How do I adjust and keep going? And here's the thing. Every time you adapt to an AI setback, you're not just solving a problem. You're sharpening your ability to handle whatever comes next. You're building the confidence to face challenges head on and that's the real power of resilience.

So here are your takeaways for today. See setbacks as lessons. Treat every hiccup as a chance to learn and improve your AI approach. Stay persistent. When things go wrong, don't quit.

Double down on finding solutions, and finally, keep the big picture in mind. The ladies and gentlemen, please. Setbacks are temporary, but progress is permanent. Oh, I need to say that one again, ladies and gentlemen. Setbacks are temporary, but progress is permanent, but only if you keep pushing forward.

Resilience isn't just about surviving AI induced challenges. It's about thriving through them when you face them. So keep flexing that resilience muscle and keep moving forward. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is today's AI skills that pays the bills.

2 in the very few moments that I have left. I I actually did find the study, and I just wanted to highlight a couple things from it. Just real quick, we've talked about it before, but for every $1 companies are investing in AI, they're currently realizing $3.5 in return and 5% of organizations worldwide are realizing an average of $8 for every $1 spent. 92 92 percent of AI deployments are taking less than 12 months and 40% of those organizations have implementation times of less than 6 months. So in less than 6 months, you could be seeing a 3x return up to a 8x return on investment.

Organizations are realizing that investment within 14 months of deployment on average, so it could be shorter than that, might be a little bit longer than that. I'm assuming it depends on the size of the org. 72% of organizations are currently or 71% of organizations are currently leveraging AI. 22% are not using it, but expect to do so in the next 12 months. 43% of organizations plan to reduce spending in other areas of the business to reallocate that spending to AI within the next 2 years.

And 32% of organizations have reduced an average of 11% of spending on certain business areas just to fund AI projects. So things like building an AI model for internal use. So if you thought like, you know, and when when what it looks like, where are they spending the most? Administrative support and services, operations, tech support, human resources, customer service. So, when it looks when when you're thinking about like whether or not your company is gonna take into this, whether or not you should get into it, whether or not you're gonna have to learn about it, you're going to have to.

Your company is eventually going to adopt this technology, and the only way that you are ever going to keep up with any of this stuff is if you wake up with AI.

That's a wrap for this episode of wake up with AI. We hope that you feel a little more inspired, a little more informed, and a whole lot more excited about how AI can augment your life and business. Always remember that this journey is just the beginning and that we are right here with you every step of the way. If you love today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. You can also connect with us on social media to stay updated with all things AI.

Until next time. Stay curious, stay empowered, and wake up with AI.