Season 2 Finale: Adapting to AI Revolution

Hello, and welcome to episode 175 of The Recognized Authority. And wow, it's been very fast, actually, to get to episode 175. I thought that it would feel slower, but wow, it's been fast. Yeah.

So this is the end of season two of the podcast. So I'm going to put The Recognized Authority on hiatus for a period of time. And I don't really know how long that's going to be. It's going to depend on external factors.

Now, I want to tell you a little bit about that and why. In fact, I have a conversation with my friend, Alistair McBride, where I explain the logic and the thinking behind that. Maybe be interested in kind of the meta, kind of, you know, the reasoning behind that decision. One thing that I have been doing is I've been running some other podcasts in the background.

I think you know that already. I'm a big fan of podcasting as a medium. and so I have had a podcast called the AI Powered Thought Leader which is at around episode 10 or so as I say this. I think I've published eight or nine of those episodes.

I'm about to publish 10 which is already recorded. It's already actually been live streamed. That's why kind of there's a little bit of flex as to what number it's at. So I'm actually going to rename that podcast from the AI Powered Thought Leader to the AI Powered Business Leader and the reason I'm doing that is because I feel like I've mapped out the problem space for thought leaders with regards to AI.

And I will tell you more about that on that podcast. I'm going to be putting the recognized authority on hiatus, and I'm going to be shifting focus to focusing more on the AI part business leader. Now, I've already had some really great guests on there, some people who you'd recognize from the recognized authority like Mark Schaefer, Chris Doe, Marcus Sheridan, really super kind of thought leaders and business leaders in their own right. So we're going to be shifting focus over to the AI powered business leader for a while.

I want to focus on AI because I think that it would be crazy for me not to, to be frank. And I'm going to explain my logic in that in my conversation with Alistair McBride, which is coming up next. I do want to invite you to come over and explore the new podcast. It's going to be dropping at the same release frequency.

So it's going to be going out at 6.01 AM every Monday morning. That is Dublin, Ireland time. So that's going to be happening from around two weeks from now.

It's going to start coming in at the same frequency. And you can also find it at AI powered dot biz. So the AI powered business leader is at AI powered dot biz. The recognized authority is going to remain online.

It's not going anywhere. I have it on lifetime hosting. So it's, it's going nowhere. I won't be taking it down.

There's 175 episodes. The content is evergreen. I hope that it's still relevant for you. That episode one, episode five, episode 100, episode 150, they're all relevant to you still today.

And yeah, I'm really looking to, I'm really excited about the possibilities of AI. And I think it's something that not enough people are talking about in the right way. I think there's a lot of talk about the hype and I would like to talk about some of the more practical implementation issues with implementing AI today. This is not something that's out there in the future.

It's available today and I've been doing some really cool stuff I'm going to share with my listeners on the AI Power Business Leader. I'm going to be sharing some of the things that I'm doing and I want to continue that discussion. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Alistair McBride, explaining the new shift in focus. And don't forget that you have, hopefully if you haven't listened to all of them, you have a big back catalog of episodes to listen to here on the Recognized Authority if you want more of this.

But I will be around. I'm not going anywhere. I'm just going to be doing something slightly different for a while and see where that takes me. I'm really excited about this.

So thanks for being a listener. If you've listened to many episodes of The Recognized Authority. If you usually listen to all the episodes, fair play. And thank you.

I really appreciate you listening. I really do appreciate every listener and everybody who takes time because the most valuable thing you can give somebody is their time. And so in order not to take any more years, here is my conversation with Alistair McBride. Welcome to The Recognized Authority, a podcast that helps specialized consultants and domain experts on your journey to become known as an authority in your field.

So you can increase your reach, have more impact, and work with great clients. Here is your host, Alistair McDermott. I'm again here with my, I guess, co-host at this point, Al McBride. Al, you've been a host of this show, I think, maybe six or seven times now.

I've been working with anybody else with you, yeah, definitely. Cool. It was a pleasure, always get a few insights. Yeah, well, the reason why I want to chat with you today is I just want to discuss the fact that this is the last episode of season two of the show so season one was 100 episodes i hope for season two to be to be another 100 episodes but actually it's only going to be 75 so um but this is the last episode of this show and the show is going to go on hiatus for um maybe a month or two it depends on on how things go um and i just wanted to discuss that with you Excellent stuff.

So tell us all about that. You're taking a slight change in focus. Yeah. So I've been talking to people about AI for, well, pretty much the last year.

I been doing a lot of stuff around AI I been giving talks speaking at events going on other podcasts talking about AI And I started another podcast called the AI Powered Thought Leader And I was really interested in kind of that intersection of thought leadership and AI and the problems that, you know, the credibility and authenticity and all of those things that we talk about on this show. And that's been running in parallel. And what I realized was I'm not able to balance the two of them.

And right now, I want to give some more focus to the AI Powered show because it's a timing issue. And we spoke in the last episode about, you know, all of the different things about building authority. But one of the things that I like the least about building authority is it's never urgent. So in Perry Marshall speak, it's not a bleeding neck.

Whereas right now, AI is urgent, and it's something where, like, there's a trend, and I want to create some content, and I want to talk to people about it. There's a lot of excitement about it. a lot of people want to talk to you about it i know you're you keep getting questions on it from various uh current clients and other people in your network not least myself how do i do this what's going on how should i use that so it is not a hot topic and i mean i've heard it described in many ways but it's a bit like people who are resistant to the internet in you know 2002 do i really need a website it's like well you don't absolutely but you're probably going to fall behind people who have a website and it's the equivalent somebody else there yesterday uh i think might have been perry marshall was talking about how it's like you know in the late 80s early 90s you know you still want to do things on paper rather than moving to microsoft office or or like an online which is when you think about it now it sounds crazy why won't you use excel or some sort of spreadsheet for god's sake you will fall behind again and you won't be beaten by ai you'll be by someone using ai to potentially take a huge chunk of your business even the whole bloody business it's scary stuff well that's that's the thing about it i i think that you know so for people who are experts and knowledge workers ai is coming for us first so this is kind of like the total reversal of technology in the past where we we've usually been kind of um inoculated against it um it's actually coming for us first and so that's an interesting challenge uh it's a little bit worrying i think and uh you know we need to figure out so so this is like if i was to continue with recognized authority without focusing more on ai then i think it would be a bit like you know having a cocktail at the beach while there's a tsunami coming towards us you know i think that we need we need to focus and say okay we need to pay attention to this and i i need to like i want to ramp up my work on the ai podcast which i'm actually going to rename which is why i i refer to it that way um i'll talk to you about that so you've started some episodes to get the grounding on it for people the ai powered thought leader and you're pivoting that a tad what are you pivoting it to and what's the thinking behind that okay so i'm renaming it from the ai powered thought leader to the ai powered business leader and so it's not a huge change um what what i've discovered is and i've done about nine or ten episodes of the ai powered thought leader and what i discovered is i think i understand the space now i think i understand the scope and the problem area and i'm interested in it you mean with your audience rather than ai per se it's how they perceive so well i think i understand the issues that people are going to face and like you know i'm now i'm gonna hold this up to the camera people can't see it but i was i was way in denmark recently and i was in a hotel um my partner was at a conference so i was i had some free time to go to go to the spa and also to sit in the in the reception area and write notes and so i have the the notes from the ai powered thought leader which i'm actually going to turn into a book um and uh so i think that the problem areas i think are limited in scope enough that i can say okay i i've got enough there on this topic that there's some resources on it but now let's go and explore this other kind of wider topic so that that's one reason is i think that i understand the scope of that so a power thought leader a few a few quick yeah okay so a few headlines there so that people can go right right so so in general so ai is going to increase productivity that's the positive side um particularly automating repetitive tasks we're going to be able to create content faster and we're going to be able to do stuff like analyzing research like for example in the last episode we we analyzed a whole bunch of data um it's going to help us do repurposing and it's going to allow us to focus on our core expertise because we've got more free time because we're able to do that the the flip side of that is it could potentially compromise our credibility so you know authenticity is something that we talked about a lot in the last episode and this could potentially compromise that because we're you know you can come across as inauthentic if you use ai in the wrong way to write like if if you're if you're writing if you're a thought leader and seen as a thought leader in your field and suddenly you're writing on linkedin starts to talk about delving into things and in this landscape of such and such in this ever-evolving world and all of these kind of giveaway ai phrases that are so obviously chat gpt that can start to impact on how people view you and and so your authenticity could be so there this kind of tension between authenticity and use of ai like should thought leaders even use ai now i think i yes we should But there a whole discussion there really as you said There a significant cohort shall we say, that are in opposition to that, and with good reason, good underlying reason.

If you listen to the episode I had with Jonathan Stark, we talked about this quite a lot. We actually talked about the whole concept of authorship and being an author as potentially being redefined in the future because what does it say to to be an author to say i wrote this i spoke with joe casabona about this as well um and that was actually several months ago on this episode on this podcast but i repurposed the episode over onto the ai power thought leader because it was directly related but you know he thinks that saying i used ai to write a blog post or to write a book it's like saying i used a car to run a marathon uh which i think is a great analogy so you know we discussed you know like where is the line when you use stuff like dictation for example and repurposing existing content that you did create genuinely but you're repurposing it and remixing it can you still claim to have and it goes to claim and credit like do we credit the ai do we you know how do we claim credit ourselves so those are those are some of the issues then there's um ip intellectual property i spoke with it with a lawyer aaron austin who had on this show as well and we spoke about the the legal implications and one of the things that she talked about was the differentiation between using AI to help create something that we're just publishing online, like blog posts or social posts, and using it to create stuff that we're actually selling.

So using it to create potentially intellectual property that we want to put for sale, then you've got to think more carefully about how you use it. You can listen to that episode with Aaron Austin. I think that's really, really interesting. There's all the ethical issues.

So, for example, these AIs tend to have all of this training data that they're trained on. There are probably inbuilt biases. And a very simple example of that is if you ask it to generate these systems, if you ask it to generate an image of a beautiful woman, it's probably going to show you a beautiful blonde white woman, probably in her early 30s, something like that. And the systems are now being tweaked to stop those biases coming in.

But that's the inherent bias that's built into them. And there's going to be like, that's only one simple example. There's going to be all sorts of cultural, racial biases in the training data. So we need to be really careful about that.

Some of that training data was also stolen. So we know that from legal cases that have been ruled. So, you know, if we create something that's based on a language model that was built using stolen training data, you know, what's the implications of that? So we have to be careful about systems that we're using.

And then there's privacy in terms of like if we're like if we take a transcript of a sales call and put it in there without editing it, we may be feeding our clients or potential clients private information into the machine and it could then be used. so um so there's all sorts of different things um in terms of ethics and and so maybe having policies around all of that and vetting the systems that you're using and um one of the things i've been doing here is i've been i've installed some language models on my my local pc here you know on windows and i've been testing them locally and they don't need any internet access everything is inbuilt self-contained and so all the data that they're working on is local So there's no training, there's no messages being passed by.

So just to kind of experiment with, you know, if businesses want to run their own instances, which is where I see this going in the future, is, you know, where it's not feeding the machine all this training data. so all of all of this i think is really fascinating so that's why um and i i think that the the scope of thought leadership and ai i think is really interesting i think it's a it's a fascinating area but i think that going a little bit broader and this is why i'm renaming it slightly to the ipar business leader because there are those other business issues um that are not just about thought leadership but are kind of um about like how do we use ai practically in in in our business and what are the you know um looking at our business processes and things and so i've had some great conversations about that already as well uh with uh joanna pineda and and others about this so sorry go ahead no that's absolutely key as you said just to to note that there's a huge amount of yes you need the right principles to move ahead with this stuff and and key concepts rules of thumb in your head but then it's also knowing the how to uh you of which programs to use what's a good idea what's not all this sort of stuff in the practicality of and how you implement it into your your week by week workflow because that's what people actually want to know at the end of the day right they want that okay how do i make things better next week yeah you know not one soft not like a big overview let's start with that but then i i see a lot of hype and like the way i think about the hype is i think the hype is warranted i've said this before um a lot of that hype is warranted because the stuff is mad it's crazy um a lot of the fears are warranted as well um the potential downsides are worrying um but hopefully if we get enough smart people pulling in the right direction and and thinking about this we'll figure out the the negative sides of it.

It's happening anyway. So I think that we have to, we have to talk about it. We have to learn about it. As particularly as business leaders, as people who are experts as people are talking to our clients we need to be literate We need to be AI literate We need to understand how these systems work and know how to use them So I think all of that is super important That why I think it you know having this kind of like changing to this process where we're in this continuous evaluation, because this is a moving target now.

It's not like this is changing day to day. It's not something where, okay, this is a new technology that's come along and we just need to figure it out. This is something that is continuously getting better. So we need to have a policy or a process where we're continuously looking at new things and kind of bringing that innovation in.

And so that's why I think if you're sitting on the beach drinking your cocktail, that's a bad place to be. We need to be prepared. Okay, we, you know, we need to look at this. We need to, we need to figure out how this is going to impact us because this is going to change businesses it's going to change society it's going to change industries and that's why i like i have to start this podcast i have to you know give this podcast more focus like because it's just so important it's so important right now it's more important to do this right now than to do this in three or four years time when it's all settled it's important to do it now because these are things we need to focus on now and as various people not at least our friend Perry Marshall keeps saying, you know, AI is not going to take your job or your business.

Someone who knows how to use AI will take a chunk of your business, potentially overnight as well. This is the time to start using these tools and be in that better position, that further along, understanding the key principles so that you can take advantage of that 40% faster turnaround of customer response, of creating a new project, creating a new product, whatever it might be. They're able to use these tools to actually improve your business. And that's the whole point.

So look, I look forward to exploring that with you in the future. Yeah. So the show, the new show is going to be called The AI Powered Business Leader. And I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes on this episode.

so this is the last episode of season two of the recognized authority i love the recognized authority so my plan is to come back um but i want to give some focus to the ai show for a while um so what i'm going to be doing my plan right now is to i'm going to take a couple of weeks to build up a little bit of a pipeline uh and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to start dropping episodes of the ai powered business leader it's on its own separate feed it's not you know you're going to have to go subscribe to that podcast if you want to get it um but it's going to be dropping at 601 a.

m on monday morning just like the last 175 episodes of the recognized authority have got at 601 a.m on monday morning so um it's it's going to be um if you if you like this show and you like listening to me then hopefully if you've listened to any or all 175 episodes then you will go uh go check out the AI part of business leader. And, um, thanks for listening to a season two. That's done.

New stuff. Well done. Thanks Al, as always. And also go check out Al's new book, dealing with Goliath.

That will be on Amazon very, very soon. Um, that is dealing with Goliath, the psychological edge in negotiation for business owners. So, um, I just want to give a little, uh, little shout out to you. I'll get the book done.

Awesome. Awesome. And so that's a wrap for season two of the recognized authority. Thank you so much for being a listener.

I really do appreciate you giving me your, your time and your attention. Go check out the AI powered business leader, the AI powered thought leader. And I think you'll be, if you're in this space of being a thought leader, wanting to build your authority, I think you will find it interesting. I have had some amazing guests on so far, and I'm going to continue to have great guests on.

So if you want to hear more from me, And I will, of course, be talking about, you know, building authority in the context of AI. But I think that it's it's just like this is just also new that we have to figure it out. Like we have to work out what does this mean for us, for our businesses? And, you know, this is bigger even than that.

It's it's it's society changing. And that's why I feel like it's so important to concentrate on this for a little bit. So that's where I'm going to be. You can find me at AI power dot biz.

I will continue to be in your LinkedIn feed. If you follow me, connect with me, I'd love to talk to you. And if you have any challenges or you're thinking about something pretty cool about AI, I'd love to hear about your thoughts about that as well, because I think it's just really interesting. For me, the interesting thing right now about AI is it's all unknown unknowns.

It's a problem space that we don't even know the problems, nevermind the solutions. And so mapping that out and figuring that out, I think is really interesting. I feel like I've already done that a little bit with the thought leadership space with regard to AI. And I'm going to be publishing a book on that shortly called the AI part of the thought leader.

And that's one of the reasons why I'm renaming that podcast actually is because I feel like I've got a good handle on that. And now I want to go on and explore some of the issues kind of pertaining to the wider business, kind of the wider business experience of AI. So that's what I'm going to be doing. I really appreciate you.